Thursday, March 5, 2015
Monday, March 2, 2015
Register > Annual IDRA La Semana del Niño Parent Institute > April 23 in San Antonio > Family Leadership for Student Success ~
Family
Leadership for Student Success ~
Liderazo familiar en pro el éxito estudiantil
This
popular annual institute offers families, school district personnel and
community groups from across Texas the opportunity to network, obtain resources
and information, and receive training and bilingual materials on IDRA’s
nationally-recognized research-based model for parent leadership in education.
This institute is interactive and participatory and all presentations are
bilingual (English-Spanish).
#AllMeansAll
#TodosSonTodos
Love Pedagogy: The Future of Education Reform #EdBlogNet @idraedu
Love Pedagogy: The
Future of Education Reform
I have seen the future of education reform, and its name is the Minneapolis Teachers Institute.At least, I hope it is the future of education reform.
The Minneapolis Teachers Institute (MTI) is a four-year old professional development program for Minneapolis teachers. It is funded by a grant from the Minneapolis Public Schools’ Office of Equity and Diversity, and coordinated by the University of Minnesota’s Department of African and African-American Studies.
But it is so much more than that.
The MTI is a hidden gem in the pocket of an urban school district that often seems stuck in a gap-filled narrative of failure and dysfunction. It brings public school teachers together for a year-long, project-based study of what it means to be a teacher today. I have seen it in action, and it is a beautiful thing.
MTI designer Lisa Arrastia
The MTI grew out of the passion and experience of Lisa Arrastia, a writing teacher and PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota with an intriguing background and a lovely vision for her work in education:
“In all of her work with schools, Lisa focuses on the development of empathic communities where young people demonstrate the freedom to think, question, and innovate as they wrestle with the tangled complexities of self, other, and difference.”
Arrastia has a lot of experience working with schools, as a former principal and school director, but says her view of education changed when her own daughter started school in St. Paul (Arrastia and her family now live in New York, where she and her husband, poet Mark Nowak, both teach).
As a public school parent, Arrastia was asked to sit on a school committee, and began to get a clearer view of the restraints teachers face on a daily basis, as they work to meet the needs of their students. Efforts to reduce homework or bring innovation into the classroom often seemed to get lost in a sea of mandates and No Child Left Behind, test-driven limitations.
That is when Arrastia started to develop a “passion for what teachers were doing,” and the MTI began to take shape.
In 2011, she heard through the education grapevine that the Minneapolis Public Schools was looking for a different kind of professional development opportunity for district teachers, and she put the MTI in motion, through her other project, the Ed Factory.
So far, Arrastia has managed to get support from MPS each year for the institute, which serves Minneapolis teachers in grades 5-12. Interested teachers apply to be MTI fellows, and then embark on a year-long, project-based study of their work. This includes monthly seminars and workshop sessions, with visiting scholars and experts from the arts and sciences, and a $1,000 fellowship upon completion of the program. Last year, featured guests included writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and social cognitive neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman. Why? Because, Arrastia says, “teachers have to be artists and scientists simultaneously.”
Beyond this, the MTI’s broader vision and purpose is to treat teachers as the “intellectual workers” they are, according to Arrastia, and to “creatively push back against the limitations of high stakes testing.”
This, I believe, is the asset-based, love-focused, relationship-driven future of education reform. As opposition to restrictive, top-down education reform builds (locally, nationally, and globally). the MTI is busy crafting an alternative vision of reform that “emphasizes the humanity of both teacher and child.” This has seemingly struck a nerve, as Arrastia says another state has expressed interest in the MTI’s work.
Poet Patricia Smith will perform at the MTI’s March 6 event
But don’t take my word for it: come to the Capri Theater in Minneapolis on Friday, March 6 for a closer look at what the MTI does. There, a manifestation of the institute’s current theme–“Love Pedagogy: Disrupting the Violence Against Young Bodies”–will be on display, as MTI fellows showcase the work they’ve undertaken this year.
