Education Corner: Let it Rain

Please check out Let It Rain... Close the Gap, especially my friends in Washington. It's a new blog (with a few kinks to work out, admittedly) meant to counter the current anti-reform climate in Seattle schools. We've all got to take part in a civil and thoughtful debate about these issues, rather than simply berating one another. Even though reformers and anti-reformers get very nasty with one another, in the end, we're all trying to make a better world for kids.

Education Corner: All I Really Need to Know (About Education)

... I Learned in Spain

(or: in which the musings about Spain continue until you want to throw things at me).

As you may or may not know, I used to be an elementary teacher and still am at heart. So everywhere I go, I notice what kids are doing. When I was very young -- about 8 or 9 - I got it into my head that I (and everyone else) was responsible for setting the tone for what kids think about the world. Even at that age, I knew that I wanted younger kids to believe that the world was a place of peace - or could be - and that they were surrounded by love.

As you might imagine, I was a huge nerd.

But I began really observing kiddos, smiling at them, saying hi, frightening their parents. This behavior continues to this day.

When I was in Spain, I took the opportunity, whenever possible, to notice what kids' schooling was like. Since we were in the capital of Spain, visiting a lot of "the sights", we got to see a lot of school kids out on field trips.

Here are my very unscientific data points:

French teens are relentlessly hip. This is to be expected, I suppose.

A tiny ham sandwich is a delicious after-school snack. We walked past several schools just as they were letting out for the day, and a lot of the parents brought their kids a ham sandwich as a snack (it was about 5 o'clock, and if the kids eat dinner at the same time as the adults in Spain, dinner was a long time off). It's the perfect sort of snack - carbs for short-term energy and protein for longer-term. Contrast that to the snack of radioactively orange "cheese" crackers that most of my students got.

Exposure to the arts at an early age is a good thing. As we approached the Museo del Prado, we saw this group of tinies:

Then, inside, we came upon a group of kids who looked to be around 7 years of age, plopped down in front of Velazquez's Las Meninas. Their teacher was speaking animatedly to them about the painting, and then all of the kids broke into song!

This really struck me, because often in America: a) there's no consensus that art is relevant (just the other week, Bill Maher said: "Highways and hospitals save people's lives, and art is a diversion."); and b) often, we don't expose little tykes to fine art because we want to wait until they can "handle it" and "take it seriously." Plus, you know, we're Puritans, and if we let our kids go to the art museum, they'll see marble penises.

But at the Prado, there were tons of little kids on school field trips. Their teachers obviously carefully planned their museum itineraries to feature the pieces that spoke to the kids' background knowledge and age.

On the same episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, on which Bill made that lame statement -- and I usually agree with him -- choreographer Bill T. Jones was speaking up for the need to fund arts and include the arts in education. He said: "The government is responsible for the material welfare of the people... government is also responsible for a certain type of education of the people. ... Art - when it is really doing what it should do -- teaches abstract thinking; it teachers teamwork; it teaches people to actually think about things that they cannot see."

Panelist Dana Loesch (grr) stated that people who like the arts will contribute to them. Gee whiz, like the parents of my students who couldn't always afford to feed their kids? Do you know why the kids got free breakfast? It's because their parents were contributing so much to the ballet.

I think back to my 8-year-old self, and the message I wanted younger children to hear about the world. If we made art a priority for our kids, I think that message would be conveyed.

Education Corner: Be Quiet, Matt Damon!

I've decided to branch out a little bit and occasionally comment about education, which is my chosen field. While not technically related to being green, I think that how we educate our children -- particularly in math, science, literature, and history -- will impact what they ultimately decide to do for the environment.

Grr.

I am mad at Matt Damon.

No. Not because he said that he's disappointed in Obama. I mean, I'm not really disappointed in Obama, but only because I didn't expect much in the first place.

I'm mad at Matt -- whose politics I usually agree with -- because he's saying lame stuff about education. On Piers Morgan (linked above) he said that he doesn't like Obama's education policy:

The actor particularly slammed education policy that ties teacher salaries to students’ test scores. "That kind of mechanized thinking has nothing to do with higher-order thinking. We're training them, not teaching them," he said. - Politico

When people say things like this, they are spouting an uninformed opinion about testing and teachers' role in it. Here are a few reasons why I disagree with Matt's over-simplified view of testing:

1. The tests we are talking about are what's known as "minimum standards" tests. They test the bare minimum you should know at any grade level. With the exception of one or two states, the tests that count, policy-wise, are not rigorous. If kids can't do well on them, we are not teaching them enough.

2. I've actually experienced having part of my teaching salary (in the form of bonuses) tied to students' test scores - unlike a lot of people, including many teachers, who are jumping into this debate. Again, since these tests aren't particularly rigorous, if my kids weren't able to perform well on them, I didn't deserve a bonus because it meant I didn't teach my kids enough. (Just FYI, I maxed out my bonus every year, while still teaching my kids to write poetry, perform in plays, do Oregon Trail simulations, and hold mock elections. Test prep shouldn't crowd out other types of learning, which brings me to...)

3. Yes, some teachers teach rote and mechanized ways to "game" standardized tests. But if they are doing that, it's not as if they were teaching Shakespeare one day and then turned around and started teaching kids to fill in bubbles. Good teachers teach higher-order thinking no matter what. The LA Times, when it explored quality teaching, found that the teachers who were getting the highest "value-added" scores (a year with these teachers resulted in boosting scores beyond what would be predicted), were teaching kids higher-order thinking skills. Teachers who are trying to game the test probably weren't teaching higher-order thinking before high-stakes testing.

This doesn't mean there aren't problems with the current state of standardized testing. It does take up a lot of time and it does put a lot of pressure on educators. Leaders, in particular, may be tempted to ask their teachers to do weird things because of standardized testing. Yet we have to remember, ten or fifteen years ago, schools were allowed to graduate kids who couldn't read or write, and hide that data in a big ol' stew of averages. Most people weren't noticing that in some schools, minority and low-income students were failing - or put into special ed - while their white, higher-income classmates were excelling. Now EVERYONE knows there's something wrong, and no one can hide anymore.