Six on Schools: Larry Cuban: Kids are cruel. They learn it from us; Changing One’s Mind about School Reform; Bronx Students
philip panaritis
"Parents are children’s first and most important examples of how to live in the world, with teachers close behind. But they aren’t the only role models. What the boys at St. Michael’s are learning is that the way to wield power is through cruelty – a message too many adults seem eager to share.
The chilling backdrop to the revelations out of St. Michael’s is a provincial government persistently targeting vulnerable youth. Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives recently eliminated the position of children’s advocate, which for the past 40 years worked with young people involved in the justice system and foster care.
Healthy sexuality is a direct target of this archaic government – one of its very first actions was to saddle teachers with a 20-year-old sex-ed curriculum. Ontario students are being kept ignorant about the lives of LGBTQ people and families, as well as the very concept of informed consent.
And, just hours after another allegation slipped out of St. Michael’s on Saturday, PC caucus members passed a resolution stating that gender identity isn’t “real.” At first, it seemed like that transphobic convention outcome was set to become official policy, but on Monday, Premier Doug Ford backtracked, saying that wasn’t his intention.
He hopefully won’t flip flop (as he has on LGBTQ issues before), since youth absolutely need clear, unwavering information on healthy relationships, resisting peer pressure and, yes, what it means to be gay: Some of the alleged incidents at St. Michael’s have distinctly homophobic undertones.
Eliminating modern sex education – which has been shown to reduce sexually transmitted infections, teen pregnancy and violence – doesn’t make any sense. So let me echo what American journalists have been saying about their government for months now: When those in power harm the less powerful for no good reason, it’s the very cruelty that’s the point"
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"I began teaching high school in 1955 filled with the passion to teach history to youth and help them find their niche in the world while making a better society. At that time, I believed wholeheartedly in words taken from John Dewey’s “Pedagogic Creed” (1897): “… education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.”
And I tried to practice those utopian words in my teaching in Cleveland (OH) and Washington, D.C. between the early 1960s and mid-1970s. While in retrospect I could easily call this faith in the power of teaching and schooling to make a better life and society naïve, I do not. That passionate idealism about teaching and the role that schooling plays in a democratic, market-driven society gave meaning and drive to those long days working as a teacher, getting married, starting a family, and taking university classes at night.
That confident belief in the power of schools to reform society took me to Washington, D.C. in 1963 to teach Peace Corps returnees how to become teachers at Cardozo High School. I stayed nearly a decade in D.C. teaching and administering school-site and district programs aimed at turning around schools in a largely black city, a virtual billboard for severe inequalities.
I worked in programs that trained young teachers to teach in low-performing schools, programs that organized residents in impoverished neighborhoods to improve their community, programs that created alternative schools and district-wide professional development programs for teachers and administrators. While well intentioned federal and D.C. policymakers attacked the accumulated neglect that had piled up in schools over decades, they adopted these reform-driven programs haphazardly without much grasp of how to implement them in schools and classrooms.
I have few regrets for what I and many other like-minded individuals did during those years. I take pride in the many teachers and students who participated in these reforms who were rescued from deadly, mismanaged schools, and ill-taught classrooms. But the fact remains that by the mid-1970s, with a few notable exceptions, most of these urban school reforms others and I had worked in had become no more than graffiti written in snow. And the social inequalities that we had hoped to reduce, persisted."
"Findings/Results: Even after considering measures of student behavior and other factors, I find that mathematics teachers are more likely to contact parents of third-generation Black and Latino youth about disruptive behavior than parents of third-generation White youth. Mathematics and English teachers are less likely to contact immigrant Asian parents about academic and behavioral concerns, even when students are struggling. Teachers are also less likely to contact minority parents with news of accomplishments.
Conclusions/Recommendations: The findings of this study point to the important role that race and nativity play in shaping teacher communication with parents. Education policy should be cognizant that racial/ethnic and immigrant disparities exist in teacher-parent contact, and encourage more training in teacher preparation programs and professional development coursework for teachers and school administrators. Moreover, existing programs and interventions on multicultural / diversity training should be evaluated for their impact on teacher perceptions and behavior."
"I don’t think you’re going to find an easier tool for creating simple charts and graphs than Chartify.
I don’t think it’s the sort of site where you upload an excel spreadsheet of data. But if you – or your students – want to visually display a few simple statistics, it’s super-easy.
It’s also free.
I’m adding it to The Best Tools To Make Simple Graphs Online."
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Testimony I will Give to NY City Council About Discrimination Against Black and LatinX Students In Access to School Teams in New York City.
My name is Dr Mark Naison. I am a professor of African American Studies and History at Fordham who has written extensively on Race and Sports in US History. But more important, for purposes of this hearing, I was a graduate of New York City public schools who ended up as captain and number 1 singles player on the Columbia University tennis team, and who had two children, Sara and Eric, who attended New York public schools and played varsity tennis and baseball at Yale University, None of us would have had that opportunity had not we played on public school teams in middle school and high school. It is simply unconscionable that many students in New York City public schools , the vast majority of whom are Black and LatinX, attend schools which have a tiny number of school teams of no teams at all.
Not only does this undermine student morale and academic engagement, it discriminates against the students denied sports opportunities in college admissions. As James Shulman and William Bowen point out in their book "The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values" being a recruited athlete is the single most powerful admissions advantage in getting into the nation's top colleges, having more than twice the impact of being an under represented minority or a child of an alumnus. Since 20 percent of students at Yale, Harvard and Princeton, and 40 percent of students at Williams, are recruited athletes, lacking access to sports puts Black and LatinX students in New York City at an added disadvantage to those they already experience due to race and class
As my mandated two minutes of testimony comes to a close, let me talk about a specific school where this criminal denial of educational opportunity takes place. On the Roosevelt Educational Campus across the street from Fordham, there are five high schools which have no men's and women's soccer teams, even though a good portion of their students come from West African and Central American countries where soccer is the major sport, What this means, the way I see it, there is a whole generation of future Fordham, Columbia and Yale students in the Bronx, students who only differ from me and my children in race and class, whose talents and opportunities are being suppressed because of lack of access to athletic teams
This discrimination has to stop NOW. Every New York City public high school student must have, at the very minimum, opportunity to play on school teams, in soccer, tennis, track and field, baseball and softball, volleyball, and swimming, Until that happens, New York City is not out of compliance with Title Six of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is out of touch with the egalitarian values this City claims to stand for to the nation and the world ,
