May
19
2013

I still love you

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Mornings I drive our oldest to school. There is a school bus he can take, but when he asked for a ride instead, because he found the ride on the bus terribly annoying, I jumped at the chance to drive him. I saw it as an opportunity for us to have a daily check-in, to catch up on stuff, and get a gauge on how he was doing and feeling. My inclination was correct, and we have spent the past four months catching up from 8:30 to 8:50 AM, just the two of us in the car.

At the end of this last week I asked why his social studies grades were lagging behind his other grades. I gave him an opportunity – an out – by asking if the issue was the subject matter, or how it was being presented. I offered up how when I was his age I turned off to social studies and history because it was so focused on memorizing dates, and what I wanted to know about was why people did what they did.

His response? “Every day we have advisory where we do a grade check. I’m aware of this.” And yes, his attitude was quite defensive.

“Well, if you are so aware of it, what are you doing about it?” I inquired.

Silence.

In classic early-teen fashion, he shut down. What I was subtly impressed by was how he looked at the cell phone in his left hand, so tempted to open it, and check it, really doing nothing more than finding a way to avoid continuing the conversation with me but he resisted. He looked down at the phone, slowly started to lift it, then put it back down in his lap where he had been holding it

In classic parent-fashion, I felt a welling of emotion, screaming from deep within, saying “Well you better listen to me, you little so-and-so,” but this time I held it back. Instead, I remained calm, and continued, “So what do you plan on doing about it?”

We talked about study habits, and some bad habits I had let develop over the course of the year. I also let him off the hook: there are only three weeks left in the school year, state standardized tests are done with, and there are no new real behavior patterns I’m going to establish with him in such short time. He is on notice, however, that next year, eighth grade; study time will be quite different.

I could see he still wasn’t happy with our conversation. I suspect he felt I was intruding, that his grades were still good enough to have him on the honor role, and, therefore, what he was doing was perfectly acceptable. What he didn’t see was that I was watching how he studied, and I had spent his seventh grade year balancing how much I intruded on how well he was doing, and I came to the conclusion that the grades don’t matter – something I’ve felt all along – but that making sure he has solid study habits before high school starts is imperative, which is why I capped our conversation with something else.

I said, “Listen, kiddo, I know you’re not happy with me.” He slumped deeper into the passenger seat of the car. “But I also know that you’re just doing your job.” His posture changed. “You’re pushing back, thinking you know what’s best for you. And you should. If you didn’t I’d wonder what was wrong with you.” I could see he wanted to smirk. “But I’m doing my job. There’s a reason you still live with your parents. You don’t know what you don’t yet know, and I need to do my best to get you to see that.” His smirk softened.

There was a silence in the car for a moment, and we both looked at each other. “My other job is to be patient, to let you push back, but not to back down. And no matter how pissed you get at me, know I still love you.”

We had reached his school, and we pulled up to the drop-off spot in relative silence for the last two minutes of the drive. He started climbing out of the car, and I called after him, “Four-fifteen pick-up?”

He looked back in the car. “Yeah. Love you, dad.”

“I love you too.”

The door closed – the door of the car – but another door had opened.

May
09
2013

Who has a voice?

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Everyone has a voice in the education reform debate. Some voices are louder than others. Some voices are more ubiquitous than others. Some voices make a lot of sense to me. Others, not so much. While many will disagree with each other, we have to all agree that everyone has well-meaning intentions: to make education better.

As I’ve discussed before, making education better means different things to different people, but that’s not the point of today’s post. What I find intriguing, and what is on my mind today is the venom with which opposing groups attack each other.

There are many groups, organizations, and individuals concerned with education reform. One academically-oriented group – the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado – consistently publishes eye-opening papers and articles detailing the players, large and small, in the education reform debate: ALEC, KIPP, the US Department of Education to name just a few. I am a great fan of their work.

