What If Miss Parker Hadn't

I was in the seventh grade when Miss Parker told me, "Donovan, we could put all your excess energy to good use." And she introduced me to the sound of my own voice.

In five minutes, Donovan Livingston the Student speaker at Harvard Graduate School of Education 2016 Convocation and Ed.M. candidate uses his voice to remind all of us of why education is powerful. His voice reminds us that equity in access to education and educational possibilities cannot and should not be restricted.The reason to be an educator is embedded in his poetry.  A number on a test does not define a person's worth. Invest in five minutes that can reaffirm your resolve to be an educator.https://youtu.be/9XGUpKITeJMUse this link from Harvard GSE to link to the text.

Still Ignoring the Evidence

Play - real, unstructured brain break time - is as important to a child's learning as academic time.So why are school leaders and decision-makers so reluctant to let go and allow more recess? I cringe whenever I hear a school leader lecture that there isn't enough time in a school day to increase play or unstructured time. Two reasons come to mind:

• Quantity not quality - somehow the misguided idea that number of minutes and time-on-task are larger concerns than actual learning,
• Test preparation is driving the construction of a school day.

Quantity not quality assumes that a student can maintain peak brain function and learn every second of a lesson. Ken Wesson tells us that students can attend to a lesson launch for approximately the same number of minutes as that child's age.  Here is a link to an article I posted some time ago outlining this thought as it applies to a classroom.  If we are serious about optimizing student learning and making sure academic time is effective, we should know how the brain functions. What is the point of just yammering for 60 minutes when a 10 year old brain turned off 40 minutes ago?I often hear - and truth be told, sometimes would say - that school days are packed. At one point when I taught 4th Grade, there were more minutes of instruction required within the day than there were minutes in the entire school day. And in this day and age, there is test preparation, which has to come from somewhere. Just exactly how much time gets expended to prepare students for those high-stakes tests like PARCC or Smarter Balance?Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Professor of Education at Lesley University advocates for younger students to have more time for play and unstructured learning time as does K-12 writer Caralee Adams in the article "Recess Makes Kids Smarter". Students are routinely asked not only to sit, but sit still for inordinate amounts of time when they developmentally are not ready to do so. Could misguided school policies requiring students to be on-task for long periods of time be driving the bulk of students perceived to have ADD or ADHD? Brain research makes me wonder.For more about the importance of recess, free play, and unstructured time, the New York Times Parent Blog posted an article titled "Students Who Lose Recess Are The Ones Who Need It Most". This article takes the importance of unstructured time a step further by advocating that taking away recess as a means of punishment for out of compliant behavior or for missing homework is counter-productive.  Losing recess may be a major factor in loss of self-control or executive function.Our kids need to move, they need less chair time for their physical health and for their brains for function. Why do we continue to ignore brain researchers? To quote Ken Wesson, "If your job is to develop the mind, shouldn't you know how the brain works?"

Resilience

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, was the Commencement Speaker at U Cal Berkeley this past week.  Ms. Sandberg also wrote the book Lean In which generated lots of controversy among women. (Full disclosure, I have not read it). Sheryl Sandberg has endured what is understandably the worst year of her life after her husband Dave Goldberg had a cardiac arrhythmia while working out on a treadmill about one year ago. The story of what came next is astoundingly honest, brutally frank, and incredibly inspirational. I'm providing a link to the transcript here as well as a later link to the video.Since reading this commencement address, I've thought a lot about what Ms. Sandberg says about resilience and those life-changing times that we encounter in living.I have an undergraduate degree in Music Education with a performance major in piano. I had my ego stroked quite often as reading music came quite easily to me and I could play fairly well. So I when I graduated, I figured teaching would be a cakewalk. Was I ever wrong!My first teaching job was as a K-12 choral/general music teacher in a struggling northwest New Hampshire school district. I was ill-prepared for the actual job of teaching and so, after a year, I left. That failure, as difficult as it was to accept, forced me to reflect on what it was I really wanted to do. If the past 20 years is any indication, I think I did find it.

The easy days ahead of you will be easy. It is the hard days — the times that challenge you to your very core — that will determine who you are. You will be defined not just by what you achieve, but by how you survive.

Finding a Plan B is not as easy as waking up the next morning and knowing what to do. Sometimes, as it did for me, it takes years to figure things out. And sometimes Plan B can turn into Plan C, Plan D and Plan E.And if you've read Ms. Sandberg's speech, well you'll know what to do with Plan B when you get there.   

