The Innovative Educator

NYC Department of Education official, Lisa Nielsen, helps with teacher training materials in the New York public schools.

Ms. Nielsen:

• Opposes High Stakes Testing
• Supports the Opt Out Movement Against Standardized Testing
• Approves of Homeschooling
• Denounces the federal Common Core Standards

She sounds like someone who is interested in children and their education.

What a crazy notion!

Susan Edelman and Candice Giove fought back against these wild ideas!  They pushed out a New York Post article outing Lisa Nielsen.  These stealthy reporters noted this below regarding the suggestion students skip school testing:

Department of Education official rips standardized testing, tells students to skip school

Parent at the Helm slammed back and gave these reporters and their “Exclusive” a big, fat F in their media world of unprofessionalism:

Dying Mainstream Media Slams Pro-Homeschool, Anti-Testing NY State DOE Employee

So, what should a couple of fine, upstanding reporters who regularly churn out trash for that beacon of outstanding journalism, the  New York Post do? They write a piece of yellow journalism, dripping with so much bias as to be laughable, slap the word “exclusive” on it, add a photo of their target celebrating a birthday at a wine-tasting party, and publish their “findings” in a Sunday edition. For good measure, they don’t open their online “news report” for comments.

Read the rest of Linda Dobson’s useful article and we’ll leave it at that.

Laura Brodie, an English professor who taught her daughter at home for a year and wrote about it in her new book Love in a Time of Homeschooling, writes a parenting column for Psychology Today and invites reader feedback to the testing question in her May 14 post, titled Standardized Testing and the Flight to Homeschooling:

“…one of the chief reasons I homeschooled my daughter, Julia, for the fifth grade was to escape Virginia’s testing regimen. In our school district, fifth graders spend much of their year preparing for tests in history, science, reading, writing and math. The result is nine months of boredom and homework overload. In my new book, Love in a Time of Homeschooling, I write about how Julia and I tried to craft an ideal year of learning for her fifth grade year, which included a lot of writing-across-the-curriculum, music, art and field trips, as well as plenty of math and hands-on science. Though we had our share of bad moments, as well as good, we both agree that homeschooling was a great alternative to a test-heavy year of public education.

“I’ll share some excerpts from my book as I write about standardized testing over the next few weeks, but for now I want to invite readers to share their opinions. How does your state handle standardized testing? Do you think the testing is improving the quality of your kids’ educations? Should we have national standards, instead of a state-by-state patchwork? Or should we cut back drastically on the testing? Should teacher pay and school accreditation be tied to test scores? And if you don’t like the testing, what are you doing about it?”

Deborah Meier, writing on Education Week’s blog, Bridging Differences takes a bigger look at testing from a teacher’s perspective, with school reform on her mind. But the assessment of testing is worth the read. A few excerpts:

When Is Achievement Really an Achievement? – By Deborah Meier

If only everyone stopped using the word “achievement” as a synonym for scores on tests. It’s a sleight of hand that justifies so much that’s gone wrong. We’ve meanwhile discounted the work of real live children as “soft” data.

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We school teachers… invent formulas to help students score well, e.g., selecting “the main idea” or the “best title” for a short reading passage. (Although, no actual publishing house would ever use the “right” titles.) In consequence we agree to direct students to the learning of “test-like” tricks–the higher the stakes the more we conform.

As a teacher, I was intrigued by the outliers–scores that seemed surprisingly high or low for particular students. I could learn something useful by going over the test with such students. But I couldn’t catch an outlier if I didn’t already know the students.

When my 3rd grade son’s teacher told me he needed a remedial reading class, I knew she needed a remedial teaching class. She had never once read with him. He was a sophisticated fluent reader, who had his own odd theories about how best to answer tests.

Meier’s passion is for schools, so she asks:

How can we use schools as places where teachers, parents, and kids engage in serious intellectual challenges, respectful of their own histories and inclinations, buttressed by the vast knowledge and know-how of many others, past and present? Plus, the confidence, perseverance and curiosity to push beyond their boundaries.

