SC Considering Flawed Reading, Fiscal Policy

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Tuesday April 09, 2013 · 5:43 AM PDT

2013/04/09 · 05:43

SC Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler, R-Cherokee, has introduced an education bill modeled on a third-grade retention policy widely promoted by Jeb Bush as one aspect of the larger so-called Florida formula. Superintendent Mick Zais has endorsed the bill as well as suggested implementing similar policies at seventh grade.

SC political leadership must not follow Florida’s lead in reading or grade retention policy for several reasons, including the following: the Florida formula has been thoroughly discredited as a basis for policy, grade retention has no support in the research that shows retention produces mixed positive outcomes along with many negative consequences for children and tax payers, and initiatives such as Just Read, Florida ignore and replace credible literacy policy desperately needed in high-poverty states such as SC.

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Thursday April 04, 2013 · 4:44 AM PDT

2013/04/04 · 04:44

By oft repeating an untruth, men come to believe it themselves.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Melish, Jan. 13, 1812

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees, in every object, only the traits which favor that theory.
Thomas Jefferson to Charles Thompson, 1787

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My university sits in the socially and politically conservative South, and our students tend toward a conservative political and world view as well. The most powerful student organizations are self-identified as conservative as well as being awash in power and funding, some from outside the university.

One conservative student organization, supported and funded by a network of such organizations spreading throughout campuses across the U.S., has for years dominated the Cultural Life Program of the university, a series of events students must attend as part of graduation requirements.

Several years ago, this organization brought Ann Coulter to campus, and when I mentioned my own concerns about her credibility during class, a student quickly defended Coulter by saying, "But she has footnotes in her book."

Coulter's confrontational conservatism speaks to the world views of many of our students and the greater public of SC, and thus seems credible even without footnotes. That student's defense highlights a key element in the rise of the dogmatic scholar that has its roots in the 1980s, a period identified by Isaac Asimov as "a cult of ignorance" guided by a new ethic, "Don't trust the experts."

plthomasEdD

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Monday April 01, 2013 · 9:12 AM PDT

2013/04/01 · 09:12

"Nearly 3,000 of South Carolina’s third-graders who struggle with reading could be held back if the state adopts a plan that would require students to read at or near grade level," Jamie Self reports in The State ("Education leaders: Florida holds key to SC literacy fix," March 31, 2013), adding later,

Under Peeler’s bill, 2,886 SC third-graders scored low enough on a 2012 reading test to be held back a year — more than four times the 584 third-graders held back in 2012. The number reflects only the lowest-scoring readers, about 27 percent of the more than 10,500 third-graders who scored as not reading on grade level....
SC schools chief Mick Zais supports the plan to hold back struggling third-graders and would like to see a similar track for seventh graders, his spokesman Jay Ragley said.

SC Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler, R-Cherokee, has introduced the bill modeled on Just Read, Florida, part of a grade-retention policy widely promoted by Jeb Bush as one aspect of the larger so-called "Florida Miracle."

SC political leadership must not follow Florida's lead in reading policy or grade retention policy for several reasons, including the following: the "Florida Miracle" has been thoroughly discredited, grade retention has no support in the research that shows retention has no positive outcomes but many negative consequences for children and tax payers, and initiatives such as Just Read, Florida ignore and replace credible literacy policy desperately needed in high-poverty states such as SC.

plthomasEdD

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Friday March 29, 2013 · 6:11 AM PDT

2013/03/29 · 06:11

"I am an invisible man," announces the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, adding:

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me....When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, of figments of their imaginations—indeed, everything and anything except me....That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact....you often doubt if you really exist....It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful.

After the reader follows the narrator along his journey from naivete and idealism to the battered realism of coming face-to-face with his invisibility, we discover that his invisibility leads to hibernation:

I'm an invisible man and it placed me in a hole—or showed me the hole I was in....So I took to the cellar; I hibernated. I got away from it all. But that wasn't enough. I couldn't be still even in hibernation.

Invisibility and hibernation represent well the education profession because educators are more and more rendered invisible and as a result have hibernated, literally in their rooms (shut the door and teach) and figuratively in their muted voices (teachers are to be objective, neutral, apolitical).

While the main elements of the current education reform movement—expanding charter schools, implementing and testing Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Teach for America (TFA), value-added methods (VAM) of teacher evaluation, merit pay—have created a significant amount of political and public debate (debates that by their very nature lend credibility to all of these reform policies), absent from that debate has been an essential message about the field of education: All of these education reform policies suggest that no field of education even exists.

plthomasEdD

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Friday March 22, 2013 · 1:41 PM PDT

2013/03/22 · 13:41

Toward the end of HBO's documentary American Winter, Brandon is finally offered a job after viewers have watched him and his wife Pam struggle against Brandon losing his job, resulting in their being unable to pay their rent and having to live with Pam's mother.

