So, What About the N word

So, What about the N Word?

Two kids are jostling in the hall.   One is calling the other kid the N word.    Does your reaction matter if both kids are white?   How about black?   How about one or two of several races?   For some reason the racial mix of the group will make a difference to how people will react.   How do families, school people and folks in the community treat the word?

Is it profane and always unacceptable as a racist slur?   If so then the make-up of the group of kids in the above example does not matter.

Should schools have absolute policies where the use of the word is just not allowed, period, end of sentence.

The Madison Wisconsin school district made an absolute rule.    The word was not to be used, no way, no how.   If staff used the word that staff member would be fired.   A school security guard who had been with the system for 17 years, was called the N word by a student.   The guard, who is African American, responded by saying to the student, “Do not call me a ‘nigger’.   That is not who I am.”   The guard was terminated!    Within in days, there were demonstrations, complaints, letter campaigns.  He was rehired.   Prior to the word being forbidden to be used by anyone, that event would have been followed up by a meeting in the principal’s office where the seriousness of the situation would be explained to the student, there would be a mediation and end with a handshake or a hug, and hopefully some education.

Managing the use of the N word is just one instance in which schools (and families) have shown their unwillingness to wade into the difficult discussions of bigotry around racist words.   While it may be true that this current political atmosphere has given license to the use of bigoted language and behavior, these problems have been beneath the surface for as long as we have had a country.   Outlawing the use of any profane word doesn’t solve the problem of why it is being used.  We just drive folks back into their hole in the ground.

We need to teach our kids empathy.   As the Native American proverb, do not criticize until you have walked a mile in someone else’s shoes.    Our students need to be taught the reasons why bigoted words are bad, and about the psychic damage they can do to the recipient of these words.  Then we can move on to conversations about how much alike we are and stop emphasizing how different we are.

Banning the N word, or any other bigoted racist word is really easy.   What is hard is trying to figure out why people want to use that word at all!

They Don't Notice Me When I'm Sad

They Don’t Notice Me When I’m Sad

Why do we have kids killing other kids by opening fire in a cafeteria or classroom?  Why is teen suicide one of the highest causes of student deaths in our country?   Why are students in our schools using profanity for everyday chats, posting sexual videos on SnapChat or texting sexually explicit photos and videos.   Maybe it is because “They don’t notice me when I’m sad”.

The high school student who wrote this sentence as part of a plea for his public school IEP committee to send him back to The Harbour School, a non-public special school for children with disabilities was desperate and accurate in his concerns about the public school.   The high school in question is widely considered one of the 2-3 best in the school district.   Its students are “good kids” from “good families”.   The student parking lot is filled with late model nice vehicles.  Yet here is the critique from a student.

“When the teachers are teaching, I can’t understand what they are saying because they are going too fast.  Whenever I tell the teachers that something is bothering me they rarely solve the problem or do nothing at all.”   Unfortunately, the teachers have a schedule to keep.  They cannot slow down or postpone progress.   The school pacing guides are designed so that all of the material will be covered by the time the school schedule dictates the state tests will be held.  “They don’t notice me when I’m sad”.

“The students are disruptive and I think they aren’t following the school rules.  They are swearing a lot and I don’t like the way the girls are dressed.  They wear clothes that expose body parts, it makes me feel disgusted.”  I am sure that swearing and dressing inappropriately are contrary to the school behavior code and to the dress code.   The problem is neither of these guides has any meaning at all unless school personnel enforce them.   So why don’t they?  There are multiple reasons.   People just don’t want the aggravation that goes with enforcing school discipline.  Parents will show up and support the misbehavior of the student and blame the teacher.  Teachers will be accused of being culturally insensitive, so why bother.  It used to be if a teacher had to call out a student for any behavior, the student knew that there would be another price to pay once he or she got home.   Not anymore.  Now the family is as likely to take the student’s side as not, because frankly, enforcing discipline is hard and there is going to be push back and, well, families just don’t have the time.  “They don’t notice me when I’m sad.”

“The kids make me feel like they are all above me.   I don’t feel safe and I feel like I don’t belong here.   I feel bad for the kid from my media production class, the kid who committed suicide.  I think he felt what I am feeling here overwhelmed, disappointed and frightened”

Violence is becoming endemic in our schools.    Suicide is now the second leading cause of death among adolescents in the U.S.  Maybe it is time we noticed when our kids feel sad.

