Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for November 13, 2005 A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

Having a wonderful Sunday afternoon...relaxed, refreshed, and (almost) ready for another week? Thinking that it's only seven more work days until Thanksgiving vacation...and then December 16th is just around the corner?

Then...leave this edition of CAT Tracks until tomorrow! Nothing positive about public school teachers here! Come back tomorrow...when you need something to "fire you up"!

Gluton for punishment? Or is it now Monday...and it can't get any worse?!

Believing that it's always good to know what your critics are saying, here are a couple of articles by folks that think...make that KNOW...that they can do it better than you...

'Unschoolers' can learn - or not
Johnny reads when he's ready, and state of Arizona butts out

By Daniel Scarpinato
ARIZONA DAILY STAR

As most schoolchildren are sitting down for their morning classes, Taylor Gavin is just rolling out of bed. "Sometimes I get up at 8, sometimes not until 9 or 10. It just depends," the talkative 11-year-old says.

Each day is different for Taylor and his 10-year-old sister, Karina. Activities range from video games at their East Side home to dance lessons to museum and national park visits.

The Gavins are "unschoolers," a small branch of home-schoolers with parents who reject the structured and authoritative nature of today's education system. Some call it "discovery learning" because of its laissez faire attitude.

Unschoolers defy the trendiest new styles of learning. Their methodology - or lack thereof - is a slap in the face of school accountability measures. In a post-No Child Left Behind Act world, federal education spending is up, standardized testing is a required part of the classroom and the word "rigor" is experiencing a renaissance in education circles.

Unschoolers don't take tests and don't typically have homework. There are no single-file lines of boys and girls, no cafeteria lunches or crashing lockers. But it's the lack of any kind of concrete lesson plan that makes unschooling far different from normal home schooling.

Unschoolers learn what they want, when they want, how they want. And that could mean learning nothing at all.

It's a concept that's totally legal in Arizona, though it's not without critics. Some say unschooling is irresponsible and question whether it allows for healthy child development.

But advocates maintain that the usual ways of learning aren't the only way of learning. Socialization doesn't have to happen in classrooms. And letting kids chart their own course, they say, will give them more choices and provide more of a challenge.

"I think when kids have the idea that their learning is up to them, they'll do interesting things with their time," said Tucsonan Debbie Gubernick, who has four children who have been unschooled, including a son who's now a junior at the University of Arizona.

"Most kids are waiting for life to start happening."

Steady numbers

General home schooling surged in the past five years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, increasing nearly 30 percent from 1999 to 2003. That's about 2.2 percent of U.S. school-age children.

Unschooling has remained a small but steady part of it.

Estimates of the number of unschoolers in Southern Arizona vary and could be as high as 50 families, though no organized unschoolers group exists in the Tucson area. Unschoolers make up about 10 percent of the entire home-school population, said Patrick Farenga, president of Holt Associates, a consulting company founded by John Holt, the author who coined the term "unschoolers."

The term and original movement came about in the late 1970s with the book "Instead of Education." Holt adopted the name "unschooling" from the popular 7-Up "Uncola" advertising campaign of the time.

"The beauty of unschooling is you're learning in real life," Farenga said. "Unschoolers have a very strong sense of how the world works because they've lived in it."

Many other home-schoolers stay away from public schools because of religious values or because they don't feel school curriculum is competitive. But unschoolers rarely incorporate religion and generally oppose barriers that stand in the way of kids enjoying life.

For example, what if a child wants to spend the day watching soap operas? That's fine under certain circumstances, parent Gubernick says.

"I think it's important for teenagers to do absolutely nothing sometimes."

And it's still possible for unschoolers - or any other homeschooler - to attend college, since an SAT score - not a high school diploma - is enough to get into many universities.

Parental rights

Home-schoolers, such as Karyn Parisi, co-president of Tucson's Southeast Side chapter of Christian Home Educators, are quick to distance themselves from unschoolers.

