Category Archives: Blog

Rosin’s “Suicide High” Is A Must Read

Posted on by
Reply

Read this.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/

Articles about child suicide usually put me off. It’s not just the tragedy of a life lost, but the emotional pit into which everyone – parents and family, friends, teachers and coaches – swirls in trying to find reasons that explain the inexplicable or assurances that “this will never happen again.”

Hanna Rosin’s ability to tell a human story supported by her responsible investigation into the lives of those involved and the credible research of experts in the field makes “The Silicon Valley Suicides” a must read. Educators will find that the culture of schooling and school practices are a part of the story but not the entire story. Parents will find their look into the “parenting mirror” is not reassuring because some of what they may see in themselves is killing their children. Children will find that the stress of adolescence is real and heavy and universal and suicide is not a solution.

Thanks to The Atlantic for its commitment to in-depth reporting. Thanks to Ms. Rosin – many thanks, indeed, for her superior writing.

Managing Your School’s DEFCOM Events

Posted on by
Reply

What did we learn from the confrontation between school personnel and a non-compliant student at Spring Valley High School (South Carolina)? You may remember the CNN, Google News and tabloid coverage of this story; it was their headline for a day. Six things, I think, need to be learned and each of the six triggers its own pyramid of discussions and lessons.

First, the erosion of authority and respect in child/adult relationships that presents so many dilemmas to contemporary parenting now lives large in school classrooms. Where once the teacher enjoyed the status of “respected” adult, teachers now are just one more neutered adult responsible for but not empowered to address an increasing level of child issues including recalcitrance to follow adult directives.

The causation of child misbehavior has been well studied and many of the root causes for misbehavior are common to home and school. Linda Albert cites four generalized causes for misbehavior that apply to both home and school. These are generic and are manifested in many child-child and child-adult relationships, often in healthy ways. It is when the child moves from making a statement to deliberately causing a problem that any of these four becomes conflagratory.

  • • Attention-seeking
  • • Power-seeking
  • • Revenge-seeking
  • • Avoidance of failure.

https://prezi.com/t_m2imirzl4o/copy-of-linda-alberts-cooperative-discipline-theory/

Child misbehavior also may be school-specific. “Garner interviewed disruptive students who told him the reasons for their behavior were generally tied to disliking a teacher’s instructional style, personality or the subject that was being taught.” The small and petty can be made major and life-changing. In these instances, the purpose of the behavior is to affront the teacher.

http://www.wpri.org/WPRI/Reports/2013/The-Impact-of-Disruptive-Students-in-Wisconsin-Public-Schools.htm

A less extreme factor is the effect of a low-lying yet constant distracting presence in a classroom. Even if a teacher is able to continue to teach and even if other children do not join the disruptive behavior, one or both may be distracted from the lesson because of the misbehaving child.

http://www.wpri.org/WPRI/Reports/2013/The-Impact-of-Disruptive-Students-in-Wisconsin-Public-Schools.htm

How often does student misbehavior occur? More than we think and with enough frequency to cause significant losses of instructional and learning opportunity. “In a poll of AFT teachers, 17 percent said they lost four or more hours of teaching time per week thanks to disruptive student behavior; another 19 percent said they lost two or three hours. In urban areas, fully 21 percent said they lost four or more hours per week. And in urban secondary schools, the percentage is 24.”

http://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/winter-2003-2004/heading-disruptive-behavior#sthash.8pk6u2DE.dpuf

Second, a student’s “no” can create a nuclear event in the classroom. Historically there has been an assumed student acquiescence to directions given by a teacher. Most children still comply readily. However, once the “no” is out there, all energy in the classroom is sucked into the resolution of the “no.” And, depending upon the resolution, the perception of all children for the locus of leadership of the classroom hangs in the balance. Students today are well aware of the snarky-voiced characters in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The Hollywood-glamorized sex, drugs and rock and roll student life style posed copycat problems for some teachers in many classrooms across the states following the 1982 movie release and, as a teen cult movie, snarky talk rears itself now and again.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083929/