Summer Pay, Explained

How would you like it if your employer said "you absolutely have done the work, but I'm not going to be able to be able to finish paying you?" Basically, that is what is happening to teachers in the Detroit Public Schools this week. And to emphasize and publicize this ridiculous predicament, the teachers in Detroit had a sick-out (teacher strikes are as illegal in Michigan as they are here in Massachusetts).CBS News broadcast a story last evening that did not make clear why not paying teachers over the summer months is an ethical as well as practical problem. This morning's Boston Globe did a slightly better job. The issue here is not about paying teachers all year long - it's about paying for services that were completed as of the end of a school year. In other words: deferred or back pay.When the Detroit Public Schools runs out of money on June 30, it will not only mean cancelling Summer School or other educational programs that take place over the 10-week summer break. It will mean that Detroit will break its promise to finish paying teachers for 2015-16.How is that? It most likely works the way things work here in Lowell.  At the beginning of a school year, a teacher can elect to receive contractual salary in one of three ways:

1. Divide the contracted pay over the 42-week school year,
2. Divide the contracted pay for the 42-week year over 52 weeks (a calendar year) and receive a lump sum for the balance on week 42, or
3. Divide the contracted pay for the 42-week year over 52 weeks (deferring a set aside amount so checks arrive regularly over the summer).

Deferring or setting aside part of contracted pay is a convenience and benefit for teachers. When Detroit's funds run out on June 30, the staff that selected Option 1 will have been paid in full for a full year's work. [Updated to include detail from NYTimes article: Detroit uses 44 week year; same principle for options 1 and 3.]. Those teachers who deferred pay (Option 3) will not receive the 10 weeks of deferred salary. So, one group of educators will have received full pay for 2015-16, but another will not. Group 2, no soup for you.I'd be upset too if money that I'd purposefully set aside to live on during a break just vaporized through no fault of my own. I'd expect most employees in any business sector would be as well.Sometimes the devil is in the details.

Onerous Regulations....

Yesterday's presentation of the Senate bill proposing a compromise to the Charter School ballot question got a predictable reaction. No one is totally happy, but the unhappiest reactions came from those who advocate lifting the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts - the ones who continue to quote the 34,000 student waiting list even in the face of the State Auditor's report saying that number is unsubstantiated.This morning's Boston Globe article contains a reaction from pro-Charter spokesperson, Mark Kenen of Massachusetts Public Charter School Association (you'll have to look Dr. Kenen's credentials up on Linkedin yourself). The quote, from the Boston Globe, is:

Marc Kenen, executive director of the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association, added that “it imposes onerous new regulations that will shackle the operation of existing charter schools.”

Wait a minute, those "onerous" new regulations, those regulations that will "shackle" operations? Some of these regulations are things such as using enforced suspensions of students as a means to create "school safety".  The reliance on suspension over other less-draconian discipline actions have recently come to light nationwide (see UCLA report on Charter School suspension rates here making note of the 44.7% suspension rate at Roxbury Prep).And then there are those pesky regulations requiring certification of teachers and representation of parents and teachers on governing boards the same standards required for traditional public schools. (For more on governance, see the Annenberg Report, Whose Schools published yesterday).Wow, if those things are considered onerous, then why not unshackle traditional public schools as well?Reference to the act, S2203, is found here.

Brain Research Matters!

Ken Wesson, asks this question

 If it's your job to develop the mind, shouldn't you know how the brain works?

I would add, and if your job is to develop the curriculum or make an assessment of that young mind, you also need to know how the brain works.The brain science, based on the work of Dr. Wesson, tells us that a child's sustained attention can be predicted fairly accurately.

• Ages 4-5   =  5 - 10 minutes
• Ages 6-8   = 15- 20 minutes
• Ages 9-12 = 22-35 minutes

This is real data based on real brain research. Data-driven. Gail Boushey and Joan Moser (the Two Sisters of the Daily Five), support this research in their work organizing and managing instructional structures for children (see prior post).When reading Jeffrey Brosco's article about increasing ADD/ADHD rates among young children (link to article above), and the array of pharmaceuticals and their side effects (WebMD), it makes one wonder about the numbers of children diagnosed as ADHD/ADD. Could the increased numbers of diagnoses be driven by children who are responding to inappropriately long and stressful attention span demands?  Is there an organic reason for a diagnosis? Or is the diagnosis driven by developmentally inappropriate demands on kids?For the educational "experts" creating those packed curricula, demanding "time on task", and sustained periods of testing, brain research must be considered. But it isn't, of course. We continue to subject children to long periods of academics, especially high stakes testing, requiring attention beyond what they are capable.Brain Research matters.    

