The hidden questions behind Caine and his Arcade

You have to watch this amazing short video about Caine's Arcade. You'll be puzzled, you'll smile, you'll choke up and all at once. Have tissue in hand.

Then, you might even get mad and wonder why learning can't be more like this for every kid like Caine.



And to think no one had to test little Caine or his Arcade's learning outcomes to determine if he was proficient. No one checked to see if it was aligned with the government-mandated curriculum or met the state's one-size-fits-all graduation requirements.

No data was collected on his "teachers" and no one was fired over the results. No schools were labeled as failures or closed.

Yet he learned! How the hell could that happen without state or federal intervention?

Things aren't always what they seem to be...

For a number of years now, public schools, teachers and administrators have been under assault by a certain faction whose obvious aim is to eliminate public education in America. Now they won't admit to that but if you study the many one-sided debates and main-stream media-aided attacks on public schools, you would be deft if you considered any other conclusion.

The anti-public education group claims that public schools aren't cutting the mustard anymore. Many sound like CNN's Fareed Zakaria when he laments, "Part of the reason we're in this crisis is that we have slacked off and allowed our education system to get rigid and sclerotic." If you read the rest of Paul Farhi's latest analysis (Flunking the Test, American Journal Review) of this doom-and-gloom chanting, which I strongly encourage you do, you will quickly begin to see the pattern of flame-throwing in the world of sensational journalism, with public education right in its path.

Zakaria's take, however, may be a perfect distillation of much of what's wrong with mainstream media coverage of education. The prevailing narrative – and let's be wary of our own sweeping generalizations here – is that the nation's educational system is in crisis, that schools are "failing," that teachers aren't up to the job and that America's economic competitiveness is threatened as a result. Just plug the phrase "failing schools" into Nexis and you'll get 544 hits in newspapers and wire stories for just one month, January 2012. Some of this reflects the institutionalization of the phrase under the No Child Left Behind Act, the landmark 2001 law that ties federal education funds to school performance on standardized tests (schools are deemed "failing" under various criteria of the law). But much of it reflects the general notion that American education, per Zakaria, is in steep decline. Only 20 years ago, the phrase was hardly uttered: "Failing schools" appeared just 13 times in mainstream news accounts in January of 1992, according to Nexis. (Neither Zakaria nor CNN would comment for this story.)

Another group of so-called reformers love to spin the argument that charter public schools are more superior to traditional neighborhood-based public schools. But when they are called on the carpet to defend this statement, they can only point to a handful of successful endeavors, then completely ignore the fact that there are more than a handful of traditional public schools also succeeding. That's like kryptonite to Superman.

Several recent articles on Mlive.com have confronted the myth of superiority championed by the anti-public education group. They are well worth the read and once again demonstrate that things are not always what they seem to be, no matter how many times you hear it from the main stream media or political power-brokers.

In Michigan charter schools, results no better than other public schools (March 13, 2012)

Michigan charter schools spend more on administration, less on instruction, study finds (April 14, 2012)

Does it matter that charters spend more on administration, less on instruction? (Julie Mack blog) (April 15, 2012)

Reducing poverty and improving schools must work in tandem

Sometimes we prefer to act like we don't know what we already know. Diane Ravitch makes this clear when she points out that cycles of poverty are not created nor can they be eliminated by schools and teachers alone.

If it were true that we now know how to break the cycle of poverty, poverty would be declining. But poverty is growing in the United States; child poverty is more than 20 percent and rising. Among the world's advanced nations, we are number one in child poverty. It's facile to blame schools and teachers, but more realistic to recognize that poverty is a reflection of economic conditions. Schools cannot create jobs, provide homes for the homeless, or change the economy.

She hits the nail on the head when she claims that both systems - reducing poverty and improving our schools - must work in tandem if we are to have any reasonable chance of success. One without the other is destined to fail.

(Wendy) Kopp (Teach for America) dismisses Finland as a model because less than 4 percent of its children are poor. But that's part of the story of their success and should not be waved aside as unimportant.

So when are we going to quit playing the equivalent of political Russian roulette with the futures of our kids and start working together on both problems, equally hard? Start by expanding financial support for public schools, and improving equity of opportunity for districts serving high percentages of poor, low-income, transient and English language learners. That will be the real "high stakes assessment" testing our genuine resolve to breaking the cycle of poverty.

If you're going to be transparent, at least be honest!

Gov. Snyder signs dues collection bill; teachers union leaders call move 'blatant political retribution'

“It is essential that state public school resources be devoted to the education of our children. This continues the fiscal reforms designed to save schools money and help them operate even more efficiently.” ~ Snyder

This is laughable on several accounts:

• It costs mere pennies to deduct union dues from teachers' paychecks.
• Districts will continue to make other deductions at the request of teachers such as donations to United Way and local charitable education foundations.
• It will likely cost more now to make the changes to our payrolls to stop the dues deduction than to continue them.

