Parents for Educating Texas

What to read now

(While I continue to toil over Part Two of yesterday's post, take a look at a new book that I'm reading right now. Come back on Monday for the last part of the conversation on parent involvement and ed reform.)

Last spring I read a book that got me thinking not about education specifically, but how the digital age is changing the way we think and learn. Called A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, I was moved by the simplicity of what authors Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown had to say, which is: in order to change education for the way we live now, we must change our entire attitude toward learning. 

But new book Now You See It by prolific author and digital innovator Cathy N. Davidson takes the 'new culture of learning' a step further. Davidson gets specific about how the brain science available on "attention blindness" can apply to what might be considered society's greatest challenge: while we acknowledge the digitization of our world, we are still working and learning in environments that were designed for the last century. In other words, we are 'blind' to the solutions to the biggest problems in schools because we literally can't see them.

Now You See It is PFET's first Book Club choice for the new school year, and although I'm only in Chapter 1, proves to be a stimulating and interesting look at one reason why schools might be failing us. I hope you'll get the book and join in the discussion when we start the Book Club on September 19.

 

Required reading for parents, teachers, and all members of the human race

The realization we came to is that it isn’t our schools that are failing: it is our theory of learning that is failing. - Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, Forbes interview

When I found this book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, accidentally, from the best culture website in the whole world, and once I ordered it rush from Amazon and tore the box to shreds trying to get at it, I grasped it tightly in my hands. On the cover, there's a photo-illustration - multicolored and possessing the Deep Space Nine feel of a Mark Grotjahn painting - that makes you feel at once like the world's falling apart and coming together to save itself just in time. Inside, the sentences are short and profound and make complete and perfect sense: in order to change education, we must change our entire attitude toward learning. 

Many of the ideas in this book we've already discussed on a very surface level - the constant upheavals (social, technological, cultural) of our modern world don't jive with our nineteenth century-style education method, which is why we are complaining that our schools are broken. But until we embrace this new world - a world where a student can Google the answer to absolutely anything at any moment - we cannot change our schools. It is only a shift in focus, a shift in our own imaginations, that will launch schools into the bright future.

The authors wisely note that "The trick is to figure out how to harness these new resources, which make play, questioning, and the imagination the bedrocks of our new culture of learning. The question is: In the twenty-first century, how do we cultivate the imagination?"

I strongly encourage you to also order a copy of this book for yourself (the grasping, gushing, and tearing cardboard to shreds are entirely optional). Look for more about this book in upcoming posts!

THE LANGUAGE POLICE and the lack of epic meaning for students, part II

My sons don't like a lot of contemporary children's stories - I can tell by their eyerolling they find the milquetoast conflicts and not-so-subtle happy resolutions of suburban animals dressed in American clothes both boring and patronizing (oh, look, two turtles in cardigans learning how to share!). The stories that they love are the big, messy, magical ones - their favorite stories are ones like Shrek! by William Steig (the real, original Shrek, not the watered-down, sugary movie version) and anything from the original, unabridged Grimm's Fairy Tales. These stories are not for the weak of heart; they involve bodily fluids, parents who don't like their children, magical high-stakes situations and conflicts, men and women with super powers and super mutations, half-animal-half-humans, even death. That is not to say that the stories are crude, or poorly executed, because they are not - they're beautiful, full of rich language and imagery that have my sons riveted. They beg me to read them over and over.

But, according to Diane Ravitch's 2003 book The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, none of these stories would make it into contemporary curriculum, nor would excerpts be featured on a standardized test or in a textbook. Why? They contain material that has become objectionable, for one reason or another, so they are replaced by the suburban animals having petty domestic conflicts. Cue eyerolls.

Did you watch the Jane McGonigal video from yesterday's post? Because ideas in her TED talk - mainly the concepts of an "epic win" and the journey with "epic meaning" found in video games - are central to today's topic, which concerns why we parents should be concerned with what our children are learning in school. Or, more directly, what they're not learning.

In the first chapters of The Language Police, the educational historian and former US Assistant Secretary of Education details explicitly how special interest groups from both the left and right seek to restrict and even censor language, ideas, historical events and scientific facts from tests and textbooks. Since she served on committees that created national tests during the '90s, and retrieved "bias and sensitivity" guidelines from all the major textbook publishers, we can be assured that she is not guessing or assuming; she copies these documents, word for word, directly into the book. In her deft analysis, what began as an honest attempt at trying to remove racist and stereotyping language from tests and textbooks has become a monster, eating up every kind of interesting piece of learning available to our young people. Politicians, along with the multi-billion dollar book publishing industry, have assumed complete control of the texts that our children read, and they are terrified of children reading material that is not already familiar to them, or contains an idea, an image, a location, or a word that might upset them. As Ravitch handily points out, this leaves out nearly every single piece of literature written before 1970.

