The Treasure Hunter

For a long time I’ve  made it a practice to send a “Letter to the editor” of a newspaper whenever I see an article about education that pleases or irritates me. In the past, most of my letters got published, but not recently. Do the newspapers think my comments are trivial or poorly written? Or are they just tired of me? I decided to post my most recent–and unpublished– letter to the New York Times for your opinions. Let me know what you think.

To give you some background, I was responding to an Op-Ed, “What Kids Really Need to Know”, by  Natalie Wexler, published on August 27.  In it she argues that E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s “Core Knowledge Curriculum,”  is the best tool for educating children, and it should replace the current emphasis on improving reading skills.  To my mind, Wexler is setting up a “straw man.”  In the schools I visit teachers have not gone wild on reading skills, ignored the need for background knowledge, or stopped teaching social studies and science. They don’t need a curriculum based on a series of informational topics.

But enough of my defensiveness; here’s my letter to the Times.

To the Editor:

In her OP-Ed Natalie Wexler is correct when she says that students need background knowledge as well as skills in their education.  But she is wrong in assuming that those two components of reading are detached from each other and that a knowledge based curriculum is necessary. When teachers choose high quality books for reading instruction, read aloud to their classes regularly, and encourage students to read widely on their own, skills and knowledge grow exponentially and in tandem.

It really doesn’t matter if the class time for science and social studies is limited in elementary school classrooms, as long as some of the materials  available contain information about one or the other, presented in a compelling  and age-appropriate way. A good education is like a healthy diet: high quality food, presented attractively, in reasonable quantities,  and available every day.

Sincerely yours,

Joanne Yatvin

I am pleased to be able to post an article about Portland State University where I was an adjunct professor and a supervisor of student teachers for 12 years. I have great respect for the University, especially its Teacher Education Department. I found this article in the University’s monthly bulletin yesterday.

Portland State University ranked this week among the Sierra Club’s top colleges and universities nationally for sustainability practices.

Sierra Magazine Coolest Schools 2015–Top 20 badgeThe “Cool Schools” ranking is published by Sierra magazine, the official publication of the Sierra Club, and recognizes colleges and universities that demonstrate a deep commitment to protecting the environment, addressing climate issues, and encouraging environmental responsibility.

This is the fifth time Portland State has been named to the Cool Schools list, but this year the University landed at its highest ranking yet—number 20 out of more than 150 schools across the nation that submitted survey data for consideration.

So how did PSU jump to number 20 from its previous position at 34?

“PSU made a lot of great strides last year,” said Jenny McNamara, campus sustainability manager. “We’ve taken steps to reduce our water and energy consumption, bring more local food to campus, and minimize the waste we send to the landfill. And we continue to offer our students amazing opportunities to get engaged in these efforts through classes and programs like the Sustainability Volunteer Program.”

Last year, PSU launched a voluntary carbon offset program for department air travel, expanded compost collection to all residence halls and department break rooms, engaged hundreds of freshman students in conducting waste audits of campus buildings, and earned its Tree Campus USA badge for its commitment to effective urban forest management.

“Young people understand the need to confront climate disruption and jump-start our economy,” said Karissa Gerhke, national director of the Sierra Student Coalition. “‘Cool Schools’ is a showcase of campuses taking concrete steps toward those goals.”

The full ranking of 153 colleges, including each school’s completed questionnaire, is online at Sierra Club’s Cool Schools page.

Hooray!  This is the first piece I’ve posted that I didn’t write.  Please help me rest my head once in a while by submitting news about something good going on in a school you are familiar with.

By Lynn Stoddard
For the Deseret News

Now that the location for the new Utah prison has been approved, there is another thing to consider before the architect gets too far along. What provision will be made if the prison starts out with 5,000 beds, and in 10 years only half that number is needed? Or in 20 years, only 1,000 beds are needed? It may be wise for the architect to design a flexible, modular prison where modules could be sold and moved away when they are no longer needed.

What would happen to the prison population if virtually every student entered school and graduated with a firm resolve to be a contributor and not a burden to society? What if the main source of inmates, the dropouts and push-outs from school, could be drastically reduced?

At the present time, our country incarcerates more people per capita than any other country in the world at a cost of nearly $50 billion a year. In Utah we spend a bit more than the national average to house each prisoner, while at the same time we spend less per pupil than any other state to educate our children. Could we spend more money on schools if we didn’t have to spend so much on lawbreakers?

While I was principal of two elementary schools in Davis County, the teachers met with each child’s parents at the beginning of the school year to form a partnership for helping each student grow as an individual. In these meetings they started to develop this revolutionary concept.

Because each child is unique and different from all others, a great variety of subjects are needed to help students develop “human growth standards” like those suggested many years ago by prominent psychologist/educator Earl Kelly: “What we need is a new set of standards to uphold. These new standards would not be oriented to subject matter at all, but rather to human growth. … We might call them human standards, and hold them high.”

The partnership conferences, combined with some priority surveys, revealed the following human growth standards: identity, inquiry, interaction, initiative, imagination, intuition and integrity. They were labeled as “I” words so that teachers, parents and students could keep them at the front of their minds to guide learning. After many years of refining and development, these growth standards are now called “Seven Powers of Human Greatness” and serve as a framework for creating a student-centered system of education.