Get the Lead Out

Get the Lead Out

Most of us have read about the lead in Flint Michigan schools when the city decided to save money by switching its water source from one of the Great Lakes to a local source that allowed lead to leach into the city’s water supply.   The full extent of the damage to Flint children is still not known.

Here is what is known.   Four years after the crisis was discovered, one in five students in Flint public schools is eligible for special education. The Superintendent has stated that 28% of Flint students have disabilities that warrant an IEP.   That is more than double the national average.  The school system is buckling under the cost of providing services and meeting federal requirements for children with disabilities.

While Flint may be best known of cities with lead in the drinking water, it is not alone.  Many other urban areas are using water facilities with lead pipes that are old and leaching into drinking water.   The situation may foreshadow issues that will be showing up in other older urban areas.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, the Education Law Center and the New York-based firm of Case & White have joined to represent Flint families suing the school system, the Michigan State Department of Education and the Genesee County Intermediate School District alleging failure to meet the needs of special education students.  Families with the resources to do so, have moved out of town. Leaving behind people who are disproportionately poor and in need of support services.  The district is unable to recruit and retain special education teachers.   It has resorted to using long term substitutes just to put a body in the classroom.  As many as 25% of the classrooms are staffed with temporary people.  It is going to take a great deal more money to provide these children with an appropriate education but the fact remains, all of the education in the world isn’t going to fix the cognitive damage to these children who will become cognitively damaged adults, more dependent on taxpayer support. 

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 98,000 public schools and half-million child care facilities are NOT regulated as to the amount of lead in the water.  In fact, there is no federal policy that mandates lead testing in schools.   Maryland has recently required all public-funded schools to submit water samples from multiple drinking fountains and faucets throughout the school.  The state health department is evaluating the samples for lead levels shutting down those water supply areas that don’t pass the test.  In Baltimore City, multiple schools provide bottled water to students because the fountains are unsafe.  Get the lead out means more than get moving.  We need to get moving before more kids are brain damaged by our neglect.

Let's DO something with all that money

Let's DO something with all that money

Lots of chatter about the Kirwan Commission and how much money it will cost, how much good it will do and whether or not we can afford it.  Let’s get rid of the first bug-a-boo, whether or not we can afford it.   Maryland is one of the richest states in the country with, by some surveys, the highest per capita income in the country.   The more relevant question is should we afford it.  Is this the best use of billions!, yes with a B, of dollars.   Just because we can afford it does not mean we should afford it.

The results are in for the national testing of reading and math.  Once again Maryland’s results are down.    Of course, the advocates for Kirwan were all over it, proving without a doubt the necessity of funding Kirwan.  What is odd about this conclusion is that the test scores used to be higher and the funding was much lower.  Seems to me that could be an argument for lowering funding LOL.

I am not advocating for that, but I do not think the expenditure of the money Kirwan is recommending is going to improve education, yet alone test scores.

Kirwan recommends spending more money on teachers’ salaries, bringing starting salaries to 60K.   Maryland already has one of the largest median salaries for teachers in the nation.    There has never been any evidence that paying a bad teacher or a mediocre teacher more money will make her an excellent teacher.   Yet we keep insisting on doing that.    The elephant in the room is the union.  No one wants to admit in this union addicted state that it is the union which assures that weak teachers get to stay on the job.    And it also assures that there can be no differentiation of staffing so everyone is a teacher or an administrator.

If we are going to spend this kind of money on education then let’s do something dramatic and bold.   Let's dramatically re-align and re-assign what the people in school buildings do.   Let's raise the salaries of the stars, lower the salaries of the bottom of the barrel and use any money we save to hire social workers and community workers.  Let's help teenage and lower socio-economic mothers learn how to parent.  Let's have school libraries open into the evening for family activities and food.  Let's put school employed community action workers into the community to help parents enrich the experiences of kids and teach everyone the value of an education.   A parent cannot read to his/her child if he or she can't read or if he or she is working two or three jobs just to survive.  Schools do not exist in a bubble.

The so-called “Independent Oversight Board” is just another expensive way to layer bureaucracy on top of bureaucracy.   If the Board is needed because MSDE and the State Board of Education are not doing their jobs, then fix that.   Don’t just add another layer so no one knows who is in charge and the dance of the lemons can just dance to a faster beat.  A chunk of money will be paid to the members of the Board, plus, of course, they will need physical facilities and support staff that take more money.  

The education system is limping along.   Throwing money at it will not fix the problems.   Nor will the contradictory approaches of paying teachers more (supposedly to increase the attractiveness of the profession) and making it more difficult to get into the profession so there will be better teachers. 

