Right now, people who have never taught students or been the principal of a school are in charge of education. Designers of standardized tests and analyzers of standardized test data wrote the Common Core Standards. Those standards will neither motivate student learning nor close the achievement gap. We must look, instead, to educators for answers about how to do both.

The answers will always focus on active learning in which students are taught to ask their own questions, collaborate with one another, think critically, and communicate clearly orally and in writing about the personal meaning they create from their learning experiences. None of these skills are taught through the Common Core Standards.

At the school level, however, educators are creating their own answers to the learning problems that students are having in their schools.  At Clintondale High School in Michigan, the principal, Greg Green, and the faculty decided upon a delivery of instruction model, called “the flip”, to improve student learning for their predominately high-risk student population. They fostered active learning by “flipping” class time and homework time. The students receive the information about the academic subject at home via technology and spend class time in active learning as they ask their own questions, collaborate with their peers, write and speak about their new knowledge, and apply what they have learned in new ways.

Graduation rates have increased; college acceptances have increased; attendance is up. Before “the flip”, 52% of the students failed English; 44% failed math; 41% failed science; 28% failed social studies. With”the flip”, 19% failed English; 13% failed math; 19% failed science, and 9% failed social studies. The students are motivated to learn, and the teachers feel the satisfaction of meeting students’ needs better.

The accompanying video describes “the flip”. Whether it is “the flip” or another innovation, the two absolutely necessary steps to improve education are:

1. Put aside the mind-numbing, anti-learning Common Core Standards
2. Empower educators to find ways to engage their students in the real learning of questioning, collaborating. thinking critically, and communicating about the knowledge they have created.

Then and only then will learning for all students improve and the achievement gap narrow.

 

 

If you cannot view the video, please click on the link below:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr_yZrPYHO8]

Ten thousand students in seventeen schools were in lockdown in the Fairfield , Connecticut Public Schools on October 23^rd because the two high schools and one elementary school received threatening phone calls. The caller, according to the Fairfield Police, proclaimed that he was on his way to those schools with pipe bombs and an M16 rifle. When those calls came in, the two high schools and one elementary school went into immediate lockdown, and, within four minutes, all of the other fourteen Fairfield Public Schools were also in lockdown.

All 10,000 students were in the care of their teachers and school administrators.

Word went out fast. The news outlets put the state on alert. Police and fire departments from neighboring towns, including Newtown, sent assistance. Some parents gathered near the schools; others heeded the advice of the police chief who asked parents to remain away in case emergency vehicles needed access to the schools. Speculation was rampant. Anxiety was everywhere. Those whom the parents treasured most in the world, their children, were in those schools. A generation of the town of Fairfield was in those schools.

With all of the speculation and all of the anxiety, none of the parents interviewed and none of the reporters, talking about the increasingly tense situation from every possible angle, expressed one single doubt that the students were in good hands.  And they were in good hands.

Teachers in all of the classrooms locked their classroom doors and committed themselves to caring for their students for whatever lay ahead. Some of the students were not in classrooms when the lockdown occurred but were in unlocked areas of the schools. Teachers in all of those situations thought quickly and made heroic decisions to create places as safe as possible for those students. Those teachers put themselves in vulnerable positions in order to protect the students if the threats became real. The students could not have been in better hands.

About two hours after the first call, the police determined there was no danger. The lockdown ended, and the students were dismissed early from all the schools. As students were leaving one of the high schools, reporters interviewed them. All of the students said that their teachers had kept them calm and that they all knew what to do because of the lockdown drills held regularly at the school.

The Fairfield teachers and administrators proved on Friday what most parents know about their children’s teachers and their children’s school administrators: They are the best of us. We trust our kids to them. And they earn our trust every day.

If we can trust our children’s safety, their very lives, to them, we certainly can trust them to design English, math, social studies, science, world language, art, music, and physical education programs and reliable ways to assess what students learn in those programs.

Let’s stop leaving the education of our children to people who have never taught even one class and have never spent even one day as a school principal.

Bill and Melinda Gates have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the Common Core standards, which are neither intellectually sound nor based on any research, and to influence promotion of those standards through their financial support of major media outlets and educational and civic organizations. It’s just money talking.

Arnie Duncan and Dan Malloy have established rewards and punishments for students, teachers, and schools, based on the unreliable measures of standardized tests. It’s just political power talking.