More problematic today are characterizations of the dark, quiet and ephemeral Ally Sheedy character in Saturday Morning Breakfast Club who refused to engage with her teachers and principal. Her passively defiant behavior was much more difficult for school personnel to deal with compared with the aggressiveness of Emilio Estevez, the clandestine actions of Judd Nelson and the small-time truancies of a spoiled Molly Ringwald. Classmates today see the quiet refusal of a student to comply with teacher directives as a statement of individualism against the conformity demanded in high stakes schools. Small-time classroom heroes emerge from the Sheedy-likes.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088847/fullcredits/

A teacher’s toolkit is large and potent in dealing with children who want to engage in their learning. It remains potent with children who have a variety of learning difficulties and distractions. The toolkit is theoretically rich but realistically limited when a student turtles-up into a “no” position and refuses to negotiate a strategy toward learning. Stalemate becomes checkmate.

Third, nothing in our communications-rich world lives in isolation. The Spring Valley student who demanded to use her cell phone instead of doing the classroom assignment wasn’t the only child in the room with a cell phone. Once the “no” escalated to action, the “story” was recorded by other students on their devices and immediately broadcast to the world. Schools have glass walls and every teacher and principal must be super aware that they and all that they do are on universal public display.

The argument about whether or not children can have cell phones at school has passed. It is a given that cell phones with cameras are present everywhere. Teaching children that there is a time and place for them to use their devices is the current work before educators. No tolerance policies have shape-shifted to “when and where” policies. That said, any and every confrontation between children and between children and adults at school is a child’s definition of “when” pull out and use their cell device. It is a new era and teacher behavior must be shaped by the fact that what they say and do in a child’s “when” will be recorded and may become viral.

Fourth, the adage that children need the best teacher available in order to advance their educational future, although still true, has been flipped in the era of performance-based teacher evaluation. Teachers now need the best students available to them to bolster the data of their professional work. Every hour of instruction in which a student(s) is inattentive to learning puts the teacher’s statistical effectiveness at risk. Today, a teacher who is mindful of student inattentiveness must be a master tactician in incident management. Keep in mind the AFT poll cited above and the hours of lost learning time that plague so many classrooms. When children are inattentive or “turtled up”, they cannot be productive learners. And, when inattentive and recalcitrant behaviors are present a teacher is not able to provide “best instruction.” Everyone loses. And this leads us immediately to number five.

Fifth, keep the DEFCOM scale in mind and assure that levels 1, 2 and 3 are kept in the “once every other century drawer.” Most school discipline problems need to be handled at DEFCON 5, the lowest level of response. And, one valuable variation of DEFCOM 5 is “ignore the problem for the time being.” Every child behavior does not require management or immediate intervention. Letting one child be herself for a class period while all other children can be engaged in learning is much more profitable for all rather letting your Dr. Strangelove loose on the problem. Strangelove’s work guarantees a nuclear event and everyone will be scorched.

The confrontation at Spring Valley defined its faculty and its students in the public mind and, although public attention is fickle and short-lived, for months and years to come that confrontation is all the public will know about Spring Valley High School. A good reputation takes years and even decades to accrue. Damage to a reputation can happen in a key stroke.

And sixth, Etta Jackson, a very insightful school counselor, schooled me decades ago in this truth: If a person who belongs to a protected class is involved in a problem, the issue immediately focuses on that protected class. The problem remains the same, but it becomes secondary to the issue. In Spring Valley, the issue the world observed was about race, treatment of a child, and gender. All that the national media wanted to talk about were the issues of race, age and gender. The problem of how adults today can deal with a child who willfully chooses to refuse direction remains the overarching and pervasive dilemma for everyone, including Spring Valley High. The issue will overwhelm and bury the problem if we ignore Etta’s wisdom. As Etta told me, when every child is a protected class of one we can help them the most with the goodness of our best daily and usual practices.