Here is a detailed description of the Capri event, from the MTI:
Our seventeen teaching fellows have each chosen one student to get to know as an individual and as a learner. We’ve asked fellows to call this student “my child,” and we have asked them to encourage the student to study them as well. Fellows and their students are studying each other in order to get a sense of their common humanity, something which the institute’s research demonstrates has, unfortunately, deteriorated under the pressure of current education reforms. Applying theories based on the science of social connection, using photographer Dawoud Bey’s Class Pictures and the prose poems “Stop the Presses,” by Patricia Smith, and “Capitalization,” by Mark Nowak, as models, throughout the fellowship term fellows and students have been photographing each other, writing about each other, talking about what they fear and love, what makes them angry, and what they hope for and desire.
I have been a lucky fly on the wall at two MTI events this year, when educator and activist Bill Ayers came, and then, just recently, when poet Claudia Rankine and novelist Marlon James readfrom their recent books and offered insights on everything from James Baldwin to the importance of recognizing the “danger of a single story.” (Arrastia introduced both Rankine and James, and led with this radical notion: “Our students need relationships and love, not discipline and tests.”)
Most MTI sessions are in fact free and open to the public, and well worth attending, in order to see, up close, the good work being done with support from the Minneapolis Public Schools–whose challenges, and critics, often seem endless.
“I would say that right now there is only one way we can remake public schools; that is, we have to make them welcoming and beautiful places. We have to spend as much money on schooling as we do on the Stealth Bomber. What we have to do is to buy all the resources necessary and give everyone the maximum number of chances to learn in ways in which they choose to learn.“
–educator Herbert Kohl, one of Arrastia’s inspirations for the MTI
New Mexico Students statewide walkout in protest of new tests #EdBlogNet @idraedu #idraed
Students statewide walkout in protest of new tests. Here’s everything you need to know and the schools where that is happening.
Students across New Mexico are planning to walkout of classes Monday en masse to protest high-stakes standardized testing they say have little or no correlation to curriculum in the classroom but are closely connected to teacher evaluations and place their own graduation opportunities in jeopardy. And many of these students have support from parents, educators and elected officials statewide.
First, take a moment to hear from the students themselves. The anxiety over these tests is palpable.
Students in a media arts class at Washington Middle School made a YouTube video that has been making the rounds:
These students explain it better than any policy wonk or bureaucrat so far. Students (and their parents and educators who work with them everyday) share the individual experiences they bring to school — ‘gang violence almost killed me’ and ‘watched stepdad beat my mom’ — which require individualized education plans to help them become the musicians, artists, future engineers or educators featured in this student piece.
Bottom line: Students are not just a test score.
Read more below on why students are walking out and how Martinez/Skandera reforms are failing NM students.
updates on Twitter @Progressnownm
@progressnownm
Skandera/Martinez reforms already led to lower reading and math scores. More testing won’t help.
Skandera/Martinez reforms already led to lower reading and math scores. More testing won’t help.
Students and parents are right to be skeptical of the benefits these tests are supposed to bring.
Last year we profiled statewide student performance since Martinez/Skandera reforms were implemented. They were down in both reading and math.
When asked about the results, Skandera told reporters the problem was not her tests, it was the kids. Students should just “try harder” she said in an interview last year.
Per-student fee routes to out-of-state company
Education Week, a national online education-focussed news outlet, explains how much this new testing scheme costs New Mexico taxpayers.
The potentially huge scope of the work is described in the language of the New Mexico contract with Pearson. It says that anywhere between 5.5 million and 10 million students would be tested annually, with a projected per-student cost of testing in the new contract of about $24.
The state PED said it would spent about $6M to test this round.
Some complaints which have, so far, gone unaddressed by PED
The new PARCC tests are much different than the old pencil and paper version you and I are used to.
Third-graders are required to take the tests on computers, yet many third graders do not have access to computers at home or in the classroom. And, third graders haven’t learned to type on a computer keyboard. Remember how confused you were when you first sat at a modern keyboard and didn’t find the letters in the same A-Z order you expected them to be?
And all of these additional testings now require third graders to take up to 15 hours of tests a year, an evaluation by Santa Fe Public Schools found.
Parents in different districts are getting different information about their options to opt children out of testing. We profiled two of those conflicting districts online last week.
Ruidoso Schools sent a letter to parents affirming that they always have and continue to have a right to opt students out of standardized testing. In contrast, Belen Consolidated Schools told parents in another letter that there was no policy to permit opting out. So which is it?