When Brandon is told he has the job, his new boss notes Brandon is overqualified, but Brandon eagerly explains that he is thankful for the work and committed to do whatever he can to be a good worker—despite the cut in pay and drop in job status not in his plans as a young man and husband seeking the American Dream.

In a May Experience course (a three-week mini-semester after the traditional academic calendar at my university) built on education documentaries and confronting the connection between education and poverty, two of the most powerful films include HBO documentaries—Hard Times at Douglass High and Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later. Just as these works rise above the generally poor examinations of education found among education documentaries, American Winter is another HBO success, a thoughtful and confrontational exploration of poverty against the backdrop of the American Dream as it is being tarnished by disaster capitalism [1].

The scene above with Brandon and a few other aspects of the documentary give me pause, but first, I want to highlight how the film overwhelmingly succeeds.

plthomasEdD

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Friday March 08, 2013 · 5:36 AM PST

2013/03/08 · 05:36

In South Carolina and across the U.S., conservative leadership of education reform has failed to fulfill a foundational commitment to traditional values, good stewardship of public funds. [1]

The evidence of that failed stewardship is best exposed in commitments to three education reform policies: Adopting and implementing Common Core State Standards (CCSS), designing and implementing new tests based on CCSS, and proposing and field-testing revised teacher evaluations based on value-added models (VAM).

SC committed a tremendous amount of time and public funding to the accountability movement thirty years ago as one of the first states to implement state standards and high-stakes testing. After three decades of accountability, SC, like every other state in the union, has declared education still lacking and thus once again proposes a new round of education reform primarily focusing on, yet again, accountability, standards, and high-stakes testing.

Several aspects of committing to CCSS, new high-stakes tests, and teacher evaluation reform that are almost absent from the political and public debate are needs and cost/benefit analyses of these policies.

plthomasEdD

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Sunday March 03, 2013 · 4:11 AM PST

2013/03/03 · 04:11

Once the storm-surge waters receded after Hurricane Katrina plowed through New Orleans, the city has since experienced another flood, one that rushed in to fill the vacuum created by tragedy in order to reap profit: Disaster capitalism.

While the impoverished struggled under the natural disaster intensifying the social disaster that had characterized their lives, the Commons were ripe for disaster capitalists to create their predatory market, notably in the person of school CEO-as-superintendent Paul Vallas. The Recovery School District accomplished the privatizers' dream of dismissing public school teachers, rendering teachers' unions impotent, and then flooding the city with "no excuses" charter schools (often Knowledge Is Power Program [KIPP] charters or KIPP-clones) staffed primarily by Teach For America (TFA) recruits.

As Sarah Carr has documented in Hope Against Hope, mostly minority families already overburdened by poverty and nearly frantic lives as working-poor and working-class parents have been eager to enroll and support the "no excuses" sales pitch.

"The children were more reluctant KIPP converts," Carr cautions, explaining:

Many of them enjoyed the trips (those who violated KIPP's rules too many times were barred from excursions, however), spoke enthusiastically about at least one or two of the teachers, and experienced some degree of academic growth after starting at KIPP. But they chafed under KIPP's rules and long hours, and all but a few had some story of an unfair benching [1] or other punishment.
"Mr. Dassler says we won't have bench at his high school, which is a good thing," said fifteen-year-old Moira, just days before starting at KIPP Renaissance. "The kids call KIPP Kids in Prison Program because we don't get out of school until late," she added. "I joked to one friend, 'Next years I'm going to be there at KIPP Renaissance with a lot of convicts.'" (p. 97)

Yet, The Washington Post, home of Jay Matthews (who authored a tribute to KIPP's founders, former TFA recruits) has rushed to declare, "KIPP doubters proven wrong," based on the recent Mathematica report. Read More

Misreading Teacher Evaluation and Retention

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Tuesday January 29, 2013 · 9:30 AM PST

2013/01/29 · 09:30

The League of Women Voters of South Carolina has released “How to Evaluate and Retain Effective Teachers” (2011-2013), but this report misreads the evidence on teacher evaluation and thus distracts high-poverty states from needed educational reform. [1]

A review of the report shows it does not establishing a clear problem with teacher quality in SC and misrepresents the current body of research on teacher evaluation, particularly value added methods (VAM) of evaluation.

As a high-poverty and racially diverse state, SC is similar to many other states facing educational hurdles, but those hurdles have less to do with identifying and ranking teacher quality and more to do with the inequitable distribution of teachers. Children of color, children in poverty, English language learners, and special needs students are taught disproportionately by inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers. SC and other high-poverty states would do well to address teacher assignment and teaching conditions before experimenting with new teacher evaluation systems.

Ultimately, this report misreads and misrepresents the current understanding of how to evaluate and determine teacher quality—specifically through test-based methods.

plthomasEdD

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Tuesday January 22, 2013 · 11:45 AM PST

2013/01/22 · 11:45

With the annual and somewhat functional recognition of certain versions of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. behind us in 2013, let me ask this: What do Jesus, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and King have in common?

I admit the answers could be many: Significant historical voices and lives, shared messages of peace and harmony, tragic assassinations, and more.

