Monthly Archive for September, 2005

Gadfly praises Joe Williams’ populist book, Cheating Our Kids.

Joe Williams’s new book is written with all the vividness, verve, and emotion of a Jonathan Kozol tome, but with a message that will make serious school reformers cheer. Hard-hitting, packed with inflammatory anecdotes and devastating details, Cheating our Kids puts a human face on today’s education policy battles.

Eduwonk wonders if any author has been compared to Jonathan Kozol and Checker Finn at the same time.

Joe and I met at our publisher’s office. We’re planning a joint book party in New York in January. At least, he’s supposed to be doing the planning; I plan to exploit his contacts.

See also on Gadfly, a guest column on culture shock by a businessman turned teacher.

Becoming a public high school teacher after nearly 30 years in business required that I adapt to a culture whose priorities, norms, and incentives are upside down. Public schools operate in ways that conflict with their core purpose — teaching children the basic knowledge and skills required to lead successful adult lives. These dysfunctional practices are a source of deep frustration for teachers because they understand that it’s the students who are shortchanged.

Read the whole thing.

Vernice Jones, a home-schooling blogger, wonders if the underclass is incapable of rising.

How helpful is it to know that their odds aren’t great? Don’t we know that? What is more helpful, to me, is the fact that when you mix education, exposure, and a little bit of opportunity, some children GREATLY benefit and can translate those benefits into success for generations to come. Why am I so passionate about that? I’m just ONE generation from being in that group of folks who aren’t expected to do anything, but with a little luck and intervention by individuals who cared, I have had access to great opportunities.

Jones’ mother grew up in the segregated South in a poor, poorly educated family. With financial help from her church and a bale of cotton a year, she earned a degree at a local black college. She sent her own children to private schools and invested scarce dollars in piano lessons and other enriching activities.

People escape the underclass if they find someone — a relative, a friend’s parents, a teacher, coach, church leader, etc. — who can show them how the steps to success: Know that you’re making decisions all the time, even when you’re deciding to do nothing, and take responsibility for the consequences of your actions and inactions. Everything else flows from that. Then, it’s helpful to be taken to the library, the zoo, the museum, etc.

One of the chief evils of racism is that it persuades victims that their lives are determined by forces outside their control. Kids need to know that they can determine their futures, most of the time, even in an imperfect world where some people will make negative judgments based on race, ethnicity, gender, whatever. Yes, there are racists out there. Do your homework. Read a book. Write a poem. Design your future home.

Newoldteacher, a graduate student in education and novice blogger (Oh, snap!), has one class that deals with content.

My professor is a real history professor from the real university I attend. He specializes in modern Islam and European colonialism in the Middle East. He wears bow-ties, tells us we’re wrong, criticizes us when we stay stupid things, and generally emits an air of effortless superiority. It’s absolutely awesome. Finally, someone who values knowledge, who doesn’t believe it’s just a useless jumble of unrelated baubles. He’s brilliant, and it’s obvious that he’s brilliant because he knows so much. It’s not that he’s used “transfer skills” from critical thinking projects he did as a kid. No. He studied for god knows how long in libraries across America, the Middle East, and Europe. He learned other languages and lived in other cultures, and he just knows his shit. Today he gave a narrative of the last few years in American life that was brief but so incisive I felt I would tear up. I hate that my school doesn’t think this type of intellectualism is worth anything. The guy in my class who was so pro-constructivism, he said “our schools produce kids who are good at school.” First off, most of them don’t. Second, what is wrong with that?

Newoldteacher, who hopes to teach social studies, thinks it’s more valuable to know things than to be able to “make a model space station out of plastic pipes and rubber tubing.”

And here’s Professor Plum on the advanced flapdoodle of accrediting teacher education schools.

A British hospital is telling vistors not to coo over newborn babies.

Debbie Lawson, a ward sister at the special care baby unit, said: “We know people have good intentions and most cannot resist cooing over new babies but we need to respect the child.
“Cooing should be a thing of the past because these are little people with the same rights as you or me.”

“We often get visitors wandering over to peer into cots but people sometimes touch or talk about the baby like they would if they were examining tins in a supermarket and that should not happen.

“Hopefully our message comes across loud and clear. The Government has set a benchmark that every patient has a right to privacy and dignity and we say that includes tiny babies as well.

Natalie Solent responds to a staff-designed display of a doll in a cot with a message saying: “What makes you think I want to be looked at?”

Since you ask: the custom and practice of all cultures past and present; the massed opinions of psychologists, paediatricians, doctors and midwives; and the instinctive and joyful reaction of every new parent that I have ever met.

Hospital officials now claim the anti-coo ban is about protecting newborns from infection. So why all the right to privacy talk? In U.S. hospitals, the babies are on the other side of a window which facilitates cooing without poking and prodding.

Jonathan Kozol’s new book, The Shame of the Nation argues that underfunded and “segregated” inner-city schools don’t foster curiosity, like schools in Cuba. In Opinion Journal, Abigail Thernstrom says Kozol is long on anger and anecdotes, short on reality. In addition to calling for more funding, Kozol believes “the standards, testing and accountability ‘juggernaut’ has crushed the ‘humane and happy’ education we once had.” When was that?

Is he suggesting that, with more money to buy those clean places and green spaces, inner-city kids would catch up with their higher-performing peers? Mr. Kozol pays such scant attention to academic achievement that it’s unclear. He is against longer school days, summer school for kids who need it, charter schools (and other forms of choice), merit pay and every promising avenue of school reform. He does, as an aside, acknowledge that kids should learn “essential skills,” but his main concern is with schools that exude “warmth and playfulness and informality and cheerful camaraderie among the teachers and their children.”

Kozol sees principals who enforce discipline and use scripted lessons to raise test scores as being punitive, not desperate to teach essential skills. Should we go back to that utopian era before No Child Left Behind insisted that children learn the basics?