What exactly should be on curriculum?

We talk a lot about curriculum. Which subjects are necessary, which are there seemingly only to torture us, and which are purely for professional development. So what courses should be on a curriculum? How do you decide how to spend a child's formative years in regards to learning, what should there be more of, and what should there be less of?

I might accidentally be biased towards social sciences, for that is something that I am passionate about, so you are now forewarned.

I have previously outlined what I think the purpose of school should be. In short I think it is educations job to create critical thinking, employable at any moment in time (meaning at any point after high school graduation) people who are well-informed about not just government, but the workings of society. In the following paragraph's I will not necessarily outline a specific curriculum, that would take a 7,000 page government document, but instead I will pitch some ideas that I think should be a focal point of public education at some place and time.

One thing I noticed about education is, yes, they do spend some time in first grade teaching you about money, and counting it, but have you never noticed they never teach you about money management? Without my parents, I would never have understood what I was getting into by creating a bank account, I would never have understood what an interest rate or credit score was, shouldn't this information be available to those that have not so dedicated parents? Personal finance should be taught in high school, more specifically money management. How to set a budget, how much you should be spending on your living space, the benefits of renting, the benefits of owning. All these things should at some point be discussed.

Understanding political platforms is under written as well. It is hard to be objective about this one, however. It would be hard to determine what is taught in this class, but there is far too much mis-information about public policy, how it is made, and what the major parties actually mean. For example, I guarantee that if you go into a public school high school classroom, at least half the students in the class will be under the impression that the "Independence Party" is the same thing as being an independent, or "blank" voter, not realizing that the party endorses political candidates and has a platform. We're taught how a bill becomes a law, we've all seen the video, but we really have no idea...what the video doesn't explain in song are earmarks, bargaining, the ulterior motives that politicians can have- especially ones that represent small communities that have just as much power as those who represent large ones. There are a lot of things that are simply glanced over when American Government is taught in public school, instead we can all recite the fact that there are two senators per state, and the number of representatives is 2 + a number determined by the population. If people would like to consider themselves so dedicated to one party, they should understand what they really mean.

Basic medical science. And I'm not talking about cell-biology or organic chemistry here, I'm talking about what to do in the event that something happens. How to treat an open wound, stuff like that. I know this comes out of left field, but the only reason I know to put pressure on open wounds that are bleeding out is from television. People should be taught what to do in emergencies, or better yet, small emergencies. We should also know the processes at work when something heals, so we can fully appreciate what is occurring. Students should eventually learn what exactly a scab is, how a broken bone mends back together, why certain breaks need metal plates, etc. What exactly is cancer? What exactly are the treatments for it? Why do we need a different flu vaccine every year? The story of how we cured polio is one of the most intriguing of the past century, and I didn't even learn it until a very specific college course about what life was like in the 1950's. Things like this can spark interest in medicine, in science, and in learning about yourself. All good things.

Those are just three suggestions, there would undoubtedly be more, but at the same time I don't think a lot of these would be included by some of the first and foremost curriculum experts. Teaching people how to literally live and navigate a world where a large portion of people are trying to get "theirs" would be beneficial to everyone.

What the class was about

Pretty loaded question there, Powell. Let's see, what was the class about?

Simple answer is standards, teacher evaluations, education policy rhetoric, political ideologies, curriculum, testing, charter schools, vouchers, school choice, and the occasional* anecdote about your kids.

But, of course, there is a larger picture. To me, the class was about seeing the whole picture, not just knowing things and taking a side, but being able to explaining things. Understanding both sides of the argument, and understanding that we really do not have a one-size-fits-all solution to the problems of education.

There were many things that I really enjoyed about the class, but I think my favorite aspect of the class was understanding why things end up going in the direction they do. Learning about how programs and policies get instituted is the key to understanding how you can change how policies and programs get instituted. I also enjoyed having students from different back grounds contributing in their own personal ways. I know we had someone who was in New York City public schools, some one from California, private schools students, and public school students. The diverse perspectives led us to diverse class discussion that would ultimately widen our perspectives.

The readings for the class provided good pre-texts to our class conversations, it informed us of the topic enough to create our own opinions, though I must admit they were often one sided- I know there is research out there that points to the positives of things like higher standards, more testing, the benefits and setbacks of mandatory pre-k, etc., and a little diversity in perspective- especially in regards to class conversational topics may have stimulated a little more positive in-class contention because I often felt our conversations took one idea and built on it without considering the opposites sides perspective entirely (i.e. the aforementioned issues).