"Our philosophy is totally different," Parisi said. "We're not rebelling against education. We just want to have more control and more say over what our children learn, which often times is tougher than what you would find in public schools."

John Wright, president of the Arizona Education Association, a teacher lobbying group, also is skeptical.

"Parents have the right to make decisions that are right for their children. In a home-school environment, it's up to them to set the structure," he said. "If unschooling is where the child's will is the child's way, there will be some hard lessons when they grow up."

And while Wright doesn't doubt that parents can provide socialization at home, he said it might be harder to accomplish in a home environment, especially without a structured home-school plan.

Still, unschooling is perfectly legal in Arizona, says Kim Fields, program coordinator for the Pima County School Superintendent's office. Home-schoolers need to file an affidavit with the county to remove children from school, she said. The same process applies to unschoolers.

The affidavit requires they be taught reading, grammar, math and social studies, but there's "no rule they have to be taught a certain way," she said.

Arizona's home-schooling laws are among the most liberal in the nation, Fields said. Parents aren't required to provide any proof their kids are learning. There are a bit more than 3,000 home-schooling affidavits in Pima County, Fields said.

Flexibility

Taylor's and Karina's mother, Eileen Gavin, became interested in unschooling when she first had her children. She tried out a private school for a few months, then decided to give unschooling a shot. She admits she isn't an absolutist, and she sometimes steers her kids toward certain subjects.

She isn't sure yet if her children's interest in self-discovery will carry into the teen years. But, for now, Taylor and Karina seem to be doing just fine.

There are no signs these children have problems socializing or are behind the curve. They have lots of friends in their neighborhood, answer questions about their daily lives with excitement and show almost no signs of insecurities.

And just what do they do all day? There's a lot of reading. Taylor learned the countries of the world by setting up Pokemon characters on a map. And Karina worked on math by figuring out how she'd spend the $340 million Powerball jackpot.

"I like it much better than when I was in school," Taylor said.

And then there is an interview with the Thernstroms, two author-sisters, who seem to be for anything except public schools...

Authors Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom are co-authors of "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning" and "America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible." Abigail Thernstrom is vice chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education. Stephan Thernstrom is the Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches American social history. The Thernstroms participated in the University of San Diego's Distinguished Speaker Series Nov. 3, lecturing on segregation. They were interviewed the same day by the Union-Tribune's editorial board.

Question: Among the most vexing problems in education is the persistent learning and achievement gap between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian counterparts. You both have written a book about this in 2003, 'No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning.' What's the best strategy for closing this gap and what in your view are the prospects for success?

Answer (Abigail): If I had my druthers, I would turn every urban school into a charter school and with the bucks stopping on the principal's desk.

Every urban public school?

Abigail: Every urban public school into a public charter school. Charter schools are also public. With real accountability on the part of the principals, but with enormous freedom in exchange to restructure schools, to hire teachers who may or may not have standard credentials, to institute longer days, longer weeks, longer years, to structure the school day in a way that makes sense educationally so that children who really need more time on task get it. And those principals have to serve not only in the usual paper shuffling role of a principal, but they have to serve as instructional leaders. In addition, they can't be afraid to say that students who come into school far behind in kindergarten – and typically African-American and Latino students do – have a set of skills to learn that are not only academic but are behavioral. And especially we're really talking about inner-city kids. The best schools teach kids, who come from highly disadvantaged backgrounds, teach them how to look at people straight in the eye when they're talking to them, how to shake hands, how to show respect for teachers and classmates when they're talking to them, how to talk quietly in the lunchroom, how to get to school on time, dress for success and so forth. That kind of education has to be part of the package of skills that students learn in schools. And yet today most public school principals and other administrators and teachers are very nervous about an education in what is often called the soft skills, but I think are equally important to reading, writing and arithmetic. Because they feel oh wait a minute we're interfering with the culture of the students; we're showing disrespect for habits that in fact are going to be disastrous as these students get older. If you do not learn these soft skills you will not climb the ladder of economic and social opportunity in America. And that ladder today is finally open, really open, to children of all colors. That wasn't yesterday's story in America. It is today.

