WE here highly resolve

 We here highly resolve…

 

 

It is the time for resolutions for the new year.  We all make them.   The length of time  being able to keep them varies greatly.  During distance learning many families have come to have enhanced appreciation for classroom teachers.   However there are still lots of resolutions we should all make to make the rest of this year and the next year more profitable for everyone.   Here are some to consider:

1.    Come to school. If you aren’t in school you won’t be learning any schoolwork.   It really doesn’t matter why a student is not in school- illness, vacation, poor technology, visiting relatives, they all add up to being absent.

2.    Listen carefully:  Parents, kids and teachers all need to listen carefully to what is being said.  Parents need to listen to their children with the filter that says, “my child is going to present the best version of events”.  Teachers need to listen to parents and students.  The vast majority of parents are just trying to get the best outcomes for their child.  Don’t get defensive.   Students, it really doesn’t matter how old you are, you still don’t know it all.

3.    Be Prepared: Children need to bring the appropriate tools to their school work whether it is a tablet, paper, pencil, calculator or desktop.  They also need a quiet place to work.  Teachers need to have everything ready for the lesson BEFORE the lesson not on the fly as the lesson is happening.  Parents need to help students to have the tools they need for school.

4.    Take school seriously:  There are many ways to send the message that school is one of the most important things a child does in preparation for his/her future.  We all need to act like we believe this to be true.  That means school takes priority over other activities.  Families talk about school being the child's job for right now.

5.    Work as a team:  School is not a competitive contest where some people win and some people lose.  If school is done well we all win.  Start with believing in the good intentions of the other person, whether that is a student, parent or teacher.  No one is in the education profession to get rich.  Educators do care about kids.

6.    Get appropriate rest and nutrition:  Everyone does better when he/she is rested and not hungry.  Kids need to get enough rest to be alert for school.  Families and teachers need rest too so they have more patience with kids and school staff (the rest of life as well).  And few people do well when they are hangry.

7.    Take life and school one step at a time:  We will get to where we need to be.  Every child can learn, just not at the same time nor at the same pace.  We all need to give kids the time they need to learn.

8.    Make learning a safe experience:  Everyone fails at learning something at some time.  Make sure there is a safety net so kids are not afraid to fail when they try. Learning is a risk taking behavior.  None of us will take the risk if we are going to be embarrassed for failing.

9.    Have a sense of humor:  See the funny side of school.  That works for life too.  Find the humor in it all.  Even in the "extra" things we see during distance learning.

10.Make these school days the best days of your child’s life:   That really can happen.  Everyone needs to try to make that so.

 

Happy New Year and good luck on those resolutions.

Kids aren't the only ones who need to be healthy

 Kids aren’t the only ones who need to be healthy.

 

Humans aren’t the only ones who need to work to stay healthy.   Schools need to be healthy as well and I am not talking about taking temperatures, fogging classrooms or using hand sanitizer.   Being willing to try to learn is a risk taking behavior and kids will only take that risk if they feel safe in the school environment.

Schools can be healthy or sick just like people.

One of the things we have learned from all this distance instruction is that relationships are at the heart of any school experience.  Every time there is a school shooting it becomes clear that the shooter did not feel known or recognized by anyone in his school.   Students need to feel that their teachers are their coaches and want them to succeed.  It is not a “gotcha” experience.  Kids need to feel safe and accepted.   Teachers need to know whose parents are thinking of splitting up, which kid’s dog is very sick, whose family is moving again and what child has never been good at math.   Staff need to know kids as individual people not as “the fourth grade homeroom”.  They need to be able to take the time (that’s YOU pacing guide) to talk with children about their lives not just their school work.

All kids can learn, just not in the same way or on the same day.   Schools need to have high expectations for every kid not just the white ones from upper middle class families. Different kids are going to need different supports to reach those goals.   A football coach doesn’t expect to have a star quarterback on day one.  There will be lots of practices and support.  So it is with students.   Perhaps that upper middle class kid doesn’t want to go to college.  Perhaps she wants to be a chef.   Teachers can help her run interference with her family to get there.  Or maybe that lower socio-economic kid really does have the potential to be a veterinarian.  He is going to need lots of supports in a family where he may be the first person to go to college.  Healthy schools have systems in place to help all kids learn to their highest ability in whatever way works best for them.

Freedom from fear is a critical component for a healthy school.  That means behavior expectations are clear and enforced for both kids and staff.   Kids are innately fair.   They will usually accept consequences they see as deserved.  Other students will feel safe to learn when they see behavioral expectations enforced in an equitable manner and that includes staff.  So if kids can’t bully other kids- and they should not- neither should teachers be allowed to bully kids and/or other staff.   Behavioral expectations should not discriminate by age. 

“If it ain’t broke don’t fix” it is the mantra of a do-nothing school.   First of all, leadership doesn’t know if something is broke if no one is ever asked.   Data need to track discipline, is one demographic more likely to receive consequences than another.   Are there some teachers who seem to “rule the roost”.   Do people have something to say but are afraid to say it for fear of being a snitch or a malcontent?   Do kids and staff have opportunities for open discussion and disagreement without fear of retribution?   Is it ok for some people to love chocolate and other not to like chocolate at all?  

Healthy schools make for healthy learners, and that includes students and staff.  Vaccines aren’t just needed for viruses. 