A Vicious Cycle

So, what would you say an unexpected by-product of ed reform might be?  With loss of autonomy in what to teach when, emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing and little control over just about anything else in the educational day, teachers are leaving some districts for transfers to more affluent schools and for other careers.I mention this because it is challenging to teach in a gateway - or as the Pioneer Institute referred to it last week "middle" - city. And because the Lowell Schools are making an effort to diversify faculty and staff.This article addresses this very issue and was published by In These Times last August. It clearly points to the challenge of hiring and retaining teaching staff in these times of education reform. As you read the article, consider the challenge of attracting teaching candidates who are impassioned to work as educators with a diverse and challenging student population.The by-product of education reform is fall-out of professional teaching staff. As professional educators reach their limits of stress, do they move to a less challenging district? Or do they leave for a career in another field, perhaps related, where the environment is less toxic?So what does happens as a result of corporate reforms overtaking the education landscape?  Is there a reliance on Teach for America trained (and I use that term loosely) or alternative certification?Here's Kevin Posen's take from the In These Times article:

In order to fill the gaps, licensure rules are relaxed and “supports” are provided for an increasingly amateur workforce—through prefabricated curriculum and assessments. And the cycle starts all over again. The demoralization of the American teacher is leading to the deskilling of their profession, which leads to teacher resignations, which leads to more demoralization, ad infinitum.

In other words - a vicious cycle for educators and education. 

Education: What is Equity?

Ludlow Superintendent Todd Gazda posed this question in a recent Commonwealth Magazine article:  What is equity?  Because, as Dr. Gazda points out, current education policy tends toward equalizing education for all students with standardized curriculums proven by standardized assessment and incentivized "business systems" for implementation.

Equity, like fairness, is not treating every student the same, but rather focuses on giving every student what they need. - Todd Gazda, Commonwealth Magazine

Any educator who has worked for a nanosecond in a classroom knows the truth of that quote. Twenty-five inquiring minds can, at any point in a school day, need twenty-five different things. One may need teacher to soothe a physical hurt. Or another may not have eaten since the last school day. And another may have witnessed a domestic assault at home.How do you suppose each of these children might engage in learning? Would they be able to engage in the instruction in the same way? Would they have mastered the content objective for the day?  No, equity is not treating each child the same.Which is why teaching, to me, is not a science that can be boiled down to a set of steps that everyone anyone can do; it is an art. We can expect our students to work and master content. We can hold students to high expectations and have faith and confidence that they will soar. But we should not expect our children to do this in lockstep.Equity in teaching is taking children where they are, determining what is needed to move ahead, and giving each the supports they need to get there, no matter how long it may take to do so.Our state and national leaders need to have the courage to allow educators to educate all students. With equity. 

PARCC Week Day 4: Time Matters

If you haven't yet looked at the PARCC sample tests available, you should (link here). It doesn't matter what your connection might be to education - parent, teacher, child - take a look. The practice tests are available in both paper-pencil and computer form, but if you can, try out the computer based test (CBT) because that is the direction that high-stakes tests are headed by 2019. And as you work through the practice test, imagine yourself as a student taking these assessments.The test administrator's manuals gives some insight into how our students will experience paper-and-pencil version of PARCC this spring.  First of all, the tests which are now called units have time limits. This is a big deal and here's why.Prior testing using the MCAS assessment was untimed, meaning that a student could work for as long as needed to complete the exam as long as school was in session. The only limit to testing time was that the test had to be turned in at the end of the school day. I was a test administrator for MCAS for the 9 years I taught Grades 3 and 4. My students always needed additional time over the suggestions from MCAS to complete each test. Each year, the students used the time to work carefully.Students who are designated as English Language Learners and/or have an Individual Education Plan (IEP) or 504 Plan may have additional time to work on tests, just as allowed on the MCAS test. This is clearly outlined in PARCC's Accommodations Manuals (see Appendix E here). That is good news for those students; however, there are many students without such plans for whom a timed test will not be beneficial.The majority of my fourth grade students needed 3 1/2 or more hours as they carefully read, reread/reworked passages and problems, checked and transferred answers diligently to bubble (answer) sheets. They worked carefully and diligently to check and re-check questions and answers, going back into texts often to make sure they had made their best answer choice based on evidence from texts or had calculated a mathematical problem correctly. We ask our students to slow down, understand the task, and take apart the text or problem carefully to arrive at an answer. Now they need to hurry up.Using information posted on the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website, click the following link to see the number of "units" and test times for Grades 3 through 8 this year. PARCC TimesThis schedule will be challenging for many. The PARCC administration "window" (time schools may schedule the tests) is April 25 - May 27.  April 25 is the first Monday after returning from school vacation and unlikely to be a test date. If the scheduled Early Release on May 4 remains, that would probably not be a test date either since the students needing additional time would have their available test time cut short. For this same reason, schools correctly will hesitate to schedule more than one "unit" in a school day. For a classroom teacher, moving ahead with new topics of instruction when ELLs or students on IEPs are still testing and out of the room makes the balance of a test day difficult to plan for.  Here's hoping that temperatures during the four weeks of the test window are not extremely hot.Even without a move to computer based testing this year, new test times will most likely make an impact on our students. Will students react to this more compact test window or new time limits during standardized testing?

