A Tragedy, indeed.

"In the tiny high school of the zone’s Promise Academy I, which teaches 66 sophomores and 65 juniors (it grows by one grade per year), the average class size is under 15, generally with two licensed teachers in every room. There are three student advocates to provide guidance and advice, as well as a social worker, a guidance counselor and a college counselor, and one-on-one tutoring after school.

"The school, which opened in 2004 in a gleaming new building on 125th Street, should have had a senior class by now, but the batch of students that started then, as sixth graders, was dismissed by the board en masse before reaching the ninth grade after it judged the students’ performance too weak to found a high school on. Mr. Canada called the dismissal “a tragedy.”' - The New York Times, 12 October 2010

I want you to think about this quote from an article on the Billionaire Boys' Club's "Superman," Geoffrey Canada and his much "lauded" Harlem Children's Zone schools.

"...but the batch of students that started then, as sixth graders, was dismissed by the board en masse before reaching the ninth grade after it judged the students’ performance too weak to found a high school on." How lovely.

Superman just left Jimmy Olsen out there to die, and he says, "hey, it's a tragedy."

"We start with children from birth and stay with them until they graduate," unless their test scores might embarrass you and your Wall Street donors. Yes, that's the alternative to public education we are being offered.

Now, I like much of what the Harlem Children's Zone represents. I like the Euro Socialist vision for America. Big corporations and the very rich should re-distribute large amounts of their obscene wealth to those born without silver spoons. Americans should have a right to affordable health care, no matter what their income level. U.S. parents should get support from birth as parents in France, Denmark, Germany, and Finland do.

I agree with Canada, the solution to education lies in solving the problems of poverty, not the reverse.

But Canada's education model is less impressive. Despite having a teacher for every 8 students, despite massive funding, his students tend to do - on average - a little bit better than kids in some of the most poorly supported public schools in New York City.

Like Teach for America and KIPP he makes rich people feel good, expends a lot of cash, and still has to set the bar incredibly low in order to show any results at all. [According to KIPP's favorite study, about 10% of KIPP schools show significant improvement after 4 years when compared to America's worst schools. According to TFA's favorite study (oddly by the same research group) TFA teachers were a tiny bit better than completely unprepared, untrained novice teachers - if you don't count English Language Learners or Special Education students.]

But the trick to all - the politically aggressive part of the charter school movement, the Harlem Children's Zone, KIPP, TFA, Democrats for Education Reform, is student selectivity, and the ability to dump kids - as Canada did - who fail to measure up.

Which is not what public educators do.

In a fight with KIPP Press Agent Jay Mathews a month or so ago I mentioned the Godfrey-Lee Public Schools near Grand Rapids, MI. Godfrey-Lee has real demographic problems - very low parental income, very low parental English proficiency, very low parental education, the lowest property tax base in the state. And Godfrey-Lee gets no massive funding support from Goldman-Sachs and others. So students may struggle, and the Middle School might get declared to be "in need of improvement." But what Godfrey-Lee does not do is toss out kids who struggle.

Godfrey-Lee doesn't do it. Nor do thousands and thousands of public school districts with similar demographics across America. They open their doors to every child who walks in. No complex parent application process. No publicly humiliating lottery. No "we're full" signs. No conversations about how "a student with these kinds of issues might be better in a public school." No limits on transportation services. Just a door which opens and stays open, for some students until they are 25.

This is what separates real educators from the "school reformers." Public educators don't kick out a grade because the kids might make you look bad. Public educators don't discourage special ed kids. Public educators don't fail to provide transportation. Public educators don't pick and choose their results.

Educating all children is hard. But the solution does not lie in the Geoffrey Canada model, the KIPP model, the charter model. The solution lies in child-centered education, and in reforming our national priorities, so we become a nation where every child matters.

- Ira Socol

Creative Collaboration

What is your school teaching?

I'm not discussing content. Content can be interesting, or worthless (a must read blog post in itself), but its a small part of school. What schools "teach" first and foremost is that completely unhidden "hidden curriculum" - the curriculum which aims to turn children into passive, compliant, individuals.