With the kind of money Kirwan wants the citizens of Maryland to spend, Maryland could actually create a new and exciting system instead of throwing money at trying to patch this one.

Wouldn't it be great to be a kid again?

Wouldn’t It Be Great to Be a Kid again?

Hmmm, if you are a kid, the answer is probably not so much.  It seems grownups have only minimal knowledge of what kids are feeling and experiencing.   Some recent research indicates some things that kids wish their parents and teachers knew about them.

Most kids are already really trying hard.  They want to please the grownups that surround them.  So telling kids to try harder or practice more and they will get it- whatever the it is- piano, reading or math.  Well that really doesn’t help much.  And telling kids to just try harder just adds to their frustration and, truthfully, it makes them angry.

Grownups think they know the kids.  Well the kids know us too.  They can tell by our facial expressions, our body language and our response time to events.  They want us to be happy.  And when they think we are not, they are concerned that somehow they had something to do with it.  If an adult is in a bad mood, it probably wouldn’t hurt to let the child/student know that your mood has nothing to do with them and that you still love/care about them.  Because kids worry that they caused the bad mood and you won't love them any more.

Kids, like adults, want to be trusted.   They want our first, second and maybe third response be that we believe what they tell us about an event.  So when something breaks and a kid says he didn’t do it, believe him until you are sure that there is another cause for the issue.   And maybe it really was just a plain accident just like adults accidently break a glass even when they are “being careful”.

Last week I saw a sign, it said, “I wish you would stop texting me every half hour, I told you I would be five minutes late.”.  Ok, pretty funny.  But kids experience that kind of dishonesty all the time and they wish we would just tell them the truth.   If you are going to be a no-show and you already know that, tell them the truth.  Don’t put them off for an hour or whatever and then announce you aren’t coming.  Ditto about someplace you promised to take them.  If it is not happening, let them know when you know.

Kids know when adults are hypocrites.   Grownups are all over them for too much time spent on electronics.  But have you ever watched adults at dinner in a restaurant?   How many of them have their phones out when they are supposed to be enjoying the company of their companion at the table.  Yet we give kids grief for doing the same thing.  Set a standard and stick to it.  It is fine for kids to have a different standard from adults, but they need to have some leeway as well.

We all want to give our kids multiple opportunities to do everything.  But what adult doesn’t treasure a free weekend morning or evening when nothing is scheduled?   Kids are often not in control of their own lives.   It is one of the worst things about being a kid.  In our rush to give children a broad life experience we don’t often realize that kids need “me time” as well as grownups do and may just need some time to just “be”.   Let’s let them have that.

I always think that the true sign of love is when someone loves you just as you are without the footnote.  As in, I love you if only… and there it comes.  If only, you would lose a few pounds, if only you would work out more, if only, you would dress better.  You get the drill and so do the kids.   There used to be a time when we taught elementary teachers to get unruly kids to behave by saying, “I like how Tania took out her book and is ready to work.”.   That is supposed to send a message to the kids who are not ready to work that they should be like Tania.  Siblings are different from each other even if raised in the same house and even when they share the same biological parents.   Yet sure enough, one kid will be the model for the others.  One of the worst things we say to kids is, “why can’t you be like …?”   Well maybe it is because he or she isn’t that other child.  Children, just like adults, want to be loved and valued for who they are, just as they are.  We need to value them for who they are, just as we want to be valued the same way.

Adults often have the language and the power to speak up when these kinds of things happen to them. Children don’t.   We need to listen to what they are saying with their facial expressions, their behavior, and, yes, their words.   It really isn’t all that hot to be a kid again.

What do principals think of parents?

So parents what does your principal think of you?

Probably not surprising that principals have names for parents and they aren’t always sugar and spice.   Education Weekly did an extensive survey of principals to ask them what they thought.  Principals walk a tightrope between staff and families.   If they are seen as caving in to families too often by staff, they will have a really tough time of running the school without staff support.   On the other hand, if they don’t provide the attention and understanding that families want there will be complaints to the upper reaches of administration.   So they must learn to walk the tightrope and avoid the squeeze play.

Based on the survey, principals use about seven different groupings for parents.

There are the “lawnmower” or “snowplow” parents.   These are people who are generally unhappy with previous experiences and come in with both guns blazing.   They are going to make sure that their child has only positive experiences.   They want the child to only experience success and avoid disappointment at all costs.   This attitude upsets principals and staff mainly because it does not prepare the child for what life will be as an adult.