Stephan: I would add two things. One, I wouldn't want to restrict the choice made available to students to charter schools. I see no reason why we cannot make it through some kind of voucher plan. Provide access to inner-city parochial schools and other private schools, some of which are doing a sensational job. In general, parochial schools these days do a much better job of educating disadvantaged children than any other that we know about. And second, I would simply note that the structure of our book in 'No Excuses' we devote a great deal of attention to the sources of the problem and try to show it is not simply the higher poverty rate in the black and Latino communities that explains the achievement gap. We argue that it is not the so-called segregation of pupils, the paucity of white classmates is not the problem. The research in general does not show that black and Latino children need to have white kids surrounding them in order to learn. We also argue that it's not that black and Hispanic kids are in schools that are grossly underfunded. The best estimates are that they have about as much money spent on them per pupil as the national average. And indeed you need only look at Washington, D.C., which is an almost entirely black system and spends over $15,000 a year (per pupil) and has the worst public schools in the country of all those that have been tested in the NAEP (National Assessment for Educational Progress) urban trial assessments. And Cambridge, Mass., over $17,000 a year. It would surprise you but that system is over 40 percent black and close to 30 percent Hispanic now. And despite these colossal expenditures, despite a pupil-teacher ratio of something like nine students per teacher, the schools' black performance there is worse than the state average, which is dominated by Boston. So the Boston public schools do a somewhat better job than the Cambridge public schools despite all that money.

Why?

Abigail: There's a culture of education in Cambridge in which actually teaching kids is not really considered good for the kids. You wait until children are ready to learn. Until they want to learn their arithmetic.

How do they know when they're ready?

Abigail: That's an interesting question. We do not live in Cambridge. Our children grew up in another Boston suburb. But not so dissimilar in terms of educational philosophy. And I will never forget the day that I walked into my daughter's fifth grade and said, 'Where is she?' And I was told 'Oh, we're doing math. She doesn't like math. She doesn't do math. She's in the library reading.' Now that's a disastrous approach to teaching children.

Stephan: And furthermore in Cambridge under this way of radical egalitarian notions, they're basically getting rid of AP courses and honors courses on the grounds that the most gifted students learn the most by being mixed in with the least gifted students because they serve as teachers, and that's the intellectually most stimulating thing. But judging from the test score results, it doesn't work that way.

With Cambridge and other similar districts you've looked at, how much of this goes back to the simple notion of racism with mostly white teachers and mostly black or brown students and educators who are concluding that these kids just don't learn and that their parents don't value education? Would you be willing to describe it as racism?

Abigail: There doesn't seem to be a correlation between the color of the teacher and the color of the student and academic achievement. And so that systems like Atlanta and Chicago and D.C. with a heavily African-American administrative structure as well as teaching staff are not getting better results. I don't think that's the variable. If it were the variable, and there has been a lot of research on this indicating that it's not, we would be in deep trouble because we have very low numbers of non-Asian minority, high-achieving college students going into the profession of teaching and that's for an obvious reason. Often these students are the first in their families to have completed college. They're the first in their families to have real potential for high earnings. And they go into law, they go into medicine, they go into business. But they don't want to go into a relatively low prestige, low paying profession like teaching. And what really matters in terms of how much students learn is how much the teachers know. You can't teach what you don't know. And so if we really think that we need academically very strong minority teachers, who are non-Asian minority teachers I should say, for the non-Asian minority children, we're in deep trouble. They are not there for them. But I don't think it's true that we need them.

How can those in academia who look at accountability be so resistant to empiricism in trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work?

Abigail: Professions have cultures and the culture of the education profession and particularly of education schools, I think, is most unfortunate. Jonathan Kozol is a guru at schools. And they're by and large still very resistant to teaching phonics, reading by phonics, when all the research shows that children have to be able to phonetically decipher words.

Stephan: California went through a long experiment with the abandonment of phonics and had the worst reading scores in the country.