PARCC Week, Day 3: Dangerous Liaisons

Who is this Mitchell Chester and why is he so invested in PARCC testing?Mitchell Chester is the current Commissioner of Education in Massachusetts. Think of that as a district superintendency, but on a state level. He was unanimously selected to be Massachusetts Commissioner of Education in 2008, following a 7-year stint in Ohio as Senior Associate Superintendent for Policy and Accountability in Ohio's Department of Education.  His career path began as an elementary teacher in Connecticut and progressed through various administrative positions at school, district, and state levels. All of which makes for an impressive resume.However, here is where I think Dr. Chester has gone off the rails: PARCC.Mitchell Chester currently serves on the PARCC governing board. Up until November 2015 when he was quietly replaced by the Governing Board Member from New Mexico (Hanna Skandera), he was the Chair of this group whose responsibilities include the following, to quote PARCC.org website:

The PARCC consortium Governing Board makes major policy and operational decisions, including decisions related to the overall design of the assessment system, adoption of performance levels for the assessments, and modifications to PARCC’s governance structure and decision-making process, as necessary.

The Commonwealth's Board of Education was determining whether or not to mandate PARCC as the replacement for MCAS at the same time that Mitchell Chester was seated on the PARCC Governing Board.Interestingly, Dr. Chester was replaced as Chair of the PARCC Governing Board shortly after Massachusetts declined to use PARCC assessments state-wide.At the same time Dr. Chester was Chair of the Governing Board at PARCC - the assessment test proposed as the accountability assessment for the Commonwealth. The Pioneer Institute, an independent think tank, outlines reasons that Dr. Chester's connections to the PARCC Governing Board were problematic in this post from July 2015.Move forward to November 2015 when the Commonwealth's Board of Education was to vote on whether or not to commit to PARCC. By this time, it was clear that the public was not in favor of being railroaded into a PARCC commitment. However, miraculously, just as the Board was meeting to make this decision, Dr. Chester was able to come up with a compromise: Massachusetts would create its own assessment to replace MCAS. The new assessment would be called MCAS 2.0 and would be a hybrid of PARCC and MCAS.Gradually over the next weeks, the independence of MCAS 2.0 from PARCC was whittled away. At first, the new assessment would only have the look and feel of PARCC; the new hybrid assessment would be developed just for Massachusetts.  Next came the news that PARCC decided states could purchases/contract some of the PARCC test if the whole was not desired. The decision to allow a la carte test items suspiciously coincided with Massachusetts' rejection of PARCC as their state-wide assessment.Questions remain concerning the percentage of PARCC test items to be inserted into PARCC, but I have read percentages ranging from 70% to 90% PARCC.   Could MCAS 2.0 just be PARCC with a new name?For the life of me, I cannot understand how this is not called out as a blatant conflict of interest. While Dr. Chester's boss, Governor Baker, doesn't seem to think there is a problem (see WBUR interview and report), the Commissioner's connections to the PARCC Governing Board seem just a little too cozy.Here are some weblinks for further reading:

• Amid Concerns, Baker Says Chester Belongs ‘In The Conversation’ On PARCC

• Chester recommends “MCAS 2.0”

• Education Commissioner Recommends ‘Next-Generation MCAS’ For State Test

• Massachusetts’s Rejection of Common Core Test Signals Shift in U.S.

• Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester Should Recuse Himself from Upcoming Decision on PARCC & MCAS

• Education Board Votes to Adopt Hybrid MCAS-PARCC Test
• Data vs. Politics: Why Has Commissioner Chester Stepped Back from PARCC?
• Hanna Skandera Is Now PARCC Chair. There Was No Press Release.