The topics and language found objectionable by bias and sensitivity panels range from bizarre to hilarious. Excluded are the history of peanuts (because some children are allergic to peanuts), pioneer women and patchwork quilting (this is gender bias, since women should not be seen doing domestic tasks - even though it's a historical fact), a blind mountain climber (blind people should not be perceived as being different from anyone else); stories about mountains, deserts and beaches are forbidden (because a child may have never been to the mountains, a desert, or a beach), and so are all stories about owls (the reasons for this are too ridiculous to list), stories about class distinction in ancient Egypt (panels don't want to draw attention to income disparity, even in ancient times), and the list goes on and on. 

"But that is not all," Ravitch writes in chapter two, "The New Meaning of Bias." "Religious and political issues must be avoided. Reading passages must not contain even an "incidental reference" to anyone's religion. There must not be any mention of birthdays or religious holidays (including Thanksgiving), because some children do not have birthday parties and do not share the same religion." She continues. "There must be no reference in any test passage to evolution or the origins of the universe. Writers must avoid any mention of fossils or dinosaurs. Their very existence suggests the forbidden topic of evolution. However, it is acceptable to refer to 'animals of long ago' if there is no mention of how old they are and no suggestion that the existence of these animals implies evolution."

I find this ridiculous and alarming for many reasons. (In future posts we will talk about the Texas SBOE, and how they ignored the advice of prominent historians and scientists and rewrote our textbooks to include topics that are important to their religious and political convictions - we will cover how destructive this kind of political censorship is to our students and to democracy in general.) But, for now, let's just talk about it from our students' point of view. Could it be somehow connected that American children are doing poorly in school because they find nothing worth learning? If we take away dinosaurs, fairy tales, ancient Egypt, inspiring stories of people with disabilities doing impossible things, stories on mountains, deserts or beaches, stories with conflict and resolution, stories with magic and holidays and mean people, what do we have left?

Turtles in sweater vests arguing over a toy.

Here is where Jane McGonigal's "epic meaning" comes in. In video games, gamers are not asked to take out the trash or learn to share; they are asked no less than to save the world. It's risky, and full of danger and excitement, but to a gamer, it's worth it. This may be the exact same reason my sons love Grimm's Fairy Tales - Hansel and Gretel are small children, but they are fighting for their lives. By not allowing children to use their imaginations in any way, and by stripping bare anything controversial or interesting from stories, are our well-intentioned curriculum writers and book publishers annihilating everything that's interesting about life? Could this be a contributing factor to why each day 7,000 American kids decide to drop out of school? 

Go into your child's classroom and take a look at how many real books are there. You will see textbooks and "stories" - tracts or pamphlets written by the textbook company - but what about real books, untampered by committies? 

 

Book Club Preview: FIRES IN THE MIND

Our new Book Club featuring Kathleen Cushman's Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery begins in only two weeks! The first online discussion and reading assignment starts on Monday, May 25 and I want you all to be there, but first you need to go get the book on Amazon - there are both hardback and Kindle versions available.

Why do I think parents need to read this book? Because Cushman's insights into the minds of children are directly applicable to both their education and home life. When we think of how to motivate our children and get them to do their best, we rarely think of asking them how to do it - but Cushman has done just that, performing what author Mike Rose calls "a lovely act of conceptual Jujutsu and instead asks 'What can the kids tell us about motivation?'" We parents can learn a great deal from Ms. Cushman's central question: What does it take to get really good at something?

She discusses how much students want to understand why they are learning what they are learning:

"In Chapter Seven, 'Bringing Practice into the Classroom,' the students do not suggest making direct links between their interests and school subjects. Instead, they remind teachers of the meaning and value they have found in outside-school commitments, and ask them to look for that in school subjects, too. As Micah, in San Antonio, explained:

"'You want to delve into the reason why you are doing something, instead of just blindly following what the teachers tells you to do. If you are getting the answer without really realizing why it's important, it's empty. You are not really learning. You are going to drop that later, because it has no importance to you in your life.' - MICAH"

In another example, Cushman highlights how important it is for kids to learn from experts:

"Watching accomplished people do something well often made these teenagers want to practice even more. Talking to experts in person was even better. As Mike said, 'If I meet a musician I look up to, everything he says is like it was bolded out.'

"So I sent students out to interview people from their communities whom they considered masters in their fields - plumbers, farmers, physicians, church organists, psychologists, engineers, and so on. And as the kids transcribed those interviews, they saw many similarities to their own learning journeys.

"Every expert's story started with a spark of interest that somebody noticed or framed. All had the opportunity to explore that interest further, with someone nearby to encourage, critique, and suggest next steps. Small successes along the way rewarded hours of practice - and with a challenge met, the experts wanted to go further."

How does this conversation - how students get really good at something - relate to our passion for reforming Texas public schools? The correlations are strong.

• From the book jacket: "Fires in the Mind uses the latest research on cognition to help students and teachers together address motivation, practice, and the need for high standards."
• Parents need to shoulder the very important role in their child's education - yes, we rely on teachers and government to provide the structure, but without our support, it's easy for children to become lost in the system.
• Until we realize what is important to learn - until government, administrators, teachers and parents come up with a common understanding of what comprises a quality education, reform efforts will continue to flounder.