But the biggest farce is that Snyder, the state legislature, and our entire federal government cause more wasted education dollars than a simple dues deduction. The mountains of unfunded administrative reporting and regulations created by their minions of bureaucrats and worthless add-ons to their idiotic regulations and personal agenda-based legislation waste more taxpayer dollars every day than dues collection will in the entire lifetime of a public school teacher.

Oh, and here's the real laugher (are you listening Governor?):

“This legislation furthers the goal of good government by promoting greater transparency...,” Snyder said in a release. (emphasis added)

If this is accurate, why don't your cronies in the State House and Senate admit that this bill you just signed was strictly designed as a blow to the teacher unions? Being transparent while simultaneously being dishonest is not what I think you intended by your statement.

While I actually do not have a personal position on whether districts collect dues or not, I do take a position on disingenuous political spin. If you're going to be transparent, be honest.

We no longer value failure in learning

Today's educational system is being pushed towards a mythical state of perfection, where all students (theoretically) achieve at the same high level at the same time. There's no room for failure in a high-stakes testing environment. It's no longer important to encourage discovery, failure, and perseverance in life's quest for success. It's now only important to be able to regurgitate what one has learned on a winner-take-all multiple choice test that's disguised as the only gateway to college and career. If you don't make it, you're a failure (and so are your teachers and your schools).

Thankfully, there were those in the past who came up through a more saner approach to education and learned that failing is not the end, nor is it the door to terminal disgrace. It's merely formative feedback that when combined with a touch of determination will eventually lead to success. No idiotic multiple choice test can predict that outcome.

Here's a few notable failures, some of whom never even completed a formal education yet ultimately achieved measurable success. For more examples, visit They Did Not Give Up:

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln went to war a captain and returned a private. Afterwards, he was a failure as a businessman. As a lawyer in Springfield, he was too impractical and temperamental to be a success. He turned to politics and was defeated in his first try for the legislature, again defeated in his first attempt to be nominated for congress, defeated in his application to be commissioner of the General Land Office, defeated in the senatorial election of 1854, defeated in his efforts for the vice-presidency in 1856, and defeated in the senatorial election of 1858. At about that time, he wrote in a letter to a friend, "I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth."

Thomas Edison's teachers said he was "too stupid to learn anything." He was fired from his first two jobs for being "non-productive." As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps."

Can you imagine earning the equivalent of a 1/10 of one-percent on a high stages test but ultimately succeeding beyond anyone's wildest dreams? Not in today's ridiculous NCLB crusade.

Albert Einstein did not speak until he was 4-years-old and did not read until he was 7. His parents thought he was "sub-normal," and one of his teachers described him as "mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in foolish dreams." He was expelled from school and was refused admittance to the Zurich Polytechnic School. He did eventually learn to speak and read. Even to do a little math.

Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he succeeded. 

"Failure provides the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently." ~ Henry Ford

Rocket scientist Robert Goddard found his ideas bitterly rejected by his scientific peers on the grounds that rocket propulsion would not work in the rarefied atmosphere of outer space.

"I never learned a thing from a tournament I won." 

~ Bobby Jones

When Julie Andrews took her first screen test for MGM studios, the final determination was that "She's not photogenic enough for film."

Enrico Caruso's music teacher said he had no voice at all and could not sing. His parents wanted him to become an engineer.

"Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; 

but great minds rise above them."

 

~ Washington Irving

My personal favorite:

There is a professor at MIT who offers a course on failure. He does that, he says, because failure is a far more common experience than success. An interviewer once asked him if anybody ever failed the course on failure. He thought a moment and replied, "No, but there were two Incompletes."

"Every great cause is born from repeated failures and from imperfect achievements." 

~ Maria Montessori

Anna Haislip wrote for the Colorado Daily:  

"When the Columbia space shuttle broke apart above Texas in February 2003, no one knew that it could one day result in success. NASA astronaut Dr. Charles Camarda, however, believes the tragedy has provided both current and future engineers with a motto to live by - where there is failure, there is knowledge and understanding that doesn't come with success."

Fear is often the only thing that stands in the way of moving from failure to success. And fear is spawned by high-stakes testing and other narrow measures of achievement that have little to do with instilling courage to fail and the willingness to learn from failure and persevere. When the only purpose to testing is to rank students and schools, it serves as a roadblock rather than a map to eventual success. Instead of being seen as a way of sorting out what doesn't work from what does, a step that's necessary for failure to lead to success, it demoralizes the vast majority of students and teachers, and forces schools to spend more time focused on fixing what was failed rather than expanding on what succeeded.

Most of us probably don’t remember learning to walk, but surely our parents do, and they can vouch that we didn’t get it right the first time we tried. Did we give up and continue to crawl? No. We tried again until we got it right. But not only did we try again, we practiced walking so much we were eventually able to run. We weren’t born knowing everything, but we were born with the ability to learn and grow. ~ Katie Barbaro

Imagine a "top-to-bottom" list of parents whose child didn't demonstrate proficiency in walking by a specific year, month and day. Thankfully we're not there, yet, but what will happen to the future of humanity when we no longer value failure as the stepping stone to success?