PARCC Week, Part 2: Pearson

If you're inside Education, you've probably got a good idea or at least name recognition for Pearson Education. And if not, well to paraphrase Lowell's own Bette Davis, "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride."Pearson is a prime example of the corporate take-over culture that infects business today.  Corporate giants adhere to a business model in which companies bid and buy smaller companies or competitors, mostly to get an already successful product developed by the second company. In lieu of development, one enterprise simply raids the pantry of another company, usually keeping the piece that they want to profit from and getting rid of most everything else.Pearson has raided many of the educational publishing houses such as Addison-Wesley, Allyn & Bacon, Heinemann, Scott Foresman, and Ginn. Sadly now that Pearson owns them, many have ceased to exist as independent imprints.Once Pearson obtained the lion's share of the textbook publishing market, they moved on to the next great profit center: assessments. Pearson owns and manages the rights to several assessments that should be familiar territory to educators, such as DRA2 . Not surprising, Pearson has the rights to PARCC. Pearson was the successful bidder to the multi-year multi-million-dollar PARCC test. PARCC Inc. or PARCC Org. - Pearson has their hand in both.When the PARCC Consortium, the group banding together to use PARCC as the required standardized assessment, began, there were 26 states committed to using this test.  As State Departments of Educations got a good look at test administration, the costs, the technology requirements, and experienced the delays in score reporting, many dropped out of the PARCC Consortium. At this writing, there are SIX remaining commited to administering PARCC (Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, plus D.C). Whether this is a factor or not, layoffs were announced this past week at Pearson.Not to worry! States can also contract for parts of the PARCC test. Offering individual test items or parts of subtests seems to be a recent development to respond to states who are, shall we say, "uncomfortable" with the PARCC test in its entirety. States like Louisiana and now Massachusetts, have floated the idea that their replacement hybrid assessment, named MCAS 2.0 in Massachusetts, may contain a significant proportion of PARCC test items.Pearson may be disappointed that the gravy train is not stopping at their corporate headquarters. However, it appears that they will manage to make a profit on PARCC one way or another.Link to next post here.     

PARCC Week, Day 1: Intro to Standardized Testing

As I sat down to write about my personal opinions about PARCC and standardized testing in general, I came to the realization that a single post might not be enough. Over the course of the next week, I'll be posting about PARCC and some of the reasons it merits the attention of anyone connected to students - parents, teachers, and community members. This is the first entry of this series.This week our local School Committee voted to change the Spring 2016 assessment tool from the previously approved (October 2015) Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) to Parternship for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC). The deed is done, but that doesn’t mean it has to stand forever.As a third-grade and fourth-grade teacher for the last 9 years before I retired in June, I had quite a bit of experience with MCAS. My students were never part of the PARCC pilot, or try-out tests, but I have taken a good, long look at what PARCC releases on their website (parcc.org). I reviewed test items as part of my personal work as educator as well as when I was a part of the team re-writing math curriculum to align with Common Core Standards.Preparing students who are barely 9 years old for hours-long testing involves teaching test taking strategies. This does not mean teaching to the test. It means basic skills such as teaching students to scan questions prior to reading a passage, reading the italicized introduction to a reading passage, highlighting using allowable tools, staying within boundaries of open response question/answer areas, erasing bubble sheets, and making only one answer choice, ensuring that the whole test has been answered and no items left skipped, reading test items and dealing with tricky and subtle changes in wording, and it means preparing to focus and concentrate for long periods of time. Some may think that those listed strategies should be assumed; I would remind you of that old saying: " when you assume....". None of this is second nature to a 9-year-old.Each year that I administered MCAS, I kept a notecard inside one of my desk drawers. On that card, I noted some factors of a students’ life that might negatively impact test performance. Why? Because invariably when the results of testing were released, teachers are rightly asked to look closely at the results and make instructional decisions to improve.  And now, in a more toxic environment, those test scores can become part of an evaluation of my teaching.I don’t think my instruction was perfect and there are/were plenty of standards on which I could have done a more effective job. My notes, however, contained items such as “no glasses, broken and not replaced”, “arrived 2 hours after test began” and “upset and crying due to fight at home”. This is the reality of teaching in schools where trauma is high. To disregard the impact of such things on a child tasked with performing on a one-shot high-stakes test is foolish.I dislike and distrust most high stakes testing. My English Language Learners (ELLs) - some years that population made up 75% of the classroom - are smart and funny and wonderful learners who easily misunderstood some of the subtleties of test language.  They’ll make sense of these tests and learn to deal with them, of course, but it will take more than a few years. Yet the Commonwealth punishes them by designating their test scores “needs improvement” or “warning”. What must that do to a child’s psyche? My students were always more than a number to me, but the Commonwealth doesn't see it that way.So through the lense of someone who has been in the room during testing, who has witnessed extraordinary effort of students to try to show their best performance on a snap-shot of their learning, over the next several posts, I will try to explain what it is that makes me even more apprehensive about this new assessment, the PARCC tests.Next topic: The Corporate Connection

No-Nonsense? Nonsense!