The “helicopter” parent wants to watch over every phase of the child’s life.  They are a lot like the lawnmower parent except that these parents want to be involved in every minute aspect of the child’s life be it academic or social.   School folks worry that the child is not going to be prepared to problem solve on his/her own when life gets complicated as we know it will.

Tiger parents are often associated with Asian parents because of the book written called Tiger Mother.  But in fact any ethnic group can produce Tiger parents.   These parents have a very authoritarian style and demand high achievement from their children in all aspects of school life- academics, sports, music, or extra-curricular activities.   Teachers are concerned that the children will feel like failures because it is virtually impossible for any child to excel in every activity.

The Elephant parent is very nurturing.  They want the child to be happy and protected.   They place a very high value on encouragement and empathy to the extent that the child seldom experiences failure.   One of the most important adult skills is resilience to failure.  Learning to pick yourself up after a flop and move on.  Kids with Elephant parents don’t get to have the chance to do this very much so they lose a valuable adult skill.

Jellyfish parents are just that, jellyfish.   They have few rules or regulations for their kids whether it is because they believe kids should not be required to follow rules or because they do not want to exert the effort to teach those rules.  Often these children are overindulged and do not learn that life will have rules that they will need to follow.

Dolphin parents are the good guys.  They are firm but flexible.  They strive for balance in rule enforcement and they do have expectations for appropriate behavior.  They nurture creativity and independence in their children.   These youngsters are learning lessons that will best prepare them for adulthood.

The Free-Range parent is quick to say that their goal is to allow their children to become independent and self-reliant so they have few rules and expect their kids to learn from experience.   The problem with this parenting style is that younger children don’t have the experience or the cognitive maturity to make these kinds of decisions.

While it is nice to be able to categorize families/parents, it is seldom accurate that a family is exclusively one type of another.   One of the things that occurred to me is that we could probably use these same categories to sort principals in terms of how they respond to monitoring and mentoring teachers.

Might be interesting to do a survey to find out how parents categorize school staff.

Tell me again what test scores mean?

Tell me again what test scores measure?

There are lots of ways to measure how good a teacher is.   Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) all teachers were going to be evaluated based on the standardized test scores of their students.   This idea makes so little sense as to be ridiculous.  Yet state after state chased the money and began to link teacher evaluations to standardized test scores of students.   Now many, many states and school systems are rethinking the standard.

First of all, this requirement makes the assumption that there is a 1:1 correlation between teaching and learning by the student.  There are multiple reasons why kids don’t learn something.   Most obviously is the fact that the student may not have the ability to learn the material no matter how well it is taught.   Or there may be other aspects of the child’s life that are putting learning way down on the child’s priority list.  The child’s parents may be separating or fighting regularly.  The family may be suffering some economic trauma with income dramatically reduced.  A pet may be sick or has died.  A member of the family may be very ill.  When a child is experiencing life trauma, there isn’t much energy left over for learning.   Today, many schools have pacing guides that require the teacher to move on according to a pre-described schedule.  Teachers don’t have the luxury to go back and re-teach what the child has not learned.  Great teaching is wonderful and important but it can’t guarantee that the child will learn.  And some children need multiple exposures to the content before they learn it.

The idea was to use standardized tests as an independent measurement of what a child has learned.  Then teachers would be evaluated by this measurement.   The purpose was to move the measurement method to something more objective so that a principal wouldn’t rate a teacher highly because the principal liked the teacher or poorly is she didn't like the teacher.   Principals and school systems would need to use the objective test measure instead of some more subjective measures.   The fact is that standardized tests are not necessarily valid measures of what a child has learned.  They can measure what has been learned as measured by the test but as anyone who has ever been tested can tell you, much more was learned than was measured on the test. 

So how can good teaching be measured objectively if we insist that it be linked to learning.  Just maybe good teaching cannot be measured independently of each specific student. 

There is no teaching, good or bad, unless it is linked to learning.   And there is no such thing as the same model of teaching being “good” for all students.  What is perfect for some students is just the opposite for others.  Searching for an objective measure of good teaching is a fools’ errand.  Good teaching is very subjective.   Oh sure, there are guidelines and requirements for a good lesson or lesson plan.  These characteristics can easily be checked off by any evaluator.  But if you want to know what good teaching is, skip the test scores and just ask a couple of kids.  Their answers will be subjective and spot on.