Six on History: Schools
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"How and to what degree does a teacher impact a student? I doubt that we will ever be able to gauge the matter. I believe it may boil down to matters of hopefulness and pessimism and the moral imperative of making a choice between them. Surely each one of us, both professional educators and laymen, impacts the lives of people we cross, but we often don't know which ones or to what degree. We must remain hopeful as an article of faith.
I once had a memorable professor at the University of Washington, Donald Warren Treadgold, an eminent scholar of the Soviet Union. Let's be kind and just say that this man, a cold warrior extraordinaire, knew his own mind. He was more than a little famous for that.
Professor Treadgold was a prolific author, and his work was known throughout the world. He authored Lenin and His Rivals; The Great Siberian Migration; Twentieth Century Russia; The West in Russia and China (two volumes); and Freedom: A History.
When I first wandered into one of Professor Treadgold's classes, almost all of my study had been on western Europe. I was a stranger in a strange land in my attempts to learn about Russia and the Soviet Union. Considering myself a hotshot, I plunged forward. But wait. The rub was that Professor Treadgold attempted to teach me a great deal that I found myself resisting at every turn. It all took place within the constraints of academic etiquette, but make no mistake, this was a slugging match. And it was a mismatch, for he knew so much, and I knew so little. I considered him to be an old relic. He considered me to be a dopy, misguided, poorly informed idealist. I dug in. He persisted.
Throughout the following years, my memory of him remained fresh. I continued to remember his disdain for my viewpoints, his deep learning, his patient demeanor, and the overall gentleness of his character. And as the decades passed, I found myself incorporating much of what he had vainly tried to teach me. It dripped into me, consciously and subconsciously. I never swallowed it whole, but the slow drip never stopped. I can now firmly say that he had as great an intellectual impact on me, both morally and intellectually, as any person that I have known.
One day, many years later, I was pecking away at my computer. Suddenly, for no conscious reason, I did googled his name. I found that two years before he had passed away as a result of leukemia. Stunned, I gazed out my window. The sun was going down and it looked cold outside. The streets were empty. I placed both hands over my face and sobbed like a little child."
Teaching Learning Technology
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3) More than half of LI students opt out of taking math tests, Newsday
"More than half of students across 57 Long Island school districts in grades 3-8 opted out of taking the math assessments given earlier this month, a Newsday analysis found.
According to data collected from the districts, 55%, or 45,747 children, declined to take the assessment tests, which were given May 3-14. The data tracks closely to the opt-out rate on the English Language Arts exams given in April, when 52.5% of children across 61 districts did not take the exams, a Newsday survey found.
Of the districts surveyed on the math assessments, 44.6% did not take the exams in Nassau County and 60.5% in Suffolk. Not all districts — there are 124 on Long Island — participated in the survey.
"This year's opt-out numbers demonstrate that Long Island continues to be the national epicenter of the pushback against a test-centered education," Jeanette Deutermann, a Bellmore parent and leader of the Long Island Opt Out group, said Friday.
The number of students eligible for the math tests is often lower than those for English Language Arts because students enrolled in accelerated math in grades 7 and 8 may participate in high school math Regents Exams instead.
In 2019, 47.9% of students across 95 districts opted out of the math exams, according to a Newsday survey. Students didn't have to take any assessment tests last year because the state was granted a waiver from the U.S. Department of Education due to the coronavirus epidemic.
Educators noted after this year's English Language Arts tests that the results likely cannot be used to make programmatic decisions. Bill Heidenreich, president of the Nassau County Council of School Superintendents, said then that, "Logistically, we administered the exam because federal law requires that we do so, but we have assessment results that we really don't know what to do with."
Prior years have drawn large boycotts of the assessments, with some parents and educators saying the tests do not accurately measure student achievement.
The tests were different on several levels this year, including: They were shorter, and remote learners did not take the tests at home but were not required to come to school for testing. The U.S. education department insisted that New York and other states conduct them, denying the state the waiver it had sought.
In seeking the waiver for 2021, the state said the tests would not be useful to fairly assess an individual or school district’s progress, given the disruptions of the year and the many students studying remotely.
The state shortened the tests — taking place over one day rather than two in each session — and schools faced no consequences or penalties for low participation rates. Federal aid distribution is not tied to test results.
Educators said the test contained only about two dozen questions. Some questions on the tests had been used in prior years, as well as in practice exams, that were familiar to students.
Testing advocates, such as the New York Equity Coalition of civil rights, education, parent, and business groups, said assessment data is "vital to understand what the academic impacts of the pandemic have been."
"Although the content of lessons in science or math, or English, or French or U.S. history differ, they have in common a massive inventory of decisions that effortlessly get made as each lesson is taught. Teachers, then, make hundreds, if not more, instructional and managerial decisions each day they teach. And that’s not counting what decisions teachers make when they interact with students before and after school, make contacts with parents on email, phones, or social media in and out of school. Of course, teachers interact with their principals as well. And many of those interactions involve decisions about students, parents, and other teachers.