David Coleman, chief architect of the Common Core and now president of the College Board, has mandated how reading and writing will be taught in kindergarten through 12^th grade, based solely on his own preferences. One of his preferences is that students read much less literature. David Coleman’s Common Core standards demonstrate that he does not understand at all how students develop as readers, writers, and thinkers. It’s just arrogance talking.

None of them know how kids learn. None of them know what real learning is. None of them know what real assessments are.

Those people who mistakenly call themselves “reformers” joined together to tell us that learning is only what can be measured on standardized tests and that good teachers are those whose students are good test takers. But what standing do those people have? What do they really know? Why should we trust them with our children’s education?

Let’s, instead, opt out of the misguided, damaging, and misnamed “reform” and put decisions about the education of our children in the hands of educators. Let’s ask teachers and administrators who love and care for our children every single day what good learning is and how to assess it. It is educators, working together, who can best set standards and design assessments that are in the best interests of students.

On October 23^rd, the people of Fairfield knew whom to trust.

Let’s do the same.

Two days ago, I received the following message:

” Just wanted to let you know that I passed my dissertation defense yesterday! 

Thank you for believing in me. Here is my first publication.”

I taught the writer of that message 24 years ago and have not been in touch with her since then. Even though I left that school, moved on to another school district, changed my last name and where I live, she  found me through social media. She now holds a doctorate in clinical social work.

I remember the paper she wrote in my sophomore Honors American Literature class. She analyzed the play, The Death of a Salesman, by focusing on the flute playing that was mentioned in the stage directions. No student of mine had ever written about the flute playing and drawn the conclusions that she did. She wrote that essay after reading the play carefully, responding to it in detail, sharing her questions and insights with the others in the class and me, and listening to our questions and insights as well. Her thinking and her writing were perceptive, innovative, and totally her own.

I remember my former student and she remembers me. That is what teaching and learning are all about.

That American literature course was not based on the 188 isolated and mundane skills that the non-educators who wrote the Common Core mandate to be taught in every sophomore English class in the country. (That is more than one skill per day for those of you who are counting). That course was based on collaborative curriculum work, initiated by the English teachers in that school district as we worked together over summers and during the school year to figure out how to best teach based on how students best learn.

Then this morning, I read an article by Gina Barreca, who once loved being a student and now loves being a teacher, in which she wrote about teachers and their students.  She gave examples of  teachers who enliven their students’ lives with a sense of endless  possibilities and how those students give joy to their teachers as they realize those possibilities for themselves. It is hearing about the kind of relationships that Gina Barreca writes about and the kind of message that I received two days ago that will inspire idealistic, bright young people to want to teach. It is inviting teachers into the dynamic and empowering discussions about teaching and learning, rather than handing them scripted Common Core lessons, that will keep teachers with the best minds in our classrooms.

The Huffington Post reported in November 2013 that there were 11 people who were greatly influencing education yet have never taught. That list was comprised of: Arnie Duncan, Bill Gates, David Coleman, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Harkin, Rupert Murdoch, Janet Napolitano, Wendy Kopp, Kevin Johnson, Cory Booker, and Mark Zuckerberg. Other givers of big money with very tight strings attached, such as Eli Broad and the Walton (Walmart) family, as well as front groups such as Families for Excellent Schools and Educators for Excellence could today be added to the list of those who influence education but have no experience as educators.

Of that Huffington Post list,  Arnie Duncan, Bill Gates, David Coleman, Michael Bloomberg, Wendy Kopp, and Mark Zuckerberg remain influential in K-12 education today.  The embattled Arnie Duncan still insists that test and punish is the way to close the achievement gap and setting up competition (races) among public schools is the way to improve education for all kids. David Coleman, as the chief writer and designer of the Common Core English Standards, leaves behind the legacy in all U.S. schools that implement the Common Core of less literature being read,  student engagement being eliminated as a goal, and writing taught as  formulas without personal involvement of the student writers. And he now he is president of the College Board so we can only guess at that damage. Bill Gates is funding every possible avenue for discussing Common Core, including the League of Women Voters, and every possible avenue for implementing the Common Core, including teachers unions and Educators for Excellence. Michael Bloomberg, although no longer mayor of New York City, still exerts great influence on the governor of New York and uses his vast wealth and powerful connections to support the cause for charter schools. Wendy Kopp, founder and now Chair of the Board of Teach for America, continues to insist that 5 weeks training in the summer is enough education and an internship under an accomplished  mentor is not necessary to produce a qualified teacher.