Unions have an out-sized voice

 Unions have an out-sized voice

 

Just about everyone agrees that it is in the best interest of children for them to be back to in-school learning.   There are huge differences of opinion about just how fast that should be happening.

Unions have taken on an out-sized voice in making the determination of when kids need to be back in school.  Mostly they push for a much more conservative approach.  They are arguing that they, too, want children back in school but only when it is completely safe to do so.   Of course, teachers are just one of the stakeholders invested in the decision.  The parents, school administrators – oh and the students- all have significant investment in getting children back into the school buildings for in-school learning.   But schools can’t open without teachers to staff them.  Therein lies the rub.  Reprising the refrain from the Viet Nam war protestors, teachers are just saying, “hell no we won’t go”.   One school district in Maryland had to delay the partial re-opening of its high schools because teachers wouldn’t come to school.   A program in Baltimore City serves about 48 students who are homeless have huge difficulty accessing online instruction.   The children are in two groups of 24 each.   They receive breakfast and lunch at school.  They s it at desks with Chrome Books surrounded by plastic shields, while they learn online.  Where are the teachers?   They are at home, they refused to come in.  Instead teacher aides walk around the room helping the children as necessary.  Teachers aren’t safe to come in, the aides and kids are-go figure!   So far there have been no virus outbreaks among the 48 children.  Baltimore City serves over 83 thousand students.  Forty-eight of those kids are in-person in-school, sort of!

The unions are also pushing back against any hybrid systems.  The unions have made it pretty clear they do not want teachers back in school until they are 100% safe.  When exactly will that be?   When exactly was ANYONE 100% safe in a school or anywhere else.

Parents are pushing back against the unions.  “Educators and teachers’ unions are not infectious disease experts or public health officials, and frankly, that’s who parents trust in making these decisions,” said Keri Rodrigues, the founding president of the National Parents Union, an advocacy organization with hundreds of parent groups across the country.

In the U.S., school districts with active unions have been last to open or have not opened at all.  The American Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingarten does say that waiting for a vaccine in every classroom is a stance that goes too far.  But she also says that when people disagree with the union stance it is just a reflection of “typical anti-union, anti-teacher animus”. " If one teacher dies from the virus that is one too many".   Of course that is true, but it is also true of if one grocery store clerk, one nurse, one grandparent dies of the virus that is also one too many.

No one is suggesting we risk the health of teachers, but why are so many teachers content with risking the futures of children.

 

Change the ruler if you don't like what it is measuring

 Change the ruler if you don’t like what it is measuring

 

The data are coming in about how kids are doing with distance learning.  And it seems that the distance part is correct but the learning not so much.  Failure rates in English and math have jumped as much as sixfold with certain populations, particularly the most vulnerable kids.

A clear stark example comparing the same kids from last year to this one tells the tale.  This year more than 36% of 9^th graders from low-income families failed English.  Last year, when these same kids were in 8^th grade, only 6% of them failed.  These numbers come from Montgomery County Maryland, generally considered to be one of the best school systems.   The numbers are even worse for kids with limited English.  This year the failure rate is 45%, when last year it was only 8% for the same kids.   People knew there were going to be gaps but the gaps were never expected to be this great.

Some learners have the advantage of oversight and support from parents and other adults.    Among White and Asian students grades in math have fallen but only by about 1%.  Among the more privileged students, the percentage of A’s in English has jumped from 16% last year to 27% this year.  Either these kids are particularly suited to online learning or some adults have their thumbs on the scales.  For learners with special needs the failure rate has jumped from 6% to 32% this year.

School leaders are working to come up with a solution.  They are not happy with the results of the measuring tools they are using.

There are two different approaches.   One is to make the work easier so that more kids can get higher grades.  Another issue is just too many assignments.  Students are overwhelmed, although it appears that for privileged families the kids and their adult support systems are doing quite well.  Leaders are saying that they are teaching content with the same “rigor” as before the pandemic.  Students are struggling.  So, if the work is made less rigorous, students should get higher grades.   Doesn’t necessarily mean they are learning more, just that the work is easier.

The second approach is to change the standard for what equals an A or a passing grade in a course.   In that approach rigor is maintained but the measuring stick used to measure achievement is modified.

All of this refers to optics.   None of this is addressing the fact that with or without rigor, kids aren’t learning as much as they were.

This might be an approach the NFL could use.  For those teams that are struggling to win, they get to play on a shorter field while the better teams keep the same standard.  Maybe if the school systems can figure this out, they can share with the NFL.  Somehow I don't think it will go over well.

If you don’t like what the ruler measures, change the ruler.

 

 

 

The Tyranny of Low Expectations

 The Tyranny of Low Expectations

 

Long ago and far away kids with disabilities were shunted off to state facilities.   Out of sight, out of mind.   Families were encouraged to “forget about the child”.   Kids who stayed at home might find themselves as adults in things called sheltered workshops, where they mostly did simple assembly tasks and were paid based on the number of pieces they completed in an hour.  There was no such thing as a minimum wage and folks were supposed to be grateful for having some place to go every day.  

Things are certainly not that bad today.  Today we have a different system of communicating to kids with disabilities that they can’t cut the real world. We send them off to be put in a sheltered working environment where we have no expectation that the student will be able to compete with non-disabled people.  These businesses are often for-profit and trade on the fact that patrons can feel like they are doing a good deed by patronizing the business.