Our local CBS affiliate posted a public opinion question this morning. The "No Nonsense Nurturing" is rearing its ugly head once again because teachers and schools using this program (see link ) have gained some news cycle traction: teachers are being told not to use "please" or "thank you" with students.As Amy Berard, former Lawrence Public School teacher, so eloquently wrote, the program requires teachers to speak with students according to a script. Don't say please. Don't say thank-you. Be direct, speak without inflection. Don't give students a choice.Oxymoronically named, the program does anything but nurture. Teachers are commanded not to use polite language as it might cause the teacher to appear to be less powerful, to lose "control". Is this what education has come to? Power and compliance?As a classroom teacher with thirty years experience, this trend in education policy to find the one program that will magically turn all students into acquiescent sheep troubles me. Educators don't need to be trained and practiced professionals who have the skills in child psychology and classroom management to read the room and respond to what the students' needs might be. No, all one needs is the magical script, training and consultant available for an extra fee.I spent the whole of my teaching career empowering students to learn by making choices, modeling acceptable social interactions, and still managed to keep 20-30 young learners from swinging from the light fixtures. Students need to learn from decision-making and practice making good choices. As a colleague in my last school used to say, "you win or lose by how you choose".An educator recently made this thoughtful observation:

One of the Great Truths of Ed. Reform is that we cheer on reformsthat affect Other Peoples' Kids, but that we would never tolerate for our ownkids.

Is this the kind of nurturing we want for our children? Puh-leeze.

The change is the thing

2015 has been a transition year for me - personally and professionally. What had always been has flipped end over end, and now there is a new lens through which the world is viewed. There is no holding on to the old as this world and the environment around me is always changing. Kind of like this image - sometimes a new point of view changes everything. And, while sometimes met with less than enthusiastic appreciation, the change is the thing.

So here's to 2016 and to meeting the changes a new year will undoubtedly bring. To looking at things from a new perspective. And to health and happiness to you and your families.

Year End Loose Ends

Project Learn

Recently I had the pleasure of talking about education with LZ Nunn and Brittany Burgess from Project Learn, a nonprofit supporting education and educators. LZ recently accepted the challenge of becoming the ED of Project Learn.One of the topics we tossed around was grant writing, and ways Project Learn might offer support to teachers and staff who would like to pursue grant funded projects and activities. As a follow-up, LZ found this grant announcement that some teachers might want to pursue:

Grant Alert DetailFund for Teachers GrantsSponsor: Fund for TeachersSubmitted: 10/27/2015 12:00:00 AMFund for Teachers provides educators, possessing a broad vision of what it means to teach and learn, the resources needed to pursue self-designed professional learning experiences. FFT grants are used for an unlimited variety of projects; all designed to create enhanced learning environments for teachers, their students and their school communities.Award amounts vary. K-12 Teachers are eligible to apply.Deadline: January 28, 2016Please Note: The Center for Health and Health Care in Schools (CHHCS) does not administer this funding opportunity.Please contact Fund for Teachers for more information and to apply for this funding: http://fft.fundforteachers.org/

Clicking on the links will take applicants to the requirements and application process. Here's a great opportunity for teachers to design their own PD and get funding to pursue it.

Common Core, Common Care

Valerie Strauss, the author of a Washington Post OP-Ed, The Answer Sheet, often posts something that sparks my thinking. Her latest column, What Happened When a Troubled Little Boy Appeared at My Classroom Door highlights the story of transient students who challenge us not only as educators, but as humans. Please read this post and think of all the teachers you know, particularly here in Lowell who create safe communities of learners despite challenges of society.

Looking Forward, Looking Back

Larry Ferlazzo, another highly regarded Education Week author as well as teacher, writes a yearly column predicting what will happen in education throughout the coming year.  Last year's column (click here), highlighted issues in education such as E-rate funding and VAM (time to break out the Google). I think #1 is spot-on: the drive to increase technology in schools is not necessarily for enhancing learning. New technology is really needed to support the new tests that will be electronically administered by 2017 (MCAS 2.0 or PARCC - they're going to put the same demands on our kids).And to find out what Mr. Ferlazzo predicts for 2016 check out the latest right here.