And while these are all credible answers, I suggest the most important commonality among Jesus, Gandhi, and King is how their legacies have been manipulated by the privileged in order to create a mythology of the passive radical.

Consider Jose Vilson's framing of how King serves other people's purposes:

"For some revisionists, MLK Jr. was either one of two things: a staunch conservative who lived patriotically, owned guns, and worked towards self-help, or he was a such a commercial pacifist whose message for peace followed every rule in the book and posed no real threat to the establishment. Then, there are those who, after having recognized MLK’s full history, still want to use his name for things he would never entertain, like breaking unions and limiting opportunity to a full education to only the 'good' kids, whatever that means."

It is at Vilson's second point—framing radicals as "commercial pacifist[s] whose message for peace followed every rule in the book and posed no real threat to the establishment"—I want to pause for a moment. Read More

MLK Day Recommended Reading

plthomasEdD

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Monday January 21, 2013 · 5:01 AM PST

2013/01/21 · 05:01

"The Drum Major Instinct," Martin Luther King Jr. [AUDIO]

"But this is why we are drifting. And we are drifting there because nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. 'I must be first.' 'I must be supreme.' 'Our nation must rule the world.' (Preach it) And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit. And I'm going to continue to say it to America, because I love this country too much to see the drift that it has taken.
"God didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world now. (Preach it, preach it) God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation."

"Final Words of Advice," "Where Do We Go From Here?" — Martin Luther King Jr.

"The MLK Imperative in an Era of 'No Excuses'" — P. L. Thomas @ Daily Censored

"'They're All Our Children'" — P. L. Thomas @ AlterNet

"The Polonius Chronicles: The Invisible Hand and the King Imperative" — P. L. Thomas @ Daily Censored

"Organizations, No, Community, Yes: MLK Jr. Day 2012" — P. L. Thomas @ Daily Kos

"21st Century Segregation: Inverting King's Dream" — P. L. Thomas @ Truthout

"Diversity and the Rise of Majority-Minority Schools" — P. L. Thomas @ Truthout

James Baldwin on Education (video)

"What These Children Are Like" — Ralph Ellison

“A Talk to Teachers” — James Baldwin

Armstrong and Woods: Capitalism's Poster Boys

plthomasEdD

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Sunday January 20, 2013 · 8:20 AM PST

2013/01/20 · 08:20

Between parts I and II of Oprah Winfrey's interview with Lance Armstrong, an ad ran on OWN that included a clip of Armstrong acknowledging losing 75 million dollars in one day due to sponsors abandoning him followed by Armstrong noting his lowest moment. The sequence suggests that Armstrong was saying his loss of millions was his lowest moment, but when the full part II ran, Armstrong, in fact, identified removing himself from LIVESTRONG as the low moment.

But the point of an ad is to tease, not reflect truth.

For many cycling enthusiasts like me, the dark underbelly of professional cycling and Armstrong have been no revelation. For the many innocent people trampled by the Armstrong stampede—such as cycling journalist Neil Browne and the well publicized Frankie and Betsy Andreu—the Armstrong confession has opened the door for some vindication of their honesty, but unlikely is that the tremendous damage done to their livelihoods can ever be repaid.

Within hours of the Armstrong interview being aired, details of a book on Armstrong's disgraceful fall were announced for a June 2013 publication, to be followed by a film.

And herein lies one thing that is receiving almost no public discussion: As long as the media, the USADA, and the public keep the gaze on Armstrong alone, the culture within which Armstrong flourished, the culture within which Armstrong was created will remain unexamined, unscathed, and free to consume.

Today among the rubble of Armstrong's machine, Capitalism remains unchecked, and many now line up once again to profit off Armstrong as they did during his rise to false King of Cycling.

plthomasEdD

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Sunday January 13, 2013 · 6:00 AM PST

2013/01/13 · 06:00

I have been a serious cyclist now for almost as long as I have been an educator, about thirty years. One of my favorite films, which I showed each year I taught high school English, is Breaking Away, a 1979 fim based on the real-life mania for cycling by the main character, Dave Stoller (Dave Blase) and the Little 500 bicycle race held at Indiana University.

Along with the focus on the love of cycling, the engaging and rich characters, and the heart-warming humor, the film is also a dramatization of America's pursuit of a meritocracy, the plight of the working class, and the promise of education.

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SC Considering Flawed Reading, Fiscal Policy

The Rise of the Dogmatic Scholar

SC Infected with Florida Formula Flu

Alternative Education Reform: Among the Invisible and "Preferably Unheard"

Review: "American Winter" (HBO)

Conservative Leadership Poor Stewardship of Public Funds

"Disaster Capitalism," "Kids in Prison Program" Justified?

Misreading Teacher Evaluation and Retention

Passive Radicals: The Manufactured Myth

MLK Day Recommended Reading

Armstrong and Woods: Capitalism's Poster Boys

"Breaking Away" from Inequity?