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Light at the End of the Tunnel

12/1/2020

 
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For the past 25 years there has been a national war between so-called education reformers and public schools.  Education historian and indefatigable blogger on the topic, Diane Ravitch, has been chronicling the attacks, losses and now, finally, victories through her blog, where she posts up to ten times a day, every day, since April of 2012. In her new book Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America's Public Schools, she pulls the disparate threads together and writes a brilliant,  page-turner story of this war against public schools for a period that included my 5 grandchildren.

Who are the bad guys?  Millionaires and billionaires who come from a business background where forces of free-market choices,  competition, and new standards create disruption in the market place allowing the best products to rise to the surface.  Ravitch names names.  We know who they are and they include Bill Gates, Betsy De Vos, and the Walton (Wallmart) families.
Ravitch aptly changes their names from education "Reformers" to education "Disrupters." Measurement is key to determining educational success in the form of high stakes testing that occurs every school year for grades k-12.  Right out of the starting gate the Disrupters' premise was wrong-headed and untested. 

The methods of this warfare included slamming public schools as "failing" and demonizing teachers while supporting the creation of brand-new charter schools and vouchers to pay religious schools using  tax payer money and selling the concept that now parents have "choice."  If you knew what it takes to create and sustain a good school, you would know that non-educators with dough  are not the people who should be starting one no matter how pure their motives. (I served 18 months on the board of a charter school that is now shuttered.) Politicians from presidents, G.W. Bush and Barack Obama, to local school board members jumped onto the shiny new Disrupter bandwagons.  It never occurred to them that America's children were  Guinea pigs.  Disruption is not healthy for children. Using children to experiment with the profit-motive in education is an insane idea.  Where can the profits for investors come from?  Real estate (the new schools need space to rent, build or buy), using cheap, young and untrained teachers from Teach for America, and the selling of technology.  Education doesn't produce a product that you can sell for a profit.  You can't garnish the wages of a state-educated worker.  But every time money changes hands, someone's pockets are lined, often illegally, since there is no mandated oversight for charter schools and many opportunities for corruption. Less that 40% of the funding for these new ventures are used for what happens in classrooms. And the Disrupters did not like to discuss that the funding not only came from the wealthiest Americans but also from the local public school budgets, thus short-changing  resources for more than 85% of American students.   

The collateral damage of this policy of disruption was the destruction of teacher morale and the anxiety that the high-stakes testing put on children.  Test prep robbed children of the joy of learning. It made them fearful that if they did not do well on the test, their teachers would be fired.  Ravitch's book meticulously cites the damage done in cities and states over the years.  It's enough to make your blood boil!  About ten years ago, I was invited to speak at Southern Florida University's Education Department.  The faculty were steeling themselves to greet the first entering class of FCAT babies, who had taken assessment exams at the end of every one of their 12 years of schooling.   Now they were to be trained as teachers. Their professors found them to be  passive, docile, and answer-driven, fearful of questions for which they had no answers and tied to using boring texts and worksheets as their main pedagogical tools. 

Another example:  My grandson, Jonny, who was a very serious student didn't do well on tests.  (Currently he is the top student in his electrical engineering class at Buffalo University but still worried about the Graduate Record Exam).  He attended a small public school in Western NY state which was not overly scrutinized by the powers-that-be and had a staff that cared about their students. But still they had to adhere to the standards and the testing.  When Jonny was in seventh grade I asked him how many of his teachers were having "fun" teaching him. By "fun" I meant that they enjoyed being in the classroom and were present for their students. He thought for a long time before he came up with his sixth grade Language Arts teacher.  I concluded that none of his seventh grade teachers were having any fun and I had a follow up question:  How did he know they weren't having fun?"Because," he responded, "I'm not learning very much."  

Ravitch is very careful to let doubters know how she  knows every fact in the book with 30 pages of citations in very small type at the back of the book.  In her final chapter, "Goliath Stumbles," she cuts loose with a passionate summation of how the tides are finally turning due to the grass-root rebellions of teachers and parent activists who defeated referendums, politicians, and lobbyists with their strikes, protests, social media organizations and most importantly, their votes.  I can imagine how fast and hard she hit those computer keys as she wrote these first glimmers that the tide is turning and humanity and sanity are finally returning to American public schools.  