Abigail: Right. And look, the ed schools in universities are cash cows. So they take anybody, basically. They're not going to start imposing standards for admission because their financial bottom line would be hurt. And we absolutely have to restructure the profession in order to create incentives for academically strong young people to go into the teaching profession. Maybe not forever. Maybe they'll teach for only three years, five years. We'd still be ahead. And I think that there's tremendous interest on the part of idealistic young college students for doing so, so you have these long applicant lines to get into Teach For America, for instance. But they don't, if they are academically strong college students, they do not want to jump through the hoops of really insultingly low-level pedagogic courses and so forth. All the good schools, and I did the school visiting, all the good schools that I looked at are able to hire teachers off the credential ladder. Teachers who have not been certified by the state as having an ed-school degree.

Stephan: If I could just add one point to this. There was a survey a few years ago, an analysis of the reading lists used in something like a hundred ed schools in the country. And as I roughly recall the results, Jonathan Kozol was read in every one of them and often in more than one course. Whereas I think the most perceptive historian writing about American education, Diane Ravitch, has written a whole string of books: "The Troubled Crusade," "Left Behind," a series of others that ought to be read in ed schools. I think that in three of the 100, Ravitch was assigned. So that I think is a wonderful indicator of the appalling culture of the ed schools today.

How do you decide what your credentials are for teaching if you use non-credentialed teachers?

Stephan: I would say I would want to pick them on the basis of subject matter knowledge and sheer intelligence and obviously a commitment, excitement at taking on this job. There are intangibles that you'd have to judge through interviews. But I think students with very strong academic records. Who should be teaching eighth grade math? Students who've done well in college level math courses, not education school methods of teaching math. We have a good friend who's a mathematician and who made enough money to retire early and who visits schools and does practice lots of teaching on a voluntary basis. And he thinks in elementary school it's no wonder that so few students are learning math because the teachers do not really understand fractions, for example. And he's got some wonderful project for teacher training that is making some progress there in Massachusetts.

Abigail: This friend of ours said to me, I remember when he first started to train elementary school teachers and he came back after his first session and said 'You know, they don't really understand a fraction is a number. They think it's hieroglyphics. I'm having to start at the very bottom.' But in any case, look, teachers do need some classroom management training. I don't have any doubt about that. You can get that in the summer. You can get that continuously if you have a principal who is in classrooms all the time. There are so many regular district public schools that I have visited where the principal is locked behind a door with a guard or without a guard but often with a guard, right, and teachers are floundering and new teachers are really floundering. And the teachers say I need help; I'm not getting it from anybody. But that seems to support what I hear from most teachers and that is that the biggest problem in the classroom is discipline.

Abigail: Well, that's right and that's why I said they need training in classroom management but they also need a hands-on principal. A principal who has won in the classroom and says, 'Look, this is what you can do, this is how to get a classroom that is orderly and in which children are learning.' But also a principal who doesn't send a totally unruly student right back into the class so that it's really hopeless. Kipp Academy Charter Schools are among my favorite. I haven't seen all of them, there are a lot of them now. But I spent a lot of time particularly at the one in the South Bronx in New York. And I took an elementary school principal from Massachusetts down to see Kipp's South Bronx charter school. We're there for a day. We're sitting in the first classroom that we're observing. And this very long-time principal in the Boston schools starts to count the children in the classroom and he looks at me, it's a fifth grade math class, he looks at me and says, 'I can't believe what I'm looking at; there are 45 children in this classroom and every one of them is listening and every one of them is learning and they're all excited and their hands are up all the time trying to give answers and so forth.' And I said, 'Yes, because the teacher really knows how to manage a classroom and those teachers are trained and trained and trained every day.'

How do you see the role of teachers unions in all of this?

Abigail: They're the problem, not the solution. I do think if you are a bang-up attorney, a bang-up doctor or somebody who's really good at the business they're engaged in, your paycheck reflects your skills by and large. Teachers, now this is just for starters, there's a flat salary scale for teachers. No matter how well you do or how badly you do, your salary is dependent on Mickey Mouse courses taken and endurance – years in the system. That is a crazy way of providing incentives for excellence.