Now, consider the complexity of a principal’s daily decision-making. Researchers shadowing principals is rare but it has occurred (see here and here). Principals keeping logs of their daily work and sharing those logs with researchers occasionally appear in the literature (see here and here). But studies that actually count decisions that an elementary or secondary principal makes daily, I have yet to find. So I have had to settle for descriptions of a principal’s typical day or examples of daily logs principals have kept to give the flavor of the rapid-fire decision-making that does occur.
Here is one example of a day-in-the-life of one principal. Jessica Johnson is Principal of Dodgeland Elementary School in Wisconsin. This day-in-the-life appeared on her blog April 26, 2009.
I am guilty of having thought as a teacher and even as an assistant principal, “What is the principal doing all day? Why hasn’t he/she done x, y or z yet?” Well, now that I’m the principal, I take back all of the thoughts I had back then, because you can just never understand what the principal does all day until you live it!
There are so many things that could happen in a day that couldn’t even be shared with staff, because: A) I don’t want to set the tone of the school by complaining B) Some information has to be filtered by me or it would just give teachers more to stress over C) There’s a lot of confidential information contained within a principal’s day. So, I want to write a list of all the crazy things that could happen on any given day.
Monday morning arrive to work at 6:30 am. Turn on the computer and start looking at my list of things to accomplish today (includes 7:35/3:05 Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings, teacher observation, teacher meeting, parent conference, call McDonald’s for additional donations of ice cream coupons for student of the month awards, write monthly principal newsletter, finalize summer school course packets, sort through the junk mail still piled up from last week-because I didn’t get to it over the weekend, complete purchase requisitions, file pink copies of all purchases for budgeting, get into classrooms).
7:00 receive call from sub-caller, write down list of teachers out today—we ran out of subs so I have to figure out coverage for one of the first grade teachers. Write a note for the secretary regarding this, tell her I’ll be to the class at 8:00, but for her to keep looking for coverage.
7:05 Try to start on paperwork, but a teacher comes in to tell about a phone call she received from a parent after school on Friday regarding a bus incident—record the information to investigate.
7:10 Try to start on paperwork, but get a call from a teacher that our online student information system (for attendance and grades) is down again. Put in a call to tech director to get it fixed…send out an email to all staff that the problem should be fixed soon *hopefully*.
7:20 Parents are here for the IEP meeting…show them to the conference room to wait….no chance of getting paperwork done now. Go to get IEP information for the meeting and see the voicemail light flashing again…check it and hear that a teacher got stuck in traffic and won’t make it in time…go tell the secretary and then run back to the IEP meeting.
7:35-8:00 IEP meeting…this one went well. Now I have to run to cover that class.
8:00-8:30 Teaching a lower grade level, no lesson plans (note to self-remind teachers to get emergency sub plans/folders ready) making it up as I go.
8:30 Call from the office that one of our Emotional/Behavioral Disability (EBD) students needs to be removed from the room—an aide is coming to cover the class instead.
8:35-9:15 Remove EBD student—severe physical aggression, I’m sure I’ll have some bruises from this one—not to mention the mess the conference room is in now (we don’t have a time-out room). I’ve had my glasses broken before, so glad that didn’t happen this time. He/she finally is calm/compliant and I escort the child back to class…
Fortunately another substitute was able to come in and cover that other class now. Thank goodness, I can get to my list…
Check my voicemail—1 teacher call with a question about the new report card, 1 teacher call requesting me to come speak with her about a student, 1 parent call angry about a bus incident, another angry parent upset with a teacher.
9:20 put the sign on my door that says “I’m out in classrooms to see what students are learning” and get to each of the teachers that left me voice messages. Make a move to classrooms for walk throughs—first one has guided reading groups and centers with 1st grade kids reading amazingly well! Start to enter the 2nd classroom of the day when I’m called for on the school loud speaker (I don’t carry my walkie-talkie when I’m going into classrooms and my secretaries know only to call for me in an emergency). Hurry back to the office to find that one of our special needs children ran off from the aide (he/she has never done this before!) I make a special all-call to the staff to let them know we’re looking for ______ and then several of us split up to search….10 minutes later we find her/him in an unattended office in the dark pretending to type on a computer. Whew! ... "
"So when Mitch McConnell and 38 Republican senators sent a letter to the secretary of education decrying the ghastly prospect of white students having to learn actual facts about slavery, it was not unexpected. For centuries, this country’s schools have perpetuated a whitewashed version of history that either erases or reduces the story of Black America down to a B-plot in the American script. It’s why they hate Critical Race Theory, The 1619 Project and anything factual—because the white-centric interpretation of our national past is so commonly accepted, white people have convinced themselves that anything that varies from the Caucasian interpretation must be a lie.
This is not new,” Jelani Cobb told The Root. “One of the most under-discussed topics in education is the role slavery plays in the early history of the country.”
“It is important to realize that all history is revisionist history,” Cobb explained. “The established historiographies are constantly revised as we learn more information.”