As of last week, the state’s Public Education Secretary, Hanna Skandera refused to say how the PED would respond to walkouts. From KRQE:KRQE News 13 requested an interview with the New Mexico Public Education Department early Wednesday through phone and email. 30 minutes before the story aired, a spokeswoman declined to answer any questions. In part, PED said, “PED supports those districts that have made the decision to act in accordance with the law.” The department refused to clarify its position on districts allowing students to “opt-out.”
And there are still concerns that the test have no correlation to curriculum being tested because neither teachers nor students know the content of tests which are developed and administered by out-of-state companies.
We profiled some of the ongoing implementation problems in an online report last month:
And parents and teachers who took the practice test in November called the tests “shoddy” and said they weren’t confident the tests demonstrated proficiency.Rio Rancho school leaders said this to the Albuquerque Journal: “Is this going to totally screw up instructional time,” asked board vice president Don Schlichte. “This just seems so discombobulated.”And with just days to go before testing begins, some schools seem to have big problems even getting the tests up and running.In Albuquerque, test runs found that half of the computers in one school did not have the right software to run the tests, while many students who could get online couldn’t log on.
Students around New Mexico are now planning walkouts on Monday in line with those in Las Cruces and Santa Fe last week.
This was the scene last week in front of the Public Education Department’s headquarters where more than 250 students braved below-freezing weather to march on and around the complex to protest the coming PARCC tests
“There’s too much testing,” student Liliana Reza Carrillo, a junior at Capital, told theSanta Fe New Mexican “There’s eight weeks of testing, one week of review and then finals.”
The all-computerized PARCC exam — short for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers — is designed to test students’ knowledge of the newly adopted Common Core Standards, which encourage critical thinking and essay writing.
The tests are expected to take up to nine hours of time over several days. Students and teachers have been taking pilot PARCC exams to prepare for the real thing.Some students who stayed on the Capital campus said they think the PARCC tests are too hard and that the pilot PARCC testing periods are taking time away from classroom instruction.
“It’s unfair; we aren’t going to pass,” said 11th-grader Ana Iris, who took part in a practice test last week. Another student said, “We test too much.”
Now students around the state are organizing similar events on Monday when testing is slated to begin.
Las Cruces Public schools are preparing for Monday’s planned student walkout to protest the new PARCC tests.There are a number of risks for students planning on walking out of Monday’s test. The test is necessary to receive a high school diploma. An Alternate Demonstration of Competency, which would be an end of course exam approved by the state, can be taken only if the student has attempted the PARCC test three times.Superintendent Stan Rounds says students who walk out on Monday can still graduate if they take the make-up within the next three weeks.“So, you walk out,” Rounds said. “If it’s peaceful, it’s using your democratic rights, we support that, that’s fine. Here’s the deal. It can’t interrupt testing that is happening, and you must make it up during this time period and we’ll accommodate you. And we are going to let your parents know your out.”The Walkout will be considered an unexcused absence, and students will be disciplined according to individual school protocol.Alamogordo Daily NewsAlamogordo and Tularosa high school students are organizing on Facebook a plan to protest the state’s new standardized tests that begins on Monday. Some parents have also chosen to submit forms to the school districts which allow their students to refuse to take the tests…Around 40 parents, students and teachers attended a meeting to discuss the PARCC tests at the Tularosa Community Center Thursday night. Tularosa resident Lorrie Stone said her daughter, a senior at Tularosa High School, is “making herself physically and emotionally ill over this test.”Students at Hot Springs High School in Truth or Consequences staged a walkout to protest the PARCC standardized test on Friday.Witnesses told KOB they chanted “You take the test” while marching onto the school’s football field. A video sent to KOB shows students yelling “No PARCC” as they held up signs.
Facebook and Twitter and other online groups have also popped up helping students in Artesia, Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Estancia, Carlsbad, Rio Rancho and Santa Fe organize similar events.
Here are a few of the schools where local students have publicly posted plans to enact walkouts on Monday to protest PARCC:
At least one parent in Socorro told a local paper she plans to relocate to Texas next year to help her child avoid the unnecessary testing.
And school districts including Albuquerque Public Schools and Artesia Schoolshave posted notices online discouraging students from walking out.
Students from Santa Fe Public Schools walked out of school last week and met with legislators in the Roundhouse to express their concerns:
There is some speculation that the students will return on Monday to meet with legislators before turning protests to the Public Education Department across the street.
