Steven Singer's Blog, page 2

Where Have School Libraries Gone?

Last week I discovered that an important part of my neighborhood school is gone – the library.

My daughter and I were taking a tour of my old alma mater, McKeesport Area High School, when I noticed the huge empty space where all the books used to be.

“What happened to the library?” I asked the guidance counselor who was showing us where my daughter’s classes would be this year.

Nowhere. Turns out it’s closed – for good.

The school board eliminated its last two librarian positions in 2018 to save money. Even then these had been itinerant librarians who jumped between buildings keeping the libraries open whenever possible but not all day, every day.

Since they’ve been gone, for the past five years teachers could still take their classes to each building library, however, without someone to sort and organize the books, it wasn’t worth the trip. So at the end of last school year, the remaining books in the high school were given away to students and teachers.

This year the high school’s ex-library space is set to become a large group instruction room.

And that may be the fate for the other libraries at the district’s two elementaries and middle school sometime in the future. My daughter tells me both Francis McClure and Founders Hall (the other two district schools she attended) have libraries but her classes rarely went there. It’s probably the same at Twin Rivers, the district’s other elementary school.

What a pity!

When I walked passed the space that used to house the high school library, I saw a few random books piled up on packing pallets ready to be taken away.

I can still remember what the room used to look like 30 years ago when I went to school there – the rows and rows of sturdy wooden shelves. I remember sitting in comfy chairs at wide tables with surfaces worn smooth by years and years of use.

Library time had been so special – curling up with a book and being transported away from the here and now. How many papers had I written with help from those books? How many books had I checked out over the years? Horror stories, joke books, historical narratives, books of world records, myths, reference texts…

My daughter will never know what that’s like unless I take her somewhere outside of the district. There is a local Carnegie library, but there’s nothing like having all of that just a few steps away.

Now I know what some of you probably are thinking: This is 2023. Why do we even need libraries anymore? Can’t kids just use the Internet?

There are many problems with this. Yes, all students in the district have access to Chrome Books and Internet connections in school. But every book is not available on-line. In fact, the number and variety of books available digitally is much smaller than most public or school libraries typically have in their collections – if you’re not going to pay an additional fee.

I can read most of the classics of world literature on the Internet, but anything that isn’t in the public domain is going to require me to pony up some dough. And the same goes for most respected resources.

Want an article from a local or national newspaper or even a magazine? Most require subscriptions to access articles – especially articles from their archives. You can find some free on-line encyclopedias but the articles are limited and it can be difficult for children (and some adults) to be able to tell which are most trustworthy. Wikipedia is still one of the most cited sources, and as useful as it is, you can’t trust it as well as the kind of reference books you’d find in most libraries.

McKeesport Area School District (MASD) isn’t the only public school greatly reducing or doing away with its school libraries.

The School Library Journal and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported:

“Between the 1999–2000 and 2015–16 school years, the NCES reports that the profession lost the equivalent of more than 10,000 full-time school librarian positions nationwide. That translates to a 19 percent drop in the workforce, from 53,659 to 43,367. The most rapid declines happened from 2009–10 to 2013–14. The decline slowed from then to 2014–15; but resumed larger losses in 2015–16, the latest data available.”

We see school libraries being closed in Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, etc. A 2016 report in The Guardian indicates how serious the problem is worldwide:

“Libraries should be a right in schools. We must give pupils the opportunity to go to a quiet place to do extra study or to choose a book to read. It is particularly important to children from deprived areas. Opening a library door helps children open their mind. For many, books are too expensive and a library allows students to borrow them.”

The problems is often one of priorities. Districts would rather spend billions on technology than libraries. However, both are important. Schools should not have to choose. They should make more diligent decisions about which technologies are most essential instead of buying every new techno-fad with huge promises and no track record.

In the most impoverished districts, the problem isn’t just what hardware or software to purchase, but how to keep the district afloat without cutting vital services like libraries.

In 2018 when the MASD board eliminated the librarian positions, district officials said the cuts were because of “budgetary constraints” combined with the rise of charter school costs.

Every child living in the district who goes to a charter school takes away funding that would have gone to pay for all the kids attending the distict. MASD paid $2 million toward charter school tuition in 2006-07, which has risen to $14 million in 2022-23, according to Business Manager Scott Domowicz.

If this continues, Domowicz said in May that he expects the district will need to pay $16 million next year. That’s 17 percent of the new budget going toward charter schools.

What a pity that parents who remove their children from authentic public schools are making it more difficult for children in those schools to have access to a campus library!

But they’re also depriving their own children of the same amenity since charter schools are much less likely to have library facilities at all.

According to NCES, in 2020–21 only 52 percent of charter schools had a library media center. And only one-third of these charter school media centers had full-time, paid, state-certified library media center specialists, compared to two-thirds of authentic public schools. It’s actually worse than it seems because these statistics include learning resource centers that are entirely on-line without any physical books. So charter schools actually have fewer traditional libraries than quoted here.

Neighboring districts to MASD have dealt with the issue in similar ways.

Nearby Steel Valley School District (SVSD) still has a library for the middle – high school campus staffed with a full time librarian.

However, the librarian’s schedule is often taken up with teaching and/or study halls making it very difficult for teachers to take their classes to the library.

If administrators and school board members don’t prioritize keeping the library open during the school day, it’s only a matter of time before SVSD goes the way of MASD.

And if that’s not scary enough, think of the academic impact.

There is evidence that school libraries help increase standardized test scores. According to Phi Delta Kappan: Data from more than 34 statewide studies suggest that students tend to earn better standardized test scores in schools that have strong library programs.

It is no coincidence that this is all happening as literacy and facts are being challenged nationwide.

According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), which monitors textual challenges, more than 273 books were challenged or banned in 2020. However, the majority of attempts to remove books go unreported so the reality is probably much higher.

This is part of a concerted effort to make America dumb again. These are political attacks against science, history and facts. It just makes sense they would also target the repositories of these sciences, histories and facts – libraries.

One day our descendants may not even know enough to ask the title with which we began this article. Instead of “Where have school libraries gone?” they may ask, “What was a library?”

“And what was a school?”

One of the last pictures of McKeesport Area High School’s library – Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis (an MASD alum) talks with students during a visit to the district in February 2023.

 

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I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

 

McKeesport Teachers Without a Contract Because of Bad Business Manager or Bad Faith School Board?

Which is it?

Does McKeesport Area School District (MASD) have a terrible business manager or a regressive school board?

School directors and the teachers had agreed to a new contract, but the board tabled it in June after concerns that the western Pennsylvania district didn’t have the money to pay for moderate raises.

Then the board skipped the entire month of July without a meeting. Which is fine if you don’t have any pressing business left unfinished, but I guess the livelihoods of hundreds of employees don’t count.

Now classes are set to begin on Aug. 21, yet the board is no closer to solving the problem.

At a school directors’ meeting last week, the board mostly blamed Business Manager Scott Domowicz.

“A contract was negotiated with ineptitude, and we cannot afford it,” said board member Matthew Holtzman. “Our business manager did not negotiate well. We don’t have the money to cover this.”

No board members sat on the negotiating committee? You just left it all up to the business manager?

“This board wants to give the teachers the raises, we can’t afford it,” board member Joseph Lopretto said. “Taxpayers will be looking at a 30% raise in their property taxes over five years.”

Where did you get that percentage from exactly? What are the exact figures, the exact cost?

All of which really comes down to the question – how is this possible!?

The pay raises in the proposed contract are not extravagant and the district does not pay as much as nearby districts.

Over five years, the proposed pay increases are: 6.11% in 2023-24, 6.59% in 2024-25, 6.03% in 2025-26, 4.38% in 2026-27, and 3.26% in 2027-28.

“This contract was offered to us. We accepted this contract. It was not the numbers we wanted, but it’s the numbers that were given to us, and that’s what we went with,” said Gerald McGrew president of the McKeesport Area Education Association (MAEA).

“At the end of five years, our highest salary is still not at some of the local district highest salary now. The parents and the kids are the ones being affected mostly by this.”

So how can this happen?

Can a business manager – a person responsible for a district’s finances – negotiate a contract without a full understanding of what the district can and cannot afford!?

Domowicz was hired in late February 2022 at an annual salary of $100,000. He had been the business manager at Spectrum Charter School in Monroeville for about a year. Before that he was Senior Management Consultant for two decades at Great Lakes Management Consulting, a firm offering accounting and tax preparation services to customers and small business owners in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

Spectrum Charter School is much smaller than MASD. The privatized school employs 11-20 people and has $1 million to $5 million in annual revenue. MASD has roughly 3,000 students and 300 teachers with a proposed budget of $86 million next year.

The previous Business Manager Joan Wehner had more experience in the education field. She was assistant to the business manager at Penn-Trafford School District for 10 years before coming to McKeesport. She left the district to become business manager at Greensburg Salem School District.

However, could Domowicz really be so clueless about MASD finances to negotiate a contract with the teachers that the district could not pay?

He certainly seemed on top of district finances at the board’s May meeting where he discussed the 2023-24 budget.