Hindsight, of course, always is clear and perfect in discerning what should have happened. Learning from our experiences or from the stories of others can give us the opportunity to play in front of hindsight. Rub your own magic ball and forecast what you will do when a child willfully chooses to push your DEFCOM buttons.

Not Reading This Summer? You Will Start School In September With Less Than You Left It in June

Posted on by
Reply

When my grandsons told me not to give them more books as summer gifts, I knew they were heading into the long, eroding slide of a non-reading summer. “We have enough books, Gramps”, they said, and “School is over and summer is for fun.” If left to their own devices, children who do not read or are not engaged in “minds on activities” during their summer vacation lose any learning edge they had during the completed school year. They will begin their next school year well behind where they ended the prior school year.

We have known about summer learning regression for a long time. The National Summer Learning Association says, “All young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer. Research spanning 100 years shows that students typically score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the beginning of the summer (White, 1906; Heyns, 1978; Entwisle & Alexander 1992; Cooper, 1996; Downey et al, 2004).

Most students lose about two months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation skills over the summer months. Low-income students also lose more than two months in reading achievement, despite the fact that their middle-class peers make slight gains (Cooper, 1996).”

http://www.summerlearning.org/?page=know_the_facts

A child’s vocabulary is her key to unlocking future learning. When a child knows the words she encounters or has a familiarity with the word families of new words, learning maintains its natural pace. Just remember what it was like in school when a teacher or a classmate used words that you did not know. You experienced the feeling of being a stranger in the conversation and that part of the conversation did not make any sense. With continued repetition of hearing or reading words that are unfamiliar, the conversation stops because you checked out.

Beck and McKeown (1991) indicate that by age six a child should know 2,500 to 5,000 words. Anglin (1993) found that by age ten a child should know 40,000 words. And, Miller and Gildea (1997) learned that a high school graduate should know 80,000 words. Interestingly, most of our word acquisition does not happen through formal instruction.

“School age language acquisition occurs primarily through incidental experience more than formal teaching. Word learning shifts from concrete and functional to abstract and unusual. This shift occurs gradually from third grade through the high school years. Environment matters. Extreme environments extremely matter.” Times and places that are “word rich” grow working vocabularies just as times and places that are “word poor” erode working vocabularies. Sometime the environment is not our choosing, but most of the time it is.

https://languagefix.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/how-many-words-should-a-child-know/

Most of us learn words naturally because we put ourselves in front of word traffic. That’s what happens when we read. It does not matter whether the material is fiction or non-fiction, in hard cover of soft, on an e-reader or a laptop. When we put our eyes on words, we will observe words or word usage that is new to us and when we make our own natural inquiry into a word’s definition or context, we grow our working vocabulary.

I tell my grandsons, aged 7, 9 and 11, that their 67-year old grandfather finds words and word usages every day that are new, or at least seem new, to him. They tend to think that the stack of books and journals on my desk and next to chairs in every room in my home are a form of decoration or just have been forgotten where they lie.

Creating word rich environments is a thriving business in the United States. Huntington is a major educational tutorial service. They say, “Make reading a daily occurrence. Reading can be one of the most drastic regression areas, so develop a nightly reading routine for the whole household. Turn off the television and cell phones and have everyone in the family pull out their books or magazines for 30 minutes or longer. If your child needs help, read together. Keep it fun-let your child choose the reading material when you go to the library.”

http://huntingtonhelps.com/resource/article/how-to-avoid-summertime-regression/#.VYhfA9FRGUl

Having fun in the summer is important for children. Working to either take assist parents with household duties or to earn money also is important for many children. Investing in their intellectual future need not steal from fun or work, because reading can fill in the ten to thirty minutes gaps between fun/work activities or it reading can be a good relaxation activity following higher energy recreation and work.

When children learn to carry a book or magazine or an e-reader with them, they are prepared to take advantage of every opportunity that summer presents. Word acquisition through continuous personalized reading in the summer is one of the most significant strategies a child can use to expand her working vocabulary. It is shameful to lose intellectual ground just because the time of the year is summer and summer is “for fun.”