A consistent contributor to NEPC is the educational historian Diane Ravitch. I’m a huge fan of her work as well.

A recent NEPC post by Ms. Ravitch, however, disappointed me, not because the content was misleading, or incorrect, but because I see well-meaning organizations and individuals spending so much time discrediting others. She questions the Gates Foundation’s funding of everything that has to do with education in America, insinuating their funding of organizations on both ideological sides of the education reform debate is an attempt to control the dialog.

Maybe.

But maybe this is a red herring.

So far in the education reform debate, when one group sees another group with an alternative ideological position, one typically tries to discredit the other. Just as with our dysfunctional political discourse today.

Why does this sniping occur? Because someone is trying to control the dialog.

I’m just as suspect of one group discrediting another as I am of another group providing funding to everyone.

And until everyone who is concerned about education reform decides to start working together, just like our political system, nothing will except for small local changes will ever come to pass.

Apr
30
2013

Education Reform for Business or Learning?

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In a recent Diane Ravitch blog post she casts a doubtful eye upon the newly ubiquitous national education standards known as Common Core Standards.

While the article is a very interesting critique on how the Standards came to being, and what the process of their creation means to the course of education reform, what is, perhaps, more interesting are the threads of responses to the posting.

As of 8:00 AM Central Time, 4/24/2013, the top-most reply by a user named “Forrest” immediately illustrates one of the underlying reasons education reform struggles for success: the conflict between the interests of business and the interests education for the sake of education.

Like any endeavor – artistic, commercial, spiritual, or otherwise – successful endeavors typically begin with an intended direction, even if that direction is abstract, like trying to figure out the meaning on life.  What do we want public education to accomplish? Do we want public education to serve and feed the needs of business, do we want it to produce well informed, and good citizens, or do we simply want to expose students to learning for the sake of learning? Do these goals have to be mutually exclusive?

Unfortunately, the current pedagogy in higher education in the United States will also make this decision more difficult. We follow a very phalli-centric, male-oriented way of thinking in how we teach and make decisions in this country. To succeed in academia to the level of a PhD means distilling your vision of whatever you are studying to a very narrow view. Yes, there are institutions that have inter-disciplinary studies, but they are not as numerous as one would think.

Do we need people who are focused and know everything about subjects like nuclear engineering? Absolutely. But because we have so few inter-disciplinary studies in our educational system is the same reason we turn around after 50 years and discover how carbon emissions are dangerous, that hormones given to animals affect human beings, and that the disposal of plastics can lead to catastrophes like the Great Pacific Gyre.

So what will our great democracy determine is the will of the masses if and when the electorate is asked – on a region by region basis – what is most important? Serving the needs of business, or exposing students to learning for the sake of learning? And given how education reform is unfolding, will parents ever be posed this question in a forum that actually effects policy? Time will tell.

Apr
24
2013

Yes, We ARE Guinea Pigs

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“We are a nation of guinea pigs, almost all trying an unknown new program at the same time.”

This is a quote from a recent article by Diane Ravitch on her blog, dianeravitch.net.

I – and many others – have considered Diane a guru of education reform. The rest of her article is classic Ravitch, but I just have a hard time with the above quote. It seems so…naïve.

Isn’t that almost anything we’re trying when attempting to reform educational policy and standards in such a short period of time? To effectively vet a new method of teaching our students using accepted academic research methods would require a decade, or more, to judge and prove the effectiveness of one method over another. And there are obviously no other previous methods that we’ve used over the past 100 years of organized, standardized public education, otherwise we would be using those methods. Right?

We’re in an interesting time in history, recognizing there is a fire smoldering all around us, and yet we don’t know what to use to put out the fire. Neither salt, water, nor smothering are options. We think we are surrounded by this conflagration within a city. Are we instead in the wilderness, which has built up century’s worth of underbrush, which simply needs to burn?

Right now we have to accept that, yes, and our children are guinea pigs. Some are going to benefit, and others are not, which really isn’t so different from the status quo.

