Only for MY Kid - The Diigo Meta page

• 05 Jan 10
  

  Heidi Gable
• 04 Jan 10
  

  Ira Socol

  kohn education

• 03 Jan 10
  

  Jim Peterson

  • 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

• 14 Sep 09
  

  Glenn Moses
  • 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
  • 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'.
  • 37 more annotations...
  • • 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,
    • The parents who prefer
      worksheets and lectures can use their clout to reverse or forestall a move
      to more learner-centered classrooms
    • 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.
    • American education is so segregated and stratified today that the elite
      mingle mostly with one another.
    • 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
    • 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
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • inclusive schooling offers all students the type of
      education usually reserved for gifted and talented students.
    • 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?
    • they are in effect sacrificing other children to their own
    • The psychology of those parents is that it's not
      enough for their kids to win: others must lose -- and they must lose
      conspicuously.
    • 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
    • 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.
    • The point is not to get an
      education but to get ahead
    • It is through this lens that we might regard the
      demand in some affluent communities for a transmission-based, "bunch
      o'facts" curriculum
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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
    • Before long, the children internalize this quest and
      come to see their childhood as one long period of getting ready
    • 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
    • moral, social,
      artistic, emotional, and other forms of development are often jettisoned
      in favor of a narrow academic agenda.
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 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
    • 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
    • "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
    • 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?
    • The answer is that the system is quite clearly broken
      for most students -- those who are not among the elect
    • 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
    • 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
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 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
    • Likewise, some parents will be relieved that
      detracking doesn't mean "teaching to the middle" -- but they have to be
      made aware of this
    • 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.
• 09 Sep 09
  

  Melissa Harper
  • 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.
• 

  Ruth Radney

  parents who want their kids to do well, but NOT all kids to do well.

  education reform learning

• 10 Apr 09
  

  Christy Tucker

  1998 article by Alfie Kohn on barriers to progressive changes in education, with some proposals for better approaches for working with parents to help them see the benefits

  education k-12 highered diversity economics

  • 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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