So, the big question: what happens if students walkout?Part of the confusion for students and parents comes from different information coming from the districts and PED’s refusal to clarify statewide policy. High school juniors must demonstrate proficiency in key subjects in order to graduate. PED has said that high-stakes testing can satisfy those requirements, presuming the student is able to pass the test designed around curriculum many of these students have not fully seen.Some districts provide Alternative Demonstrations of Competency (ADCs) for students who opt-out or are unable to complete the tests. Other districts have publicly reported that students who walk out on Monday March 2 will have the option to make up the tests later in the year. More information is available on nmoptout.org or from school districts.
READ MORE:
Sunday, March 1, 2015
A Town Where a School Bus Is More Than a Bus #EdBlogNet #idraed
A Town Where a School Bus Is More Than a Bus
For the bulk of her career, Lavonda Thompson, a 48-year old bus driver and school custodian in Hartsville, S.C., never questioned either her role or the larger system she was serving. “My job was to drive the bus and clean the buildings,” she said. “The child’s job was to act respectful and follow directions.”
Today, however, Thompson and her fellow drivers understand they are uniquely positioned to play important roles in children’s experience of school, beyond getting them there and back home safely. As the literal transition guides between home and school life — and the first and last adults with whom children interact before and after school each day — bus drivers can help recognize how children are faring emotionally, respond to behavior problems in thoughtful ways and set a welcoming tone for the day.
Recent research in fields ranging from developmental psychology to neuroscience has confirmed that optimal learning environments require a safe and welcoming space for children, a sense of belonging, and an emphasis on forming healthy relationships. Yet there are many other adults beyond teachers who regularly interact with children — and who are often overlooked as potential contributors to the educational mission.
Take Hartsville. Until recently, no one there had ever asked Thompson or her colleagues what they noticed about their child passengers on the bus, or thought to connect their observations to the behavior teachers might witness in the classroom. Moreover, while Hartsville’s teachers were expected to be knowledgeable about their students’ academic standing, they were not expected to be attuned to their psychological states.
That began to change in 2011, when the community announced a five-year plan to transform its elementary schools. It partnered with Yale University’s School Development Program, which helps schools identify and meet the developmental needs of children. It began to evaluate its schools by a broader set of measurements – including the number of disciplinary referrals a bus driver had to write each morning. And it started to coordinate its social services to ensure a more equitable set of support structures for Hartsville’s poorest families.
Hartsville is a town of 8,000 residents, evenly divided between black and white, and unevenly distributed across both social class and five square miles in an arbitrary maze of winding streets and subdivisions. It is also the subject of an upcoming documentary film on PBS (I am one of its producers), which chronicles Hartsville’s efforts to mitigate the effects of poverty on children and their families by strengthening the quality of its neighborhood schools.
The connective tissue of those efforts is a communitywide focus on development. “Healthy development in school occurs when children form positive relationships with adults,” explained Dr. James P. Comer, who founded the Yale program more than 40 years ago. “For meaningful change to be sustainable, you need a work force of professionals that really understands child development, and you need policies that incentivize the behaviors that rely on that sort of expertise. Poverty is a disease that affects a community, and we can’t heal a community in isolation. We have to heal the whole thing by creating an ecosystem of folks on the ground.”
Across America, more than 16 million children — slightly more than one in five — now live in poverty. And in communities like Hartsville, the need for a healthier social ecosystem is acute.
Although it has pockets of privilege, Hartsville also has large areas in which poverty is the norm; more than 70 percent of the town’s elementary school children receive free or reduced-price lunches. And although we often hear about a general crisis in education, the reality is that American schools with less than a 10 percent poverty rate rank first in the world in science and reading, and fifth in math, on the PISA exam, a triennial international survey of 15-year-olds. By contrast, American schools in which more than half the students live in poverty score well below average in all areas.
This clear connection between the percentage of children living in poverty and a school’s overall ranking is not just a cause for concern. It is also an opportunity to think more holistically about the needs of children. As Sara B. Johnson and others wrote in a February 2013 article for Pediatrics: “The fact that early environments shape and calibrate the functioning of biological systems very early in life is both a cautionary tale about overlooking critical periods in development and reason for optimism about the promise of intervention. Even in the most extreme cases of adversity, well-timed changes to children’s environments can improve outcomes.”