The most common type of these businesses is a coffee shop or a café.  In these businesses people with disabilities work in the lowest skilled job in the café.   If a worker cannot make change then someone else will handle the cash register or there will only be non-cash payments.   If a worker cannot take the pressure of lots of orders being called out, then a more typical staff member will take the order and feed it to the person with disabilities at a rate the worker can manage.  Often these workers with disabilities are paid the prevailing minimum wage.   So, what is wrong with this system.  Seems like a win-win.
What is wrong is that the system is disrespectful to the abilities of the worker with disabilities.   It represents an environment that is not a real environment in the commercial world.  Employers might make allowances for employees with disabilities.   BUT, they will also instigate training programs so that the person with disabilities can move beyond what he/she cannot do to being able to do more advanced tasks.   In the supported employment scenario, the business accommodates to the skill set of the disability.  It is ok, to be disabled.  Expectations are lowered to the level of the employee. 

In a competitive employment situation, the employee with disabilities is trained to increase his/her skill set.  And as the employee learns to do more tasks that employee is enabled to possibly work somewhere else if the current environment is not working.  If Starbucks doesn’t work, what about Dunkin?   Whereas, if a person with disabilities is totally accommodated by the supported employment that person does not have options to try another employer because the employee has not increased in skills to be able to do so.   In the real world, employees accommodate to the employer’s needs, not the other way around.

When we have low expectations for employees with disabilities, we are sending a clear message- this is the best you can be- adjust.

Is that what we want for our kids?

 

Does DeVos Matter?

 Does DeVos Matter?

 

For many of you who are reading this, your response might be DeVos who?  So maybe she doesn’t matter.  But truthfully, she can matter quite a bit.

DeVos is the outgoing Secretary of Education in the Trump administration.  By some counts she is the most disliked of all Trump’s cabinet members and she has had some tough competition.

Initially her selection was challenged by the fact that she has no experience at all in education.  Oddly, many people thought that the Secretary of Education should have some experience in the area.   Her strongest qualification was that she had donated heavily to the Trump campaign.  But the major reason for her detractors was that she strongly supports private education and does not support public education.  Although in fairness, she has had very little experience with public education because she is very wealthy, went to all private schools herself and so have her children.  Having never worked in any area of education she hasn’t worked in public education either.

So why has that mattered?   About 6% of all funding for public schools comes from the federal government.  People think it is more than that but it isn’t.  it is almost entirely directed toward special areas of interest, high poverty areas, leveling the playing field for girls in sports, or supporting HBCU’s.   Most of the money is determined by Congress, but the Secretary of Education gets to distribute it.   She has strongly advocated for schools opening totally in-person during the pandemic and threatened to take money away from public schools that didn’t open and give that money to private and parochial schools.  She has weakened the protections for students who are raped on college campuses.  She has reduced the civil rights protections of students in public schools and erased protections for students in predatory and for-profit higher education facilities.  She has intervened in cases where schools were accused of disproportionately putting children of color in special education so that the school districts could continue those practices.

Because other secretaries get more ink, DeVos frequently flies under the radar except with people in education or the children who are served.   All during her term, there has been no question but that she sought to move money from public schools to private and religious schools.  She sees no Constitutional issue with spending public funds on religious education.

There is heavy pressure on President-elect Biden to pick an experienced educator for that department.  All educator eyes will be on his pick and hopefully whoever that is will matter very positively to public educators and children with challenges.

Can we afford to improve education?

 Can We Afford to Improve Education?

 

Public education is in trouble right now.  Yes, the virus is awful, but things were bad before the pandemic and now they have gotten worse.  Public schools have multiple deficits and the virus has left them with fewer students, hence less money to meet those deficits.

If you were in charge, how would you spend the limited resources.  Here are a few options to consider.

First of all is teacher salaries.  The average teacher salary in Maryland is $60,000 after about five years on the job. They earn much less than other college educated workers.   It would take about 35.5 billion dollars To close that wage gap for all 3.5 million teachers nationwide.  That is a significant amount of money.   How would this expenditure improve education for kids?

Many children in lower socio-economic groups struggle after school.  They do not have good places to go.  What would it cost to provide high-quality after school programing for the 35.5 million kids preK through 8^th grade who could benefit from extended or enriched learning experiences?  Programs that would keep kids off the street and support their social-emotional development.  Of course, there is a price tag to that.  It is about 122 billion dollars.   Would that level of investment pay dividends in more kids staying in school and more children benefiting from school experiences rather than getting into criminal or gang activity down the road?

Many states do not require full-day kindergarten.   Yet most educators believe that children would benefit from the start with high quality kindergarten.  To provide that service, schools would need to hire about 56 thousand kindergarten teachers.  It is not clear where they would be found, but at current salary rates, the cost would be about 5 billion dollars.   Would the return on that investment of better prepared students to start school be worth it?

The pandemic has made it increasingly clear that school buildings in our country are aging.  Many are so old that the HVAC systems cannot be upgraded for better filtration.  There are about 70,000 school buildings in our country.  It is projected that it would cost 215.5 billion dollars to fully upgrade the buildings that need repair, renovation or modernization.   Our kids deserve to be educated in a decent facility.   Are we willing to pay the price to do that?

Perhaps the final item on the menu is the easiest.  We have learned during the pandemic that iPads and Chromebooks are great learning devices even after the crisis is over.  For a mere 14 billion dollars every student could have a device. 