Domowicz said next year’s total proposed budget is for $86 million with an approximate fund balance of $10.6 million. This is an increase from the $79.8 million budget approved by the board for 2022-23.

Even though this years budget has a fund balance for the future, expenses are rising.

“Contractual labor agreements and additional staffing represents an increase in payroll expenses of 8 percent,” Domowicz said.

“There (have) been a lot of labor market pressures making recruitment and retention difficult without making some market adjustments to what we are offering in starting salaries. And there (has) been a decline in the median income of the families that we support with the district.”

This does not sound like someone ignorant of the issues.

He even noted that charter school costs were one of the leading causes of financial increases. Every child living in the district who goes to a charter school takes away funding that would have gone to fund MASD. The district paid $2 million toward charter school tuition in 2006-07, which has risen to $14 million in 2022-23.

If this continues, Domowicz said he expects the district will need to pay $16 million next year. That’s 17 percent of the new budget going toward charter schools.

If Domowicz’s figures were accurate all along, why is the school board suddenly refusing to approve the contract with the teachers it had originally offered?

In today’s increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-teacher environment, it is no stretch of the imagination to see why.

The entire country is in the midst of a national educator walk out. Teachers are refusing to stay in the classroom due to poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect.

After decades of neglect only made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re missing almost a million teachers.

Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left!

Finding replacements has been difficult. Across the country, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.

Not only are teachers paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, but a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.

And now MASD school board is refusing to approve very reasonable raises for educators who have given everything to the district and its children.

This is my school district where my family was educated, where I graduated and where my daughter still attends. I’ve seen so many fine educators give up the ghost and leave the classroom for better opportunities elsewhere.

If MASD school directors don’t do something to solve this problem, we will only lose more talented and experienced teachers. The quality of education will fall further while charter schools gobble up even more of our tax dollars. This means devaluing our properties and paying even higher taxes.

No one wants a tax increase.

The median income in the district is about $34,379, according to Domowicz. The community cannot afford to waste its declining tax revenue.

School directors need to either prove that the business manager they hired is incompetent and replace him – or prioritize educators when writing their budgets. You can’t have an excellent school without excellent teachers. And you can’t have excellent teachers – especially in a time of shortage – without paying them a fair wage.

Even though many school boards don’t have a meeting in July, perhaps MASD directors shouldn’t have done the same without a solution ready in August. That kind of disrespect is just asking for educators to strike – though the MAEA has not threatened to do so.

It is a shame that we are even in this position.

US schools should not have to rely on local tax revenues to fund neighborhood schools. Rich communities can afford to give their children the best of everything and poorer ones like McKeesport have to make do with whatever they can scrape together.

This is not how other modern countries do it. Internationally, schools are more often funded by state or federal governments so that all children get equitable resources. And charter schools do not even exist in many modern nations. However, until our own regressive governments catch up with the rest of the world, it is up to our duly elected representatives at home to get down to work and make sure all our children have the best we can provide.

School directors, no more excuses. Get to work.

 

 

Like this post?  Y ou might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

 

 

Teach for America Promised to Fix the Teacher Exodus Before Anyone Even Noticed There Was One. Now It’s Choking on Its Own Failure

Teach for America (TFA) was a solution to a problem it helped create.

Educators have been leaving the profession for decades due to poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect.

So Wendy Kopp, when in Princeton, created a program to fast track non-education majors into the classroom where they would teach for a few years and then enter the private sector as “experts” to drive public policy.

These college graduates would take a five week crash course in education and commit to at least two years in the classroom thereby filling any vacant teaching positions.

Surprise! It didn’t work.

In fact, it made things worse. Apparently deprofessionalizing education isn’t an incentive to dive into the field.

That isn’t to say everyone who went through the program became a bad teacher. But the few good and committed educators that did come through the program could have done so even more successfully by graduating with a degree in education.

Now the organization created in 1990 is expecting its lowest enrollment in 15 years. TFA anticipates placing slightly less than 2,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall. That’s two-thirds of the number of first-year teachers TFA placed in schools in fall 2019, and just one-third of the number it sent into the field at its height in 2013.

Apparently fewer people than ever don’t want to train for four to five years to become lifelong teachers – and neither do they want to be lightly trained for a few years as TFA recruits, either – even if that means they can pass themselves off as education experts afterwards and get high paying policy positions at think tanks and government.

On the one hand, this is good news.

Watering down what it means to be a teacher is even less popular than actually being an educator.

On the other hand, we have a major crisis that few people are prepared to handle.

The US is losing teachers at an alarming rate.

After decades of neglect only made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re missing almost a million teachers.

Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 567,000 fewer educators in our public schools today than there were before the pandemic. And that’s on top of already losing 250,000 school employees during the recession of 2008-09 most of whom were never replaced. All while enrollment increased by 800,000 students.

Meanwhile, finding replacements has been difficult. Across the country, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.

Not only are teachers paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, but a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.

It’s no wonder then that few college students want to enter the profession.

Over the past decade, there’s been a major decline in enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs in education.

Beginning in 2011, enrollment in such programs and new education certifications in Pennsylvania — my home state— started to decline. Today, only about a third as many students are enrolled in teacher prep programs in the Commonwealth as there were 10 years ago. And state records show new certifications are down by two-thirds over that period.

To put that more concretely, a decade ago roughly 20,000 new teachers entered the workforce each year in the Commonwealth, while last year only 6,000 did so, according to the state Department of Education (PDE).

But don’t look to most of the so-called experts to solve the problem. A great deal of them are former TFA recruits!

Through programs like TFA’s Capitol Hill Fellows Program, alumni are placed in full-time, paid staff positions with legislators so they can “gain insights into the legislative process by working in a Congressional office” and work “on projects that impact education and opportunities for youth.”

 
Why do so many lawmakers hire them? Because they don’t cost anything.
 

Their salaries are paid in full by TFA through a fund established by Arthur Rock, a California tech billionaire who hands the organization bags of cash to pay these educational aides’ salaries. From 2006 to 2008, alone, Rock – who also sits on TFA’s board – contributed $16.5 million for this purpose.

 
This isn’t about helping lawmakers understand the issues. It’s about framing the issues to meet the policy initiatives of the elite and wealthy donors.

 
It’s about selling school privatization, high stakes testing and ed-tech solutions.
 

As US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said on a call with Justice Democrats:

“I don’t think people who are taking money from pharmaceutical companies should be drafting health care legislation. I don’t think people who are taking money from oil and gas companies should be drafting our climate legislation.”

 
I’d like to add the following: people taking money from the testing and school privatization industry shouldn’t be drafting education policy. People who worked as temps in order to give themselves a veneer of credibility should not be treated the same as bona fide experts who dedicate their lives to kids in the classroom.

 The whole point of this scam is to serve the needs of the privatization movement.

Investors want to change public education into a cash cow. They want to alter the rules so that corporations running districts as charter or voucher schools can cut services for children and use the extra cash for profits.

And that starts with teachers.

If we allow privatizers to replace well-prepared and trained teachers with lightly trained temps, we can reduce the salaries we pay instructors. We delegitimize the profession. We redefine the job “teacher.” It’s no longer a highly-trained professional. It’s something anyone can do from off the street – thus we can pay poverty wages.

And the savings from cutting salaries can all go into our corporate pockets!

This kind of flim-flam would never be allowed with our present crop of highly trained professionals because many of them belong to labor unions. We have to give them the boot so we can exterminate their unions and thus provide easy pickings for the profiteers.

This helps explain why so many plans to address the teacher exodus are focused almost exclusively on recruiting new hires while completely ignoring the much larger numbers of experienced teachers looking for the exits.

According to the National Education Association (NEA), it is teachers who are quitting that is driving a significant part of the current educator shortage. More teachers quit the job than those who retire, are laid off, are transferred to other locations, go on disability or die. And this has remained true almost every year for the last decade with few exceptions.

To put it another way, you can’t stop a ship from sinking if you don’t plug up the leak first!

But experienced teachers always have been the biggest obstacle to privatizing public schools and expanding standardized testing.

That’s why replacing them with new educators has been one of the highest priorities of corporate education reform.

After all, it’s much harder to try to indoctrinate seasoned educators with propaganda that goes against everything they learned to be true about their students and profession in a lifetime of classroom practice than to encourage those with no practical experience to just drink the Kool-Aid.

So it should come as no surprise that supply side policymakers are using the current teacher exodus as an excuse to remake the profession in their own image.

As Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama (Later Chicago Mayor) said:

“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

If our policymakers really want to solve the problem, we’d spend at least as much time keeping the experienced teachers we have as trying to get new ones to join their ranks.

Research shows that teacher experience matters.

“The common refrain that teaching experience does not matter after the first few years in the classroom is no longer supported by the preponderance of the research,” Tara Kini and Anne Podolsky write in Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness?

“We find that teaching experience is, on average, positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career.”

Their analysis is based on 30 studies published over the past 15 years and concludes:

1) Experienced teachers on average are more effective in raising student achievement (both test scores and classroom grades) than less experienced ones.