While the institution continues to debate this answer, homeschooling families figured out their answers and have been putting them in practice for decades.

Read the whole article here.

The Alliance for Childhood doesn’t like the new Common Core Standards proposed by National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

From Alliance’s Newsroom:

Citing “Grave Concerns,” Experts Condemn Proposed Core Standards for Young Children

“The proposed standards conflict with compelling new research in cognitive science, neuroscience, child development, and early childhood education about how young children learn, what they need to learn, and how best to teach them in kindergarten and the early grades,” the statement says. It calls for the withdrawal of the proposed K-3 standards and the creation of a new consortium of teachers, scholars, and scientists to design more appropriate guidelines for early care and education.

The group argues that the proposed standards will greatly increase the amount of didactic instruction and standardized testing in literacy and math in the early grades, and will “crowd out” other important areas of learning. Young children “need to learn about families and communities, to take on challenges, and to develop social, emotional, problem-solving, self-regulation, and perspective-taking skills,” the statement says.

There is little evidence that the approach taken by the core standards for young children leads to later success in school, the group argues. Existing state standards have led to a heavy emphasis on skills-based instruction with little or no time devoted to child-initiated learning, according to recent research.

The Alliance suggests “parents, teachers, and others to register their concerns about the standards at the official site, www.corestandards.org.” They have issued:

An urgent call to action: Most Americans are unaware of the threat to healthy early childhood education posed by the K-12 “core standards” announced on March 10 by the NGA and CCSSO. Public comment on these national standards will close on April 2, an appallingly small window. The time to act is now.

What’s wrong with the standards: Existing state standards for kindergarten and the early grades have already ramped up rote learning, didactic instruction, and standardized testing and nearly driven out hands-on active learning and play. The new standards will intensify these inappropriate and unhealthy practices.

A few comments from the signers:

“The common core standards will perpetuate current ineffective methods rather than leading to much-needed reform in early education,” says Joan Almon, a former kindergarten teacher and Executive Director of the Alliance for Childhood. “Young children learn best through hands-on approaches that combine teacher-led activities with child-initiated learning and play.”

~~~
“I support this statement whole-heartedly,” says Professor Katz, of the University of Illinois. “Research indicates that while early formal instruction of preschool and kindergarten children may appear to show good test results at first, in the long term, in follow-up studies, such children have had no advantage. On the contrary, especially in the case of boys, subjection to early formal instruction increases their tendency to distance themselves from the goals of schools, and to drop out of it, either mentally or physically.”

~~~
“The people who wrote these standards do not appear to have any background in child development or early childhood education,” says Professor Emerita Stephanie Feeney of the University of Hawaii, another signer. “As written, these standards could have a very detrimental effect on young children. I strongly urge that they be rewritten to reflect what is known about young children’s development.”

These standards matter to homeschoolers because “48 states, 2 territories and the District of Columbia committed to developing a common core of state standards.” When the inevitable calls for more regulation of homeschooling come, it will be demanded that homeschoolers be held accountable to these standards too.

The Alliance’s Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals can be read here (pdf). You can also read statements from 35 signers here (pdf).

Writing for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Daveen Rae KurutzIn portrays the disctinction between homeschooling and cyber charter schools right.

“The advent and success of cyber charter schools has had a huge impact on our students,” said Charles Machesky, superintendent of Uniontown Area School District, where homeschool enrollment dropped by half in five years. “We’ve got six or seven cyber schools sending us bills, and some of those are in place of homeschooling.”

Homeschooled children are taught using a curriculum the parent fashions. The state Department of Education does not consider children enrolled in cyber schools as being homeschooled.

While “homeschooling” comes off a bit odd in the title, (In-home schooling popularity slipping across state), research tying homeschooling to standardized testing is cited and a few mythical assumptions are made, it is still good to see this article.

Oh, yeah. The numbers make more sense too. But that seems to follow getting the distinction right.

Read the entire article here. Read more about NHERI research here.