Such a realization, however, should not stop us from trying to find an answer, and to finally control this smoldering mess.

Apr
11
2013

The silver bullet for education reform

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There’s a reason there’s no front runner in the education reform debate.

Look at some of initiatives that have existed: Teach for America. KIPP. Kahn Academy. STEM-focused schools. Every initiative has their champions and detractors. Each has elements that can be shown to be extremely effective for at least one group of students.

No system – and I mean none – can statistically prove that it is an effective solution for every student sub-group. There’s a reason no system can accomplish the Herculean task of reforming education in this country; we are looking for a single system to effectively educate every student, every type of learner.

Doesn’t this seem ludicrous?

Name a system or institution in this country that has been able to effectively serve such disparate communities as those we ask our public school systems to serve.

So when we look at education reform, should we be looking at a classically American approach to solving problems: the silver bullet? Maybe education reform is going to be far more difficult that we wish, that we have to look at larger cultural shifts. Maybe it’s time to do something that at this time in our country’s history is going to be very difficult to accomplish: cooperate.

What if we were able to combine multiple methods: federal and local, public and private, Teach for America, KIPP, Kahn, and more?

Am I delusional in this thought? Absolutely. But how else are we going to accomplish what everyone agrees is the goal of public education in America: providing opportunity for every student? From what the statistics have proved so far, there’s yet to be a single solution that works for everyone, but combined, we may get closer to meeting that goal.

Apr
06
2013

What defines success in education?

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Education reform is doing better than people think, but, conversely, will never ultimately be successful as long as we continue following the current reform paths.

No one will argue that whatever path you are on in the quest for effective education reform that it is complicated. And the person who claims education reform is simple, that it there is a silver bullet that will solve all of the problems, is either terribly naïve, terribly arrogant, or both.

That education reform is complicated is, unfortunately a product of our living in a capitalist centered democracy. The struggles mirror the political and social struggles of our country, the struggle between federalism and state’s rights, the struggles between religious studies and secular studies, the struggles between the haves and have-nots.

This struggle has been going on within the United States since its birth, but the motivation of the struggle has changed over the years. Today, the struggle is as much about the United States retaining its position as the dominant player in global politics and economics as it is about the betterment of the next generation of students.

So the question must become, “what defines success in education?”

Apr
03
2013

The right fit

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We had a recent struggle with our youngest not doing so well on a spelling test. Came to pass that he’s finally bumped up against something in school in which he’s going to have to finally exert some effort. We knew this day would come, and hoped it would happen sooner, as it had with his older brother, but at least now we could deal with it, and hopefully give him some skills that will take him far past fifth grade.

As happens with issues surrounding school, however, something far more significant than academic achievement came out of the spelling struggles.

A fairly typical theme of modern society is how many of us grapple with fitting in. What does that mean, fitting in? For me it has always been trying to find a group of people who get me, and when you don’t fit neatly into one social group or another, fitting in is not such an easy fit.

In the quest to figure out what was keeping our youngest from doing well with his spelling, we also uncovered the internal anxiety he has regarding finding that group of people who get him. He’s athletic but not all about sports. He likes playing video games but gets bored with them after a while. He’s academic, but only wants to work so hard at school. He has a whole family of stuffed frogs who are truly part of our family. They each have personalities and are as much part of our family dynamic as our two cats.

And all of these things that make our youngest who he is – the parts about him we would never want him to change – are things he does not want to share with his friends. He fears his athletic friends only want to play sports all of the time. He fears his gamer friends just want to play video games all of the time. He fears his academic friends won’t think he’s smart enough. And there’s no way at all any of them are going to know about the frogs. No 11 year-old has stuffed frog friends, he worries.