2) Teachers do better as they gain experience. Researchers have long documented that teachers improve dramatically during their first few years on the job. However, teachers make even further gains in subsequent years.

3) Experienced teachers also reduce student absences, encourage students to read for recreational purposes outside of the classroom, serve as mentors for young teachers and help to create and maintain a strong school community. 

The road to keeping experienced teachers isn’t exactly mysterious.

First, there must be an increase in salary. Teacher pay must at least be adequate including the expectation that as educators gain experience, their salaries will rise in line with what college graduates earn in comparable professions. This is not happening now.

In addition, something must be done to improve teachers working conditions. Lack of proper support and supportive administrators is one of the main reasons experienced teachers leave a building or the profession.

And perhaps most obviously, politicians have to stop scapegoating educators for all of society’s problems and even for all of the problems of the school system. Teachers don’t get to make policy. They are rarely even allowed a voice, but they are blamed for everything that happens in and around education.

If we want teachers to work with socially disadvantaged students, they must be provided with the institutional supports needed to be effective and steadily advance their skills. 

But this requires making education a priority and not a political football.

To do that, you would need to stop bankrolling organizations like TFA.

However, the billionaires funding school privatization and the standardized testing industry would never allow it.

So unlike our public schools, as fewer and fewer applicants come to TFA, there will always be money to keep it afloat.

Those who are causing the teacher exodus will never be the ones to fix it.

Like this post?  Y ou might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

 

Florida Attempting to Revive the “Happy Slave” Myth as Real History

Frederick Douglass was widely considered the most photographed American in the 19th century, though he never smiled in a single portrait.

He stares out of the frame with a look of quiet dignity, but never joviality or contentment.

The reason for this is simple – he didn’t want to perpetuate the myth of the “Happy Slave.”

Douglass was born into bondage until he fled to the North at age 20. He was considered a fugitive for nine more years until 1845 when English friends raised $711.66 to buy his freedom. He was already a famous orator, author and abolitionist.

But he knew the power of a picture and how a still image of him grinning ear-to-ear might be used by slaveholders to indicate that people of color enjoyed their own servitude.

Now 158 years after the Civil War, the Florida Department of Education is trying to perpetuate that same myth with its new guidelines for Black history curriculum in public schools.

Among other things, the guidelines suggest that American slavery was not all bad because enslaved people developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.” 

The guidelines say that teachers’ lessons should “examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).”

This seems like a strange thing to emphasize about people who were engaged in back-breaking, life-shortening fieldwork on the cotton, rice and sugar cane plantations. Putting the focus on the various tasks they completed seems to make slavery little more than another type of “agricultural work” – just one of many “trades.”

But we’re losing sight of the fact that it was forced labor! That seems an essential feature – a defining characteristic!

So enslaved people might acquire skills in bondage that they did not previously possess. They could sometimes become expert artisans who might earn money to buy things.

But they did not own their own bodies! They were property! That limits your buying power in kind of a major way – not to mention your humanity!

No skills, nothing you could purchase could possibly make you cherish your lack of freedom.

In his autobiography, Douglass wrote:

“I have observed this in my experience of slavery, that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom.”

People like to tell stories of enslaved people singing on the plantations to ease their load and as proof of how much they enjoyed their work.

Of this, Douglass wrote:

“Every tone was testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. . . . To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. . . . The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.”

The new education guidelines in the Sunshine state are the latest since the Stop Woke Act was enacted in July 2022. The law says discussions about race must be taught in an “objective manner” and should not be “used to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view.” It also states that students should not feel guilty for actions taken in the past by people of their same race or origin.

Florida has taken broad measures to align its education standards with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s vision of a state “where woke goes to die,” which constrains teachers to discuss race, gender and sexuality, if at all, only in a way in which the Governor would approve.

The irony is that these guidelines show exactly why teachers need to discuss these subjects more openly and freely – why authentic history MUST be taught – not some far right fairytale vision of the past.

Not only are these guidelines insensitive at best, state policymakers do not understand the actual record. They seem to believe in Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden” to colonize, civilize, and Christianize non-Europeans – that slavery was a means of protecting and bringing Africans into the civilized era.

But this is pure nonsense – what’s worse it’s antiquated nonsense.

People who were kidnapped from Africa and forced into slavery across the Atlantic were not savages who were civilized by white slavers.

These were people with their own cultures, heritages and, yes, skills.

Most Africans who were abducted to North America were from West Africa and West Central Africa.

Each regional clan or group had professions or crafts such as weaving, basket making, potting, or iron working. They grew agricultural products, made textiles, manufactured goods, music and art. They made traditional foods and had unique customs.

These skills were used by enslaved people in the American South and beyond creating many industries in the US, but their contributions were most often erased.

Take Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

Around 1850, an enslaved man named Nathan “Nearest” Green taught a white man, Jack Daniel, the art of whiskey distillation – though it would take another 150 years before this would be publicly acknowledged.

Daniel was an orphan working as a day laborer on the farm of Dan Call, a Lynchburg preacher, grocer and distiller. Daniel took an interest in the distillery and pleaded to learn the trade. Call eventually introduced him to Green, who he called “the best whiskey maker that I know of,” according to a 1967 biography, Jack Daniel’s Legacy. He instructed the enslaved man to teach the young boy his distilling process.

Green taught Daniel “sugar maple charcoal filtering” (now called the Lincoln County Process), a universally accepted critical step in the making of Tennessee whiskey. This involves filtering the whiskey through wooden charcoal chips before being placed in casks for aging. Food historians believe this was inspired by similar charcoal filtering techniques used to purify water and foods in West Africa. The process imparts a unique flavor that set Jack Daniel’s whiskey apart from its competitors.

After the Emancipation Proclamation, Daniel bought Call’s distillery, renaming it after himself. More than seven generations of the Green family worked either for or with the Jack Daniel’s brand.

It’s important to note that these were skills Green already possessed. They were not learned in bondage. They were brought with him to this country.

Another example of this would be Black cowboys.

Despite the relative lack of Black faces in Hollywood Westerns, Black men made up about 1 in 4 cowboys in the old West.

Men of color handled cattle, tamed horses, worked ranches, encountered outlaws and starred in rodeos. It’s estimated that anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 Black cowboys were part of the legendary cattle drives of the 1800s.

Many Black cowboys developed their skills in Africa – not America. People abducted from countries such as Ghana and Gambia were already experienced in managing large herds of cattle and their abilities with animals were highly desirable.

During the Civil War, some Texas ranchers who fought with the Confederacy left enslaved people behind to maintain their ranches.

Once again these were skills brought to this country just as the people possessing them were – by force.

The Cotton Gin offers a more contentious example.

Eli Whitney, a white man, is given credit for inventing the machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber.

However, there is much debate about where he got the idea.

Some historians believe Catherine Greene, a woman he was living with, devised the cotton gin and Whitney merely built it and applied for the patent, since at that time women were not allowed to do this. Others believe the idea was Whitney’s but Greene played an important role as both designer and financier.

However, according to the University of Houston’s College of Engineering, Whitney got the idea from an enslaved person known to history only as Sam. Sam’s father came up with a kind of comb to get the seeds out of a cotton boll. Whitney heard about the idea and simply mechanized it.

Whether Sam or his father were able to invent the cotton gin because of skills learned in America or Africa is hard to say, but they certainly didn’t profit off of them. If they were given any remuneration, it was nothing in comparison to Whitney.

Ironically, this device made the mass cultivation of cotton profitable. The result was that the enslaved population in the United States jumped from about 250,000 around the time of the Revolutionary War to around 4 million at the time of the Civil War.

Sadly, this is far from the only example of white people getting the credit for the intellectual work of enslaved people.

Jo Anderson came up with the idea or at least co-invented a reaping machine that revolutionized agriculture. But the credit went to Cyrus McCormick, the white man who owned him.

Cutting wheat in the early 1800s was slow, difficult and labor-intensive. Workers had to walk and cut the stalks with scythes, and laborers (also called “binders”) walking behind them gathered and tied the stalks into sheaves. The reaper was a device that sheared a wide path of grain. A worker would just need to rake the cut stalks off the machine’s bed onto the ground in ready-to-bind stacks.

In the 1850s, Benjamin Montgomery invented a steamboat propeller designed for shallow water. But since he was enslaved, his invention could not be patented in his name. His owners – future Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph – then tried to patent the propeller in their names but the request was denied since they were not the inventors. It went unpatented.

In 1831, a freed slave named Henry Boyd invented a “Tester Bed” that used wooden side rails. However, he had to let a white man, George Porter, patent his design for him since he could not do it, himself.

Free Black men were technically allowed to patent inventions but it could be incredibly difficult to do so. Often they ended up putting patents in the names of their white lawyers to give them a better shot at acceptance.

While some of these skills may have been learned in servitude, Black people rarely got to experience the rewards they deserved for using them.

It should be achingly obvious that being kidnapped and enslaved did not in the final analysis profit Black people even if they may have occasionally learned skills or earned a little money. Any suggestion otherwise is pure fantasy.