Mark Zuckerberg may be an outlier. After donating 100 million dollars to the Newark schools and realizing that endeavor failed because educators and parents were left out of the process, he and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan who has been a teacher, have now donated 120 million to San Francisco and Bay Area schools with the stipulation that all efforts must focus on teacher and parent involvement. He has learned that it is teachers who know about teaching and learning, and it is parents and teachers, not investors or politicians, who care about the children. We will have to watch this endeavor.

Here is what The Huffington Post had to say about the non-educators who have been and still are in charge of much of what has been called “reform” but actually should be called malpractice as suggested in another Huffington Post article:

They design teacher evaluation systems, teacher training guidelines and the types of standards that need to be taught. Yet, they have never been teachers themselves.

These days, being a teacher is clearly not a prerequisite for becoming a leader in education. In fact, some of the leaders with the most daily influence on classrooms come from entirely unrelated fields.

Below we have compiled a list of some of the most influential leaders in education who have never been teachers.

• Arne Duncan
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  While our nation’s foremost leader in education policy has extensive experience in education administration, he was never actually a teacher. In the early ’90s, Duncan headed the Ariel Education Initiative, a program that helped fund college for inner-city kids in Chicago. He became the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools system in 2001, before assuming his post as U.S. Secretary of Education.

  Education was an important part of Duncan’s early life. His mother runs an after-school tutoring center, while his late father taught at the University of Chicago.

• Bill Gates
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  Microsoft mogul Bill Gates has risen as an education influential in recent years through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation’s education initiatives have pumped billions of dollars into advocacy groups and research organizations that support pro-education reform causes like charter schools and teacher evaluation systems.

  In addition, Gates himself has reportedly taken a strong personal interest in improving student outcomes across the country. His foundation is also helping to fund the implementation and promotion of the groundbreaking Common Core State Standards, a set of national education benchmarks that have been adopted in most states.

  However, some teachers resent his unduly influence in the field. Several months ago, a website called “Teachers’ Letters to Bill Gates” emerged. The site publishes letters from educators who feel the philanthropist has impacted their classrooms in negative ways.

  “We are teachers with questions. We are teachers who no longer want to live behind the Gates. We are teachers who are not funded by the Gates Foundation,” the website’s “About” section reads.

• David Coleman
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  David Coleman, a figure The Huffington Post has dubbed “the most influential education figure you’ve never heard of,” is the president of the College Board, a national educational organization that is currently redesigning the SAT. Prior to his post at College Board, he was “the chief architect” of the Common Core  English Language Arts Standards.

  While nearly every teacher and student in the U.S. will be impacted by Coleman’s ideas, the education influential was never a teacher. During his early years, he was exposed to the world of education through his mother, who was a university president.

• Michael Bloomberg
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  Changing education in New York City was a centerpiece of Michael Bloomberg’s agenda during his three terms as mayor. A 2002 law, which was renewed in 2009,granted the mayor direct control over the city’s public schools. During the rest of his time in office, Bloomberg worked to expand charter schools in the city, make teachers more accountable through evaluations tied to student test scores and close what he deemed to be failing schools.

  However, it does not seem his legacy will end as he vacates his mayoral post. As HuffPost’s Joy Resmovits wrote, “his legacy in remaking the city’s schools was at the center of local and state elections nationwide, sometimes explicitly” this November.

  Successful businessman? Yes. Teacher? No.

  Mark Zuckerberg
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  Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, made a big splash in the education world in 2010 when he agreed to donate $100 million to public schools in Newark, N.J. In 2013, Zuckerberg and other technology influentials launched a political group that pushes for issues including school accountability and STEM education.

  The Silicon Valley boy king was never a teacher.

  Wendy Kopp
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  Wendy Kopp is the founder and chair of the Board of Teach For America, an organization that puts thousands of recent college graduates and professionals in classrooms with disadvantaged youth. Yet, she was never actually a teacher herself.

  Kopp had the idea for Teach For America as an undergraduate at Princeton University. Its model recently went global with an organization she founded called Teach for All.

Language is power. Let’s promise ourselves that we will never say the word “reform” when it refers to initiatives for our schools mandated by those who have never taught in any school.  Those individuals, regardless of their money or their political power, do not understand what it is to teach and what it is to do the demanding, thoughtful, fulfilling work of helping children and adolescents to learn. Let’s, instead, call their initiatives by their right name: malpractice.