That being said, I also do not see that as being too big a deal. A little diversity would be nice, but the perspectives on the things I previously mentioned are often based off of statistical data that does not provide much for conversation and can be tedious, and is often not exactly what you think it is (i.e. saying something like x amount of parents are in favor of higher standards, when no other options were provided for them to select). All in all, I think I learned a lot more than I ever expected to about education policy through our in-class discussions, and the subject has become one of my favorites especially within the political sphere. It is very likely that I write my final political science next year on the subject as well.

*By occasional I mean frequent & often.

The Perfect Teacher

Our discussion in class about the two books this week (Improbable Scholars, Confessions of a Bad Teacher) had me wondering about two things. The quality of my public school education, and what it really means to be a great teacher. As I was trying to fall asleep last night, I was recounting my experience top to bottom, and I came to the conclusion that in my 12 year public school career where I had roughly 40 teachers (one a year in elementary school, and 5 or so a year from middle school on), I can honestly say I had at 2 that flat out, should not be in classrooms, and maybe half a dozen that may have just been in the wrong classroom.

As far as the two teachers go, one was a middle school spanish teacher who played favorites, publicly ridiculed students, only graded certain kids assignments, rarely taught, constantly made kids cry, and he was inclined to be much sweeter to the members of the fairer sex. The other, a math teacher I had in high school, once literally video taped herself teaching a lesson at home, her hand being the only thing in focus, and made us watch it as she sat at her desk with her feet up. She did this so students would not be inclined to ask questions, and she would not have to teach the same lesson multiple times a day. There were other things, of course, but this was the most prominent.

Then I thought about the truly great teachers I've had. Out of the same 40, I had close to 10. I'm lucky- I went to a top 400 United States public school, so I had opportunities I am aware other students definitely do not have, but 10 truly great teachers and I'm beginning to paint a picture of the traits they held in common.

The first being, excitement. I mean this is multiple ways; them excitement about the lesson, instilling excitement about the lesson, and just being excitable people. Of course, this trait has it's time and place as well. I definitely had teachers that were bubbly to the point of ridiculousness, and to the point where it deterred you from thing (who can really get excited about fractions- come on stop playin'). For the great ones, it was always a time and place thing. For Mr. McKillop, it was rewarding students with basketball shots for good grades, the whole class to watch and if you hit yours, you were rewarded with a slurpee at the end of the week (fourth grade). For Mr. Stapleton, it was providing us with creative writing prompts every morning, first thing, and if you liked yours enough, and were brave enough you could share yours in front of the class. Eventually the stories even started to play off of one another (sixth grade). Mrs. Madonia in middle school also somehow managed to make math fun, the woman used to bellow "HAPPY HOLIDAY's, YOUR CHILD IS FAILING" as a joke right before holiday breaks, but her voice was her strength. She wasn't afraid to yell at you in a playful manor should you make an error. This wasn't necessarily a youth thing either, it was just teachers truly passionate about their subject.

After the excitement, and the personification of these teachers rather than them standing in front of the class and scaring you, they were real people as well as teachers. I can still go back to my schools, sit down, and have a conversation with these people because they were people, not educational machines. Their involvement in my life, their interest in us allowed us to know their door was always open and they wanted us to succeed.

I think one of the traits I cannot really talk about with great strength would be the empathy that Alina had. I was never in a situation where most of the kids in my class were ESL, hell I am from one of the least diverse places on the entire planet (95.5 white), but this doesn't mean I don't understand the importance of empathy. When you understand circumstance, you can understand a person, when you understand a person you can teach them. Not only that, they'll respect you more and that will make them actually listen. It is key for teachers to know their student body, it will help them react to things more appropriately, it'll help them understand why they're coming up short in some places while seeing great success in others and they can build off of that.

The last is the natural ability to explain things. It's a trait that makes teaching so difficult, and is hard to learn. It's a matter of having a way with words, I guess. It takes experience first and foremost, knowing what questions students will ask so that you can frame the original explanation in a way that it won't even need to be asked. This is my biggest problem with teaching to the test, it encourages teaching us how to do things, but not why we need to do things. You hear kids so often say, "when will we use this in the real world." And yes, the answer is not always clear, but they have the right to know that physics will be used by potential engineers, and cell biology will be used by doctors, and english literature will be used by no one (just kidding).

In short, a passion for teaching and the right subject placing is the first step to being a great teacher. The question is how do we a) get enough of this in education and b) convince people it's actually there?