When teachers and parents unite to help children develop curiosity and other human growth standards, students become voracious readers. Each child learns to read at his or her “right time” and they do not have to be coaxed, required or assigned to do it.

What happens to schooling when a top priority of teaching is to help students learn to ask powerful questions — when students find that school is the place where their questions are not only respected, but sought?

Answer: The school is transformed from a place where many students do not want to attend to a place where they scramble to get in and do not want to leave at the end of the day. When the power of inquiry is raised as an important human growth standard, it changes nearly everything. School becomes an institution that serves the needs and interests of each unique student. Every child excels in something that benefits society. Large prisons are no longer needed.

Utah’s soon-to-be new prison gives us a golden opportunity to lead the nation in both prison reform and fixing our obsolete system of public education.

Lynn Stoddard taught fifth and sixth graders and served as an elementary school principal for thirty six years. Stoddard now promotes Educating for Human Greatness as a new educational paradigm and way to help every child excel and become a contributor to society. (efhg.org)

Some of you may be wondering what the dark spot is on my face in the photo at the top of this blog and why I chose to be known by that particular photo. Let me explain. The spot is a Painted Lady butterfly that was one among many raised in our first grade classroom at the rural Oregon school where I was principal from 1988 to 2000. I chose that photo as my emblem because it expresses my love and faith in our public schools, our children, and our teachers.

The photo was taken by first grade teacher, Rachel Sudul, on the day the butterflies hatched in her classroom. A month or so earlier she had come into my office asking if she could have some school funds to buy a butterfly larvae kit and a tent to keep the butterflies in. I was surprised and fascinated by her plan to raise butterflies in her classroom and use them as a tool for student learning. Of course I gave her the funds she needed, never suspecting what a great teaching tool they would be.

Rachel’s students, just beginning to read and write, followed every step in the growth and development of the larvae and the behavior of the resultant butterflies. They drew pictures, wrote about what they saw, made up butterfly stories, and sought out books in our school library to learn more. Although I can’t remember everything the teacher or the kids did as part of this project, I do know that it was a total success. Our first graders, mostly from poor families, who had come to school with few skills and little academic knowledge, were now learning the basics of reading, writing, science, and research. I continue to be proud of Rachel, who is still doing great things as a teacher at a different school in rural Oregon.

Far too many politicians and ordinary citizens have forgotten that the purpose of American education is as much to support a democratic society, as it is to produce students who are “college and career ready.” They have also forgotten that the proof of the pudding is not how well one school’s test scores compare with another’s or the level of respect our national system of education receives from the rest of the world, but the proportion of young Americans who are leading honest, productive, and caring lives.

No question, children’s civic learning begins and continues in the home through watching, listening, and imitating what their parents do. But home cannot offer children the full range of experiences. They need to interact with adults and children of other backgrounds, behaviors and beliefs. In the past, schools picked up the reins for civic learning where parents left off by providing social interaction through recesses and some classes, such as physical education and art. But nowadays the pressure to raise test scores and the tightness of school budgets have forced most schools to stop providing those opportunities. In enacting harsh discipline policies, and in putting so much importance on test scores, schools have all but wiped out the possibility of students learning and practicing citizenship. What can be done to restore this emphasis?

Above all, teachers need to set up ways for students to participate in classroom planning, decision-making, and organization. There is no reason why students shouldn’t be able to add their own interests, if appropriate, to the topics to be investigated in a unit or to choose between teacher-suggested projects. And only a little training will get students to put their classroom back in good order at the end of the day. When kids feel that “this is our classroom” rather than the teacher’s personal domain, they become good citizens in their own small community.

At the school-wide level it is up to administrators to establish policies that respect students’ civil rights and personal dignity, even when they have broken the rules. One regular practice should be to give misbehaving kids a fair hearing before deciding what the consequences should be. I chose to use the word “consequences” rather than “punishment“ because I believe that in most cases the next step should be to have the misbehaver work on “fixing the problem” rather than undergo punishment. If there is a way to repair the harm that was done or to make the person who was harmed feel better, that’s what a misbehaver should do. He or she will start on the road to better citizenship as the result of a positive action.

The next step in civic education is having students participate in school decision-making in ways that are age-appropriate. For example, children from elementary grades can work with a teacher to choose playground games and set the rules of participation, while high school students can serve on committees that make decisions about what is best for them, such as which non-required subjects should be offered and how parent/teacher conferences should be structured. In their spare time older students are capable of joining with parents on local projects such as preparing and serving food in a homeless shelter, encouraging people to vote, or building a playground in a neighborhood that has none.

Once more, I remind you that giving all this attention to student citizenship is not an unreasonable expectation. Until high stakes testing took over our schools, demanding that every school day and every bit of student and teacher effort be dedicated to raising test scores, citizenship training was common. Remember the Safety Patrol  that monitored street crossings and the mechanical  equipment helpers who delivered movie projectors to your classroom, set them up, and took them away when you had finished with them? But now, the legislators concerned about school “accountability” have no interest in how students treat each other, serve the school, or how schools treat their students. Concern for the growth of responsibility and humanity in our children should never be out of style.