If you were in charge, where would your values direct your money?  And as a taxpayer it IS your money.   How would you spend it?

 

 

Deserting public schools

 Deserting public schools

 

We are going to see some big changes in public schools in the next year or two.   During the great recession of 2008, private schools were losing students at serious rates.  Now the reverse is true.

Families with the economic resources are leaving public schools.  Private schools and community religious schools are the beneficiaries of the exodus from public schools.  Families get that virtual learning is an oxymoron.   Parents of young children cannot believe that there are expectations for little kids to sit in front of a screen for five hours a day.  Teachers’ unions are calling the shots about when kids can come back into buildings for school.   Meanwhile, private schools and community-based schools are opening for instruction for full days.   There have been no major outbreaks of illness among students or staff.  Families are going back to work; students are going back to school.  The big question for public schools is will these loses be permanent?

What will this exodus mean for public schools?   The assumption is that the loss of seniors in June will be made up by incoming kindergarten and first graders.  But that didn’t happen this year.  Public schools are given state aide based on a pupil count in mid-October.  Those counts were down dramatically this school year leading public school systems to lose millions and millions of dollars.

The loss of revenue isn’t the only loss to school systems. The people who are leaving are the people with the resources to afford private school.  In addition to their economic well-being they are also people who value education.  They are the people who testify at budget hearings and legislative meetings demanding more money for education and better facilities.  They are the “consumers” who do not have a vested financial interest in schools.   Who will public schools turn to for advocates when they are gone.  Teachers’ unions will argue for more money.  But they are arguing from a place of self-interest and essentially what they want is more salary money, not necessarily better schools.

There is another issue.   Fewer students means that fewer teachers will be needed and fewer teachers mean lower expenses for school districts.   Staff are the biggest expense of schools.  Those unions that have been resisting coming back to school may find this stance to come back and bite them in the spring when new contracts are let.

But most of all, will our public schools be re-configured so they are made up of the marginal in our society, the economically depressed, the homeless, the families for whom education is not a high value.  And then where will our society be?

Education is not about child care

 Education is not about child care

 

Schools need to open up.  The economy needs to be restarted.  Parents need to get back to work so schools need to reopen.

What are we thinking??!

Yes, schools do need to reopen but it is not because families need child care so they can get back to work.   Schools need to reopen because, quite frankly, online learning stinks.

Yes I have heard that some kids are thriving on it.  I am not sure what exactly that means.   From what I have seen online learning involves a lot of worksheets, memory responses of information, and very little higher order thinking.   Yes Zoom and Google classroom allow for group discussion.   They also allow for individual cop-out.   Kids leave to use the bathroom.  Other kids in the house are on other computers or tablets.  Parents are doing their own work or have the TV blasting in the background.  

Good education is all about higher order thinking.  Students learn to develop concepts; they learn to write about them.  They also learn to discuss them.  Teachers encourage hands on learning.  Kids build stuff in the classroom.  They make change using real money.  They share text books.  And yes, they do those damnable worksheets too, but those are not the bulk of the day.  

We are heading into a lost year of education for our kids.   Does anybody care?  Is anybody there?   The people who should care the most seem to be worrying more about their own well-being and physical health.   In a recent Maryland county 68% of the families said they thought it was not safe for kids to go back to school.   Teachers’ unions seem to have totally forgotten their mission is to serve kids.  Early in the pandemic we called out health care workers as heroes.  And they WERE.   But when those heroes were interviewed they responded by saying that they signed up for helping the sick.  And many of those front line health care workers were not the highly paid medical profession workers.  Many were the health aides, the cleaning people, the nursing assistants.  They are not well paid but they are well committed to the mission.   Well teachers signed up for educating kids and mostly they seem missing in action.   Many love teaching from home and tending to their home business.  We already know that families with the economic means are leaving public schools for private ones.  Those schools are opening.  Those teachers are coming to school.  Those kids are getting a good education.  The teachers’ unions are the front line on this effort to keep teachers at home.  Their message is that the teachers won’t be safe.  Well when I look around those teachers who are worried about their safety are in the grocery stores, in the restaurants and in the shopping areas.  

Education is not about child care.  It is about preparing and educating our kids for their futures and ours.   It is time we started taking seriously what our kids are losing this school year.

Dream Catcher or Dream Maker

 Dream Catcher or Dream Maker

 

I want to be a professional basketball player.   I am 5’1” and poorly coordinated.  But being a professional B-ball player has always been my dream.   My parents do not want to be the people to tell me that I cannot catch this dream no matter how fast I run.  They do not want to destroy my dream.  Is that a good idea?

Many kids with disabilities have lots of dreams they are chasing to catch.  Some of our students want to be professional rock music stars.  It looks like a great gig.  All of that money and all of that adulation.  WOW! Seems great.  Truth is most folks without disabilities aren’t going to do that.   But suppose a child wants to be something more mundane.  Maybe my child wants to be a veterinarian.  She really loves animals and wants to work with them.   For starters there are no schools of veterinarian medicine in Maryland so she would need to go to the school in Virginia that has an agreement with Maryland.  And it is very tough to get in as you might imagine.   Well what if my child loves to cook and wants to be a chef in a restaurant.  That should be easy.  There is more to being a chef than just being a great cook.  The hours are LONG.  The pressure intense and there is often a lot of noise and hollering in a commercial kitchen.  Can your child handle all that? 