​Thanks for the lesson, Diane Ravitch.  Many still need it.    








How I Teach STEM

20/10/2019

 
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STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, all separate disciplines in history that are now linked conceptually in the acronym, and, hopefully, in curricula. These new books of mine are in a new imprint, Racehorse, for my publisher Skyhorse Publishing.  They are the first original books I have created for them, although they have published three other titles of mine that are bind-ups of evergreen subjects that went out of print and  now live on as bigger books representing about thirteen individual titles.  The Racehorse imprint is on topics in children's books that are trending. Since I have always integrated the STEM disciplines in all of my books about settled science (basic principles of physics, chemistry, and biology), I have to smile.  Almost 50 years after the publication of my first  breakthrough book, Science Experiments You Can Eat, I'm in the right place at the right time to catch the wave.

My friend, Dr. Myra Zarnowski, who teaches in the Education School of Queens College, has been asking me for years to "unpack my process."  She wants me to articulate what has always been intuitive for me.  Well, Myra,  let me try to do just that, using my  two latest books as examples.

1. I connect my reader emotionally to a phenomenon they have observed or can create.  The first sentences in Ice Cream  are: 
        "Ever eat ice cream soup? If not, here’s how to make it.  Put a scoop of ice cream in a dish.                  Leave it alone.  Wait. This is the slow but sure recipe for making ice cream
soup."  
Here I am inviting kids to do something slightly absurd and think about ice cream in a humorous way.

In Straw, I invite them to try something that looks easy but turns out to be impossible:
       "Bet You Can't Suck a Drink Through Two Straws:
                "Put two straws in your mouth.  Put one straw in your drink and let the other hang 
                  outside the glass.  Suck away through both straws at the same time!"
Done correctly, no drink arrives in your mouth.

2. Next I invite the reader to wonder what makes these things happen.  I ask them questions:
What is the shape of a scoop of ice cream?  Does it have its own shape? Sucking is work that goes against the force of gravity.  What is the source of that force?

I also give activities that help to answer the questions.  What kind of face do you make when you suck?  What happens to the size of the inside of your mouth when you suck?  (I'm paraphrasing here so you get the idea.)

3. In Ice Cream , I point out that only one part of the mixture of foods that is in ice cream is the part that actually freezes.  It's the water that's already in milk and cream.  So scientists isolate the part that changes so they can understand it better.  What follows are activities with ice and water.
In Straw, they discover that air pressure -- an invisible force-- does the work if you create a partial vacuum, a term they come to understand through the story of a historical experiment--the invention of the barometer.

4.  Finally, I tie the principles discovered by science to technology, engineering, and math.   In Ice Cream, they discover that different materials used for drinking can act as insulators and slow down the rate of melting.  In Straw, I explain how a partial vacuum is made by a fan in a vacuum cleaner and they can discover the place where there is suction and where there is exhaust.  

In other words, I begin with what they know, make them think about it in a different way and give them tools to explore those thoughts and then connect those thoughts to something else they are very familiar with.  Because I integrate activities throughout, my books are hybrids between expository material, narratives and a lab manual.  (They are not supposed to be read like a novel.) The child sees for him/herself the evidence that can be applied to solving other challenges.  It's an arc I repeat over and over in all my books in different and creative ways.  

Instead of dragging children into the world of STEM, I bring STEM into the world of children. It's a paradigm shift from traditional texts in the individual disciplines.  And it works.   





          



     Vicki Cobb

    *Award-winning author of more than 90 nonfiction books for children, mostly in science.
    *Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
    *Founder/President of iNK Think Tank, Inc.
    *Passionate advocate for the joy of learning for every child and teacher.


    Disclaimer: All opinions, typos, and grammatical errors are my own,  especially small word omissions which I often don't notice in my fervor.  

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