It is a political fiction that is being revived to stop any attempts at actual justice in this country.

Though they are no longer enslaved, African Americans still suffer from the after affects of our peculiar institution. Jim Crow laws continued until the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement. Even then policies like red lining, discriminatory hiring practices, and over-policing of Black neighborhoods continued. Though progress has been made at each step along the way, Black people still suffer from institutional racism of which Florida’s new educational guidelines are a prime example.

Just in our public education system, children of color are more likely to find themselves in under-funded schools with fewer opportunities, narrowed curriculum and subjected to evaluation by biased standardized tests. They are targeted by fly-by-night charter schools which often have no elected school boards and worse academic records than neighborhood authentic public schools.

Florida’s new guidelines are another attempt to erase the problem without fixing it – to make even stating the racial realities impossible for teachers in the classroom and thus unlikely to be learned by anyone who doesn’t experience this type of inequity first hand.

As Douglass said in a speech in Cork, Ireland:

“The people of America deprive us [Black people] of every privilege—they turn round and taunt us with our inferiority!—they stand upon our necks, they impudently taunt us, and ask the question, why we don’t stand up erect? They tie our feet, and ask us why we don’t run? That is the position of America in the present time. The laws forbid education, the mother must not teach her child the letters of the Lord’s prayer; and then while this unfortunate state of things exist they turn round and ask, why we are not moral and intelligent; and tell us, because we are not, that they have the right to enslave [us].”

It’s no wonder he did not smile in his photographs.

I doubt his expression would change much, If he were alive today and presented with Florida’s idea of Black history.

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Will PA Finally Hold Cyber Charter Schools Accountable?

Pennsylvania pays more than $1 billion every year for its 14 cyber charter schools.

And overpays them by more than $450 million each year.

Now – after half a decade of legislative shenanigans – a new bill actually has the possibility of being passed to hold these types of schools accountable.

Last week House Bill 1422 passed by a vote of 122-81, with all Democrats voting for it, joined by 20 Republicans. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro would likely sign the legislation if it comes to his desk.

So now it goes to its biggest hurdle – the Republican-controlled Senate.

The state GOP has held up every cyber charter reform measure since the previous Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf suggested it. However, now that Democrats hold a slim majority in the House, Republicans can no longer stymie it completely.

One of the largest problems centers on the cost of doing business. Cyber charter schools educate students online via computer. So why do local public schools have to pay cyber charters the same money as brick and mortar schools to educate students living in their boundaries? Cyber charters don’t have nearly the brick and mortar – no athletic fields, busing, etc. And the physical structures they do have are much smaller. The result is underfunded public schools and cyber charters bursting with cash.

That means higher public school taxes for you and me while cyber charters spend money like it’s going out of style.

The new measure would stop that by telling public schools exactly how much they must pay cyber charters – $8,000 per student not receiving special education services. Most schools currently spend approximately $10,000.

In addition, cyber charter schools would no longer be given more funding for special education students than authentic public schools. Tuition for special education students would be aligned with the system used for authentic public school districts. These measures, alone, are expected to result in about $456 million in savings.

But that’s not all!

The legislation also seeks additional transparency, eliminating conflicts of interest and requiring cyber charters to comply with the state’s ethics and open records law as authentic public schools are already required to do. It would ban enrollment incentives, restrict advertising and event sponsorships.

Gov. Wolf’s original proposal went even further. He had asked the General Assembly to place a moratorium on new cyber charter schools and cap enrollment in low-performing charter schools until they improve. None of that appears in the current legislation.

The bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Joe Ciresi, D-Montgomery, said the goal was not to close cyber charter programs, but to stop overfunding them. He said:

“We’re looking to put money back into the public schools and also leave the choice that’s there. We should have choice in this state. We’re asking that it’s a fair playing field.”

A lot of the prohibitions in the new legislation seem to have been inspired by real practices by current cyber charter schools like Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA), the largest school of this type in the state.

For example, CCA spent approximately $19 million on marketing over a two-year period, including a float featuring Jerold the Bookworm for a Thanksgiving Parade.

The proposed law would prohibit all public schools from paying to sponsor public events such as parades and professional sporting events. Moreover, it would require all public schools who advertise to state that the cost of tuition and other costs are covered by taxpayer dollars.

CCA also uses tax dollars to provide $200 for monthly field trips that can be of debatable educational value. They’ve gone to petting zoos, laser tag, bowling and kayaking. A parent of a CCA student even bragged on Facebook about using these funds for Dave and Busters Arcade, a Motley Crue concert, Eagles tickets, and family vacations to Universal Studios and Disney, according to Education Voters of Pa.

The new bill would prohibit cyber charter schools from paying or reimbursing parents/guardians from educational or field trips as well as offering any cash, gifts or other incentives for enrolling or considering enrolling in a cyber charter school.

It would also force these types of schools to be more financially accountable by requiring them to approve an annual budget by June 30th each year, and make the budget available, as well as imposing fund balance limits so they couldn’t horde taxpayer money – all things already required of authentic public schools.

Charter schools – institutions that are publicly financed but often privately run and not subject to the same rules and regulations as authentic public schools – are still controversial despite the first charter school law being passed in 1991 and having spread through at least 45 states. However, only 27 states also allow CYBER charters like this – schools that teach mostly (or entirely) distance learning through the Internet.

Nationwide, Pennsylvania and Ohio have the largest cyber charter enrollment. In 2020-21, the Keystone State enrolled 61,000 students in cyber charters – and roughly 21,000 attend CCA.

A 2022 report by Children First found that of the states with cyber charters, Pennsylvania spends the most but has the “weakest systems to ensure students and taxpayers are getting their money’s worth.” Moreover, of the roughly $1 billion state taxpayers spend on these schools, several reports suggest that the money comes from the poorest districts, where cyber student academic performance is much lower than at neighboring authentic public schools. These are the students most in need of help.

Many provisions in the proposed bill read like such common sense initiatives, it’s chilling that they aren’t already in place.

The bill would require cyber charter schools to verify the residency of enrolling students, report the number of newly enrolled students and how many of those students have been identified as needing special education. Since cyber charter teachers meet with students online, they would need to visibly see and communicate with enrolled students at least once per week to verify the student’s well-being.

There are also many rules about how a cyber charter school can be governed. You could not have a school director from another school district or a trustee from another charter school serving on the board of the cyber charter school. Boards would require a quorum and a majority vote to take action. They would have to comply with the Sunshine Law, Right-to-Know Law, and the Ethics Act. Cyber charter school boards would need to have at least seven non-related members, at least one of whom must be a parent/guardian of an enrolled student.

But let’s not forget the many ways this new law would make cyber charters more transparent. Cyber charter schools could not lease a facility from a foundation or management company – unfortunately a common practice that allows the school to bill the public for a service to itself multiple times. Any conflicts of interest between the cyber charter school and a foundation or management company would need to be disclosed. Cyber charters would not be allowed to have administrators and their family members serving on the board of a charter school foundation that supports the charter school. No charter school trustee could be employed by the cyber charter school, a foundation that supports the school, or a management company that serves the school. The state Department of Education would need to have access to the records and facilities of any foundation and/or management companies associated with the school. Foundations associated with these schools would need to make budgets, tax returns and audits available.

The overwhelming majority of these regulations simply hold cyber charter schools to the same standard we already use for authentic public schools.

However, what often gets left unsaid is how terribly students do academically at cyber charters – something completely left out of this proposed legislation.

Study after study consistently shows that cyber charters are much less effective than traditional public schools – heck! They’re even less effective than brick and mortar charter schools!

A nationwide study by Stanford University found that cyber charters provide 180 days less of math instruction and 72 days less of reading instruction than traditional public schools.

Keep in mind that there are only 180 days in an average school year. So cyber charters provide less math instruction than not going to school at all.

The same study found that 88 percent of cyber charter schools have weaker academic growth than similar brick and mortar schools.

Student-to-teacher ratios average about 30:1 in online charters, compared to 20:1 for brick and mortar charters and 17:1 for traditional public schools.

Researchers concluded that these schools have an “overwhelming negative impact” on students.

And these results were duplicated almost exactly by subsequent studies from Penn State University in 2016 (enrolling a student in a Pennsylvania cyber charter school is equal to “roughly 90 fewer days of learning in reading and nearly 180 fewer days of learning in math”) and the National Education Policy Center in 2017 (cyber charters “performed significantly worse than feeder schools in both reading and math”).

The legislation being considered here does the important work of holding cyber charters financially accountable. However, there still remains the very real question of whether this type of educational institution is viable under normal circumstances.

 
It will be interesting to see if Republicans find even accountability a prospect worthy of a vote in the state Senate. Lobbyists for charter school networks like K12 Inc. and Connections Education have spent billions of dollars against something like this ever happening.

I guess we’ll soon see who the Commonwealth GOP really listens to – voters or corporate interests.

 

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I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

What Can Educators Learn from “Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom”?

So there I was, stranded at the bottom of a pit in the depths.