Even though no teacher in America has been hogtied and forced to teach the curriculum devised by historians, journalists and people who know things, The Root was curious. If The 1619 Project is an attempt to rewrite history, which version of history does the GOP fear is being altered?
The Root decided to see what some of the signatories to Mitch McConnell’s Strawberry Letter knew about slavery and Black history. We dug through state curriculum standards, yearbooks and spoke with teachers to see which interpretation of history the white tears-spewing politicians learned when they were in elementary and high school. In doing so, there are certain things we realized:
- There is no one Social Studies curriculum: Most states’ departments of educations create a K-12 social studies curriculum that sets a minimum standard for what students should learn by a certain grade (Here is Georgia’s). The rest is usually left up to the districts, schools and even the teachers.
- There are two histories: As someone who was homeschooled, this was a revelation to me. The majority of K-12 students cycle through two levels of social studies. The basics of geography, civics and history are usually taught in elementary and middle school. Students learn another, more detailed history and civics curriculum in high school that usually includes separate courses for civics/government, world history, and American history.
- But really, there are three histories: Many states mandate a “state history” course, usually from a limited selection of one or two state-approved textbooks. In some cases, the state course totally contradicts what the students learn in American history classes.
- Sometimes there are four histories. There are some states where students take two different state history courses—one elementary level class and one high school level class.
- ...Or six histories: Take Georgia, for instance. In elementary school, students learn the basics of American history and state history. In middle school, they take world history and another year of state history. In high school, they do it over again, with mandatory courses in world history and U.S. history. However, in Georgia, and in most states, students use textbooks from different publishers and authors, many of which tell completely contradictory versions of the same stories.
- But no Black history: Aside from cursory mentions of the Civil War, Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, most state educational curriculums don’t specify how much history should be dedicated to Black history. In Georgia, students have courses on Native American history, Latin American and Caribbean culture, a course that combines African and Asian geography, but nothing specifically on Black history.
Knowing this, we dug through bios, school archives and academic resources to find out how these GOP legislators gained their knowledge of America’s past. In most cases, we were able to find the exact textbook each legislator’s school district used for one of the state or American history courses. In other cases, we were able to find contemporaneous descriptions of the textbooks from academic journals or reports. To our surprise, most received a well-rounded education on the history of Black people in America.
Just kidding. They all learned variations of the same white lies. And, apparently, they’d like to keep it that way.
Here’s what we found.
Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.)What she said: “The 1619 Project is nothing more than left-wing propaganda. Tennesseans don’t want it in our schools. We want our children to learn about our nation’s history.”
What she read: Although she represents Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn attended elementary and high school in Laurel, Miss. In 1959, the year Sen. Marsha Blackburn would have entered kindergarten in Mississippi, the state legislature handed control of choosing textbooks to Gov. Ross Barnett. At the request of the Mississippi State Society of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), the state had already mandated a ninth-grade course in Mississippi history, which means Blackburn learned the history of her state from John K. Bettersworth’s textbook Mississippi: a History.
The New York Times wrote in 1975 that Bettersworth’s catalogs “treat blacks of old as complacent darkies or as a problem to whites.” When The Root reviewed the text, we noticed that the entire history of the 250-year institution of slavery was reduced to five pages. Bettersworth’s book was based on UDC propaganda that taught children that the slave master treated his slaves “as his own,” but noted that most of the human chattel were so lazy that “it took two to help; one to do nothing.” However, Bettersworth was sure to point out the kindness of the masters who educated the enslaved “as they taught their own children.”
Mississippi: A History also treats the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education case as a travesty, insisting that Mississippians were largely satisfied with segregated schools. “Incidents had been extremely rare,” it explained. “[F]or by and large, each race—its parents, its pupils and their teachers, had found it advantageous to remain in an ‘equal but separate’ status.”
Blackburn’s alma mater, Northeast Jones, integrated in the fall of 1970, the year after Blackburn graduated.
Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)What he said: “The 1619 Project is left-wing propaganda. It’s revisionist history at its worst.”
What he read: Tom Cotton, a 1995 graduate of Dardanelle High School, likely learned his American History from The American Pageant. While Cengage is a relative newcomer in the textbook industry, its high school history book, The American Pageant was used across the country for many years. The text is nuanced and thorough, even in how it presents slavery...most of the time.
Unbending loyalty to “ole Massa” prompted many slaves to help their owners resist the Union Armies. Blacks blocked the door of the “big house” with their bodies or stashed the plantation silverware under mattresses in their own humble huts, where it would be safe from the plundering “bluebellies”...Newly emancipated slaves sometimes eagerly accepted the invitation of Union troops to join in the pillaging of their master’s possessions.
This would be a theme throughout many of the textbooks. The few passages that described the lives of Black people were usually crafted from single-sourced narratives of enslavers or other white people. “The-thing-that-happened-that-one-time” becomes the mold for “this is how the slaves were,” which is the literal definition of stereotyping.