Stop the worrying!

I am of the opinion that a large part of our educational reform- or educational misreform rather, is because of our great distrust of teachers. I also think it is ignorant to say that this mistrust is unwarranted, and before you freak out let me explain.

I've probably said this before, but there's a very adequate reason that parents worry about teachers. They are literally sending their children to spend a day with these people. As I will explain in my group project about standards, this very fact is played off of a lot in politics. Politicians, unwittingly or otherwise are able to pass legislation to increase standards under the guise that it will improve teachers & schools. Of course parents are going to jump on board and support these things, because it's about their children and they don't take that lightly, nor should they.

Now, whether or not a teacher is good at their job doesn't really matter at all when it comes to this, because parents are very likely going to assume the worst. They're always going to assume that there's better out there for their very own and act based off of that instinct. When a politician brings up more standards, they say yes because that's a guarantee that their kids are going to get the education they need. Note that this guarantee isn't coming from teachers, but from politicians.

So how do we fix this? We put the guarantee in the teachers hands and not the politicians. Autonomy in the teaching profession is very clearly what teachers want, they want to be trusted to educate students in the way they want to. They also want security, and like all people pay for their work. So my solution, and of course this isn't new but perhaps my explanation as to why this works is, is to make teachers the new doctors.

Higher pay and more prerequisites to becoming a teacher. You can grown all you want about having more prerequisites, but the point would be that the higher pay would be worth it, the same way it is for a doctor going to medical school. What this would create is a guarantee that you're getting the best of the best. The job market would be more competitive not because the degree was easily attainable, but because of what it offered. You also get the added benefit of making sure the teacher is ready, and not just some 22 year old that still has to finish their masters.

Teachers would get higher pay, and the security they want from the fact that they are trusted, and parents would get the guarantee that their children are in good hands, and standards could be taken out of the equation. If politicians wanted to reform, they would have to do so productively, and not just by passing off responsibility to the parents, and by this I mean they would have to make changes to things like budget, and curriculum, rather than standards, and teacher contracts.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, please comment!

Charter Schools

After hearing a charter school teacher speak, my views on Charter Schools haven't all that much changed. The only problem I have with Charter Schools is that there success derives from their rarity. Of course schools in poor income areas that have lower class sizes, a higher budget, and a staff insistent upon getting students to graduate and go to college is going to have better results.

But, the issue arises, how do we replicate these results? And to this I don't think there's an easy answer. When you look at these schools, like Geoffrey Canada's schools in Harlem, and see that 2/3rds of their funding is private, you have to realize that their isn't an infinite abyss of private money willing to fund schools, the same way there isn't an infinite abyss of public money to fund public schools. What I'm trying to say is, there can only be a limited amount of successful charter schools because if they only depended on public funding, they'd likely be no better than public schools.

I think they're great to have around, especially the ones with proven track records, but one issue I have with some is the fact that they have an application process and than pass it off as if they've made the best out of the worst. Having an application completely defeats the purpose of having a Charter Schools, that's why I think a lottery system is undoubtedly the most appropriate system.

As for things public schools can do to make themselves as successful as these Charter Schools, I think it's easy. I think there needs to be more staffing in terms of college prep. Public schools should have a fully dedicated staff that meets with every student at least once a year to discuss where they're headed in terms of their academics. It doesn't even have to be about colleges alone, they could stretch it to career preparation as well. Preparing students for life after school needs to be tackled better.

I also don't believe that Charter Schools stricter standards are such a big influence as they make them out to be. Doing things like reprimanding students always is predicated upon the idea that the students want to be there. A student being suspended from a low-income school that's not a good student does not care he's suspended because he does not want to go to school. The punishments Charter Schools are dolling out are effective because the students, and the student's parents want them to be there.

This is yet another reason Charter Schools are going to be more effective. If a parent takes the time to enroll their student into a charter school, fill out the application, or even attend the lottery, they are already demonstrating their commitment to being a parent, those students have a good backing behind them and are bound to be at least a little bit more dedicated.

All in all, I have no issues with individual Charter Schools, the issue I do have is when people start looking to them as a national education solution, or taking their bloated results seriously.

One of the things I'm more intrigued to read about is how tenured public school teachers, and those alike feel about Charter Schools. It seems to me that these school's successes are predicated on being able to pay low teacher salary to young teachers. It'd be interesting to see if their was a love-loss between public and Charter School teachers.

Class Discussion the other day

Sorry for the ailment delay...

