I this episode, Zac talks with Adam Haigler who, with his wife Allison, started and runs The Pioneer Project (a homesteading gap year initiative in Brasstown, NC). The conversation turns to misconceptions about gap years as well as the difficulties reaching all populations in recruiting for the program.
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Oklahoma ranked 34th and 20th in rounds 1 and 2 of Race to the Top, respectively. Connecticut ranked 25th in both rounds. Florida ranked 4th in both rounds and was awarded $700 million in Round 2 funding.
The difference between setting policy and sponsoring a competition is that it’s difficult to hold competition losers to the rules of the contest once they’ve lost. As states move to comply with the rules of the game they’ve already lost, we’re likely to see them taking their toys and going home. I can’t blame them.
According to this July 3 EdWeek piece, Oklahoma is having a difficult time pulling together the tech necessary to implement the digital edition of the PARCC assessment in the 2015-16 school year.
A survey of the state’s schools found only 20% of the states schools have the banwidth and devices necessary to deliver the assessment, according to EdWeek.
While they’re still planning on PARCC-ing, EdWeek reporter Benjamin Herold writes, “Officials said Oklahoma is not formally withdrawing from PARCC, but the details of how the state will remain involved now that it is not planning to use the consortium’s tests remain unclear.”
In Connecticut, officials have asked permission from federal officials to give schools the choice in which tests to administer to students. A Smarter Balanced state, Connecticut’s governor would like schools to be able “to choose whether to offer the Smarter Balanced test or the Mastery or CAPT test — or both” according to a July 11 article in The Hartford Courant.
Reporter Kathleen Megan suggests the delay in implementing Smarter Balanced testing is needed while teachers adjust to the new Common Core curriculum which is described as “more stringent” than original Connecticut standards.
If this is referring to comparisons such as the Fordham Institute’s 2010 comparison of CT to CC ELA standards, such a claim of stringency would appear apt.
Examining Fordham’s complaints about CT’s reading standards, though, reveals some questionable claims.
The reading expectations generally place as much emphasis on content-less and often unmeasurable comprehension skills and reading “reflection” and “behaviors” as they do on important content. For example:
Make connections to text representing different perspectives [such as] family, friendship, culture and tradition, generating personal and text-based responses [sic] (grade 2)
While it’s likely difficult to evaluate students’ connections to different perspectives, the claim that such skills as the ones above are unimportant is devoid of a basic understanding of the research surrounding what draws students into reading and keeps them there. This is to say nothing of the sustainability of civic awareness for students whose teachers encourage the taking on of multiple perspectives.
While it’s certain that Connecticut English Language Arts standards could likely have been revised toward increased clarity and structure, it’s unlikely they deserved the “D” awarded by Fordham compared to Common Core standards.
This is all to suggest that both Oklahoma and Connecticut are moving in a direction that isn’t directly tied to thoughtful consideration of what is best for their students and teachers.
According to the Children’s Defense Fund’s 2013 report on children in Oklahoma, “A child dies before his or her first birthday every 22 hours” in the state and nearly a third of Oklahoma 19-34 month olds are not fully immunized.
In Connecticut, the two main teachers unions have praised the governor’s request for flexibility. These are the same unions who were on board for the adoption of the new measurements of teacher effectiveness as required for the application for Race to the Top funding when it was first announced at the height of the economic collapse.
The money didn’t come to Connecticut and the state is bracing to take on new standards, tests, and systems of teacher evaluation just the same. With one year of flexibility, it’s likely that teachers will understand that all of the pieces to which their unions agreed are highly stressful and coming without the funding their acquiescences to these changes was meant to attract.
While it’s unlikely RttT losers like Connecticut will completely depart from the suggested path of the contest, there’s no policy or law keeping them from pausing to reflect on the rush of changes and asking, “What are our priorities for the children and adults in our education system based on the expertise of the system?”
To be certain, that dialogue will be better-informed, more thoughtful, and more productive than any policies adopted as part of a race.
What about Florida? That’s a post for tomorrow.
One of the best non-running aspects of being a runner is the slower exposure to the communities in which I live. A choice to make a turn in my running route has often brought me into knowing hidden gems of the towns and cities where I live and run.
Such a thing happened today when I stopped to turn around and head back home at a pavilion of a park along my route. There, I saw the box pictured below. A closer look told the box’s story.
Something like this should be in every park in every town across the country. What’s more, there should probably be two levels of boxes right on top of one another. The upper box with books for adults and the lower box with books for children.
Imagine an initiative of elementary schools throughout a community to create these boxes for every park they were near, to stock the boxes, rotate the books, and track the history of the project.
Not only would such a project bring literacy to community common spaces, they would act as signposts as well. Signposts alerting the community to the fact that local schools see themselves as part of a larger ecosystem as well as signposts tethering schools to the community and helping students understand a small act of civic engagement.
As soon as I typed this, I also started conceiving concerns around such an initiative. First among them was the defacement of the boxes. This is a reason to move forward with such an idea, not turn away from it. If the boxes are defaced, it presents true challenges of citizenship for the students involved and for the entire community. Raising such issues to the proper public officials again establishes channels of visibility between schools and the community.
These may be difficult problems to navigate, but I’d rather have students rising through our schools who have experience solving these problems than have students who were sheltered from addressing difficult community issues. It’s a question of citizenship.