When Comer and his team conducted their initial environmental analysis of Hartsville’s schools in 2011, they noticed a pattern. “In our conversations, lots of people raised concerns about the bus,” he said. “Kids would come into school revved up because of things that happened there, and there were an alarmingly high number of bus referrals. So we made it a goal to include the buses as a key part of the overall solution.” In doing so, he said, “we identified two things that were missing: first, there wasn’t a real relationship between the drivers and the school; and second, the drivers didn’t have any training on how to deal with children or families — the only training they’d received was how to drive a bus.”
In response, staff members from the district and the program organized a series of two-hour training sessions for the drivers, which they spread over two years. They provided basic information about the developmental pathways along which kids develop, and suggested constructive ways to interact with students and parents (for example: speak to every child every day, learn everyone’s name, and try to build relationships with the children and their parents). “The goal was to make the drivers feel like a valuable part of the whole picture, and to help them start asking for the behavior they did want, instead of talking about the behavior they didn’t.”
They also reviewed the bus referral form itself. “It listed 48 possible infractions — and no rules,” said Camille Cooper, who directs the programs’s learning, teaching and development initiatives. “If you’ve got tons of referrals but no rules, the expectations for the kids were not being clearly communicated.”
So the drivers honed in on the behaviors they thought were most important. They continued to explore strategies for better communication between the children and their families. And they reduced what had been a long list of opaque infractions into a short list of five rules, which ranged from the mundane (staying seated) to the aspirational (treating one another with respect).
Cooper also worked with Hartsville’s elementary school principals to help them strengthen their bonds with the drivers. “I’d never worked with the bus drivers in any capacity before,” said Tara King, the principal at West Hartsville Elementary School. “There was never any relationship there, let alone a professional development opportunity. But when we started looking at bus discipline across the district, we saw how high it was — higher even than the in-school referrals — even though kids were spending a lot less time on the bus than in school.”
King mentioned a fifth grade student, Rashon Johnson, who had benefited from the new coordinated approach in Hartsville’s schools. and whose experience figures in the PBS documentary. Rashon’s mother was raising three children alone, working 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, in two minimum-wage jobs. The impact of her absence had begun to show in Rashon’s behavior at school, prompting King to worry about the boy’s prospects for advancing to sixth grade.
The bus program was redesigned in large measure to ensure that a child like Rashon begins his day with supportive, rather than punitive, interactions with adults. For King, this is mission critical. “If you don’t address a child’s emotional needs, he won’t learn,” she said.
After school hours presented another opportunity to deepen relationships. King signed Rashon up for Boy Scouts and enrolled him in the Boys & Girls club.
Within school hours, the School Development Program’s work focuses on helping teachers, district and support staff — from principals to cafeteria workers – take the initiative in identifying children at risk, in part by developing a shared language about what the children face and how they are likely to react developmentally. This is a major departure from the old approach — typically waiting for behavioral problems to occur and then reacting to them.
The results are promising. At the end of the 2013-14 school year, disciplinary referrals had dropped by 71 percent as academic achievement rose. And King had the pleasure of watching Rashon walk across the stage to receive his fifth-grade diploma.
“What we’ve done is change the thinking from punishing bad behavior to supporting appropriate behavior,” King explained. “That has allowed our teachers to spend more time on instruction. And it’s allowed all of us to start engaging with the kids in more constructive ways.”
James Comer has based his career on that formula. “Learning is still widely thought of as this isolated, mechanical cognitive operation that children can either engage in or reject. But it has been our repeated experience that when you increase the developmental knowledge and behavior of adults, the behavioral and learning challenges of children begin to disappear.”
Lavonda Thompson agrees. “That’s what I took from this – just taking into consideration at times what could be going on with them, instead of just thinking this is a bad kid.
“You have to understand the environment they’re growing up in. Now I understand I need to explain to kids why I’m asking them something. I don’t get as upset with them now as I used to — I used to be more of a yeller — and I don’t do a whole lot of write-ups.
“I talk to the parents instead. And when the children want to talk, I listen.”
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Sam Chaltain writes about American public education. He is the author or co-author of six books, including Our School: Searching for Community in the Era of Choice, and a co-producer of the PBS documentary film 180 Days: Hartsville.
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