BYU Newsnet, Provo, Utah, 11 January 2007, Homeschooling Presents Pros, Cons

Neutral paragraphs: 12

Pro paragraphs: 5

Con paragraphs: 7

Fort Worth Star Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas, 16 January 2007, Away from home

Another reality is that no matter how well-meaning and devoted home-schooling parents might be, they simply can’t be expected to demonstrate teaching proficiency in every discipline. TCC’s programs provide a handy and affordable curriculum addendum.

The upshot of the article is that homeschooling can’t provide a fully-rounded education. Of course, mass-schooling can’t provide the individualized learning opportunities and self-direction that homeschooling does, and even schools use some outside materials, such as when the class takes a field trip. Why is it presumed that all instruction and learning must come from one source?

You can have anything you want, you just can’t have everything. (meaning, choices have to be made)

The first three paragraphs of the next article set the tone for reading it: the disadvantages of homeschooling.

Zanesville Times Recorder, Zanesville, Ohio, 20 January 2007, Staying involved is key to success for homeschooling, say parents, students

Growing up in public schools brings to mind homeroom, recesses, getting into groups to work on projects, sitting at lunch tables with classmates and riding the bus.

For most children of homeschooling who don’t have those experiences, the parents rely on family, field trips into the community and homeschool support group activities for socialization.

Most commonly, when parents who homeschool are asked what the biggest disadvantage to homeschooling is, they’ll respond with “socialization.”

So many times homeschooling is portrayed as always playing catch-up to the public school ‘standards’ as if they are the absolute in quantifying our experiences as children. What a thin existence that would be.

Also consider how the reporter sees the kids: “children of homeschooling.”

Does the reporter also see children attending school as ‘children of school?’

To put this in another perspective, imagine reading an article comparing the ‘disadvantages’ of home cooking to that of eating in a school cafeteria. First off you have to do all that shopping. Then you have to take home whatever food you’ve inexpertly chosen, sort it, store it, and cook it.

But how do you cook it? You’ll need books and books of recipes with all those complicated instructions, and fractions, and weights and measures. Are you sure you’re up to producing nutritious, and edible, food?

Then there are the gizmos you need: refrigerators, freezers, stoves, cupboards, plates, cups, bowls, cutlery. Where will you get the expertise to judge which materials are worthwhile and which will lead you down the garden path to wasted time and money? All that stuff is really expensive — and you’re not a chef, you know.

• What if you accidentally feed your children … rhubarb leaves. (I had to point out to one produce department that the rhubarb leaves contain oxalates, as they were selling the stalks with the leaves still attached)
• Or perhaps you’ll believe, as did a highly educated friend, that the green parts of potatoes are the healthiest bits. (I had to explain about solanine.)
• What if you leave susceptible food out too long and the harmful bacteria grow?
• What if you don’t wash off pesticides?
• Or maybe you’ll buy the wrong kind of food, such as butter, or maybe margarine.

Through your ignorance, you could kill your child! (eventually)

Then imagine reading an article about the alt.food fad of homecooking, ‘For most children of homecooking who don’t have those cafeteria experiences, the parents rely on eating out at buffet restaurants in the community and on homecooking support group activities for pot lucks.’

Maybe we ought to be careful that the restaurant industry doesn’t lobby to create compulsory feeding establishments that supply only Food Pyramid foods in carefully parcelled amounts, complete with scales for weighing us to make sure our bodies are assimilating the food in an approved manner.

To me it was a great relief that January finished up with this five-star article about a homeschooling family. All the objections and disadvantages are summarily dealt with, and dismissed. I’d ‘critique’ it, but the list of ‘Yesss!’ comments would quickly stale.

Martinsville Bulletin, Martinsville/Henry County, Virginia, 28 January 2007, Coulson children dispel stereotypes

There were “a million reasons” the Coulsons wanted to teach their children at home, Chris said, from dissatisfaction with the role standardized testing plays in public schools to a desire to have more time together as a family.

Long live the adventure!

Quality Counts 2007: From Cradle to Career: Connecting American Education From Birth to Adulthood, the 11th installment of Education Week’s annual report on state education reform was posted this week at the Education Week’s website.

