This link has been bookmarked by 29 people . It was first bookmarked on 10 Apr 2009, by Christy Tucker.
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23 Apr 14
Malcolm LawPhi Beta Kappan April 1998
For many parents it is not enough that their own children are succeeding, they need to know other children are failing and failing conspicuously -
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"I thought if it was good for kids, everyone would embrace it, and I thought all adults wanted all kids to be successful. That's not true.
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first of which concerns the type of instruction that is offered.
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Second, there is the question of placement, or which students get what
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practices that take place after
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selecting and sorting students so only a few are recognized: awards, letter grades, weighted grades
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It's not about success but victory, not about responding to a competitive environment but creating one.
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"The psychology of those parents is that it's not enough for their kids to win: others must lose -- and they must lose conspicuously."
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This explains much of the frustration experienced by educators who insist that narratives or portfolios are far more informative about students' learning than letter grades are, or who cite evidence to show that focusing students' attention on getting A's tends to reduce their interest in the learning itself.
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then A's will always be necessary
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The problem does not rest solely with our attitude toward children, however, but also with our attenuated sense of community.
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No wonder such parents are more likely to ask, "How is my child doing compared to everyone else?" than to inquire about how effectively that child is learning. To paraphrase a popular song, What's learning got to do with it?
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whether we are witnessing a debate over pedagogy or about something else entirely.
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This bottom line is never far from the minds of such parents, who weigh every decision about what their children do in school, or even after school, against the yardstick of what it might contribute to future success.
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They are not raising a child so much as living résumé
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reductive world view
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children internalize this quest and come to see their childhood as one long period of getting ready
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, this poisonous assumption that the value of everything is solely a function of its contribution to something that might come later, will continue right through college, right through professional school, right through the early stages of a career, until at last they wake up in a tastefully appointed bedroom to discover that their lives are mostly gone.
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straining toward the future
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moral, social, artistic, emotional, and other forms of development are often jettisoned in favor of a narrow academic agenda.
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"We need fundamental changes in how we construct pedagogy and curriculum
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The child's needs and point of view often play little role in decisions that are made by, as well as for, the parents.
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it's not just other children but the very prospects for a democratic society that are at risk from tracking and other practices.
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Focusing on broad, long term goals for their children.
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points up just how useless norm-referenced evaluations really are.
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Our job is not limited to educating students; sometimes we are called upon to educate parents and others in the community.
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determination and genuine love for what they are doing)
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03 Oct 11
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10 Feb 11
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affluent white parents have already won. The plum classes and programs for their children already exist, as do the letter grades and awards to distinguish them from those other children. The system serves these parents well, and their influence is such -- or the fear that they will yank their children out is sufficient -- that few superintendents (and even fewer school boards) dare to rock this boat on which first-class cabins
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w superintendents (and even fewer school boards) dare to rock this boat on which first-class cabins
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nunavut teacherRT @rogre: That last quote (referring to noblesse oblige) comes from @DebMeier, also via "Only for MY Kid" by @alfiekohn http://bit.ly/1 ...
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What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.
-- John Dewey, School and Society
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14 Sep 09
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your upper-class, high-achieving parents who feel that education is competitive, that there shouldn't be anyone else in the same class as my child, and we shouldn't spend a whole lot of time with the have-nots
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I thought if it was good for kids, everyone would embrace it, and I thought all adults wanted all kids to be successful. That's not true. The people who receive status from their kids' performing well in school didn't like that other kids' performance might be raised to the level of their own kids'.
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Take a step back, however, and you begin to grasp the import of what is happening from Amherst, Massachusetts, where highly educated white parents have fought to preserve a tracking system that keeps virtually every child of color out of advanced classes,
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The parents who prefer worksheets and lectures can use their clout to reverse or forestall a move to more learner-centered classrooms
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Pitched battles are more common in integrated schools, but even here they happen rarely because, in large measure, the affluent white parents have already won.
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American education is so segregated and stratified today that the elite mingle mostly with one another.
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racking, advanced placement (AP) courses, and gifted programs do not provide differential instruction for legitimate pedagogical reasons -- or allow for a system based on merit -- so much as they represent a naked grab for artificially scarce benefits by those who have the power to get them
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To begin with, AP classes at the high school level are usually difficult but often poorly taught, with an emphasis on short-term memorization of facts presented in lectures and textbooks -- in effect, one long test-prep session
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the beneficiaries of these educational advantages would "be more concerned about the labels placed on their children than about what actually goes on in the classroom.
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Granted, it is hard to deny the superiority of the instruction in gifted-and-talented programs and some other honors or high-track classes, what with hands-on learning, student-designed projects, computers, field trips, and other enrichments. But research generally shows that it is precisely those enrichments that produce better results rather than the fact that they are accorded only to a select few.
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The detracking in these 10 schools was carefully planned to bring other students up to a high level, but not to take anything away from the privileged children. Yet the reaction from the parents of the latter students has been powerfully negative -- often fatal for the reform efforts. These parents have pressured educators "to maintain separate and unequal classes for their children, . . . [demanding] to know what their children will 'get' that other students will not have access to.
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inclusive schooling offers all students the type of education usually reserved for gifted and talented students.
