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What’s a New School Superintendent to Do?

30/7/2018

 
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The “School Reform” movement is characterized by a top-down, disruptive administrative process bent on privatizing public education.  It includes charter schools (start-up schools using public funds with little or no financial oversight thus becoming ripe for corruption and other forms of failure) and voucher programs (where public funding is siphoned off so that students can go to private schools). It has had a great deal of criticism from Diane Ravitch, who aggregates reports of successes and failures in support of public education, a necessary institution for our democracy.

Last week I attended a conference sponsored by November Learning (BLC2018) which is focused on children and how to help them learn effectively.  Jonathan P. Raymond was one of the speakers.  His new book Wildflowers: A School Superintendent’s Challenge to America got my attention.  As an author, I don’t know much about school administration.  Raymond followed Rudy Crew as the superintendent of the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) in August of 2009 to December of 2013 with 46,000 students of which 75% had family incomes below the federal poverty line and spoke more than forty different languages.  It was also the period where the State of California was in its sixth straight year of budget cuts to school districts.

Raymond moved to Sacramento with his family and entered his three children in the public schools.   Then he spent the first hundred days visiting every school in his district, sometimes as many as three a day.  He came armed with a vision of educating the Whole Child— “head, heart, and hands”—a philosophy that looks at children as individuals and addresses issues of readiness to learn (like good nutrition), and reaches out to the parents and community as partners in this vision.  He identified the six worst schools and decided to make them a priority.  He hired insiders, with proven value, to become part of his team. He is anti-standardized testing and is profoundly influenced by John Dewey and the contemporary formidable educator Linda Darling-Hammond.  All of these things made me sympathetic to his journey.

There was one aspect of Jonathan P. Raymond’s preparation for this job, however, that gave me pause.  Raymond briefly summed up his early career as a lawyer and politician who became a Broad Fellow at the Broad Academy for ten months in preparation for an administrative job in education.  Diane Ravitch offers this post on some of what the Broad Academy has done and what it stands for.  His belief in educating the Whole Child and his experience of the Waldorf school progressive education overrides some of what he learned from Broad.   Here’s what Raymond says about “school reform” and teachers:

“It’s no secret that some people in the so-called “school reform” movement are at war with teachers’ unions, and whether they intend it or not, are perceived as being at war with teachers themselves.  What I learned in Sacramento and keep learning as I move forward personally and professionally, is that no effort to transform a school or a district can succeed without recognizing the dignity and worth of teachers [italics, his] through appropriate compensation, opportunities for professional development and positive collaborative working conditions.”

He also said:

“The Broad Academy did me no favors with it came to union relations.  ‘People who come from outside education are more used to working in performance culture versus entitlement culture,’ Broad’s director told The Sacramento Bee when my appointment was first announced.  Disparaging hard-working educators by calling them ‘entitled’ is not how I would have set the table. “

His last chapter, “Solutions: Five Keys to Reimagine Schools,” puts leadership in the center with input from students, teachers, and community resulting in compromise in which all factions have buy-in.  He is at odds with the entrenched top-down organization that is a tradition in most districts.
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Jonathan P. Raymond’s title Wildflowers is a metaphor for the potential of all children to find a way to bloom when they encounter the proper nurturing environment for the special idiosyncratic germ within them.  This is a passionate, thoughtful book that can bring vision and hope to our public schools.  




Putting Citizenship Back in the Curriculum

8/4/2018

 
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Eric Liu, founder of Citizen University and Executive Director of the Aspen Institute’s Citizenship and American identity program. Photo by Vicki Cobb
On April 7, 2018, I returned to Teachers College, Columbia University for their Academic Festival, a celebration of the mission of this premiere graduate school founded on the principles of John Dewey as stated on the wall over the  TC reception desk: 
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photo by Vicki Cobb
The title of the keynote address by Eric Liu was "Teaching Civic Power." It was a rousing reminder that, as Dr. Liu quoted Sandra Day O'Conner: " 'Compulsory public education was instituted in the country in the first place to create citizens,' not wage workers, not customers, not capitalists, but citizens capable of governing themselves and their country." He believes that all teachers, no matter what subject, are also teaching civics through their own behavior.  He also recollected that in 1814, 25 years after the founding of the United States, John Adams said, "There never has been a democracy yet that has not committed suicide." 

On the up side, Liu said,
 "The United States today is not quite suicidal but it is definitely in a state  of self-inflicted fragility."  This is not a recent phenomenon but has been growing over the last forty years  "of erosion of common purpose of the leaders of both parties and .....of devaluation of public education in general and civic education in particular." 

We the people have ceded our collective power (the capacity to make people do what you would have them do)  over the years to special interests, to those who have wealth and to corruptive influences.  According to Liu, "Power doesn't so much corrupt as it reveals character."  The good news is that Eric Liu is optimistic about the future:  

 "Despite the sickness of the body politic right now, let me tell you why I am so hopeful.   In part, to be honest, it is because of the man who currently occupies the White House. After all, he alone, as he likes to say, he alone has sparked the greatest surge of civic  engagement this country has ever seen. Millions of Americans are stepping off the  sidelines and participating. .... People are swarming like antibodies to a virus … the immune system of the body politic is now kicking in.  The goal now has to be civic renewal—we need a new network of mutual aid, civic, social and moral character."  


How this can be done is by returning to the principles of John Dewey who believed that learning comes, not just from books, but by doing.  Eric Liu embodies these principles and he is speaking to wake us up. Thus the teacher, the writer, and the citizen of a democracy are all  practicing acts of faith, where learning and the thriving of a democracy become true through our best practices.
It will come, according to Dr. Liu, with the "savvy realization that we're all better off when we're all better off."

 
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I'm expressing my gratitude to the inimitable John Dewey.

     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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