Most importantly when is the right time to tell my child that he/she is just not going to catch that dream.

The truth is the sooner we help our kids look at reality the better.   Making informed choices for adult careers is not destroying dreams, it is making different dreams come true.

As parents and teachers we need to make the full reality of any dream we want clear.   There are more variables to choosing a career than just “liking” to do some part of the work.  Sure it is important to want to work with animals if you are going to be a veterinarian.  But there are lots of other “work with animals” jobs that have different demands that might more reasonably fit a person’s skill set.  Working with our kids we can make differing dreams come true.   And we should.  We do not serve our children’s best interests if we waste the career preparation time available to us letting our children think they can catch that dream.  We need to work with our children to engage all of their talents and align those talents with the demands of another dream that together we can make come true.

Working with the advantages available we can make dreams come true for our children and stop chasing the ones that are just a bad fit.

Bad for reading, bad for America

 Bad for Reading, Bad for America

 

The average adult American cannot pass the citizenship test that Immigrants need to pass to become citizens.   Almost half of all eligible voters don’t vote- although maybe this year with such strong feelings on both sides we might see more folks voting.

In recent years there has been a heavy push to increase reading instruction and reading test scores.  But the number of hours in a school day are finite so some other subjects had to give up time to reading.  First went the arts, then went physical activity and most recently social studies have suffered.

A recent Thomas B. Fordham University study by Tyner and Kabourek correlated reading comprehension ability with reading achievement.  They concluded that the puny history lessons are not only bad for good citizenship they are bad for reading comprehension.

The study found that students who received just an additional 30 minutes a day of social studies instruction in grades 1-5 do better in reading than do students with less social studies.  Their conclusion is that social studies is the only clear, positive and statistically significant effect on reading ability.  

We teach teachers that kids need to first learn to read then we can worry about social studies.  Our kids spend much more time on reading instruction than do the children of other developed countries but they don’t read as well.  It is the common wisdom – but false- that kids will pick up social studies and science once they have learned to read. And for many schools, reading means just decoding.   These big blocks of time for reading and math are not being tested to see if they are doing the job as intended.  

Louisiana, not noted for its excellence in education, has begun to push the trend in the other direction.  Literacy curricula that use social studies curricula to align with reading are discovering that kids are excited about the lessons of history and about how and why things turned out the way they did.  They also learn some geography along the way too.  And, not surprisingly, reading comprehension scores have gone up.

Rebel teachers may find it easier to sneak in some lessons on history and government as they teach their students to read.  After all, not nearly as many eyes on the teacher when she/he sneaks those content lessons into a virtual  class.  

That might not only improve the students’ reading scores, we could also turn out better educated citizens.  That would be better for reading scores but also better for America.

Failure can be a good thing

 Failure can be a good thing

People often try to avoid failure.  But it can be a very good thing.   After all we don’t learn very much when we succeed but when we fail, we learn a lot.

Distance learning can avoid failure.  After all parents can be sitting right there to make sure that the student does not fail at all.   If necessary, parents will do the work for the child.  Not good.

Failure teaches us where we need to improve.  Failure shows us how we can do better.   Failure can be the final straw to push us towards a better path for our future.   Failure can teach us a great deal about ourselves.  It can teach us not just what we have done wrong but it can teach us what we have no interest in learning.  Children need to fail in school.  And then to push forward to succeed.

But children need to fail safely because too much failure can beat us down and make us think that we can never learn or that we are stupid. Failure needs to be close enough to victory that we will try again OR far enough away from victory that we chose another path.

Distance learning again separates the haves from the have nots.    Some students have lots of parental support.   Perhaps even too much support.  Parents are visible in the virtual classroom hovering behind the student.  Parents make comments about how they are “working together” with their child to ensure the child gets the work correct.  These kids do not succeed at learning but they get very good at learned helplessness so that the parent takes over and does the job for the student.   Children are learning the wrong skills.

Other kids get no help at all.  Parents are not available to help for a variety of reasons, other children, job responsibilities or even lacking the necessary skills.   Those students may well be overwhelmed by the distance learning tasks and may feel that success is just too far away and they cannot reach it.

The greatest failure of all, is the learning lost to all of our children during this time.   The lost learning will not be regained.  The kids who have not learned to read will be years catching up if at all.   The students who have suffered great social emotional damage are going to need a great deal of counseling to overcome what has been lost.  In urban and rural areas thousands of students have dropped out of school just by attrition without any formal process.  They will not be back and their futures will be forever impacted.  What gifts could they have given to our society that we will never see.

Failure can be a very good thing.  It can teach us about ourselves.  It can inspire us to greater heights and it can beat us down.  Like Goldilocks, we need to have the porridge just right.

 

What did you learn in school today?

 What did you learn in school today?

 

There is an old folk song that begins, “what did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?”   It seems that in spite of Trump’s threat to withhold funding from California if it begins teaching a new curriculum called the 1619 Project Curriculum, he can’t.  There is a federal law that forbids the federal government-including the president and/or Congress- from meddling in a school’s choice of curriculum.  It is that simple.  Curriculum is a local decision.

The New York Times developed a history curriculum of the same name that California has chosen to adopt.  Trump has also threatened that the U.S. Office of Education “look into this too” with the threat of more federal funds being taken away from California.

