This Tuesday I had the opportunity, thanks to a NY Educator Voice Policy Fellowship, to advocate for the desegregation of our schools in Albany. Many thanks to Assemblyman Michael Blake, Assemblyman Luis Sepulveda, Senator Gustavo Rivera, Senator Jesse Hamilton, Senator Marty Golden, and Assemblywoman Yu-Line Niou and their staff for listening and for their time. And many thanks to America Achieves and the Educator Voice fellows who joined me in this advocacy: Arthur Everette, Ingrid Lafalaise, Darlene Cameron, Jodi Friedman, and John Heneghan. They were truly a great team. You can read more about them here.
On to our roundup of links and thinks on education and more:
de Blasio, supposed progressive champion, keeps hedging on school desegregation
“Could we create the perfect model for diversified schools across the school system? No,” de Blasio said. “Because you have whole districts in this city that are overwhelmingly of one demographic background. You would have to do a massive transfer of students and families in order to achieve it. It’s just not real.”
It blows my mind that someone who campaigned on progressivism and “a tale of two cities” can make blithe statements like this.
When we talk about desegregating schools, I don’t think any advocate is saying that every school should be some perfect mix representative of the entire city. That’s not geographically possible. What we are talking about is leveraging the many opportunities to promote diversity where they exist.
If our mayor can’t understand the nuance of that, which he and his chancellor have repeatedly demonstrated, then I have little hope that this mysterious “big vision plan” will do anything at a structural level to address the issue.
And by the way, mayor: no one expects you to wipe away 400 years of American history of discrimination and poor housing and schooling policy. But we do expect you to take leadership when you are in charge of one of the largest and most segregated school systems in our nation.
Mayor de Blasio: I can’t ‘wipe away 400 years of American history’ in diversifying schools, Chalkbeat NY
The relationship between property and segregation
Matthew Desmond has a powerful piece on the housing subsidies for the middle and upper class and it’s devastating effect on increasing inequality. This problem relates strongly to segregation in the northeast — starting with the GI Bill and extending to the selfish property value battles over public schools today.
How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality, NY Times
Meanwhile, white and wealthy districts are quietly splitting away to further segregate themselves
Behind the rhetoric of “local control,” what we see is more for some kids, and less for others. Guess who.
The Quiet Wave of School District Secessions, US News
School choice alone is not enough to diversify schools, nor provide quality options
If schools are going to become more diverse, than school choice must be coupled with admissions policies to cultivate diversity more intentionally. And all schools must be held to a higher standard to ensure quality.
The Broken Promises of Choice in New York City Schools, NY Times
Emotional expressiveness is correlated with diversity
“In the countries with more immigrants, people smiled in order to bond socially. Compared to the less-diverse nations, they were more likely to say smiles were a sign someone “wants to be a close friend of yours.” But in the countries that are more uniform, people were more likely to smile to show they were superior to one another.”
Why Americans Smile So Much, The Atlantic
Insights from a researcher
On Head Start:
“The bottom-line question is whether Head Start helps kids in the long run, and the answer is yes.”
On accountability system design:
“I think that there is a lot of evidence, not just from our study but others, that we should be kind of small-c conservative in the design of these [accountability] systems. The more complicated you make it, the more incentives you create for strategic responses. I think really complicated systems and multiple targets and multiple ratings are kind of like technocratic exuberance. I think we really should scale back our ambitions with the accountability systems and focus on the most important challenges.”
On crime and social context:
“I think of school as the main social institution for kids at the age of peak criminality. When you think about it that way, it’s not surprising that the school context could have an important effect on crime.”
On school integration:
“I think [school integration is] about the non-academic outcomes: crime, civic participation, racial tolerance, all those things. If you look at the original justification for Brown v. Board of Education, it had nothing to do with achievement gaps.
It’s about, we want to bring society together, so that we can live together. Somewhere along the line, with the Coleman Report, we started to think about integration as a tool for closing achievement gaps. When actually to me, the first-order reason to integrate schools is so that we can all get along as a society and so that people can be more civically engaged and appreciate the perspectives of those who are different from them.”
Another way to say it is, we have other tools for closing achievement gaps. Like, we can do separate-but-equal if we want to — that’s what some of these no-excuses charter schools are: really good schools that are highly segregated. To me that’s an incomplete solution, because schools aren’t just factories for producing achievement — they’re social institutions, they’re democratic institutions.”
Word.
Harvard Researcher David Deming Takes the Long View on Head Start, Integration, the74
Let’s put our metrics on social relationships
“If relationships are a core component of opportunity, why not treat them as a 21st-century outcome unto themselves?
Alternatively, if our notion of an ideal graduate does not include a strong and diverse network, we’re likely to find ourselves routinely underinvesting in relationships.”
Really interesting point to consider here. As far as I know, absolutely no ESSA plans are considering social metrics for inclusion in accountability measures.
