preachin' to the choir

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury conventional wisdom, not to praise it.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good oft interred with their bones.

Politicians have used policy to punishing effects on our profession. Our autonomy—and indeed our integrity—as teachers and members of the professional class is threatened daily. The press opines about the need for “accountability.” Republicans rant about the need for “choice.” The public is pummeled with negative stories about dysfunctional districts and trashy teachers. We’re in an all-out PR war, and our students’ academic lives are on the line.

While politicians clamor to take credit for the latest educational craze, we teachers are in the ditches—day in, day out—diligently disciplining and didactically directing. We know what works with kids because we work with kids! How can anyone who hasn’t spent more than a few hours in a classroom know what is best for students? Don’t you find that insulting? Have you ever spent a few hours in the state Capital building or Congress then decided you knew exactly how to legislate? It’s ludicrous! We need to stand up for ourselves! We need to demand the respect we’re due.

Our profession has been marginalized by state-sponsored, mandatory reading programs and high-stakes, standardized testing. These are clumsy tools at best. They aren’t the precision instruments needed to address the disparate needs of 21^st century American school children. Non-standard English speakers and English language learners need more finessed, more finely tuned teaching—practices that reading programs like Open Court don’t provide.

Take the teaching of reading comprehension skills for example. To teach Main Idea, the 5^th Grade Teacher’s Edition simply states, “Have students locate the main idea of the paragraph and its supporting details.” That’s it. No instruction on how to find the main idea or activities teaching what a main idea is, just find it. A careful look at the 4^th grade T.E.’s reaps the same result. How about 3^rd grade? Still no explicit instruction. 2^nd grade? Nope. Well, surely then the first grade teacher’s edition would have at least one activity teaching this abstract concept in a concrete way… Nonewhatsoever.

Yet we expect someone who is new to this country—someone who has never spoken the language or read it fluently—to pick out the main idea of a literally foreign text when he/she has never been taught how to do it?! That’s insanity. Oh, and by the way, here’s this standardized reading test—only in English, mind you—that we expect you to be successful at, or we’re going to send in the “program improvement” team with their clip boards and bow ties to go snooping through your teacher’s lesson plan book! Outrageous.

We must work smarter than that. We mustn’t fall prey to the one-size-fits-all approach. There are no silver bullets, no panaceas—only good teaching and good resources. We must have both in order to be successful. We must supplement our current reading programs with venerated practices that are professional and practicable, like explicit comprehension skills instruction. We must teach students at their instructional reading level, not at their frustration level, two to three grades above their comprehension level, like in the Open Court series. This is the “soft bigotry of high expectations.”

Our core texts—math, social studies, science, and health—are also too difficult, so we must replace them as well. They are all written at grade level, yet how many of our students in urban schools—the ELL’s, et al—read at grade level? These students are just as deserving of science and social studies instruction as more affluent students. They need textbooks that are not only aligned to their grade-level standards, but more importantly, written at their own individual reading level. So while your top—or at grade level—students read the harder text, the lower students still have access to the same content, but with easier vocabulary. It can be done… with a little ingenuity… and a lot of cash.

This reminds me of a bumper sticker I used to see occasionally: It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need, and the army has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber. The money issue is a problem, but perhaps it’s an opportunity for local publishing businesses to get involved in education. To wit: perhaps smaller, local companies could step in to meet each state’s needs instead of huge, national text book companies (McGraw-Hill, Houghton-Mifflin, etc) that make a uniform, grade-level text that they can sell in any state. This could address the educational problems each state faces on a more local level. Just another way we could better serve the needs of our students in this country. Thank you.

vilify the fry

The nascent movement to ‘vilify the fry’ may have begun with Cultural Politics and Education (Apple, 1996). Recently, French fries have been an enemy to both our health and waistlines due to their preparation in trans fat. A few short years ago, we changed their anti-American image by renaming them “Freedom Fries.” But a decade ago, cheap French fries began wreaking havoc on education with far more serious effects.

This didn’t happen in the United States—it happened in Asia—but with W.T.O. trade policies like NAFTA, a similar educational crisis is currently affecting California: how do we educate the ever-growing immigrant population? This has had national, political ramifications. Immigration and national defense are arguably the two most important issues to both democrat and republican voters in this upcoming election year. So what do French fries have to do with immigration? I’ll get to that. Suffice to say, the immigration problem we face in 2007 is analogous to the problem of cheap French fries in the Asian country where those potatoes were grown.

When a multi-national, fast-food giant was offered huge tax breaks to move their potato farming and French fry production to rural areas of this Asian country, thousands of indigenous people were forced from their homes—land on which generations of their kin had lived, long before banks and mortgages and deeds existed. Naturally, the people migrated from their rural environment into and around the cities.

