NYC Chancellor won’t grade himself
If this is how the Chancellor evaluates himself, why is he grading schools and teachers on a curve that ends with letter grades, or their equivalent? From an interview with Anna Phillips:
Q. If you were to rate yourself, give yourself a grade for your first year as chancellor, whether it’s an A through F or a 1 to 10, what would you give yourself and why?
A. And my response, and this is my honest response, is I don’t give myself a grade. I don’t really focus on that. To me it’s the satisfaction of what I see when I go to schools and when I interact with students. You know me, you guys have been trailing me for a while. I just love being in the schools, I love being with the students, hearing what they have to say, meeting them, watching them learn, watching them answer questions, and my quote unquote grade is derived by the type of interaction I have with them and they have with me.
For the record, I do not think the Chancellor should have the very complex aspects of his job reduced to a number or letter; neither should teachers nor students for that matter.
Service learning done right
Good to see great thing happening at my old school, Bronx Lab:
I’m lucky enough to work at the Bronx Lab School, a community that has made a commitment to service learning as a part of our philosophy and curriculum. Each year, for the last three school days before spring break, all students participate in a service learning project that is designed by one or two teachers in a program called Explore Week. After working with the music teacher on a project last year, I was looking to develop my own project for this year. Because of my experiences working with Operation Wounded Warrior through my volunteer fire department (chronicled on this blog in the past) I knew that I would love to do a project where our students got to work with our nation’s veterans. When it was time to design our projects, a colleague of mine in the history department had the very same idea and our project was quickly developed: giving our students a chance to meet and interview veterans about their experiences, as well as issues relating to veterans and to make a short film about both.
Education war officially delcared
More on this later, but for anyone who had any doubt there was a war against public education in this country, so-called reformer Geoffrey Canada makes things explicit:
“someone has to make war.”
This comes from a piece in a really scary NY Times piece by Anna Phillips about the creation of new lobbying group organized to influence NYC’s mayor election and education policy in NY:
On the board are some of the most well-known and polarizing figures in public education, including Ms. Rhee; Mr. Klein, now a News Corporation executive; and Eva S. Moskowitz, the former councilwoman who now runs a chain of charter schools. Also on the board are former Mayor Edward I. Koch; Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone organization, a network of charter schools; and a number of venture capitalists and hedge fund managers, who have served as the movement’s financial backers.
This is yet another example of what Joanne Barkan recently showed in Dissent: education “reformers” are now trying to buy political elections.
How NY is Screwing Up the Common Core
Previously, I’ve explained why I like what the Common Core does for Social Studies learning and teaching. My latest piece for the New York Times’ Schoolbook takes on the implementation of the new standards:
Teachers who focus on content and test-prep are sadly doing all that is necessary to prepare students for the exam. A recent study by Gabriel Reich of Virginia Commonwealth University found that the Global Regents Exam does not call for any historical thinking skills, but rather knowledge of history content, basic literacy and “test-wiseness.”
The history Regents exams do not ask students to do anything that meets the overwhelming majority of the new Common Core standards.
It is particularly troubling then to find that the state does not seem to have a concrete plan in place to change the history regents exams.
Please read the whole piece, and add your comments here or there.
A feminized profession?
Here’s a very provokative post from Ariel Sacks. In honor of women’s history month, she asks to what extent discourses of, and expectations for, teaching are influenced by the profession’s history as a woman’s job:
Teachers have often been expected to give endlessly of ourselves and our time–like only a mother does for her children. There is often guilt when we pull back from the level of sacrifice that has come to be expected of us.
Teachers are expected to be modest. It is difficult to learn to self-promote. Ask teachers who have learned to do it, and they will likely tell you a story of how they struggled to get over their hang-ups around self-promotion. (Case in point–I still do not have business cards; just can’t quite bring myself to do it, though that makes no sense.)
I think she’s on to something…
Come Work at Harvest Collegiate
The school I’m currently planning, Harvest Collegiate High School, is looking for excellent teachers to help plan and build our school. Full information is bellow. Please share widely.
How the war against public education is fought
I used to really resist the discourse that suggests teachers are “under attack” and that there is a “war against public education.” But unfortunately, there is one. Journalist Joanne Barkan has documented exactly how this war is being fought in Dissent. Her third piece in this series, on how education “reformers” are using their resources to elect friendly politicians to local and state positions, is another must read:
Ed reformers spend at least a half-billion dollars a year in private money, whereas government expenditures on K-12 schooling are about $525 billion a year.
The piece is just as much about education as it is about how much influence money can have on elections.