Shadows all around me, puddles of glowing purple gloom everywhere, the burbles of monsters slowly approaching…

No time to climb out – let’s build a hover bike!

And before you know it, I was zooming up and outta there!

Until I ran out of battery and went careening back to the ground. But I was out of the pit!

“The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” is a really great game – even for a nearly 50-year-old public school teacher like me.

As classes dwindled down in June and the summer approached, I noticed some of my students who had finished their work bringing the game in on their portable Nintendo Switch consoles.

Like me, they were enthralled by the level of choice the newly released game presents.

Rarely is there one answer to a problem.

The previous Zelda game in the series, “Breath of the Wild” (2017), threw the doors wide by giving players an open world to explore. No longer did you have to go down a linear path of which dungeons to complete in which order to defeat the bad guy. You could go in whatever direction you wanted, doing almost anything in whatever order you pleased.

The new game takes that even further. “Tears of the Kingdom” gives you three open worlds to explore and offers you the ability to build a wide range of contraptions to create your own solutions to problems.

For example, when I was stuck in that pit, I could have tried to climb out, I could have stood my ground, or I could have built almost anything imaginable that might help.

It’s that kind of increased choice that makes this game special and of particular interest to educators.

After all, this is something many of our students enjoy doing in their free time. The game sold 10 million copies in its first three days, becoming the fastest selling Nintendo game in history. That’s roughly $700 million and growing.

This doesn’t mean edtech companies should rush in to take over. Teachers and public schools are still the best way to educate students.

But the way I see it, if teachers can make learning more intrinsic and exciting, it’s a plus. These are my three major takeaways from the experience:

1) Power of the Sandbox

There are many types of video games.

Some are focused on action – such as shooting down the most enemies. Some focus more on puzzles to solve. Yet others are focused on building things like farms or homes or even civilizations.

Sandbox games are more self-directed. The idea is to create a space where gamers can do pretty much whatever they want. There’s no imposed objective. You’re given simple tools that you can easily see how to manipulate and you’re left to decide how to use them.

It’s based on the metaphor of leaving small children in a sandbox and just letting them play.

The most popular model is the game Minecraft. In it, players are thrust into a world made entirely of blocks that can be combined and recombined to build anything they want. It’s almost like a virtual world of LEGO bricks.

Players build structures like dream homes or space ships. Some tell stories. Some recreate real or imagined structures like the Eiffel Tower or the Death Star from “Star Wars.”

While there are also dungeons you can fight through to get more materials for your creations, the main emphasis seems to be on building.

Minecraft, in itself, is a very popular game and has been so since 2011.

However, “Tears of the Kingdom” takes this a step further by making the sandbox a tool in a world with a specific objective.

Like most Zelda games, you play as a character, Link, who has to save the princess, Zelda, and the kingdom of Hyrule from a bad guy, Gannondorf. The difference is that one of your tools to do that in this game is an ability to combine certain items together into structures.

These aren’t just blocks. They can be as complex as fans or lasers.

You can try to build a flying machine, but you have to make sure the fans or rockets or whether you’re using to propel them are pointing exactly where you want them, don’t consume too much battery, etc.

It takes design, testing, a knowledge of basic physics, etc.

For example, one of my first attempts at a plane kept flipping over. The reason – my fans were placed in opposite directions so that the lift given by one was counteracted by the other. Another device only went straight up. The reason – rockets only provide lift in one direction and quickly give out.

Players can easily get lost in building things. Sometimes that can seem way more interesting than the overall objective of beating the bad guy and winning the game.

However, there are certain game objectives that help you become a better builder – give you longer battery life, etc. So the game rewards you for progressing along each route – the story objective and the sandbox.

It’s a fascinating game loop that may keep this adventure fresh with replayability long after the main objective is complete.

So how does that impact education?

We know students like self-directed learning. If they are at all interested in the subject, giving them the power of following their natural curiosity can lead to amazing results.

This is often used in STEM lessons, where kids are given an objective and various tools and told to try to figure out how to achieve that objective. Who can build the highest tower that won’t fall over? Who can build the fastest race car on this track? Who can build a boat out of cardboard and duct tape that will float longest in a swimming pool? Etc.

However, it can also be done in other disciplines. You might study how the writer Langston Hughes communicates his message in a poem like “Mother to Son” and then ask students to do the same kind of thing in their own poem. You might read several stories and poems by a single author like Edgar Allan Poe and then ask students to find similarities between the author’s work and life.

In each instance, it’s not about just giving students tools and leaving them alone to discover what to do with them. It’s up to the teacher to provide a goal or a direction in which to go. The students take it from there.

The freedom of the sandbox by itself can be thrilling to some students in certain disciplines. But it can also be terrifying. Both aspects are necessary to reach the most students. When learning can be both intrinsic but directed, that’s when students get the greatest results.

We often pretend that students can do just as well without instruction – and there can be marvelous gains by some students in this way. However, teachers are there for a reason. We know the curriculum and many avenues to understanding it. We can point students many ways to understanding that they might not discover on their own.

Games like “Tears of the Kingdom” show the importance of both choice and direction.

2) Importance of a Learning Community

One of the things I was surprised about the most in “Breath of the Wild” and this new Zelda game is the way each created an online gaming community.

In particular with “Tears”, I found several YouTubers who focused on the game and made videos about nearly every aspect of it.

There were walk-throughs of various parts of the game: how to find different armor, defeat bosses and mini-bosses, build the best things, etc. However, there were also videos focused just on individual’s personal experiences with the game and even conjectures on the lore.

It is unclear how some of the elements from the first game impact the second that the developers kept intentionally vague. The community of players stepped in to fill in these gaps with theories that would put the best literary analysis to shame.

For example, the first game was full of Sheika Shrines. In the second game, the shrines were gone from most of the same locations. Instead there were new Zonai shrines in disparate locations. Why the discrepancy? There seems to be a growing consensus that the Sheika shrines were either dismantled by the Hyrulians and/or destroyed by Gannondorf when he reawakened to begin the current upheaval.

All of this really enhances the gaming experience. Not only do you feel less isolated, but you feel validated. You’re part of the act of making meaning out of the whole experience – listening to others, adding to the conversation, etc.

For example, there are certain enemies that just scared the heck out of me – chief among them were Gloom Hands. These are puddles of slime that come out of nowhere and shoot hands out at your character that can squeeze you to death in seconds.

Then I saw several videos where YouTubers explained how Gloom Hands freaked them out, too, (some complete with funny videos of them screaming when being ambushed by these creatures) and how to deal with them.

By watching these videos, I got to be much better at the game than I would have been otherwise. Some vloggers were so calm and reassuring when they said these sorts of creatures were easy to deal with and nothing to panic over that I felt way more confident. Moreover, if I did come across something that gave me trouble, I knew where to turn for help and guidance.

How important this is in the classroom!

Teachers often fill this role, but if we can create a community in the classroom, itself, that is even better. When students can discuss assignments and help each other through obstacles, that is so much better than the teacher being the only person in a position to help.

I try to foster as much discussion as possible in my classes through Socratic Seminars and informal groups. However, if you can get small group work to function while still being focused and productive, you can increase this aspect, too.

It’s all about the classroom you can create. You need shared values, empathy and students who understand how to best interact with each other. It’s easier said than done but a worthy goal for sure.

3) The Danger of Outside Assessment

This may be the most overlooked lesson from games to the classroom.

One of the biggest differences between the gaming and school experience is whether someone is looking over your shoulder or not.

In a video game, the player decides what he or she wants to get out of the experience. Do you want to simply beat the game? Or do you want to 100% it – achieve every goal the programmers put into it.

How long you take and how much you complete is up to you.

Sometimes the gaming community can contribute to this by giving opinions about which goals are worthy of completion, etc. However, whether you have achieved everything you want and the ultimate assessment of such things are really up to the individual.

Things are different in class.

On one level, students are assessed by their teachers. They grade assignments, give tests, etc. However, this is similar to the game, itself. When you fight Gannondorf, the game tells you whether you’ve beaten him and sometimes how well this is accomplished.

For example, there are a few different endings to the game that you can get depending on how well (or completely) you achieved certain objectives.

I think that’s similar to what the classroom teacher does. It’s part of the experience taken in context and (hopefully) well understood by the student.

The difference comes from forces outside the classroom.

Students don’t just achieve grades. They are also subject to standardized tests. These are assessments created out of context of the classroom, graded by hired hands, that are used to determine how well the curriculum has been learned.

They are artificial, biased and politically motivated.

Imagine if after playing a video game someone from the government had to come in and give you a score. Imagine if they made you play another (different) game to determine how well you did on this one. Maybe you feel like you aced “Tears of the Kingdom” but they said you didn’t do so well on “MarioKart” and thus failed the experience.

Outside assessment can kill intrinsic learning. It can make everything extrinsic – will this be on the test? What do I need to pass the test? Etc.

It would poison the video game experience as it poisons the classroom one.

We only allow it because of strange outdated ideas about learning and psychology. We pretend it’s all behaviorism – students given this stimuli should produce this response. We know that’s not how the human mind works, but politics and capitalism refuse to let us move beyond it.