From the Press Conference announcing the report, author Lynn Olson stated:

Quality Counts 2007 begins to track state efforts to create seamless education systems from early childhood to the world of work by looking at performance across the various sectors, and at state efforts to define students’ readiness to succeed from one stage to the next. He continues on to explain that the new Chance-for-Success Index ” provides a state-focused perspective on the importance of education throughout a person’s lifetime. It dramatically illustrates why states need to pay attention to human capital development at every step along the way if they want to have a vibrant economy.

School-to-Work, Outcome Based Education, Goals 2000, and reports such as Cradle to Grave continue to insist that the federal government can demand more of parents and pile more and more adult like responsibilities on babies through teens. Each year they continue to pile standard upon standard upon the backs of young people in an attempt to raise the bar and produce better workers. Within school reform many have attempted to imitate home education via the new public cyber schools, but even they are public schools at home that still fall under the NCLB mandated cast iron cookie cutter standards. These standards continue to weigh heavily on the backs of older children and to now insist on state standards for each state for preschoolers as well seems to border on abuse in my estimation. Do they have proof positive that these actions will cause no harm?

Before adding yet more standards, shouldn’t we stop and evaluate the affects that the already heavy standards have had on young minds and bodies?

A September 11, 2006 NEWSWEEK article, The New First Grade: Too Much Too Soon, by Peg Tyre reports that, “Kids as young as 6 are tested, and tested again, to ensure they’re making sufficient progress. Then there’s homework, more workbooks and tutoring.”

The article is five pages long and it is well worth the read. Here are just a few key points:

In the last decade, the earliest years of schooling have become less like a trip to “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and more like SAT prep. Thirty years ago first grade was for learning how to read. Now, reading lessons start in kindergarten and kids who don’t crack the code by the middle of the first grade get extra help. Instead of story time, finger painting, tracing letters and snack, first graders are spending hours doing math work sheets and sounding out words in reading groups. In some places, recess, music, art and even social studies are being replaced by writing exercises and spelling quizzes. Kids as young as 6 are tested, and tested againsome every 10 days or soto ensure they’re making sufficient progress. After school, there’s homework, and for some, educational videos, more workbooks and tutoring, to help give them an edge.

Some scholars and policymakers see clear downsides to all this pressure. Around third grade, Hultgren says, some of the most highly pressured learners sometimes “burn out. They began to resist. They didn’t want to go along with the program anymore.” In Britain, which adopted high-stakes testing about six years before the United States did, parents and school boards are trying to dial back the pressure. In Wales, standardized testing of young children has been banned. Andrew Hargreaves, an expert on international education reform and professor at Boston College, says middle-class parents there saw that “too much testing too early was sucking the soul and spirit out of their children’s early school experiences.

In my opinion, there are many at our Federal and State Capitals who seem to believe that they have “the plan” that will best serve America’s children. It seems to me that it is our fundamental responsibility to make every effort to assure that no one, (not even those attempting to improve “human capital”) should, suck the soul and spirit from our children. Just as those objecting in Wales, many have been saying no as well in the U.S. via this petition calling for the dismantling of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Many times those in education reform refer to the successes they have seen in home education and some even attempt to duplicate them, but I’m afraid they keep missing WHY home education is so often successful. Home Education provides each individual child the opportunity to run, jump play and enjoy their childhood. They are not viewed as potential “human capital”, but as human beings with the fundamental right to live and learn in a way that best suits them. Home Education allows the child’s spirit and soul to soar and to grow. Home Education allows each family the freedom to nurture each individual child in a way that best meets their needs. The standard is what is best for the child, not a federally mandated one size fits all directive. The minute you try to legislate it something that replicates home education, you lose a basic fundamental freedom and begin to squash the joy that comes with following one’s heart, playing and learning when ready rather than when dictated how and when by the state.

Let’s just say no to any childhood experiments and say yes to what works – let’s just let them be little!

posted by Mary N.