But I don’t know that accountability would be the right focus for these kinds of measures in any case, though I agree they should be measured. The author suggests utilizing name generator surveys, surveys of whether students know people in different professional fields, and relationship mapping between students and adults. This could be critical information for school staff to consider, alongside the kind of environmental survey information that is obtained from surveys like the NYC student/teacher/parent surveys and surveys like the Tripod survey or Panorama surveys.
If you think of a school as an ecosystem, mapping the social networks of students and adults and seeking to expand and diversify those networks makes a whole lot of sense.
For HS Grads, 21st-Century Thinking, Skills (and Robots) Can’t Replace Importance of Human Networks, the74
The only way to ensure there’s no lead in school water is to install new pipes
While we’re at it, might as well update the infrastructure and install air filters.
Replacing fixtures will get rid of lead in schools’ drinking water: expert, NY Post
Cormac McCarthy writes a science article, and it’s brilliant
What does it have to do with education? Well, his topic is language, and if you teach, then you should know something about linguistics. And his points about the relationship between problem-solving, the unconscious, and language bears some interest to educators as well.
Plus, it’s Cormac McCarthy.
“The evolution of language would begin with the names of things. After that would come descriptions of these things and descriptions of what they do. The growth of languages into their present shape and form—their syntax and grammar—has a universality that suggests a common rule. The rule is that languages have followed their own requirements. The rule is that they are charged with describing the world. There is nothing else to describe.”
The Kekulé Problem, Nautilus
Have kids first attempt to write a new word before showing them the correct spelling
Maybe a little tiny piece of initial “discovery learning” ain’t always a bad thing–when it comes to spelling and reading new words?
“To put this into practice, Ouellette recommends that teachers let students attempt to write words before showing them the correct spelling. “Instead of giving them a word list and telling them to memorize it, before a student has ever seen the word, you’d encourage them to spell it,” he said. “It’s a spelling-first approach.”
Invented Spelling Leads to Better Reading, Study Says, Ed Week
IEPs are the inspiration for personalized learning, apparently
“Our public education system essentially piloted personalized learning when it adopted the Individualized Education Plan (IEP) for students with disabilities. Perhaps ironically, special education is one of the few areas where policy and practice recognizes that kids are unique and that the one-size-fits-all approach won’t work. With personalized learning, we can take that idea to scale.”
It’s interesting to premise your advocacy for personalized learning on IEPs. Here’s a question: have IEPs demonstrated a significant impact on outcomes for students with disabilities?
IEPs are important to ensure that a student is guaranteed services and that they are given education commensurate with all other children. But unfortunately, they don’t necessarily equate with an improvement in outcomes.
Time for a New Conversation in Education, HuffPost
Though actually, personalized learning originated in the 1960s
It’s precursor was called “Individually Prescribed Instruction.”
The Rear-View Mirror on Personalized Learning, Larry Cuban
Multiage classrooms are an interesting idea, but they may present a problem for building knowledge
In order to effectively build and reinforce essential knowledge and skills, a curriculum must be carefully sequenced and aligned across classrooms and grades, as we’ve explored here before.
Fannie Lou Hamer, a school in the Bronx, is profiled in this Atlantic article on the potential of multi-age classrooms. But their approach necessitates a non-sequential curriculum:
Sumner says this fits with his school’s commitment to inquiry-based education, which teaches students certain key skills instead of facts that they can “regurgitate” on command.
“We’re leaving a lot of things out—we acknowledge that,” he says, explaining that their approach prioritizes depth over breadth. Students do not cover American history from the beginning to the present day, he says, but instead “learn to think like a historian and to understand the social, economic, and political drivers of any situation, so they know what the right questions are to ask about any period in history.”
Seems to me like this runs counter to everything we know about effective retention of information and learning. I’m not opposed to the idea of multi-age classrooms — I think it makes sense not to make curriculum dependent on a grade — but approaching curriculum like this is a disservice to students most in need of support.
Inside a Multiage Classroom, The Atlantic
A special education teacher on the importance of accountability
“The accountability part is really key. I started teaching with the implementation of No Child Left Behind, and that was really the first time where we required states to report on their testing scores for students with severe disabilities … As a classroom teacher and someone who is advocating for inclusion, that gives me a leg to stand on when I go talk to administrators about why kids need to be in academic, grade-level classes, that we didn’t have before. I think focusing on designing assessments that align to standards, and that are also accessible to students with severe disabilities, is really important to show that there’s growth happening.”
Teacher of the Year Finalist Megan Gross on Embracing Students With Severe Disabilities, the74
Maybe public education needs to be run more like Central Park
Meaning more public-private partnerships
How Central Park Could Fix Public Education, The Atlantic
Maybe we need to sing together more, folks
“It dawned on me not long ago that people don’t gather to sing together much anymore. And it might help if we did. People do go to hear other people sing quite a lot these days. But it might help us all to move our muscles, get out of our heads, breathe the air, and sing together so that we might feel human again.”
TO MAINTAIN HARMONIOUS COMMUNITIES, HAUL OUT THE HYMNALS, SHOW TUNES, OR ANTHEMS, The Daily Yonder
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Schools & Ecosystems 