As I did my best to let my son know that how he felt was perfectly normal, and that we has not alone, I could not stop thinking in the back of my mind how the sad irony is I’m sure most of his friends feel similarly, just with their own hang-ups. I talked to him about when I was young, about how I always felt alone in a crowd, that it wasn’t until much later in life that I started truly baring my sole to friends about my fears and anxieties, that I wouldn’t be accepted if they knew about my hang-ups. Of course my friends all had their own hang-ups and worries.

What I did not tell my son was how, sadly, the greatest unburdening of my friends’ collective souls never really came until our 20th college reunion, where a group of six of us convened. In an alcohol-loosened gushing stream of honesty, one-by-one we conveyed our feelings of being lost, and how we perceived the others to have had their [stuff] together.

But by the time my son and I finished talking about his fears and insecurities I was confident that he knew he was not alone, and that he cold always turn to his dad whenever he did feel alone in a crowd, and that at least one person would always understand him.

Mar
25
2013

The Puzzle

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Is it possible that everyone is right and no one is right? I’ve been asking myself this question quite often lately. When you really stop to listen and read and learn about all of the separate issues that are grabbing headlines in the education reform movement, you can always find people – real human beings – involved who are earnest, well-meaning individuals, truly invested in whatever snake oil they are pedaling.

Snake oil? Now why did I have to go use inflammatory language like that?

Well, if you really stop to listen and read and learn about all of the separate issues that are grabbing headlines in the education reform movement you may not find it difficult to see that none of the proposed solutions has the potential to work for all children across all socio-economic classes within all of the sub-cultural groups we have here in the U.S.

In a recent posting, a blogger named Crazy Crawfish takes time to point out many of the flaws in some of the more well-known solutions. And he started by building a wonderful metaphor about what’s going on here, referring to the pieces of the [education reform] puzzle.

But here’s the key extension of that metaphor he missed: within a puzzle every piece is integral to the complete success, yet alone each piece is hobbled by its own uniqueness, and inadequacy in revealing the complete picture.

Maybe, just maybe, Crazy Crawfish has finally hit on the one metaphor that truly does indicate what’s going on in education reform. No initiative will work by itself, and yet everything is required to complete truly effective education reform.

My readers know that I am a huge advocate of parental involvement when it comes to developing academically successful children. The more I have researched the importance of parental involvement, the more I see the other dependencies that touch effective parental involvement: financial resources, community cohesion, effective school administrations, engaged teachers.

Nothing in this debate can stand alone as the sole cause or the sole remedy. As Crazy Crawfish says in his post, “Right now hundreds and probably thousands of disparate groups [are] polishing their individual pieces of the puzzle.”

And I would argue they are all correct to continue with their pursuits. There’s a place for all of the methods in this movement. This is a democracy, after all, and with the benefits of freedom comes this other messier element of everyone having a voice.

Parent groups. PTAs. Students First. Charter Schools. KIPP. Kahn. The Gates Foundation. Virtual Schools. Teach for America. Fiscal Austerity. The list of players and ideologies goes on and on.

Is it so surprising that there are so many alternatives? Is it surprising given the status of politics in America that there is such division regarding how to manage policy? Is it surprising in this land of look-at-me driven by social media that each one claims to be the only solution? Is it surprising given the fiscal climate and a gap between rich and poor that hasn’t been this great since the Great Depression that some communities feel the fight is futile?

The answers are in front of us, and it is a great puzzle. At what point, however, will we all start to work together to make the parts of the puzzle start to fit?

Mar
23
2013

On the way to school

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An interesting conversation with my oldest unfolded the other morning in the car as I was driving him to Middle School.

“What would make school more interesting?” I asked.

“Not having school.” was his terse reply.

I took this with a  grain of salt since he was in the middle of making up for 10 days of missed school, having been out with a bacterial infection that took a too long to diagnose and contain.

“Imagine not having school as you know it.” I continued. “What would you want to learn about?”

This came on the heels of my watching the video featured in a recent Huffington Post article about the school in Massachusetts with a truly intriguing twist on learning.