The influx of families created a burden on the city’s schools, and they began to over-crowd. Unfortunately, the government would not build new schools without a “legitimate” need based on “official” statistics. The displaced families were considered “illegitimate”—and therefore weren’t counted in “official” statistics—because of their “immigrant” status. Moreover, babies born to these families weren’t counted as new births unless they were born in a hospital—facilities that weren’t readily available in the slums and “shanty towns” where many moved.

While the “Value Meal” was heralded in America for its abundance of cheap food options—including fries—unbeknownst to most Americans, it was causing an educational crisis in Asia. Since the fast-food company was offered sweeping tax-breaks on the land, no new revenue was coming into government coffers. This–and the unfair counting of its citizens—accounted for the dearth of new schools. Even if there were a “legitimate” need for new schools, there was no money to fund their construction.

We have a similar educational problem in California. After Clinton signed NAFTA in 1994, huge companies (like the auto and textile industries) moved their domestic production facilities south of the border. Many of these factories were built in rural areas, and indigenous people were forced to relocate. Some moved into the surrounding cities, but many moved to the Border States like Texas, Arizona, and California. They moved into urban areas where local school systems—already over-crowded and under-funded—have struggled to address their needs ever since.

The English Language Learner—or ELL—student generally requires more resources to educate; resources many inner-city schools lack. Since Proposition 13, school funding has been tied to property tax. Downtown schools, surrounded by apartments and low-income housing, don’t have the local tax base that more affluent, suburban districts have. Therefore, ELL’s and inner-city children get a “separate but unequal” education.

Standardized (English only) testing only exacerbates this problem. And with federal educational funds tied to these tests, our education system stands at a crossroads. Do we professionals let top-down policies such as NCLB destroy what we know are best teaching practices? We know high-stakes testing doesn’t lead to more effective teaching or a better education—if anything it leads to higher dropout rates. But maybe that’s the point: as long as we stay enamored with cheap French fries, we’ll always need someone to run the drive-through window.

letter to the stephanie miller show

hi,
why does your show promote that empty vessel, maureen dowd? her deranged diatribes have damaged dems for the past 15 years, yet i hear her pieces read frequently on the s.m. show. please. stop.

as glenn greenwald and bob somerby have ably pointed out: this woman is clearly not well. it's a wonder the n.y. times still employs her. her recent comments about the "dominatrix" (hillary) could have come from that mccain supporter. her taking a shot at your man, "obambi" is just another illustration of her historically vile treatment of dem. hopefuls (see also: gore, 2000 & kerry, 2004).

unfortunately, the m.s.m. read from one script--a script created by the likes of dowd, matthews, et al-- in which liberal men are wishy-washy pussies and liberal women feminist "bitches." (conversely, conservative men are "real" men--see: chris matthews' crushing on "manly" fred thompson.) i expect this brainless narrative from right-wing radio, but not from the n.y. times. "liberals" like maureen dowd (and frank rich, another of your buddies) have put cowards like bush/cheney in the white house and our bravest in iraq with these inane caricatures.

their constant derision of democrats begs the questions: with "liberals" like these, who needs conservatives? and when was the last time you saw a conservative columnist like william kristol or robert novak treat their own kind so... well, unkind? i hope you recognize the damage done to progressive politics by liberal-on-liberal attacks. we do the other side's dirty work for them. how smart is that? (insert hillary laugh here. real bright...if we like to lose.)

i like your show and listen daily, but i want to win in 2008. in order to do so we must not prop up people like dowd and rich. they are fatuous, fops--part of a millionaire press corp "serving" a(n increasingly dwindling) middle class nation. real issues are anathema to these people. they've got great health care, thank you..."diamonds or pearls?" more importantly, we progressives must not do our opponents' work for them. (insert howard dean hurrah here) we've already got enough work trying to win back the white house in '08.

your official "humorless, stick-up-the-butt-liberal" 5th grade teacher from long beach, ca
mr. c.

p.s. no, my shift key is not broken. i just don't like to yell. it's uncivil.


the stephanie miller show airs weekday mornings from 6-9 on ktlk 1150 am.

veterinarian's day

today, when we stood to say the pledge in my class, i asked my students why we had a holiday on monday. one of my students excitedly raised her hand. since she was an 'excel' student last year i expected the correct answer...

"yesterday was veterinarian's day!" she exclaimed.

while no one in the class even cracked a smile, i stifled my giggle long enough to explain that it was veteran's day--a day where we honor the service of our men and women in uniform who fight to protect our constitution and our freedoms.

later on i realized that this student might have been trying to be funny. last year her class may have laughed at her "mistake," but this year, i don't think anyone in my class knew what she was talking about!