How is it that 20 years after the 'A Nation at Risk' report, we seem to have so little progress in improving the colleges of education? And why isn't it possible to get teachers and their unions enlisted in the effort for reform?

Stephan: That's very difficult because these unions are democratically organized. They elect officers by popular vote. And their first priority has to be as much money as possible for as little work as possible, to put it crudely. That is, they have to, to a large extent, respond to the demands of their members. And so they have to protect the most mediocre teachers who a principal would like to fire. They have to stand up for their rights and so they're going to extraordinary procedural protections so that experienced superintendents and principals know this teacher is terrible so we'd better shuffle him off to another school. The worst teachers rotate from school to school. It's almost impossible to fire them. So that is, I think, an intractable problem. Their basic incentives, their purpose, is to advance the interests of their members.

What about the media? Over and over again you see unions allowed to get away with the shorthand that holds that they are 'fighting for the kids.' Maybe this argument made sense 40 or 50 years ago, but now it seems like it's governed by the tyranny of the anecdote: a reporter has had a great experience with a teacher, therefore all teachers are noble. How much of the problem here is the media's inability to confront the fact that unions are pursuing a very narrow economic interest and are not all about helping the kids?

Abigail: I think you're perfectly right that the whole public school system, it's an employment system. It's not about kids. The kids don't come first. And in terms of the tyranny of the anecdote, I'm reluctant to say this but I do think it's a problem in general in newspaper reporting. I find it in whatever the subject. And I say to reporters, 'Wait a minute. You've got one anecdote.' We've got for instance a major newspaper, it's initials are NYT, writing an article on what has been destroyed in New Orleans. I mean obviously a lot of things have been destroyed in New Orleans. But finding one family to say that there was a sense of community in this very impoverished sector of the city and the sense of community has been destroyed. And a friend of mine says, 'Oh, the sense of community has been destroyed.' And I said, 'Where are you getting that? It may be true. It may not be true.' The New York Times came up with one family and a series of anecdotal stories. So I think it's a larger problem with the media; that they have no training in social science. They don't know how to ask basic statistical questions so that they look at the question of class size, for instance, and it doesn't occur to reporters to look at the scholarly literature on class size. If they did, they would find that is not really where you want to spend your extra dollars. They don't look at the literature on Head Start. If they did, they would know that Head Start really has done almost nothing for kids academically, basically nothing.

So what are the charter and parochial schools doing for a lot less money that makes the difference?

Abigail: They're managing their budgets well. They're putting the money where it counts. They're putting their money into the longer days, generally, longer weeks, longer years. They're putting their money into differential pay.

When you say differential pay you mean?

Abigail: Merit pay. More money not only for better performance but for teachers with scarce skills, like teachers with strong math skills. There also is a hostility to using skills that people outside the profession have because it is the job of unions to limit entry.

What is your take on No Child Left Behind?

Abigail: A very mixed bag. I was from the very start a skeptic. I thought, OK, I like testing, I like standards, I like accountability. But all children up to proficient, if we define proficiency by the National Assessment for Educational Progress standard, is ludicrous. It can't be done.

You both wrote a highly praised study of race relations, published in 1997, 'America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible.' You're a vice chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. In 1968 the Kerner Commission famously concluded that America was two separate and unequal nations. What's changed between 1968 and today?

Stephan: In terms of most objective measures, economic and social welfare, there has been very dramatic progress. And certainly dramatic progress in terms of residential integration. For the Kerner Commission, a kind of central idea was that there was the black inner city and the white suburbs. But since that time, the rate of black movement into the suburbs has been approximately double the white rate so that now 36 percent of all African-Americans live in suburbs and they comprise almost 10 percent of the suburban population. So they are underrepresented in suburbia, but by much less than before. And actually there has been a great deal of residential mixing.