The 1691 Project argues that the United States doesn’t originate in 1776 the year of the Declaration of Independence but instead originated in 1619, the year the first Africans were brought to this continent and enslaved.   The project then traces the impact of slavery on all of the country’s founding principles.   The curriculum can be adapted for all grade levels.

Under the Every Child Succeeds Act, which is the current primary source of federal funding in schools, the U.S. Office of Education can’t even endorse a program of study.  Nor can it make existing funding conditional on certain curricula or types of instruction.  The law does not allow any federal stamp of approval on a curriculum or sanction of one over another.

Education and curriculum in the United States have always been a very local affair. There is no mention whatever of education in the U.S. Constitution.   It is relatively recently that the federal government got into the business of significantly supporting education with money.  Even so, federal funds only make up about 5-8% of public school funding.  

There is a saying that all politics is local; the same is true for education.  So what our kids learn in school today, very much depends on what the local boards or possibly state boards decide.   Sorry Mr. Trump, that issue is not on the president’s plate.

Does TV impact how we view disabilities

 Does TV Impact how we view disabilities? 

 

In some ways TV is a window on our social mores and in other ways it can lead us into better understandings.   Five years ago the wonderful children’s show, Sesame Street introduced a character with autism.   The show also included an online resource with information about the condition and resources for families.

But did any of that make a difference?  

Last month the journal Autism published the results of a formal study to see if shows like Sesame Street could really change attitudes.

The idea of the study was to see if viewing the website, “Amazing” that described autism and provided resources would change the attitudes of both families with children with autism and families with no children with autism.

Before viewing the website, families were assessed regarding their attitudes towards children with autism.   Not surprisingly, families who had children with autism were more positive toward the condition than were families without these children.

But here is what is very interesting.   The 473 families of children with autism and the 707 families without autism both had attitudinal changes after viewing the website.  Parents of children with autism commented that the information helped them to feel empowered and less helpless in dealing with their children.  Parents of children without autism said that the website information made them feel less frightened of not just the condition but of children with the condition.  Perhaps, previous iterations of people with autism on TV led to those fears?  The authors of the study concluded that “acquiring knowledge from a website may serve as an easy, quick way to reduce bias without potential harmful consequences toward individuals with autism”.   

These results can be extended lots of way.   Characters with disabilities on other TV shows, not just those aimed at children, could go a long way to improving employment opportunities for people with disabilities. These characters could be whatever the role demanded of them but that they just “happened” to have a disability.   The disability would not be significant to the character as it is on shows like Monk or other shows that use the disability as a character flaw that has some good to it as well.

TV is very powerful.  It is powerful when we include people of color in not stereotypical roles.  It is powerful when we show people with physical disabilities fully active and engaged (think the old show Ironside).   Imagine what it could do for people with other disabiities if they were just plain folk doing a job.

 

 

Oh my! Our kids are Cheating online

 Oh My- kids are cheating during online learning

Once we get past the reality that virtual learning is an oxymoron, we might be able to address the problem.

Cheating, as defined in a recent Education Week article, is when kids get help during virtual instruction.  They may get the help from family or friends or other students.  Somehow this is bad.  Some teachers are calling out kids and saying that the students are cheating.  

In the workplace, staff are not expected to do all the problem solving themselves.  In fact, it is considered a great workplace skill if a person knows how to collaborate with colleagues and come up with a solution.

Maybe the problem isn’t that kids “cheat”, but that the kind of learning teachers are asking of kids lends itself to children seeking the one right answer from whatever source is available.

What if teachers stopped asking one right answer questions.  What if they stopped asking multiple choice or true/false questions or questions that asked for the one right answer.  What would happen if teachers took the harder way out and asked questions that required children to not only problem solve but to also require that they collaborate with peers.  With one switch of the question, a child could go from being a cheater to being a problem solver.

In the early days, we had kids write a pledge that said, “I have neither given nor received help during this work”.   I always thought that was pretty stupid.  If you were passing someone else’s work off as your own, what would keep you from not being honest about the pledge?

This switch to online learning could be a wonderful time to get rid of grades.  Teachers (and school districts) like to fool themselves into believing that grades are a precise measurement of what a child has learned.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  What if a teacher asks a child to look at the geography, weather of a state, educational and income levels of the population and based on that information to predict what the economy of that state might look like?   Or, on the other hand, if a teacher asks a child to research the principal products of a state, describe its geographic features, the population and the name of the capital.  Which activity will be less open to “cheating” and more importantly, which activity will require more thinking and problem solving?   Clearly it is the first activity since that requires conjecture on the part of the student and there is no right answer.

It isn’t the kids who are cheating, it is the teachers who are cheating the kids out of productive learning activities. 

Unequal is even more unequal

Unequal is even more Unequal

 

Life is not fair.  We all know that.  But the virus has made those disparities even more obvious.  The vast majority of students in the United States attend public schools.   Public schools by their nature are required to serve the public-with all the good news and challenging news that implies.  So if you have a disability, practice a faith tradition, or no tradition at all, or if you have sexual identity issues, the public schools will accept you and provide an education for you.  Private schools by their very private nature can exclude pretty much at will.  So a private school may chose not to serve kids with disabilities.   Or it may choose to serve a particular faith tradition and no other.   It may take a “moral” stand against children who are homosexual or transgender and exclude those children.   In a typical year, about 10% of our nation’s children attend private schools.