Someone is making money off of this and we can’t disrupt that with real reform.

Perhaps if we looked more closely at how things function in the world of video games, we’d have a better idea of how to change things for the better in the classroom.

To better understand learning, we should look to the whole child – and the whole child’s experience outside of school.

This includes Zelda, Gannondorf and Link.

Like this post?  Y ou might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

 

Absurd School Voucher Proposal Stalls PA Budget

How do you stop the other team from making a goal when you aren’t even sure your own team’s goalie will try to block the shot?

Pennsylvania House Democrats find themselves in that uncomfortable position as they refuse to pass a Republican supported 2023-24 budget on time.

The problem? School vouchers.

Democrats generally oppose them and Republicans love them. But in the commonwealth, new Gov. Josh Shapiro, ostensibly a Democrat, has let it be known that he likes vouchers under certain conditions.

So Republicans designed a bill exactly along those lines hoping that if they can get it through both legislative bodies, the Governor will give it his signature. (Under the previous Democratic administration, Gov. Tom Wolf blocked the worst the GOP could throw at him, stopping all kinds of horrible policies from getting through.)

A budget encrusted with voucher giveaways passed the Republican-controlled Senate on Thursday, but the House – where Democrats now hold a slim majority – refused to go along with it.

So Republicans are holding the entire budget hostage. As usual.

In a time when the state is flush with cash from inflation-juiced tax collections and federal pandemic subsidies, legislators still couldn’t pass a budget on time.

And it all comes down to our schizophrenic education policies.

Fact: the Commonwealth shortchanges public school students.

The state Supreme Court said so after an 8 year legal battle.

Now lawmakers in Harrisburg are rushing to fix the problem by tearing public schools apart and giving the pieces to private and parochial schools.

It’s called the Lifeline Scholarship Program – throw a lifeline of $100 million to failing edu-businesses and religious indoctrination centers on the excuse that that will somehow help kids from impoverished neighborhoods.

You could just increase funding at the poorest public schools – but that would make too much sense.

Better to give taxpayer money to private interests with little to no accountability or track record and just hope it works!

During the election, Shapiro admitted he liked the concept of these kinds of vouchers, but back then the only other choice was Doug Mastriano, a raving MAGA insurrectionist Republican. The Democrat could have said he had developed a taste for human flesh and he would have been the better alternative.

This means only the slim Democratic majority is left to uphold public schools over this wrongheaded policy nightmare.

House Democrats swear the bill is destined to fail.

House Majority Leader Matt Bradford, D-Montgomery, put it this way:

“There are not the votes for it. It’s not coming up, and if it comes up, it will be defeated.”

This seems to be the case. Yesterday, the House Rules Committee voted against sending the tuition voucher bill to the full House for a vote. So it is not scheduled for a vote at all.

However, now that the June 30th deadline has been blown, lawmakers probably will try to use this newest school voucher bid as a bargaining chip to get a spending plan – any spending plan – passed. This could drag on for months – it certainly has in the past.

The current voucher iteration is a taxpayer funded tuition subsidy for students attending private schools.

Under this bill, students in the lowest 15% of schools in the commonwealth (as determined by standardized test scores) would be eligible.

So what’s wrong with school vouchers?

  1) Vouchers have nothing to do with helping kids escape struggling public schools.  

   School vouchers overwhelmingly go to kids who already attend private or parochial schools.

This is true even when the law explicitly stipulates the money should only go to poor and needy children.  

In the states that have released their data, more than three quarters of families who apply for vouchers for their children already send their kids to private schools. That’s 75% of voucher students in Wisconsin, 80% in Arizona, and 89% in New Hampshire. So these kids didn’t need our tax dollars in the first place.  We’re just paying for services they’re already receiving.

 Moreover, the very idea is absurd. If the school where the student is enrolled is struggling, why wouldn’t you simply invest in that school to make it better and fix the underlying problem? Why disrupt children’s educations by moving them to another school in another system that is entirely unproven, itself? 

2) Using taxpayer money to send your child to a private or parochial school has got nothing to do with getting a quality education.  

  If we look at the facts, using a school voucher to go from a public school to a private one actually hurts kids academically.  

  Large-scale independent studies in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., show that students who used vouchers were as negatively impacted as if they had experienced a natural disaster. Their standardized test scores went down as much or more than students during the Covid-19 pandemic or Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  

 This should come as no surprise. When we give children school vouchers, we’re removing their support systems already in place.

  They lose the friends, teachers, and communities where they grew up. It’s like yanking a sapling from out of the ground and transplanting it to another climate with another type of soil which may not be suited to it at all.  


 


   3) Vouchers have nothing to do with more efficient schools.  

  Let’s get one thing straight – voucher schools are businesses, often new businesses just opening up. And like any other start-up, the failure rate is extremely high. According to Forbes, 90% of start-ups fail – often within the first few years.  

 The same is true here. Like charter schools (another privatized education scheme), most voucher schools close in the first few years after they open. In Wisconsin, for example, 41% of voucher-receiving schools have opened and subsequently closed since public funding began in the early 1990s.  

  Yet when they close, they take our tax dollars with them leaving less funding available to educate all kids in the community.  

 Public schools, by contrast, are community institutions that usually last (and have been around) for generations. Their goal isn’t profit – it’s providing a quality education. 

  4) Vouchers have nothing to do with freedom or choice.  

   Unless it’s the choice to be a bigot and indoctrinate your child into your own bigotry. 

      Vouchers are about exclusion – who gets to attend these PRIVATE schools –  and indoctrination – what nonsense they can teach that public schools cannot.  

   Private schools can and do discriminate against children based on religion, race, gender, sexuality, special needs – you name it – even if those schools take public money.   

  For example, in Florida, Grace Christian School, a private institution that refuses to enroll LGBTQ kids has received $1.6 million so far in taxpayer funding. In Indiana, more than $16 million has gone to schools banning LGBTQ kids—or even kids with LGBTQ parents! That’s roughly 1 out of every 10 private schools in the state with just this one discriminatory enrollment.  

   Meanwhile thousands of parochial schools that receive public funding use textbooks provided by The American Christian Education (ACE) group. This includes the A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press textbooks. A Beka publishers, in particular, reported that about 9,000 schools nationwide purchase their textbooks.  

    In their pages you’ll find glowing descriptions of the Ku Klux Klan, how the massacre of Native Americans saved many souls, African slaves had really good lives, homosexuals are no better than rapists and child molesters, and progressive attempts at equal rights such as Brown vs. Board of Education were illegal and misguided. You know – all the greatest Trump/MAGA hits!  

  Call me crazy, but I don’t think that’s a curriculum worthy of taxpayer dollars. I think if you’re going to take public money, you should have to accept all of the public, and you shouldn’t be allowed to teach counterfactual claims and prejudice as if they were fact.  

To be fair, this voucher program is not supposed to take money directly from the public system – one of Shapiro’s requirements for his support – but the money has to come from somewhere.

The state treasury would be responsible for managing the program, and it can’t just print money. This is taxpayer funding. We won’t allocate the money to support the schools we have, but we’re willing to send $100 million to schools we have no responsibility for now!? With no fiscal accountability!?

Lots of other states have enacted vouchers like this and surprise, surprise! The program expands enormously. For instance, in New Hampshire, voucher supporters predicted their program would cost taxpayers about $130,000, but within two years the cost had ballooned to more than $14 million.

Pennsylvania schools have monetary needs – but this voucher program is not one of them.

Lawmakers have been tasked by the state Supreme Court with increasing education funding.

That’s education funding for public schools – PUBLIC. Schools.

If they want to give away our tax dollars to their buddies in the private education industry or support religious indoctrination, that’s a different matter entirely.

And shame on Shapiro for giving the most reckless policymakers in the commonwealth on the other side of the aisle hope that these shenanigans will work.

 

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Teaching Blind Obedience is Child Abuse

My daughter is not a little soldier.

She does not jump at my orders.

She can be rude, crude and badly behaved.

But I wouldn’t want her any other way – because the alternative is worse.

The same goes for my middle school students.

If you enter my classroom, you may find some children questioning my assignments.

“Mr. Singer, why can’t we chew gum in class?”

“Mr. Singer, why do you give so much homework?”

“Mr. Singer, why do we have to write a rough draft? Why can’t we just write a final copy?”

But you’ll notice my students almost always call me “Mr. Singer.” The reason is trust and respect.

Over time we’ve formed a relationship with each other where they’ve learned to respect me as their teacher and I have tried to earn that trust by treating them kindly and giving good reason for the things I tell them to do.

They are obedient (for the most part), but not BLINDLY obedient.

That may sound like splitting hairs but it’s one of the most important distinctions in education.

When someone knows WHY they’re doing something, they are an agent – they are responsible for their own actions. They are self-disciplined – not drones acting without thinking solely because they were told to do so.

That is incredibly important.

Think of what blind obedience does to adults.