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This is essentially what happened in San Diego, where an attempt to give a leg up to lower-tracked students was, as Elizabeth Cohen of Stanford University puts it, "the kind of project that you'd think wouldn't bother upper-status parents at all. Wrong! They said, 'What are you going to do special for my kid?
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they are in effect sacrificing other children to their own
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The psychology of those parents is that it's not enough for their kids to win: others must lose -- and they must lose conspicuously.
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These arguments will only persuade someone who is looking for more information about his or her child's improvement or someone who is concerned about sustaining the child's interest. If, however, the point is not for assessment to be authentic but for it to serve as a sorting device, to show not how well the student is doing but how much better he or she is doing than others, then A's will always be necessary -- and it will always be necessary for some people's children not to get them
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In a new book titled How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning, David Labaree of Michigan State University argues that schooling these days is not seen as a way to create democratic citizens or even capable workers, but serves more as a credentialing mechanism.
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The point is not to get an education but to get ahead
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It is through this lens that we might regard the demand in some affluent communities for a transmission-based, "bunch o'facts" curriculum
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if "young people who have traditionally monopolized 'success' in the classroom are likely to find themselves joined in success by more of their peers," this can be "profoundly upsetting to some of their parents whose ambitions for their children include being at the top of the class in school and getting into elite colleges.
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Of course, reasonable people can disagree about the best way to teach math and other subjects, but more than one observer of the "math wars" has wondered whether we are witnessing a debate over pedagogy or about something else entirely.
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Or does parental opposition really just reflect the fear that more sophisticated math instruction might be less useful for boosting SAT scores and therefore for getting students into the most elite colleges? Math reformers who counterpose merely doing arithmetic with really understanding (and being able to apply) mathematical principles may be missing the more pertinent contrast, which is between doing what is best for learning and doing what is best for getting my child into the Ivy League
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Before long, the children internalize this quest and come to see their childhood as one long period of getting ready
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What they don't know, for their parents surely will not tell them, is that this straining toward the future, this poisonous assumption that the value of everything is solely a function of its contribution to something that might come later, will continue right through college, right through professional school, right through the early stages of a career, until at last they wake up in a tastefully appointed bedroom to discover that their lives are mostly gone
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moral, social, artistic, emotional, and other forms of development are often jettisoned in favor of a narrow academic agenda.
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What Garrison Keillor said about school choice proposals could easily be applied to ability grouping and gifted programs: they seem to make sense "until you stop and think about the old idea of the public school, a place where you went to find out who inhabits this society other than people like you.
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In some places, there is legitimate reason for concern, but as a rule too much attention is paid to the difficulty level of what is being taught, the simplistic assumption being that harder is better
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To judge what goes on in a classroom on the basis of how difficult the tasks are is rather like judging an opera on the basis of how many notes it contains that are challenging for the singers to hit
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The truth is that, if tests or homework assignments consist of factual recall questions, it doesn't make all that much difference whether there are 25 tough questions or 10 easy ones
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"Parents say, 'Look I live in this $600,000 house. I was successful with the system you currently have. Why do we have to look at anything different?' " The twin premises of this argument, of course, are equally ripe for challenge: that the most important kind of success in life can be measured in terms of real estate and that their own success occurred because of a system that includes letter grades, separate tracks, memorizing the multiplication table in third grade, and so on
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the elite students are getting a school-within-a-school with small classes and plenty of attention, so "why should you be for change when your kids are benefiting from exactly what we say is wrong with high schools?
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The answer is that the system is quite clearly broken for most students -- those who are not among the elect
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f students can read but don't, if they fail to think deeply or to take satisfaction from playing with ideas, if they are primarily concerned with what is going to be on the test, then something is drastically wrong with the status quo
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They couch their opposition to detracking mainly in terms of the low-track students' "behavior" -- lack of motivation to learn, lack of commitment to school or interest in higher education, tendency to act out, and so forth -- without making the connection between these behaviors and the low-track students' "penetration" of an unequal and hierarchical system in which they are at the bottom
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ringing those lower-achieving students into the classroom is going to water down things for my children. They're not going to be able to keep up, and the teachers are going to have to slow things down.
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We need to invite people to live up to their own best ideals, to impress upon them the moral implications of these policies, and to help them understand that it's not just other children but the very prospects for a democratic society that are at risk from tracking and other practices
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The reformer's job, then, is to help parents see that favored educational practices -- from drill-and-skill teaching techniques to letter grades to awards assemblies -- are actively impeding the realization of the very goals that they themselves say they want
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Likewise, some parents will be relieved that detracking doesn't mean "teaching to the middle" -- but they have to be made aware of this
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We're not in the business of educating one group of students. As professionals we're responsible for educating everyone, and there are things that we must not do. That's a moral and professional issue.
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09 Sep 09
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What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.
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Ruth Radneyparents who want their kids to do well, but NOT all kids to do well.
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10 Apr 09
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McClaren, who looks back on what happened from his new post several states away, says he made "two fatal assumptions" when he started: "I thought if it was good for kids, everyone would embrace it, and I thought all adults wanted all kids to be successful. That's not true. The people who receive status from their kids' performing well in school didn't like that other kids' performance might be raised to the level of their own kids'."
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27 Apr 06
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