But this is not a typical year.   Many public schools are doing virtual learning.   Others are opening on a hybrid schedule with some students in the building and some virtual.   Some schools have opened and then closed because of a virus outbreak.

Parents are addressing the virtual learning approach in differing ways.  Some families are investing in pod groups where several families hire a teacher and set up 3-5 children of similar ages in a pod for learning.   That takes money.  Other families are looking into private schools that are opening with enhanced safety precautions.  Private schools which had seen a decline in enrollment during the great recession that has to some extent continued  were quick to jump on the bandwagon, extending application dates and openly advertising for families who did not want virtual learning.   Surveys have found that higher income families are more concerned with a structured formal education program than they are afraid of the virus or hospitalization.  The ability of a private school to cherry pick its students has upset teachers’ unions and public education advocates who are opposed to tax credits for private school tuition or scholarships for these reasons.

Parents ask why private schools can open safely and public schools cannot.  There are multiple reasons.  Most public schools are big and they can’t pivot to social distancing within the buildings.   Public schools are also not nimble and they need to appease a teachers’ union before they can make major decisions.  Public schools also answer to multiple publics, whereas private schools usually have less diverse populations and do not need to please as many different viewpoints.

Public schools are starting to notice that families are voting with their feet.  A major public school system has seen enrollment for this school year drop by over 2000 students. Public schools are often funded based on a head count of students, lower enrollment means fewer dollars for the system.  This past June the seniors graduated albeit without much of a ceremony.   In September, there were not enough kindergarten children to replace the seniors who had graduated.   Many of those kids went to private kindergarten rather than the public online option.

Children whose families can afford private education, live in an area where private schools are geographically close or who have fairly mainstream typical kids will have options that others do not.   

Children are learning all of the many ways unequal has become more so during the pandemic.

What's Wrong With Labor?

 What’s Wrong with Labor?

 

This is an important question.   We have all just enjoyed a beautiful Labor Day weekend holiday with picture perfect weather.   Yet we seem of late to be adverse to actual labor.

State departments of education are pushing hard that every student be college ready.  They completely ignore the fact that there are some students who may not have the interest nor the academic skill to go to college.  Yet somehow the college and careers programs give very short attention to the career part of that training.   The facts tell us we might be doing something wrong.

 

As of the end of August the unemployment rate for all members of the workforce was 8.4%.   In spite of the Great Recession, when Obama left office the rate was 4.7%.  The federal reserve tells us that the natural rate for the U.S. should be between 3.5 and 4.5%.

 

But let’s unpack those numbers.  In spite of our huge push to send everyone to college, 41% of recent college grads are  working in a field that does NOT require the college degree for which they continue to be in debt!   And 12% of college grads are unemployed.   That information contradicts the common wisdom that you need a college degree to get a job.  In fact, right now, college educated people are unemployed at a higher rate than those less educated. 

 

What about those people who in spite of the pressure to go to college went into a career.   A job where they learned a skill.  A job that gives them a skill that is in demand.   Even with the high unemployment rate brought on by the pandemic, the skilled trades are doing quite well.  Looking at those numbers, we find only 6% of plumbers, 3.6% of HVAC techs, and 6% of electricians are unemployed, numbers well below those of their college graduate peers.

 

Students can learn a skill trade without a college degree and in many cases with the high school certificate.   The community colleges offer many technical degrees that  yield a high income job and do not require a high school diploma.

Do NOT decide that I am advocating against going to college, because I am not.  What is being advocated is that there are multiple paths to successful employment and those paths do not all start with a college degree.

 

We are all happy to have a 3-day weekend to celebrate.   But when it comes to celebrating labor itself- well that’s another paycheck.

Who's in Charge?

 Who’s In Charge?

 

Last week the Governor of Maryland held a press conference in which he strongly encouraged local school districts to open at least partially for the upcoming fall semester. He offered some metrics guidance with regard to positivity rates and percentage of cases within the local population   He dangled a few million extra dollars as incentive (although there were those who called it a bribe). 

  There were several issues with the admonition.

First of all, the way the system is set up in Maryland, the Governor has no authority over public school systems.  That authority rests with the Maryland State Board of Education.  While it is true that the present Governor has now appointed a majority of the members of the Board, once appointed they seem to have developed minds of their own.

Secondly, some school systems opened on August 31, so telling folks to make a major change four days before they were scheduled to open seemed a bit pushy to say the least.  The rest of the districts will open in about eight days.  Not exactly a lot of time.

Then there were the superintendents of the local districts.  These people had put a lot of time, energy and consultation with their staffs to determine the best way forward considering safety of kids and staff and their recognition that distance learning is often not learning.  They know they are trying to strike a balance between safety and learning. This is not exactly a path that anyone has travelled before so there are no historical markers to guide the way.

Thirdly, there are these entities called teachers’ unions.   They are very powerful and for the most part are resistant to returning to in-the-building learning.  Although the officers do acknowledge that some teachers do want to be in school and teaching.

And finally there are the parents and their children. Remember them?   The children are supposed to be the point of the whole system.  What do they want?  I am comfortable thinking that a big part of the Governor’s push is that parents need child care if they are going to get back to work.   And employers need workers if the state economy is going to start moving again.  Some parents very much want schools to open or at the very minimum some other public funded child care program.  But there are parents who do not think it is safe for their children to be in a public school and don’t want them there, education be damned.

