The Treasure Hunter

Ordinarily I get up at 7:30 A.M., rain or shine.  But it was snowing this morning, so I turned over and went back to sleep until almost 10. A.M.  Although I had decided what to write today, I hadn’t written a word yet and it was a tricky subject. I was worried.  Then, as I ate breakfast, The Oregonian gave me a topic I could handle more easily, and it was good news: almost free tuition for Oregon’s students at community colleges, and it wasn’t going to raise taxes. Read all about it below.

Without raising it’s own debt level, the state of Oregon has found a way to enable almost all high school graduates and those who have earned a GED to attend community college for two years debt free. The only cost to students or their families will be $50 a term for tuition.  Students may enroll next fall.

The program, put together by the Oregon state legislature and named “The Oregon Promise” is not actually new because most of the money was there for before under federal Pell grants. What is new is bringing  together state and federal benefits in an easy-to-understand package with reasonable conditions and the determination to publicize it widely. Not only will the program pay almost all of students’ tuition, it will also provide $1000 a year for books and other college costs. Another attractive feature  is that  Oregon’s taxpayers will not feel  additional pain as a result of the state’s share of the costs.  The program  will add only $10 million a year to an existing state budget of over $9 billion.

The requirements for students under the new program are also quite reasonable. They have to attend school full time and maintain a grade point average of 2.5 or higher. Even undocumented immigrants may participate. Although they are not eligible for federal grants, the state will cover the full price of their tuition.  The only dark side of the programs is that students from low income families may not be able to take advantage of them because they cannot attend school full time and still hold a job to help support their families   Perhaps a couple of the prosperous businesses in Oregon, who often complain there are not enough capable  new workers in the state, will see that it is to their advantage to create prizes for those who would otherwise not be able to attend school full time.

Happy New Year Everyone!  In the past my New Year’s Resolutions have focused on losing a few more pounds and cleaning up our storage room.  But for 2016 I want to work harder and smarter to support and improve our public schools.  I am well aware that alone I have no power to move policy makers and legislators in the directions I want them to go.  But I can vote, write to and phone my representatives, stand up for public schools and their teachers, and try to persuade the readers of this blog to do the same.  To give you an idea of the specific things I hope to do in 2016 I am posting a list of my resolutions as today’s piece.

1. Search wider for sources of information about good things happening in schools across the country.

2. Encourage readers to make me aware of what is happening in schools in their communities and let me know of sources where I can get more information.

3. Write letters and make phone calls to my legislators to inform, criticize, or praise them.  Also, invite them to read my blog.

4. Continue to encourage parents to opt-out their children from high stakes tests and give them reasons why such actions are best for everyone.

5. Write about ways that teachers can help their students meet their state’s standards through vigorous activities rather than the inert and uninspiring lessons suggested in the CCSS documents.

6. Oppose the increase of charter schools and any special “favors” to existing ones, such as free space in public school buildings or additional public funding.

7. Oppose vouchers for students to attend private or religious schools and explain why such actions are morally wrong and further damage public education.

8. Attack the “baloney” being spread about the incompetence of teachers and the failure of our public schools wherever I find it.

9. Avoid self-aggrandizement in describing things that were done in the schools where I was principal.

10. Do my best to post three meaningful pieces every week, not necessarily all written by me.

Today’s post will be my last one for 2015.  We are going on vacation with our youngest son and his family in a warm and sunny climate–Maui.  Along with my bathing suit and a sexy dress I am taking the past three issues of Education Week, which I haven’t had time to read, confident that I will find some things I can write about in 2016.  But in the meantime I am posting a bit of good news about Professor Gay Ivey at the University of Wisconsin, the same place where I did my graduate work  and strengthened my faith in the wisdom of teachers and the abilities of children.

Although the article I am quoting from focuses on Ivey’s election to the Reading Hall of Fame and her role at the U.W, I was much more impressed by her teaching experiences and her reading philosiphy because they are a lot like mine. So, I trimmed the article down to highlight only those things.

UW-Madison’s Gay Ivey had an amusing initial reaction in November upon learning she had been elected to the Reading Hall of Fame:“I didn’t think I was old enough,”

The Reading Hall of Fame was established in 1973 in an effort to contribute, from the collective experiences of its members, to the improvement of reading instruction. To be elected to the Hall, one must have spent at least 25 years actively involved in reading work and be widely known and respected by his or her peers in the field.

Ivey has spent the past 25 years trying to better understand students’ motivations for reading –- and what happens when their reading is feeding their interests and curiosities. She started her career in education as a middle school reading specialist in Albemarle County, Virginia.

“What has driven all of my research is my initial experiences as a classroom teacher,” Ivey says of those early years working in her home state of Virginia.  “I wouldn’t have paid attention to what I now believe truly matters in reading without those wonderful experiences teaching kids from really interesting communities and with really interesting lives that enriched my own life and way of looking at the world.”