            Today’s assignment was to come up with a creative way to solve our countries issues as they pertain to a subject within education. The teacher of the group immediately honed in on the subject of student evaluation as they pertain to standards, a subject in which we really haven’t discussed (student evaluation not standards). I think it’s interesting that the teacher in the class was of the first to bring up students. Her idea, of which I hesitantly agreed to was to have student evaluations based not on any standardized material, or comparative standardized material (whether that be tests or projects), but on individual work that highlights the skills and abilities of the student.

            Originally I was hesitant towards this idea and focused on asking the questions that politicians would ask. How would we compare students to one another? How would we know that they covered everything we wanted them too? Who would grade these assignments and how do we avoid teacher bias towards their own students as well as lenient standards that allow for more students to pass? I wish I could say we answered all of these questions completely, but there is definitely still some room for improvement in the answer that we agreed upon. Katie’s answer is strong in that it truly allows for evaluation of each student’s unique qualities, as opposed to their test taking skills. At first we discussed the idea of a presentation, but presentations are biased towards those who are adept at presenting, and not necessarily those who are knowledgeable, so what we ultimately leaned towards was a portfolio.

            The idea of a portfolio is definitely a unique one, they’re often only used to grade class by class, and they could still be used for this. A teacher would still be able to give out a grade based on the student’s class portfolio which could include everything from tests they’ve taken (or could be graded along with in-class non-standardized tests they’ve taken) to projects, and it would be all encompassing. One of the original problems I had with the presentation idea was that not every college is going to want to sit through presentations, and sift through various portfolios. The idea of a portfolio would likely lead to more work on the part of colleges, but it could also eliminate needs for standardized tests, and could in turn would allow for teacher approved and verified work to be handed in. What I mean by verified is hypothetically, the teacher could hand in a description of the assignment along with a verification that the assignment the student was handing in wasn’t changed after its due date.

            The big thing with the idea of handing in portfolios is that it puts a lot of responsibilities in to the hands of teachers and is very subjective. Teachers often feel affectionate towards students, and take pride in their own students. If you leave such a large portion of grading up to the teachers, it would be theoretically possible that their subjectivity, especially in non-standardized things like oral presentations would be graded higher than they should be. It would take a lot of trust in the objectivity from a teacher for these grades to be evaluated, but even still the work that would be turned into the college, or employer could be evaluated by them without thoughts from the teacher.

            Another issue that arose is that there would be a lot of difference amongst students. They’d all have these individual projects that probably are all over the place in terms of subjects and yes, this would allow for them to demonstrate the skills they wanted to show, but it wouldn’t highlight their shortcomings and area’s they needed to work on as much. Showing what you’re good at in education is just as important as knowing what you need to work on. If a student was adept at making movies, there’s a good chance that every individual assignment he/she would do would be catered to that skill. It’s not necessarily a bad thing when you think about the student utilizing a skill that will allow them to have a future in that industry, but what if the student decides later that it is not what he or she truly enjoys? Then they would be behind because they’ve spent so much training time devoted to one skill, they may not be so adept at doing things like debating, or publicly speaking.

            I think one of the important things about a public education is the multiplicity of things taught and how they’re taught. You’re never taught everything the same way and there is a lot of different skills to be taken from things learned that are presented to you in fact, but are utilized in the shapes of presentations and tests later. This multiplicity allows for options in the future, regardless of whether or not you excelled at them when you first started doing them.

It’s also important to keep in mind that the responsibility put on the teachers to objectively grade, come up with all the projects, and essentially guide a student towards where they want to go in life will not be met without contention. We’re so focused on the rhetoric of saying “we don’t trust teachers enough” that we often forget how incredibly important trusting teachers can be. What I mean by this is; there’s a reason this is a highly contested debate, people don’t want to leave their children with just anyone, and to leave them with people that will ultimately have so much influence? You better make sure the people are equipped to guide them.

So in order for a portfolio plan to work I think there would have to be more than just the portfolio. Ever notice the people who curse the SAT’s so often are the people that didn’t do as well as they hoped? They forget the SAT’s are the saving grace for a lot of students that can demonstrate ability on them (like me). I know I may be in the minority, but without them I would’ve never have made it to this college, and I would argue with you to the death that I belong to be here. It would not be bad to continue to utilize some of the things already in place as an accurate measurement of a student’s complete picture as well as a portfolio. GPA, SAT, a portfolio, and a body of extra-curricular activity would be, in my opinion, a solid representation of a student.