So who does that leave in charge?   Truth is that in Maryland the local school districts are pretty much the place where the rubber meets the road.  After months of little to no state leadership through this crisis, now is probably not the best time to change the rules of who is in charge.

It's not all physical

                                                        It’s not all physical

 

Kids are back in school.  Well not exactly, mostly they are back in school virtually or online.  The purpose of keeping children out of school is protect their physical health.

But what about the damage to their mental health.   Now that students have  been home for months and away from their peers, there are increasing indicators that children’s mental health is suffering.

Children need consistency of schedules, predictable rules and consequences, and set expectations.   These conditions teach children how to behave, develop self-discipline and impulse control.   Without these guiderails, therapists are seeing an increase in behavioral problems in their pediatric clients.   Having these guidelines is much easier within a school setting.  Children are used to having these kinds of rules consistently enforced and they see themselves and their peers being held to the same standards.

Parenting is not this rigid.  And parents are often juggling work expectations at home, multiple children at different ages as well as the child receiving online instruction.

There are indicators that too much alone at home time is starting to risk a child’s mental health.  One of the first indicators is that the child is more withdrawn than usual.  This issue can be observed when a child withdraws from family and retreats into more screen time with animation, games and non-human interactions.

Families should also monitor eating and sleeping patterns.  Is the child eating or sleeping at the patterns that differ from pre-virus days? Sleeping patterns can have the child up late with screen time, sleeping irregularly and then not wanting to get up.  Everyone seems to have gained weight staying home so much but is the child eating noticeably more or less than usual?

Probably all of us are a bit irritable because of the changes in our lives.   But if a child seems to demonstrate a low mood or being irritable over an extended period of time, it is important to do a mental health check in with the child’s physician.  The same is true if a child seems disinterested in activities that used to engage him or her.

This virus is supposed to be a physical virus, but if we ever needed more evidence that the body and mind work as one, this is it.  It's not all physical.

Kids are just collateral damage

 Kids are just collateral damage

 

Our society keeps telling everyone who will listen that we really care about children.  Fact is, it is behavior that shows what we really care about.  And based on our behavior we don’t care about children much at all.

Babies are born drug addicted, damaged with fetal alcohol syndrome and/or tobacco use and our society does not hold the mother in the least bit accountable for the lasting damage to that child’s life.  Males create multiple children with multiple females for whom they have neither the intention nor the capability to actually “father" these children they have created.  Yet, there are no consequences for these behaviors.  At least not to the male who “fathered” the child.  There are lots of consequences to the child.

Families want to adopt these children, but they cannot without the biological parent allowing the adoption and giving up custody.   Our social services agencies are addicted to the fiction that kids are always better with biological parents so these people are given multiple chances to clean up their acts so they can regain custody of the child.  In the meantime, the child gets to bounce from foster home to foster home belonging to everyone and to no one.

By the time these kids become teens their lives are often in disarray, turning to street gangs for the nurturing and sense of belonging they should be getting from families.   Then we start pouring millions of dollars to save them from the one-way ticket from school to jail.  By that time the train has left the station and the barn door cannot be locked.   When these children needed society’s intervention, society was busy protecting the rights of the adults, the children were the leftovers.

And our disregard for children extends to the professionals who care for their needs.  Otherwise well-paid professionals earn less if they earn their money caring for children.  Pediatricians, child-psychologists, child social workers all earn less than the adult serving counterpart.  We all know about teachers.   

School staff are mandated reporters for child abuse.  Yet when they call Child Protective Services to report a concern, they are just as likely to get a recorded message as they are to be able to speak with a social worker.  Child protective services agencies are understaffed and over worked.  They can’t begin to do the job they need to do.  But it doesn’t matter because they only serve kids and children can’t vote.

Every child deserves a loving family, food security, a safe neighborhood free from fear, and stable housing.  As a society we speak good words, but kids are just the collateral damage because above all, we need to take care of adult rights and the collateral damage to children be damned.

Twice Baked

 Twice Baked

Most folks get that distance learning is at some level an oxymoron.   There is an inverse relationship between distance and learning.  The more distance, the less learning.  Teachers need to be able to reach out and touch a child.   Technology is a wonderful thing but it does not replace hands on learning.  Children with disabilities are even more greatly impacted.   Kids who struggle to read are not great candidates for screen time learning.   It’s difficult enough to sustain their attention in a classroom let alone on the screen of a tablet.   

Pundits tell us these are about to be boom times for private schools as parents of plain children look at small private schools as a serious option.   Some families have even joined to create “COVID pods”.  When several families join and hire a teacher who they set up in a learning pod in someone’s backyard. 

Day care centers are jumping on the bandwagon.   Some are offering online tutoring and monitoring of school work in addition to day care while parents go back to work. 

But all of these plans cost money.   And probably won’t work for kids with disabilities.  

Exceptional learners are already being burned by the ineffectiveness of distance learning in meeting their needs.   They get burned again if they are in a family of modest means.   And the alternative options that work for plain kids don’t work for students with special learning challenges even if their parents had the money.  It seems that the federal and state requirements that children with disabilities receive a free, appropriate education has been all but forgotten. 

More seriously learning challenged students are getting next to nothing from online learning.  Why can’t these small numbers of students be brought into carefully sanitized buildings where they can receive in-person instruction?

How many times do children with disabilities have to be burned?   They are not potatoes that improve with a second baking.