American historian Howard Zinn famously put it this way:

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders… and millions have been killed because of this obedience… Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… [and] the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”  

When I was a college undergraduate, I was unsure what to major in and I began my undergraduate work in psychology. Of all the things I learned in those early survey classes before changing course to writing, philosophy and (after a career in journalism) education, the lesson I’ll never forget is the groundbreaking 1961 study by Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist.

Milford famously wondered how many people would willingly comply if a person in a position of authority told university students to deliver a 400-volt electrical shock to another person. His students predicted that no more than 3% of participants would deliver the maximum shocks. However, when he actually conducted the experiment, 65% delivered the maximum shocks.

During the experiment, each subject was asked to press a button that they believed gave increasingly high voltage electric shocks to the student on the other side of a wall if the student gave the wrong answer to a teacher’s questions. It should be noted that the students on the other side of the wall did not actually receive shocks, but the participants BELIEVED that they truly were shocking their fellow students by pressing the button.

Many of the subjects, while believing that the student was actually receiving shocks and hearing their protests and cries for mercy – including complaints of a heart condition – became increasingly agitated and even angry at the experimenter. Yet 36 out of 40 people, in turn, continued to do what they were instructed to do all the way to the end. Even when the student became silent when apparently receiving a shock from a switch labeled “danger: severe shock”, the subject continued based on the instruction that silence is to be read as a wrong answer.

This experiment (which would be highly unethical today) has become a classic in psychology, demonstrating the dangers of obedience.

Milgram wrote in 1974:

“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

In fact, these experiments were inspired by history – specifically by the Nazi, Adolph Eichmann, who defended himself at the Nuremberg Trials by saying that he was simply following orders when he commanded the deaths of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.

This is what blind obedience gets us – a society of Nazis willing to do anything if told to do so by the proper authorities.

Parents and teachers are in a delicate situation then.

We’re responsible for guiding children into adulthood, and that often does require a measure of obedience. The question is how to get there without stripping away a child’s agency? How to get children to do generally what is necessary for their learning while still leaving their independence intact?

Let’s be honest – schools play an essential role in teaching obedience. It’s a critical life skill that helps children learn to follow rules and directions. Without obedience, adolescents would have difficulty following rules at home, at school, and in society.

One of the ways schools teach obedience is through rules and consequences. When children break rules, they face consequences such as being sent to the principal’s office, getting detention or being suspended. Such consequences help children learn that there are repercussions for their actions.

Schools also teach obedience through modeling. Teachers and administrators try to set good examples for children by obeying rules, themselves. When children see adults following the rules, they are more likely to do so themselves.

Finally, schools teach obedience through positive reinforcement. When children do the right thing, they are rewarded with praise, stickers, or other incentives. This positive reinforcement helps children learn that obedience is a good thing and that it is something that should be rewarded.

However, as children grow older, it is just as vital that teachers and parents not only foster obedience but also critical thinking about that obedience.

When a child questions a rule (and they will question it), we should not instantly meet that questioning with negativity or shock. We should calmly and rationally answer.

We should not get angry at questions, we should welcome them. Questioning should be a part of instruction because as educators and parents we should not want blind obedience. We should want trust and understanding.

As Albert Einstein said, “Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.”

I was reminded of this when watching the recent documentary “Shiny Happy People” about the Duggar family. The brood of religious fundamentalist Christians made their TV debut in 2004, going on to become a household name with their TLC show “19 Kids and Counting,” presenting Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their ever-expanding household as a seemingly “perfect” family. 

However, behind the scenes, the family’s theocratic hierarchy led to sexual, emotional, and physical abuse, which was allegedly brushed aside by their church.

In 2015, it was revealed that the Duggars’ eldest son, Josh James, had molested numerous underage girls, including four of his siblings, when he was aged 14 to 15. These revelations led to the cancellation of “19 Kids and Counting.” In 2021, Josh was arrested after police discovered he had been receiving and was in possession of child pornography.

The family belongs to the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), a nondenominational Christian sect that serves as an umbrella organization for several ministries founded by minister Bill Gothard in 1961. 

According to the documentary, IBLP teachings require absolute obedience. Authority is distributed in various circles – God being the highest authority, followed by the family’s father, etc. Women are considered to be among the lowest forms of authority. In fact, two of Josh’s sisters who he had abused were even made to go on TV to speak in defense of their abuser. 

We hear a lot of propaganda from religious fundamentalists about how public schools groom students into being politically liberal. However, teaching blind obedience is the true grooming. It is setting people up to become victims of anyone who they perceive as having authority over them.

This is what made the Duggar children ready made victims for their own brother. It sets children up to be easily abused, gaslit, fooled and dominated.

And in doing research on this topic, I found many articles defending absolute obedience by reference to the Bible. The idea that authority is a hierarchy and we should simply follow the instructions of those above us in that hierarchy is as rampant as it is perverted.

Any discipline adults give to children should be in service of them eventually becoming independent and self-disciplined. That means being able to make independent choices about their own behavior without prompting from an adult.

There is a difference between being self-disciplined and being obedient.

A self-disciplined child will complete an action, regardless of who is watching. She will do the behavior because it is the right thing to do. In contrast, an obedient child may follow directions to please a parent, to avoid a consequence or to receive a reward. Being obedient is following directions or commands from an adult. It is exhibiting “good behavior” when an adult is present. Meanwhile, having self-discipline is making those choices without the presence or reminders from adults.

It may be tempting to see children marching in line or sitting calmly with their hands in their laps and consider that an ideal. But as children grow, we must learn to tolerate more frequent independence.

In fact, we must do more than tolerate it. We must cherish it.

The opposite is so much worse.

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I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Efforts to Legalize Child Labor are the Next Logical Step After Corporate Education Reform

 
Standardized testing. 

 
Privatizing public schools. 

 
Defunding poor students.  

 
What’s next? 

 
Republicans across the United States have an answer – legalizing child labor. 

 
Since 1938 with the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration restricted children younger than 14 from being employed, and put strict rules in place on when those younger than 18 may be employed, for how many hours and in what fields. 

 
Today Republicans across the country seem poised to repeal those protections. 

 
In Wisconsin, Republicans want to allow 14-year-olds to work in bars and restaurants serving alcohol. These kids aren’t legally allowed to drink the beverages they’re pouring but I’m sure that won’t cause any problems. Nooooo! 

 
In Ohio, the GOP majority legislature is trying to allow kids ages 14 and 15 to work until 9 p.m. during the school year with their parents’ permission. Those teens better make sure their homework is done before their work-WORK because there won’t be anytime before bed. (No matter that this is illegal under federal law. I guess the rest of the country will have to change to accommodate the Buckeye State.) 

 
Donald Trump’s former press secretary, nepo baby, and current Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law in March eliminating permits that employers used to have to check to verify a child’s age and their parent’s consent before hiring a minor. Without this, it’s much easier for companies caught violating child labor laws to claim ignorance. But, hey, freedom. Right? 

 
And that’s not even counting measures to loosen child labor laws that have been passed in New Jersey, New Hampshire and Iowa. (Iowa Republicans were even going to let 14- and 15-year-olds work in dangerous fields including mining, logging and meatpacking, before coming to their senses!) In the last two years, GOP Lawmakers have proposed loosening child labor laws in at least 10 states, according to a report published last month by the Economic Policy Institute. Some of these bills became law and others were withdrawn or vetoed. 

 
Make no mistake. These are not aberrations. This is the thrust of the mainstream Republican party today. 

 
National business lobbyists, chambers of commerce and well-funded conservative groups such as Americans for Prosperity – a conservative political network – and the National Federation of Independent Business – an organization that typically aligns with Republicans – are backing the state bills to increase teen participation in the workforce.  

 
Meanwhile, child labor violations have increased by almost 70% since 2018, according to The Department of Labor. The agency is increasing enforcement and asking Congress to allow larger fines against violators. 

 
How did we get here? 

 
Corporate education reform. 

 
It’s like the old adage: if a frog is suddenly dropped into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out and save itself from impending death. But, if the frog is gently placed in lukewarm water, with the temperature rising slowly, it will not perceive any danger to itself and will be cooked to death. 

 
That’s what our national education policy has been for the last two decades. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been slowly raising the temperature and now the water is boiling over. 

 
We’ve been increasingly treating children less as individual humans who are ends in themselves and instead as cogs in the machine, widgets, things to be molded and manipulated for the good of the economy. 

 
Here we have an entire industry of standardized testing that makes its money as a parasite on the public school system. The same multi-billion dollar corporations design the tests, grade the tests and then offer remediation when kids don’t pass the tests. It’s a classic captive market where the provider has no incentive but to perpetuate the conditions that increase its bottom line. Students aren’t the consumers of this product – school districts are – and they have no choice but participate. It’s encoded in federal and state law. They have to play along and are, themselves, judged by the results of that compliance. 

 
Then we have privatization – charter and voucher schools. These are institutions ostensibly set up to educate students, but unlike authentic public schools, these organizations are allowed to turn a profit. Some of them get to hide behind the label “non-profit” but the result is the same. And once you allow financial gain of this sort into the system, that’s what it’s all about. Kids become a means to an end, not an end in themselves.  