I hope you get the book; if you take a peek I bet you'll soon be as excited as I am about reading and doing the exercises together. As Ms. Cushman says at the end of chapter one:

"'Train every day, then you will see,' advised the samurai Musashi four hundred years ago. Ten thousand hours - that roughly corresponds to the time students spend in school during four years of high school and four years of college. What are we asking our youth to practice in the precious time? What fires are we lighting in their minds?"

 

PFET Book Club: Would your favorite teacher be considered effective today?

Mrs. Cynthia Holtzman was my freshman US History teacher, and my favorite. Just like Ms. Ravitch's favorite teacher, Mrs. Ruby Ratliff, whom she describes at the top of chapter nine of The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Mrs. Holtzman was also quite gruff and demanding - we were expected to use proper grammar and syntax on every assignment and wrote only essays for tests (to be sure we grasped the depth of the material). She did not hand out very many As. She had lots of rules - no gum chewing, no looking out the window - and like Mrs. Ratliff, "did nothing for our self-esteem." To both women, "Accuracy mattered." Yet she was respected as one of our school's greatest teachers; I couldn't wait to get to Mrs. Holtzman's class. Instead of reading from the textbook or, like many of my other high school teachers, sitting at her desk while we read from the textbook - she would stand at the front of the class and teach us history like it was a long and complicated story, one with interesting characters and events that did not stand alone, but were forced upon humanity by a complex combination of reasons and causes, leading to "watershed moments." I remember the day I heard that term for the very first time, and how much it meant to me to understand something so powerful. American history had never felt so real, nor had I ever before understood how complicated and diverse every historic event actually was. Each morning, I would sit down in her class - not chewing gum, of course - and be mesmerized for 55 minutes.
Ravitch wonders, would her Mrs. Ratliff (or my Mrs. Holtzman) be considered an "effective" teacher by today's standards? How would your favorite teacher hold up? How would we measure what they taught us?
Her point has to do with how we are evaluating teachers in today's NCLB, corporate management-style school climate - one that equates teacher effectiveness with student performance. Like Ms. Ravitch, I am beginning to see that chaining student achievement to the teacher alone may not be good for anyone.
"Clearly she (Mrs. Ratliff) had multiple goals for her students, beyond teaching literature and grammar. She was also teaching about character and personal responsibility. These are not the sorts of things that appear on any standardized test." Ravitch worries that we have narrowed the scope of too many teachers, and they've become resentful. I have to say I agree with her. My own father - a public school teacher who ran into students around town constantly who exclaimed, "You were my favorite teacher!" - took early retirement because he resented the way teacher evaluations were changing. "If she (Mrs. Ratliff) had been evaluated by the grades she gave," Ravitch writes, "she would have been in deep trouble, because she did not award many A grades." My father was also "talked to" about giving too many failing grades. This drove him nuts, because he had the points in his grade book to prove that each student had earned her grade! This seems ludicrous, but we're doing the exact same thing to teachers by making them solely responsible for the constant improvement of student test scores.
This week's chapters - Choice, The Trouble with Accountability and What Would Mrs. Ratliff Do?, had me both alarmed and disappointed with present school reform. Are we missing the entire point of education? Ravitch puts it better than I: "We even forget to reflect on what we mean when we speak of a good education. Surely we have more in mind than just bare literacy and numeracy. And when we use the results of tests, with all their limitations, as a routine means to fire educators, hand out bonuses, and close schools, then we distort the purpose of schooling altogether."
There is so much to chew on in these three chapters, I became confused at some points - did you? I have no idea if the unions are good or bad (Southern states with weak or no unions have consistently performed the worst in the nation - is this the lack of unions or general lack of wealth? Or could it be the lack of unions is somehow tied to lack of prosperity? Unsure.). I don't know whether having unlimited choice to which school you can attend makes any difference in how students fare (the results of the studies are murky and seem to vary from state to state). Accountability-style testing and the practice of firing teachers based on what their students do seems utterly nonsensical - shouldn't teachers be judged by some sort of teacher standard instead?
All we know now is that what we have is not working. Our students are receiving a base, watered-down version of history, science, art, music, and only the most basic reading and math in order to ensure passage on state tests - or else. Teachers like Mrs. Ratliff or Mrs. Holtzman may not pass muster by today's standards, which require each teacher to show that their students are highly successful in order to keep their jobs - no matter how low the standards might be, or taking into account the effort put in by students - or else. Both union and non-union teachers feel they are under the gun, told by management-style reformers that they will comply with the new rules - or else. Entire school districts (including DISD, as reported by the Dallas Morning News, see p. 155) have encouraged cheating and shortcuts in order to inflate scores, because scores must constantly improve - or else.
If Mrs. Holtzman were here, she would point out that it's not just one reason causing the failure of the American school system, but many, just as slavery was not the only reason for the Civil War. What we need to identify is our own watershed moment - the critical turning point that will change our thinking and force us to act, to take our children into a deeper, richer, more successful future.
"If we fail to attract and retain teachers like Ruby Ratliff, will we produce a better-educated citizenry? Will our schools encourage the innovative thinkers who advance society? It's not likely."
What's our watershed moment going to be?