While many scholars today are examining how to better motivate children to read, Ivey explains that is not her area of scholarly focus.  Instead, she is taking a closer look at the benefits students receive when following their own passions and reading for their own purposes. To examine this topic, Ivey has spent the past six years studying English classrooms in which teachers prioritize engaged reading, instead of specific, assigned readings.

“I’m studying what happens in those classes with individual kids, and between kids, that shapes instruction in those classrooms and the goals of instruction,” says Ivey.

When students are exploring their own reasons for reading and are really engaged with a text, Ivey explains, there are numerous consequences. Reading engagement is linked not only with developing competence as a reader but it also has intellectual, social and emotional consequences, she says.

“It’s not the volume of reading that matters most, but the quality of those engaged reading experiences,” says Ivey.  “I’m less interested in finding ways to produce higher test scores and more interested in studying engaged reading and its relationship to the development of the whole person. I’m studying reading as a tool for helping students make sense of their lives and each other and the world.”

In August, after more than three years of writing pieces for Diane Ravitch and Valerie Strauss’ blogs I decided to start my own.  Both those smart and dedicated bloggers had shifted their focus from essays about education to news events, almost all of them bad news about what was happening in public education.  As a career-long educator, who in her dotage still supports teachers and public schools, I wanted to write about the positive aspects of education in the past, present, and future.  And for four months now, that’s what I’ve tried to do.

As a result, I’ve gathered a decent number of faithful followers and others who read my blog only occasionally.  No worries readers, unless you send me a comment I don’t know who you are or how often you read my blog.  But I still need your help.

In case you don’t know, writing is difficult and time consuming.  From the beginning I pledged myself to posting three pieces a week and have been faithful to that pledge most of the time. I sit down to work every morning, including Sunday, trying to generate new ideas or writing whatever I’ve decided on.  Some days, because of other obligations I don’t get very far; on other days I scrap what I’ve already written because I don’t like it.  In desperation, I’ve also gone back to essays I wrote many years ago, revising them a little and hoping that most of my readers don’t remember them or were too young to read when they were first published.

Anyway, you get the picture. Your help could be in the form of essays you’ve written, descriptions of what is happening in the schools near you, references to articles in the newspapers you read, or just suggestions of topics that need to be addressed.  As far as possible, your contributions should be about the positive happenings in education. But I know, that like me, you are going to have trouble finding good news.

For now, let’s raise our glasses and salute the New Year, hoping that it will produce some educational “treasure” for all us tireless hunters and that many new hunters will join us.

Today’s post is a response to the law just passed by Congress to replace No child Left Behind (NCLB). The New York Times published a piece by David L. Kirp describing that law yesterday, which I found clear and accurate. So, if you can go to that article (link), I suggest that you read it first for a more complete description of the law than I can give here. Then read my analysis and my concerns.

The major changes in the Every Student Succeeds (ESSA) law are the shift from Federal control to state control and the removal of the rewards and punishments for schools that were used by the the Department of Education to ensure compliance.  Yearly student tests will continue, but they will be chosen or designed by the states. In addition, the effectiveness of schools will be judged on more evidence than just test scores. Finally, actions to improve the performance of students in high poverty schools will be the central  focus of states for the next several years.  Although these changes promise better days for our public schools in the future, I still see much to be concerned about.

First and foremost, the beliefs that have dominated American education over the past twenty-some years still hold sway among decision makers and the public at large. Those beliefs were first voiced in a 1983 report by a commission created by President Ronald Reagan, titled, “A Nation at Risk.” Its central theme was that the United States’ educational system was failing to meet the national need for a competitive workforce. On the opening page the report declared, “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” And it continued with a frightening possibility: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Like its predecessor, ESSA will operate on the same beliefs about our system of public education, and for that reason states will be inclined to identify the same goals and use similar strategies to reach them.  We are not done with judging our students, teachers, and schools mainly by test scores, or believing that comparisons with other countries’ scores on international tests are meaningful. Nor, are we done with top-down decision making on what, when, and how our students should learn, in disregard of teachers’ knowledge and experience.  Many state legislatures–and their constituents–will continue to believe that charter schools, on the whole, are better than public schools and move to increase them.  And some of those states will continue to offer vouchers to a few students to attend private or religious schools in the belief that they are throwing life preservers to drowning children.

Can these aberrations be stopped?  The only way I see is for parents, teachers, and informed citizens to strengthen their efforts to support our public schools. We need to put pressure on state legislatures to use their funds and power to make intelligent decisions for our schools.  If we are silent, thinking that all is well now that NCLB is dead, the future will be no better than the past.