Tuesday night I came home from "teaching" a class. I drove through the night listening to NPR programs about the almost-ready-to-begin Chilean miner rescue and about recollections of a similar rescue 62 years ago in Nova Scotia. At home I watched two things on my computer, the BBC Feed of the Chilean rescue and the video below, sent to me by the head of MSU's Alumni Association:

I have a BA in Criminal Justice/Juvenile Justice from Grand Valley State University,
where I had extraordinary professors

Spring Hill, Nova Scotia 1958 - the rescued (above)
and the rescuers (below)

And as I watched both, I met friends, from Virginia, and Perth, and Salt Lake on Twitter, and we talked about this.

"What is rescuing those miners? Learning, care and creativity. Sounds familiar?" said Tomaz Lasic from Western Australia. "And collaboration" I said.

We thought about how amazing humans are as problem-solvers in an immediate crisis, whether rescuing astronauts on a crippled moon journey or capping a runaway oil spill a couple of miles beneath the ocean, but how bad we are at developing solutions when we lack the immediate issue to focus on.

I said, "We are brilliant problem-solvers when we want to be. I think we owe God better than we give on too many days."

And Dave Doty said, "No doubt--but most days we're too busy casting blame than pulling together. This is very inspiring."

So let us be inspired.

"What is rescuing those miners? Learning, care and creativity." "and collaboration."

And what are we teaching?

In the morning this Tweet arrived via BBC's stream: "1022: Chilean Planning Minister Felipe Kast tweeted: "A great day for restoring faith in our collective ability to face huge challenges with urgency and hard work."

This comes at an interesting moment. Today, Washington, DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee resigned. Rhee is famous - or infamous depending on who is doing the writing - for dissing the value of creativity. It is also the day that The New York Times chose to look 'under the press releases' of Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone.

Speaking of the Zone's new high school the Times reports: "The school, which opened in 2004 in a gleaming new building on 125th Street, should have had a senior class by now, but the batch of students that started then, as sixth graders, was dismissed by the board en masse before reaching the ninth grade after it judged the students’ performance too weak to found a high school on." (article p. 2)

Yes, they kicked out an entire grade because the kids' scores would have made those who promote these schools look bad. [I think Canada began with the best of intentions, it is sad to see him become a shill for American Express and right-wing politicians on both sides of the Atlantic.]

No one dismissed: the Chilean rescue was the result of allowing competing creative solutions (three rescue tunnels were being dug) and a commitment to actually leaving no one behind.

There was also a comment on my blog post about helping students to see differently: I had quoted Postman and Weingartnerabout prohibiting teachers from "asking any questions they already know the answers to." And a commenter asked, "Is this supposed to apply only in limited situations or what? I can't imagine how kids would ever learn math, for example, if their third grade teacher only posed problems (say, from calculus) that she couldn't figure out."

I tried to explain that I could demonstrate, allow discovery, allow students to doubt, that "testing" - this commenter was really not talking about "teaching" - she wanted to know how to test "knowledge of facts" - is not "learning," but he/she could not understand.

And now I think of the GVSU video and the Chilean Mine Rescue. Both could certainly be "assessed," but neither could be judged on the basis of an "objective" exam. Neither could have happened without "students" looking over each others' shoulders, sharing work, talking, arguing, disagreeing. Neither could be limited by a specific knowledge base or the separation of knowledge areas. Neither could have happened with artificial time limitations.

Both are the result of many things we far too often discourage in school.

So, let us be inspired. Let us be the opposite of Michelle Rhee. After all, if kids are creative problem solvers we can easily leverage that to allow them to "read" and "write" in many ways. If kids are creative collaborators we can help them learn to build networks for learning and discovery. If kids are caring humans we can give them a world to learn about. The technologies of this century make the mechanics of reading, writing, math easy, it is the creativity, the empathy, the collaborative skills which need the encouraging.

We need classrooms filled with the chaos of imagination, the chaos of 'in-progress' communication capabilities. The chaos of many different paths to learning. We don't need more tests, we don't need more "standards," we don't need more scripts. And we don't need more unified strategies.

Let us embrace a learning system which helps create adults who will change the world. We can do it. It isn't easy, but, Yes, we can.

- Ira Socol