Entries tagged 'teaching'

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

Teachers’ Protest Not a Good Idea

By now, everyone should know that I’ve been an outspoken opponent of nearly $5 billion in proposed budget cuts to public education in California. While I support their frustration, a planned school-time walkout by teachers in Los Angeles is not a good idea.

On Friday, June 6, the teachers plan to demonstrate in front of their local school sites for the first hour of the school day, leaving students in the care of aides and administrators. Los Angeles Unified has gone to court to try to prevent them from doing so, citing the potential danger to students from being able to provide only minimal supervision.

In some schools–particularly those where we’re talking about 2,500+ kids–the teachers are inviting chaos, instead of finding a more responsible time to hold such a protest, such as the numerous after school rallies that have occurred up here in San Francisco.

Superintendent David Brewer III put it simply and clearly.

“We’re trying to send a very strong signal to Sacramento that these cuts are unacceptable,” he said. “We’re not questioning the message. We’re just questioning the method.”

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Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

Recognizing Schools’ Place in Inequality

San Francisco Unified’s school board unanimously approved a new strategic plan for the district at a meeting Tuesday night.

That alone would normally not be news, except this time the planning was headed up by Tony Smith, deputy superintendent of instruction, innovation and social justice for the district.

Smith, who came to SFUSD from the superintendent post in Emeryville, came to his role with a strong appreciation for schools’ place in preserving much of the inequality that exists in society today. That belief is clearly evident in the new plan.

“For far too long, demographics, specifically the socio-economic, linguistic and racial backgrounds our our children, have often closely correlated to their success in school. We refer to this historical trend as the ‘predictive power of demographics,’” the plan states.

This admission alone is historic for a school district, as much of this predictive power comes from districts’ and states’ policies, which often disadvantage students of color or students from low-income neighborhoods.

Staffing policies that encourage the newest, least experienced teachers to teach students who most need the help are a prime example. The New Teacher Project’s report, “Unintended Consequences,” explained this phenomenon in much detail in 2005 and little progress has been made since in most major school districts.

The plan commits the district to rethinking all of its policies and practices from the viewpoint of having acknowledged its historical contributions, something that is undoubtedly going to be difficult and painful at times, but in the end should be a positive experience for the district and its students.

But Smith has been around long enough to realize that change will not come with words alone. Thus, he proposes assessing schools’ progress not on test scores alone, which is way too common nowadays, but on each school’s “ability to disrupt the historically predictive power of racial, ethnic, linguistic and socio-economic student attributes.”

That’s a much higher calling, but one the district (and the rest of the country) desperately needs.

(Photos from Flickr user dlemieux)

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Monday, December 3rd, 2007

More Than 5 Trillion Words

This is an amazing video about how we must rethink information in the digital age. While we all live in this time–reading and writing blogs, turning to alternate sources for information–we rarely stop and consider the revolution occurring right under our noses and how easy it is for us to find information using one of the more than 5 trillion keywords in the index of a search engine like Google.

The video is produced by the Digital Ethnography project at Kansas State. They’re involved in an ethnographic study of YouTube, which offers some very interesting perspectives on learning in the 21st Century.

As a former teacher, these types of efforts are critical both at the university and K-12 levels, as most teaching (and learning) that occurs right now is stuck in the decidedly 19th-Century model of lectures, note-taking and exams. Add in a pretty common (at least in the business world) piece of technology, like a laptop computer, and the formula shifts like it has in Maine, where the state has been issuing Apple laptops to all 7th and 8th grade students since 2001.

Teachers become coaches. Students explore, teachers assist and, together, often add to the greater body of knowledge available on the Internet. That’s how we prepare kids for a 21st Century, interconnected world.

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