Six on History: Schools
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"What happens to schools when it is safe to reopen fully? Pundits call for more testing, longer school days, anything to make up for “learning loss.”
Gretchen Dziadosz, executive director of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, has a better idea: community schools.
She writes in the Columbus Dispatch:
There is a cost-effective way to keep school doors open 12 hours a day and which provides organized services to students in addition to their normal in-person class time. These are schools in which parents don’t need to pay for after-school day care or private tutoring and students can complete their homework before they come home. Already overburdened, this solution prevents an increase in workload for educators. This solution is called the community schools model.
There are already more than 5,000 U.S. community schools, and research shows they succeed in improving student achievement. This proven, successful model can be implemented in many more communities if policymakers, parents and schools have the desire to make it happen.
Imagine school buildings and programs open to families and students all year.
Imagine a school in which students have available tutoring, supervised homework time, mentoring, enhanced science, reading, art, music and sports programs, school clubs, programs with the local zoo or library, computer labs with internet access, dance classes, community theater, whatever the community chooses to provide.
Imagine a school in which the whole family can access programs such as COVID-19 vaccinations, eye exams, mental health services, GED programs, adult enrichment classes, tax services, insurance assistance and sports…
Working together with the school, community resources are brought into the school to improve access and opportunities for students and families. Students struggling with math might have community volunteer tutors. Students without broadband internet at home have access to the computer lab. Students who need reading assistance can work with the local library program.
Read more about how community schools can transforms schools and communities."
- Ed Tech Digest
- A Look Back: New Activity I’m Using With ELLs: “Critical Thinking Dialogues”
- Just Sent-Out Free Monthly Email Newsletter
- My Favorite Posts That Appeared In February
- “2 Years on, What Have We Learned About Teaching in a Pandemic?”
- New Ukraine Teaching & Learning Resources
- More Recent Articles
"Ten years ago, in another somewhat futile attempt to reduce the backlog of resources I want to share, I began this occasional “Ed Tech Digest” post where I share three or four links I think are particularly useful and related to…ed tech, including some Web 2.0 apps.
You might also be interested in THE BEST ED TECH RESOURCES OF 2021 – PART ONE, as well as checking out all my edtech resources."
Here are this week’s choices:
MemeDb seems like an easy way to make memes. I’m adding it to The Best Tools For Making Internet ” Memes”
Memory looks like an interesting flashcard maker. I’m adding it to The Best Tools To Make Online Flashcards.
Instacap lets you annotate websites. I’m adding it to The Best Applications For Annotating Websites.
Test Me is a new flash card creator that uses Artificial Intelligence. I’m adding it to The Best Tools To Make Online Flashcards.
Five Tools for Making Word Clouds is from Richard Byrne. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About “Word Clouds” ... "
I thought that new – and veteran – readers might find it interesting if I began sharing my best posts from over the years. You can see the entire collection here.
This post originally appeared in 2021:
geralt / Pixabay
I haven’t done a very good job promoting speaking practice with my ELL History class this year (it certainly hasn’t helped that – up until this past week – we had been on full-time distance learning.
Between a desire to want to do some new and different activities during the final two months of school and a desire to add speaking practice to the mix, I came up with a new activity I’m calling “Critical Thinking Dialogues.”
I first begin with a short Read Aloud related to a topic we had studied. In the example I’m discussing in this post, it was a Read Aloud about students having to drop out of school to work and help support their families during The Great Depression.
The Read Aloud is followed by a dialogue, which I first model. It includes several blanks that students have to complete that basically answer a question with their reasoning that supports it, and that also includes some humor. In some ways, it’s an oral and simplified version of the ABC Paragraph. Groups of three students go into Zoom breakout rooms (or practice in my physical classroom) to work together to fill-in-the-blanks and then perform for the entire class.
Here’s The Great Depression Critical Thinking Dialogue (you can download it here).
Great Depression Dialogue:
Student One: It was pretty interesting learning about the Great Depression.
Student Two: Yes, it was interesting. I didn’t know so many people didn’t have jobs for such a long time.
Student One: It lasted ten years!
Student Two: And so many people didn’t have enough food to eat!
Student One: If you lived back then, do you think you would have left school and tried to get a job to help your family?
Student Two: I think ______________________ because _______________________. What do you think you would have done?
Student One: I think ______________________ because ______________________. What do you think you would have done, __________________________?
Student Three: I think _____________________ because ______________________. If I left school one good thing would be that I wouldn’t have to take Mr. Ferlazzo’s class. It’s so boring!
Student One and Two – together: BORING!!!!!
Is it an earth-shatteringly creative instructional activity?
Of course, it isn’t!
But it’s a nice “twist” on the typical dialogue, and it can be modified for any content class. They can be made increasingly more demanding and, ultimately, students can create their own.
I’ll have quite a collection of them by the end of the school year, and we’ll include downloadable versions of them in the second edition of The ELL/ESL Teacher’s Survival Guide. The second edition will be out next year, and will be at least twice the length of the first edition. And, as in all of “my” books (in quotation marks because many, like the Survival Guide, are co-authored), all the student handouts for this one will be available for download without having to purchase the book or registering on any site.