 
And let’s not forget how all of this enters into the finances of public schools. Unlike most countries across the globe, education in the US is supported primarily by local taxes. So rich neighborhoods invariably have robust public schools that provide students with all the resources they need. And poor communities have impoverished schools where students get only whatever parents and teachers can scrounge together. In this country, children are not a worthy cause all by themselves – we only care about them if they’re OURS. 

 
The entire apparatus of corporate education reform is focused around jobs. In this ideology, the function of school is to prepare students for employment – that is all. It is not to make students good citizens, knowledgeable voters or even fully realized human beings. Rich kids are prepared for the jobs that will keep them rich. Poor kids are prepared for the service industry – so the rich have someone to wait on them in restaurants and stock grocery store shelves. 

 
The fact that the Covid pandemic has reduced adults willing to continue working in these fields for such low wages has only motivated the wealthy and powerful to fill those vacancies with younger-and-younger people who won’t understand how much they’re being taken advantage of and won’t complain. 

 
For example, take this quote from Rex Tillerson, former ExxonMobil CEO: 

“I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer. What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation. Now is that product in a form that we, the customer, can use it? Or is it defective, and we’re not interested? American schools have got to step up the performance level—or they’re basically turning out defective products that have no future. Unfortunately, the defective products are human beings. So it’s really serious. It’s tragic. But that’s where we find ourselves today.” 

We find the same rhetoric on the left as well as the right. 

 
The Center for American Progress (CAP) – a so-called liberal Washington think tank lead by Barack Obama  and Hillary Clinton minions like John Podesta – repeat the same conservative talking points. For example, CAP published and article called “Preparing American Students for the Workforce of the Future” which read like a companion piece to Tillerson’s diatribe. They did concede that being ready for “civic life” is important as well as being “career ready,” though. 

So far, few Democrats have taken the next logical step along with their Republican colleagues.

And they ARE colleagues. Don’t let the hyped up media culture war distract you. When you take out social issues, America’s two parties are as different as milk chocolate and dark chocolate. They’re the same basic thing separated only by intensity and bitterness.

Republicans are ready to undo child labor protections. Democrats will only take away kids’ rights at school.

 
This is what you get when you dehumanize students. This is what you get when you signal it is okay to be a predator on student needs to help fulfill the needs of the economy. 

 
Money comes first. Students – children – are a distant second.  

 
So finally the chickens of corporate education reform are coming home to roost. I don’t think we’re going to like the eggs. 

Like this post?  Y ou might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

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I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Student Projects are Better Than Tests

 
 
The class was silent. 

 
Students were hunched over their desks writing on paper, looking in books, consulting planners.  

I stood among them ready to help but surprised at the change that had overcome them.  
 

Maybe 10 minutes before I had heard groans, complaints and the kind of whining you only get from students at the end of the year.  
 

“Do we have to keep doing work!?” 
 

“Can’t we just watch a movie!?” 
 

“Ms. X- isn’t doing anything with her students!” 
 

And then I dropped the bomb on them.  
 

We had less than 3 weeks left in the school year. We had just finished our last text. In 8th grade that was “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. In 7th grade it was “Silent to the Bone” by E.L. Konigsburg.  
 

Now was the time for the infamous final project.  
 

Some kids asked me about it at the beginning of the year having heard about it from a brother or sister who had already graduated from my class. 
 

“Mr. Singer,” they’d say, “Is it true you give a 1,000 point project at the end of the year?” 
 

I’d laugh and ask who told them that, or if that sounded credible.  
 

“Do you really think I’d give a 1,000 point project!?” I’d say in my most incredulous voice, and they’d usually laugh along with me.  
 

But some of them still believed it.  
 

That was nearly 9 months ago. Yet it all came flooding back when I passed out the assignment sheet.  
 
 
 

 
In the world of education there are few truths more self-evident than this. 
 

Projects are better than tests. 
 

Just think about it for a minute. 
 

On the one hand you have a project – an extended group of related assignments demonstrating learning and culminating in a product of some sort – a paper, a poster, a movie, a presentation or some mix of these. 
 

On the other hand you have a test – a quick snapshot of skills taken out of context.  
 

Which do you think is the better assessment? 
 

Imagine a musician.  
 

You could have her answers questions about notation, rhythm and theory…. Or you could just have her play music.  
 

Which would best demonstrate that she can play? 
 

It’s the same with other subjects.  
 

Take a test on reading – or actually read.  
 

Take a test on writing – or actually write.  
 

Take a test on math – or actually….  
 

You get the picture.  
 

And so did my students.  
 

I place a huge emphasis on writing in my English Language Arts classes. In 8th grade, my students have already written at least a dozen single paragraph and two multi-paragraph essays. So they’re pretty familiar with the format. I try to get them to internalize it so that it’s almost second nature.  
 

So when the final project comes along, it’s really a culmination of everything we’ve done.  
 

In Harper Lee’s book, there is the symbol of the mockingbird: 
 

“Your father’s right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” 
 

We already discussed how several characters in the book could count as mockingbirds – Tom Robinson, Atticus Finch, Boo Radley, etc.  

 
So I have students write about mockingbirds in all of the texts we’ve read this year. That includes “The Outsiders” by S. E. Hinton, “The Diary of Anne Frank” and several short stories.  

 
In 7th grade, we’re at a slightly different place. 

 
At the end of the year, students have written nearly as many single paragraph essays but no multi-paragraph ones yet. I use the final project to introduce them to the concept and explain how it’s the culmination of what we’ve done before.  

 
Students write about characters that they like from all the stories we’ve read throughout the year. These would be characters from texts as diverse as the one by Konigsburg, “The Giver” by Lois Lowery, “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens and several short stories.  

 
As projects go, it’s kind of narrow.  
 

In the past, I’ve had students make movies together interviewing various characters from their texts. I’ve had them design posters extolling various aspects of the Civil Rights movement. I’ve had them design graphics explaining the difference between internal and external conflict.  
 

But this is the end of the year – time to keep it simple.  
 

There’s actually a lot of research supporting this kind of assessment. 

Two separate studies were published by Lucas Education Research with Michigan State University (MSU), the University of Southern California (USC), and the University of Michigan. Researchers took either high school students or third graders and put them through a Project Based Learning (PBL) curriculum. 

The high school experiment conducted by MSU and USC involved 6,000 students in science and humanities from 114 schools about half of which were from low-income households. Students who were taught Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. Government and Politics and AP Environmental Science with a PBL approach outperformed their peers on AP exams by 8 percentage points in the first year and were more likely to earn a passing score of 3 or above, giving them a chance to receive college credit. In the second year, the gap widened to 10 percentage points. One key finding of the study, which included large urban school districts, was that the higher scores were seen among both students of color and those from lower-income households. 

The experiment with third-graders produced similar results. Students from a variety of backgrounds in PBL classrooms scored 8 percentage points higher than peers on a state science test. These results held regardless of a student’s reading level. 

 
In some ways, this should be obvious.  

When you put assessment in context it is more accurate. When you divorce it from its academic context (as you do with tests) it’s more abstract and less accurate. 
 

The problem is one of time and ease of execution. 
 

Put simply – tests are easy to give and grade. Projects are difficult.  
 

Even designing a good project can take lots of trial and error. Tests are often prepackaged and easy to design – you just have questions clustered around whatever skills you were hoping students would learn. 
 

It is very difficult for teachers to design entire courses with projects at every step of the way. Some might say it isn’t even desirable since such a course would probably not be able to cover as much material as traditional curriculum and it is generally preferable to use different modes of assessment in a single course. Let’s not forget that some students excel at tests and would suffer academically if the only kind of assessments were project based.  
 

My personal philosophy is one of moderation. Use projects when you can and when appropriate – but not always. And if you’re going to test, a teacher created assessment is orders of magnitude more valuable than a standardized one. 

 
And in terms of projects, the best is at the end. What better way to demonstrate the cumulative learning of a course than through a cumulative project?  

My students seem to agree. 

 
After the initial anxiety of such a hefty project, my kids in both grades settle down pretty quickly and get to work. I think they find the project comfortable because they’ve been exposed to almost every part of it before. This just brings it all together under one project.  
 

It’s the opposite of learned helplessness. Students already know they can do it. All they have to do is step up and get it done. 
 

That’s also why I make the project worth such a huge amount of points.  
 

I already double points for the last grading period. Doing that and having such a hefty final project sends the message to kids that they can’t slack off now. The work they do in the closing days of school will have an outsized impact on their grade. If kids care at all about that – and most still do in middle school – they’ll make the effort.  
 

It also helps fill the last few days and weeks with a focus on process. Nothing has to be memorized. Nothing is beyond anyone’s ability. We’re going to work together – each student and me – to make sure the final project gets done.  
 

Usually they accomplish it with flying colors.  
 

It’s something they often remember and pass on in legend to their younger siblings who bring it up in hushed tones when they enter my classroom for the first time. 

 

Like this post?  Y ou might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!