Education

The “C” Student

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 4 Comments

With the great debate going on that has polarized the education world with the mentality of “us” vs. “them,” it is important to be honest about who many of our teachers are.  I know right now that this post is going to ruffle some feathers, but I speak from personal experience in many ways.  I was and still am a teacher.  This isn’t the voice of an outsider.

A larger percentage of students in teacher education programs are C students.  Most A and B students don’t go into education.  They just don’t.  There I said it.  Teacher colleges (aside from the elite schools) are filled with mediocre students.  I notice this in the work I do with student teachers and pre-service teachers. I know this from the work I do as an NCATE reviewer for English Education programs.  I know this because I was a teacher.  Who we are as teachers is how we see our students.  It is how we judge our students and compare them to others.  When teachers see students who are trying as hard as they can and are still only achieving at the average level–that level becomes the A level.  I know there are those teachers of you out there saying “no,” “why not reward growth?”  Well I am here to call you out.  Really you don’t do that?  If you don’t do it now, didn’t you do it in the beginning?  I will admit that I did.  I would see students grow and change and put in so much effort without real gain and I would empathize with them.  I would want to reward them for their hard work.  All I was doing was making myself feel better and setting them up for failure.  It took me a year of teaching and researching to realize what I was doing and that it wasn’t about rigor or good education.

Most teacher prep programs have a required GPA of 2.5.  Really?  That is so low.  I know it’s okay to have a C student as president, but I certainly don’t want one as my doctor nor as my child’s teacher.  Shouldn’t our classrooms be staffed with the brightest teachers we can get?  I really think this is why TFA (Teach for America) has been so successful.  While many of their corps members don’t teach a subject they have a degree in, they are smart.  Smart is important.  Smart is what creates ideas.  Smart is what challenges beliefs and the status quo.  Our educational system (public) was not created to build intellectual capacity of the citizens in America.  If it was, uneducated women (no offense) wouldn’t have been the first teachers in public education.  I have always felt that our teacher education admission requirements were too low.  If we have low standards for our teachers, how can we expect them to have high standards for their own?

Education for too long has accepted mediocrity and perpetuated it.  I’m not sure how to change it or fix it.  I do  know that we should let just anyone who wants to be a teacher be one.  I’m sorry if that is politically incorrect, but it’s true.  We don’t let anyone who wants to be a doctor be one.  We should have high standards.  If a person wants to work hard and is smart enough then of course let’s train them to be a teacher.  These are our kids lives at stake.  Three years of having a bad teacher increase exponentially the chance that child won’t finish school.  Aren’t our children worth the demands and rigor?  I know that mine are.  I know that everyone’s are.  It’s time for a change and it has to be systemic.  If we want our children to succeed we have to have teachers who know how to succeed–not just get by.

Time For Change

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 1 Comment

I saw Madeline Sackler’s documentary The Lottery last night. I haven’t seen Waiting for Superman yet. It was a movie that stirs emotions-sadness and anger are two of those emotions.

I have much more to say, but will hold those thoughts until I see the other movie.

Now, all I can say is that I am lucky that I have a quality choice for my kids. I am also revitalized in my work to reform public education. They are all our children.

A Movement

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 1 Comment

I’m not talking about this here blog. This is not a movement–trust me.  I eagerly tuned into Oprah on Friday to hear the continued conversation on public education.  I was happy that the content of the show was not overshadowed by Mark Zukerberg’s amazing announcement.  Not that his donation to Newark Public Schools isn’t amazing; it is.  But money cannot fix everything that is wrong in education.  Newark already spends $22000 a year per student–more than any district in the country.  Am I cynical?  Yes.  Money isn’t what is wrong in education.  Granted some districts desperately need money.  What I am saying is that money alone isn’t going to solve the problem in education.