Why Has Public School Teaching Been Stable over Time (Part 7) by larrycuban
"The realities of teaching an elementary school class for six hours a day or meeting five classes daily in secondary schools banged up newbies. In order to survive their first year, novices had to learn quickly and deeply the tradition of teacher-centered instruction that dominated nearly all public schools. Each generation of rookie teachers, then, learned different ways of teaching while unlearning many (but not all) what they brought from their university courses in order to survive their initial years in classrooms[i].
The literature of new teachers surviving (or exiting) their first year of teaching is legion. From hundreds of descriptions, one paragraph from a novice nicely captures those 180 school days where a 20-something teacher not only encounters her first batch of students but lasts sufficiently to continue into a second year:
Overwhelming is the word that best describes my first year of teaching. I wasn’t prepared for the multitude of things on my plate. I didn’t have a handle on classroom management, and I left each day feeling exhausted and defeated. [ii]
One would think from the above paragraph, books written by first year teachers and war stories exchanged with friends and family that most newbies quit after that initial year. Not so. Many continued to teach. Helping to reduce attrition have been strong district and university efforts to ease entry of rookies through fellowship and residency programs, especially aimed at minority teachers. Such efforts, small as they are have begun slowly to reduce the attrition that does occur. A recent study of 1900 first-year teachers covering the years 2007-2012 found that 10 percent of novices left after the first year; 12 percent after year three, 15percent in year four, and 17 percent in the fifth year—or over half within five years.[iii]
As in most professions, attrition of beginning teachers occurs in the early years but by the fifth year, exiting the classroom has settled down and most teachers have gained sufficient experience in comfortably managing groups of students and teaching required content and skills.
But in the process of survival and gaining confidence in being a teacher, these rookies also absorb the existing cultures of their suburban, rural, and urban schools. The learning curve rises steeply for newcomers as they learn the ropes of managing groups of students and crafting lessons.
Newbies toss out some of the research knowledge and techniques learned in university courses and practice teaching stored in their grab-bag and cook up new ways of teaching learned from trial-and-error in actual lessons they taught and techniques picked up from colleagues who they see as effective.
Should rookies stay at the school or try another school, by years three to five they have become experienced teachers. They have absorbed existing norms of “good” teaching and ways of being an effective teacher in their schools that are considered appropriate by colleagues and principals. Eventually, many novices become members of a stable teacher corps within a school.[iv]
Thus, newcomers slowly inducted into the culture and ways of teaching in a school become, in time, part of the cadre of experienced teachers who continuously juggle both stability and change as they welcome new recruits to their profession.
What’s missing from this brief description of the all-important journey of going from university training program, to classroom rookie to experienced teacher is the decisive role that the unnoticed, taken-for-granted structures of the age-graded school play in converting novices into veterans thereby sustaining stability and change. Here is where the age-graded school structure and its “grammar of schooling” enter the analysis.
[i] The classic example is what university educators often called “classroom management” and public school teachers referred to as “discipline” or “controlling students” in order for them to learn. Over time, university educators incorporated into their teacher education curriculum either courses or short modules where “classroom management” techniques were taught. See, for example, Gordon Eisenman, et. al., “Bringing Reality to Classroom Management in Teacher education,” Professional Educator, 2015 at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1062280.pdf
[ii] Cindy Bourdo, “The Biggest Lesson of My First Year Teaching,” Edutopia, February 11, 2019
[iii]Lucinda Gray, et. al. “Public School Teacher Attrition and Mobility in the First Five Years,” National Center for Education Statistics, April 2015)., p. 3.l; National Center for Teacher Residencies, “Equitable Access To Teachers of Color Matters,” at: https://nctresidencies.org/
Residency programs where aspiring teachers spend a year with an experienced teacher in an on-site apprenticeship while attending after-school university classes have helped acclimate new teachers to the unrelenting demands of classroom teaching. Many of these programs recruit and train minority teachers so that after a year they have become licensed and earned a Master’s degree. See: https://nctresidencies.org/
[iv] Susan Kardos, et. al., “Counting on Coleeagues: New Teachers Encounter the Professional Cultures of Their Schools,” 2001, Educational Administration Quarterly, 37(2), pp. 250-290.
"Every February, it comes around: Black History Month. It may seem like a feel-good event that has nothing to do with the nitty gritty of school policy and everything to do with uplift. But in my mind, the Black excellence we celebrate and try to nurture this month is the very reason we scrutinize one of the most foundational school issues we face: School finance.
Before I get to that, let me say the obvious: Black history should not be relegated to one month a year. And it should not be limited to predictable recitations of Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver and Martin Luther King Jr. We need to go deeper.
We need to celebrate intellectual luminaries like Mary McLeod Bethune, Ida B. Wells, Bayard Rustin and Carter G. Woodson—the man who lobbied so hard to establish Black History Month back in the 1920s. And I want to celebrate Black excellence in today’s leaders. People like Rep. Maxine Waters, who has steadily held her ground to protect democracy; Sen. Raphael Warnock, who courageously ran for office in a state unlikely to elect him—and wound up tipping the Senate toward the Democrats by winning a seat once held by a Confederate general; Jason Reynolds, who publishes true-to-life stories that resonate with and engage Black children; and Nikole Hannah-Jones, who gave us the 1619 Project and continues to lift up all the history that has been missing from our classrooms for so very long.