In Education, Everything Is Politics

Posted on by
Reply

What should one do when “the Great Hub Bub” seems so overwhelming and no one appears capable or willing to listen to those who yell “Stop! What are we doing! This makes no sense!”? The conundrum of public education in our times is summarized in two of my favorite quotations: “Everything is politics” (Thomas Mann) and “It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much” (Yogi Berra).

The “Great Hub Bub” occurs in this convergence of educational and political overtalk when the drowning conversation, the real talk, is all about political advantage. Do we really think that a public figure would embrace parental choice if large financial donations and a voting block of outspoken public advocates, aka voters, were not associated with parental choice? Look to the list of governors and legislators funded by Americans For Prosperity. The PAC power of AFP pre-determined the status of parental choice in Wisconsin; there really was not debate. Or, would an elected official oppose the research of solid field studies and glom onto catch phrases if there was not an advantage? How many elected officials denounce any attempt to reform the K-12 science standards because their political position is that humans are not responsible for global warming? These are examples of special interest in action. Everything is politics.

In this environment, try to have a real conversation at the state or federal level about K-12 education, but check your wrist watch to see how many seconds it takes for the other person to cite a partisan or PAC talking point. It won’t take sixty seconds.

Today’s mail brought an informational piece from our state legislator. He resigned his position as the Board President of a local school district to run for state office. His school district, along with all Wisconsin districts, experienced significant reductions in state financial support as part of a Republican Governor and Republican-controlled legislative efforts to balance the state budget by cutting educational funding at all levels. His Board publicly pointed to the loss of state funding as the need for several successive funding referenda for their district. Even with successful referenda that Board laid off teachers and cut programs. Our legislator, the former Board President, now tells us in his mailing that the Republican policies are good for Wisconsin and are causing good things for K-12 schools. It’s impossible to get into a conversation with a partisan politician about K-12 education, they are talking the party line too much.

And, the Hub Bub goes on and on.

The Big Picture Is Needed For A Better Future

Posted on by
Reply

Who sees the Big Picture for your school? The Big picture. You remember what that is. Generally, the Big Picture is the school’s Mission Statement. It is the collage of high ground learning outcomes that your school wants all children to achieve in “the best of educational worlds.” Some schools see themselves in terms of their Big Picture and their potential for making their Big Picture a statement of what they are. Big pictures are the work of visionaries, the large achievements to be attained over time. Big pictures are the dreams of teachers and parents related to the qualities that future children might become.

Just as there are Big Pictures there also are little pictures. The little picture, and there are many of them, are not associated with the best of educational worlds but with the reality of educational worlds. A little picture is this year’s graduation rate, or the comparison of this year’s fifth grade reading scores with that cohort’s reading scores last year, or the number of days that children categorized as minority were suspended from school this year compared with the number of suspension days for children categorized as white, English-speaking and not impoverished. Little pictures require school functionaries who are tasked with the management of specific annual outcomes. Little pictures are the annual measures of what happens on a daily and ultimately annual basis in a school.

It is difficult in 2015 to be a keeper of the Big Picture. Visionaries see schools differently than functionaries. This is a statement of truth not of prejudice. In order for schools to succeed in the world of 2015, they need the diligent work of functionaries, leaders who are focused on the little pictures of school accountability. A school that fails to meet its accountability mandates is a school with a limited future and a school without a future fails its community.

But, what if a school neglects its Big Picture? What if school leadership emphasizes the measured scores of little pictures by abandoning its efforts to provide an array of arts and humanities programs? What if the wellness curricula of physical education and health are short-changed? What if college-preparation extension courses of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate are eliminated? What if the only instructed language is English and the only career preparation is high school graduation? The answer to these “what ifs” is that the soul of the school will be lost. While the bones of instruction that support tested curricula will remain, the richness of programming authorized by the Mission Statement that ensures that the school can meet the ambitions of every child will not live in this school.

Achieving the little pictures at the expense of the Big Picture gives in to the pressures of education politics and abandons dreams of a greater future.