“Nothing.” He said.

“Nothing? Well you just learned how to string a lacrosse head last week. That’s learning something.”

And then came the real kicker from him.

“Yeah, but in school they’re teaching us about stuff that someone else has already figured out. I mean why do we need to learn how to figure it out when someone else has already done it.”

I paused on this one, ready to pounce on him for being a product of the immediate-gratification-iPhone-toting privileged teens of today. And I paused longer.

I really didn’t know what to say, but he had unknowingly really piqued my interest. Again returning to a comment a student had in the video, “Everyone wants to learn something.”

“Well what if you could just study lacrosse for a year: the history, how to make sticks, stringing, playing, everything that has to do with lacrosse. You’d have to learn how to use math, and reading, and science…”

I paused when I heard him give a muffled “Hmmph.”

I think I had him for a moment, and then I brought the “school” stuff back into it. That’s when he hmmphed.

And this is from a kid who does well in school. We don’t have to worry about his grades or standardized test scores: the true coin of the realm as Kathleen Scott, the principal in the boys’ school in California, used to appropriately refer to test scores.

Is his academic apathy part of a larger social issue, or is it just the pain of getting through middle school? Did the access to information – which is now sadly referred to as just “content” – the fear of which started with Alvin Toffler and “Future Shock” in the 70s, now accelerating at practically incalculable rates as teenagers seek the next app to pique their interest? Facebook to younger teens is passé. Instagram and Snapchat are it. But those will soon wane, replaced by the next bright and shiny tool to communicate with.

More crucial to the issue of keeping students engaged with academics is that answers to practically any question a student will ever have is a Google search away. This doesn’t’ mean they’re receiving the most accurate or correct answer, but they are receiving an answer, and that’s all they care about: immediate results.

After all, if someone else has already taken the time to figure out something, why should they bother? This is a generation of doing. They’re more than happy to let other people do the thinking, to provide them with the gadgets for their active lifestyles.

But what happens when it’s their turn to invent the gadgets, and to do the thinking? Because, eventually, their turn will come.

Mar
19
2013

If parents of English Language Learners matter…

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I’ve already noted before that simply stating that you are fighting for education reform is problematic since the definition of what education reform is, or what successful education reform looks like is fluid and differs from person to person, student to student, parent to parent. But that last classification – parent to parent – is quite important.

A press release from the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) on March 19, 2013, however, gets to the root of what I see as an integral element to any effective education reform initiative: parental involvement. As anyone in academia knows, the nature of research and of receiving funding to perform research can be very myopic, focusing on very specific details of an issue. The title of the press release in this case says it all: Enhancing Education for English Learners through Parental Involvement.Little Graduate

Parental Involvement. Across the spectrum of education reform initiatives is the assumption that parents are involved with the academic involvement of every child out there. This assumption is unfortunately quite flawed, and a failed assumption that spans all social-economic demographics. Parents, however, are the secret sauce in creating successful students, regardless of how you define success.

Are there potential problems with that drive towards success? Of course, but maybe it’s time we realize no one is perfect, but we’re all trying to do the best we can. Sometimes, however, parents need extra efforts from school districts to feel as if they have a voice at the school, or to feel somehow less disenfranchised. In other cases, parents might need a little extra education to understand exactly how important their involvement is.

As Diane Ravitch notes in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” and other studies by group such as the NEPC have shown, the principal reason for the success of educational alternatives like charter schools is the self-selection that occurs by parents. As the headmaster of the charter boarding school in “Waiting for Superman” says, while greeting new students to the school around two-thirds of the way through the film (paraphrasing), “Congratulations, you’re here because someone, a parent or caregiver, cared enough to make sure you made it here.”

I suspect if the research in the above study that was applied to English Language Learners were applied to other sub-groups of students, the same findings would result: being aware of distinct cultural groups of students, and engaging the parents of those students is paramount to the success of those students.