Connecting Dots

Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Lesley University Professor Emerita, recently stated the following during an acceptance speech for the Deborah Meier award. Dr. Carlsson-Paige cites a statistic from the DOE Department of Civil Rights which reports that 8,000 Preschool students (!) were suspended at least once in a school year.

“There is a connection, I know, between these suspensions and ed reform policies: Children in low income communities are enduring play deficient classrooms where they get heavy doses of direct teaching and testing. They have to sit still, be quiet in their seats and comply. Many young children can’t do this and none should have to."

Anecdotally I know she is right, not only for low income early childhood classrooms, but upper grades as well. Kids may not always be direct in identifying what is bothering them; they sometimes show us with their actions. They "act out" with displeasure.Brain-based research from experts such as Ken Wesson tells that children in Kindergarten are capable of 5-10 minutes direct instruction and learning before they become inattentive; fourth graders - my former wheel house - can sustain attention for 10-20 minutes.The connection is that "mini" lessons, those short and focused bursts of direct instruction beginning a learning segment, are often 20 minutes or more. And when that is followed by more pencil/paper task work, there lies a recipe for disengagement. Now extend that: what happens when a 10-year old is asked to sit and engage in a high-stakes task such as our current MCAS test? Last spring most of my students wrote from 9 am to 2:35 with a 25 minute break for lunch during Long Composition, English Language Arts, and Mathematics Tests.Teachers do what they can to make classrooms and lessons more active by allowing kids to get out of seats, work in different parts of the room, and through cooperative/collaborative learning activities. What is lacking, however, is recess and play time - time for socialization, for learning to negotiate with peers, for exercise, fresh air, and fun.Make no mistake: play time is important to every child. And yet it is the first thing to be cut back when schedules are tightened to accommodate more time on tasks.So when Dr. Carlsson-Paige is talking about a connection between allowing kids more recess and the number of discipline issues, we need to listen. Our kids are stressed out and need to get off the conveyor belt.

Truthiness in Local Education

The current Mayor of Lowell, Rodney Elliot, recently posited this gem in our local newspaper. Take a look at the bulleted items, if you have not already read this, and be outraged. Note the date on the letter - the day after the City elections. Could this be a manipulation of facts engineered for personal gain such as a second term as mayor?This bullet from the article caught my attention as it points to a fundamental problem with the article and appears to include unattributed misinformation. Here's a quote:"Instructional time increase to state average of 275 minutes (4 hours, 35 minutes a day). Lowell is at 255. Most states exceed 300 minutes."Let's take a closer look at what Mr. Elliot is saying.  As Blogger Gerry Nutter pointed out in today's post, State Law mandates the amount of instructional time in a school year. The times mandated are 900 HOURS (54,000 minutes) per school year (elementary) and 990 HOURS (59,400 minutes) per school year (Middle & High School). And because in education, there is no such thing as "simple arithmetic" in getting to the minutes that count toward an academic day, some number manipulation is required. Time spent in recess, transition times, lunch or breakfast do not count.In the realm of activities that do and do not count as education, I suppose administering 3 days of MCAS testing (975 minutes) last spring might also be disallowed. But I digress.When Mr. Elliot wants to talk instructional time using minutes per day, his argument needs a bit more scrutiny. Simply throwing a out a claim that Lowell teachers instruct students for just 255 minutes a day is more than a bit misleading. What is his source for the claim that "most states exceed 300 minutes".An elementary school day (I'll use an example of the school from which I recently retired) is 6 hours and 20 minutes (380 minutes) from start to finish. To be precise, an additional 5 minutes is "unassigned" at the end of a school day for teachers only and is not included in the 380 calculation. Let's subtract 15 minutes at the beginning of the day because the "tardy" bell rings 15 minutes after the other students have arrived and universal breakfast is served during that time as breakfast. 6 hours and 5 minutes (365 minutes).Less 30 minutes for lunch and recess leaves 5 hours 35 minutes (335 minutes). Students attend Allied Arts classes for 50 minutes every day (physical education, art, music, content/library). THEY are still receiving instruction, albeit from another professional. Even if a generous 10 minutes is allocated daily for transitioning between rooms (many teachers no longer take whole classes to the bathroom, students sign out when they need to leave), the number of instructional minutes is 325 which is more than the 255 minutes Mr. Elliot reports Lowell teachers spend and even above 275 minutes which he claims as a state "average".So what about the classroom teachers? If the students aren't in the room, what is that prep time used for? Four days of the week, the teacher is given prep time of 50 minutes; one day each week is reserved for Common Planning, or some type of professional meeting involving all the teachers at a grade level. While not directly instructing students at this time, prep time activities support students (and families) in many ways.Prep time really involves: phone calls and follow up with parents, report writing and preparation for SpED team meetings (sometimes even the meetings take place in this timeframe), helping students process behavior issues, correcting assessment (and sometimes administering assessments), preparing materials for lessons, planning co-teaching activities with colleagues, mentoring a new teacher, meeting with an administrator for evaluation/student concerns. It is not a "free" period - time to put up the feet and chat with another teacher. I feel the minutes a teacher spends preparing do impact instruction and should go right back into the teaching day.So at a minimum, disallowing the preparation time, a teacher spends an average 285 minutes teaching; however, counting preparation time - as it should count - the daily minutes rise to 325. Bottom line: This time is essential to a teacher's responsibilities. This IS work time.If you're keeping track, the tally is between 285 and 325 minutes of teaching per day, not 255 and not 275 as reported by the Mayor.So my question remains: where is the truth? Because, I for one am tired of education and hard-working educators being tossed around as collateral by politicians with an ax to grind.