Thanks, Friends of Martin Acres.
This has been a summer of attempting to get through many of those books which have lived on the shelves of three different houses now without actually having, you know, been read.
Aside from the weak-willed ordering of still more books from Amazon and picking up a few the other day at the local privately-owned book store, I’m making progress.
Today, I finished Kathleen Cushman’s Fires in the Mind. It earned two stars from me on GoodReads.com, but I wanted to want to award it much more.
Cushman and her teenage collaborators take as their focus of investigation the idea of expertise and how a person becomes an expert. As they work through these ideas in the first few chapters, they turn their attention to schools and what formal education systems can do to encourage the same kinds of mind fires as students’ outside interests as discussed in the first half of the book.
From just this premise, I was hopeful. It’s a topic that has the potential to illuminate faculty meetings, and pre-service teacher classrooms everywhere. What are we doing in education if not working to encourage students’ curiosity and ability to work toward expertise?
The book falls short in a few ways.
First, Cushman laces the text with quotations from her “collaborators” throughout. These were teenagers who participated in the Practice Project as an attempt to answer the questions mentioned above. The quotations made the reading choppy and I found myself working to hold on to a singular narrative voice. While appreciating the inclusion of direct ideas from students, I often found myself wishing they had written the book outright alongside Cushman rather than Cushman trying to put their words where she felt they belonged.
Similar to this, the student quotations are apparently taken verbatim from student interviews. As such, they include the odd error in traditional grammar. I suppose this is an attempt to validate the approach and show that these are regular kids offering up their ideas in their own voices. I celebrate that idea. At the same time, should Cushman have faltered from Standard Formal English, her editor would surely have dinged her on the mistake.
If we are talking about kids becoming authentic collaborators, it feels wrong to lower the bar for how their words are presented.
The other fault I found as I was reading was the lack of direct references to others who have walked this way before and done the work of research expertise and engagement. Perhaps this was done so as not to crowd out the students’ voices. For me, though, it ended up taking the legs out from under the text. I would be far more likely to recommend this book to others if the student researchers’ findings sat alongside and made reference to the others in the field doing this work. At the back of the book, Cushman acknowledges that the work of the Practice Project was informed by the writings and research of many others and lists those texts, writing that she was glad the students were able to read the other authors’ work.
By hiding this until some curious reader tries to figure out what’s happening, the book creates a sort of fence around the students’ work that keeps it in a different arena than the experts. This keeps them as “student experts” rather than full-fledged “experts” and the separation was a perpetual frustration for me.
If you are going to pick up this book, and I’m sure there are those who would benefit from its reading, start in the middle. This is where the text starts to wrap the students’ findings around the everyday work of schools. Each chapter in the concluding half included passages that sought to provide concrete suggestions for making homework worthwhile, creating engaging projects, etc. I almost missed this when I considered putting the book down and walking away early on.
As I was reading Fires in the Mind, I was hesitant to acknowledge my criticisms of the text. I finally came to terms with the fact that criticizing the book was not the same as criticizing the important work and her collaborators engaged in throughout the Practice Project.
The project sounds as though it was worthwhile, informative and engaging for students. The retelling of the project, however, left me wanting more.
In a conversation pre-Morsi resignation/soft military coup, I mentioned my frustration with the perceived dichotomy of the situation – military takeover or Morsi’s continued abuse of powers as seen by many Egyptian citizens.
“It’s as if the world has forgotten to look for the third way,” I said, and it is a thought that has been hanging around my brain ever since.
It was augmented when a friend shared a link to this NYT story on Oregon’s agreement to pilot a new way of funding higher education. It is a third way.
When I suggest the third way, I don’t mean to limit things to three possibilities, but to work against the idea that, when two options have presented themselves, we stop looking for others.
It’s akin to the lessons I tried to help my eighth grade students learn when they were starting to write persuasive essays. After deciding to write in response to a given prompt, the students would talk out their thinking regarding their stances on the issue. “Well,” someone would say, “I think I’m for it,” while another student across the room would announce that she was against whatever topic was up for debate. Then, they decided they were ready to start their planning of their argument.
I stood back.
A few minutes passed.
“Mr. Chase,” said one voice or another, “I’m trying to plan my argument, and I keep coming up with reasons why this is a good idea, but I’m arguing that it’s not.” The student would look over to me chagrinned, sure that the only option would be to switch sides, since the evidence was mounting over there.
“What if you acknowledged that the idea isn’t all bad?” I’d ask, “And, make the argument that your side is the better of the two.”
Usually with some coaxing, the student would agree to attempt this line of reasoning.
The best moments, though, were the students who sat confounded for several minutes, notes scratched all over their papers. “I keep thinking about it,” they would say, “and I don’t think either of these sides is the right way to go.”
“Do you have a better idea,” I’d ask.
“I think so.”
“Then, write that.”
These are the students I wish we were looking to more as models of the debates we wage over the important issues of our time. They are the ones who give themselves the space to lean back in their chairs, consider the information in front of them and decide they’d like to try to find a path different than those laid out for them by others.
Robert Frost may have seen two roads diverging in the woods, and that’s largely the basis for much of our contemporary policy decisions. What’s necessary though, is re-writing Frost and choosing the road not yet seen.
That will make all the difference.