But as much as we have to celebrate, there is still so much more to do. School finance illustrates the point.
Brown v. Board did not save us
To begin with, we all know that Brown v. Board of Education did not solve the problem of segregated schools. “Schools are still segregated, and Black children are paying the price.” That statement is taken directly from the Economic Policy Institute, whose 2020 study proves it as fact. EPI shows that nearly 70 percent of Black children attend a school where a majority of students are Black, Hispanic, Asian or American Indian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of white children attend such schools.
What makes this so unacceptable is that where there is racial segregation, there is economic segregation. Nearly three-quarters of all Black students attend a high-poverty school, while fewer than a third of white students do the same.
This is a shameful inequity. But it is in line with what Black people have historically experienced. Let’s start with the 19th century, when we were shut out of education entirely: Reading and writing were crimes for enslaved people, punishable by whipping or imprisonment. Beginning in the 1930s, redlining, a housing policy that limited Black people to living in certain neighborhoods, separated and underfunded Black communities, including their schools. In the 1950s, Black children were denied any schooling when white families shut down some public schools rather than allow their children to attend with Black neighbors.
School finance and equity
We have come a long way from some of these policies, though we still have a long way to go—and to be truthful, we still feel their impact. But rather than despair about continuing economic inequity in our schools, I am looking to fresh statistics that give us the tools to address it. The Shanker Institute’s recent report, The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems, is a great start.
“School funding is a huge factor in the equal opportunity realm,” says Matt Di Carlo, one of the report's co-authors, in a blog post last year. “Districts in which funding is more adequate tend to score higher. No surprise: Funding matters.”
Here are some top lines from the report:
- Education opportunity in the United States is highly unequal. The poorest districts, on average, spend 17 percent below estimated adequate levels. Meanwhile, the highest-income districts spend 36 percent above adequate levels.
- There are stark discrepancies in funding by student race and ethnicity. Black and Latinx students are twice as likely as white students to be in underfunded districts. Spending for the typical Black student’s district is 21 percent below adequate. By contrast, spending is 21 percent above adequate levels in the typical white student’s district.
- In 20 states, K-12 funding is regressive, meaning the poorest districts (which need the funding most) get less funding than higher-income districts.
Many of us don’t need these eye-popping numbers to know the details of inequitable education. We feel it in our bones.
I grew up in the housing projects of Miami and attended Title I schools the entire time. Ninety percent of us were on free and reduced lunch. And the education we received—as hard as our teachers and administrators worked—was inferior. Our textbooks were dated. Our school ceilings were falling in. Our air conditioning and heating systems were broken. Our teachers were underpaid and overworked.
This is what it looks like to be funded “below adequate levels,” as the report frames it.
I was lucky, though: We had a music program at my high school. As a young boy with a severe stutter and a family with little money for any of life’s extras, music was a lifeline for me.
Our little band did big things because we had remarkable teachers, not because the state funded us. We all borrowed instruments from the school—20-year-old instruments, in many cases. I vividly remember watching the band director load up his car with old bassoons, saxophones and clarinets at the end of the school day so he could repair them in his home. I later learned that Mr. MacKenzie stayed up until 12 and 1 a.m. to fix those instruments. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have been able to perform at Friday night’s football game, or at the local social hall or the church. This is how teachers go above and beyond—back then and today.
Later I experienced inequities at Bethune-Cookman University. Like all HBCUs, we had a history of operating on a shoestring, and that meant limited funds for the band. When I made the state’s intercollegiate band, I saw peers from primarily white institutions with their professional grade instruments. I saw their athletic facilities as well: Their gyms were bigger, and they had ice baths and massage tables and gleaming locker rooms. It goes without saying, we had none of that.
My later experience as a band teacher, again at Title I schools in Miami, showed me inadequate funding from another angle. We never had enough uniforms for everyone. The uniforms we did have were tattered or didn’t fit properly.
And yet we persisted.
That’s what we have to do today. We have to persist. We have to continue to fight for the funding our schools need. And we have to make sure that more money and resources go to the schools that need it most.
Moving forward
This month, as we enjoy earnest proclamations and Black History Month celebrations, listen to young people read Dr. King’s speeches and honor our heroes, let’s not ignore the hard work of digging into the details that contribute to Black excellence—like school finance.
What would it look like if we could use this report as a benchmark to see where we need to go? To advocate for fair funding? What if it were a starting line full of possibility for improvement? What if we used these statistics to convince policymakers to take the politics out of school finance and instead directly address actual student need?
Our moments of joy in accomplishment and even survival are unassailable. But we have to look at continuing inequity as well. Dive into school finances with unwavering advocacy. Build political will. Get into the weeds with state legislatures and district school boards.
We must make sure all students—the ones who live in high-poverty areas as well as the ones who do not—have the resources they need. It is our job to ensure a high-quality education for every one of them.