This Weekend, We Got Out

Fear is for people who don’t get out very much.~Rick Steves

Why Vote?

This is a local election day in Lowell, MA. Both City Council and School Committee representatives will be decided upon by the end of the day. Local pundits are predicting a low turnout, and I for one hope they are totally off base. Not exercising your right to vote is something that I just don't understand. Don't people want to have a voice in who represents them?In the late part of the 19th century, women and especially married women had little in the way of citizen's rights and they most certainly could not vote or hold office. While unmarried women could inherit money, married women could not. I've been reading the history of women's voting rights in one of my ancestral heartlands, Missouri, and while this is Missouri's story, there are probably many commonalities with other states.My great grandmother, Minnie Palmer Flournoy was made a young widow in 1891 when her husband Richard was killed in a tragic train accident. As a widow with two very young children, she had to fight the railroad through an attorney to get a settlement for Richard's untimely death. I have that correspondence in my genealogy files. If memory serves me correctly, she received the princely sum of $500.When women of Missouri demonstrated for the suffragette movement, my great-grandmother was part of that. I often have wondered if her motivation and support for the 19th Amendment could have had its beginning in the treatment she received from the railroad when her husband died.Nearly every time that I vote, I think of the courage my great-grandmother had to muster to participate in the suffragette marches. I am grateful, but also awed because women like Minnie Flournoy had the extraordinary courage to demand the right to participate in our representative democracy. They did not give up on this idea even when the measures were defeated as they were several times in Missouri.This morning I voted as I have on nearly every Election Day since I was old enough to do so. To do otherwise would be a disservice to those women who recognized a wrong that needed to be made right.

PARCC: The Elevator Speech

This morning, I was greeted by more "alleged news" (thanks Jack Cole for THAT gem) purporting that "Educators Urge State Board to Adopt PARCC Exam". Despite the fact that this news is sourced in the Statehouse News Service and, therefore, just a press release unworthy of front page space, I call baloney.  Here is why: 

1. PARCC is not proven to measure college and career readiness any better than the current MCAS test. Now I could go off on a tangent about the merits of any single, high-stakes test in predicting future success for students, but I'll stick to the fact that in this era, testing rules. If the new assessment doesn't do what it is touted to do, why bother to change?
2. PARCC is expensive. PARCC is administered electronically. That means network and hardware expenses above and beyond what cash-strapped schools already have in place. So, instead of hiring staff or purchasing materials to support programs, a school district is supposed to buy technology upgrades for the purpose of testing. In addition, the time needed to administer PARCC is "expensive" in that instead of learning something, anything, kids are busy with an assessment of dubious value.
3. PARCC puts many urban districts at a disadvantage.  I taught in a school with a 90%+ poverty level. My kids were not regularly exposed to technology unless they were accessing it in school. The PARCC samples I've seen require a high-degree of manipulation between reading a question, computation and/or side work, and moving items around a screen to create an answer. So for kids like my former students, PARCC becomes more a test of technology skill.
4. PARCC is owned by Pearson.  Pearson - the giant conglomeration owning lots and lots of curriculum resources and now they own the PARCC test. Pearson also dabbles in teacher effectiveness, which (I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn) is tied to the assessments (those assessments are very ones Pearson also owns). In the old days, the US government would call this a monopoly. Now it's simply sweet one-stop shopping. What could possibly go wrong there?

Why in the world does Massachusetts continue to entertain alignment to PARCC? I have no idea.