I will admit I tuned in because I knew someone in the audience and because Geoffrey Canada was going to be on the show.  Let me just say that I think Geoffrey Canada is amazing and is the type of leader we need in education.  No one who has been reading here for any length of time will be surprised by my passion for education.  I have long spoken of how our educational system is broken.  The entire system not just parts of it are broken.  One of the things pointed out by Canada and others is that if our educational system was a business, it would have gone out of business a long time ago.  You can’t produce “products” that are inferior (I hate to talk about students this way–but for the sake of the analogy bear with me) and stay in business.  But in education that is what we have.  We have more and more students who need to take remedial classes in college–even in the Ivy league.  This generation is the first generation that is going to be less literate than their parents (on a side note it’s also the first generation to have shorter life expectancy than their parents).  We can’t just keep with the status quo otherwise we are failing our children and theirs.

Our educational system is the definition of insanity–doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result.  We are still educating kids the way we were educated and the way our parents were educated.  Education has lagged in innovation–Canada said on Oprah, “we wouldn’t think of putting our kids in cars without seatbelts [as our parents did]” so why do we continue to send them to schools that are still educating kids in the same way?  Education is the only industry where someone can go to work and fail everyday and still keep going to work.  Why don’t we demand more?

I am not blaming all teachers, but I know some teachers who are using the same lesson plans from day to day, year to year.  If it didn’t work last year it isn’t going to work this year.  Teaching is hard work and it is a job that needs to be treated with more respect–from those in the profession.  No one outside of education is going to take teachers seriously until we start to take ourselves more seriously.  Teaching is a “real” job/profession.  It has real demands.  Our jobs aren’t done until our students have learned what they need to know (how to think).  We have to be willing to put in the time and I really don’t want to hear (sorry teacher friends) that you don’t get paid enough.  In some cases this is true, but in many cases it isn’t.  Teaching is a profession, like medicine and/or law, that doesn’t end at 3pm or 4pm.  It is a job we do until the student has been served.  Does this make it hard on families?  Yes.  Does this mean we need to work extra hours?  Yes.  We need to spend time planning our curriculum.  The textbook is not the curriculum.  If your textbook is your curriculum, then you aren’t doing your job.

Parents you aren’t blameless in this.  If you aren’t teaching your kids to study, you aren’t doing your job.  You can’t just make sure they do their homework–although that is a start.  You need to encourage your kids to study and to think.  It takes a village to raise children and it is time we all come together to make a change.  To demand excellence from ourselves.  If you are teaching because you like summers off, then it is time to leave education.  If you aren’t asking your students to think in real ways, it is time to leave education.  If you think it isn’t your responsibility to ensure that your students succeed and have the skills to do so, it is time to leave education.  I’m sorry but that is the truth.  Our kids deserve the best and we shouldn’t have to abandon public education to get the best.  All kids deserve it.  Where one is born (zip code and economic status) shouldn’t determine whether a kids goes to college or to jail.  This is America in the 21st century. Our children deserve better.

Waiting For Superman? Don’t Hold Your Breath

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 1 Comment

I might be one of the only folks out there not excited about seeing the movie Waiting for Superman. Am I going to see it?  Absolutely.  I’m a trainer of teachers and an overseer of charter schools. This movies embodies everything that interests me and maddens me in education.  There has been a lot of hype around the movie, even more so since Oprah did a whole show about the movie and charter schools.  I won’t get too involved in that whole brouhaha.  There is another documentary, that came before Waiting for Superman called simply enough The Lottery, that deals with the exact same issues.  It actually does the same thing–it follows kids/families as they compete for “coveted” spots in charter school.  I’m guessing it didn’t garner quite the attention that Waiting for Superman has because of it’s title and famous director.

I will be seeing The Lottery at our states charter school conference in November.  I will wait to see Waiting for Superman until after that.  It isn’t that I place value on one of these movies before the other.  I admit often that our educational system is in a state of emergency and has been for a long time.  Academics and the like have been struggling about how to improve our educational system.  It isn’t as easy as opening charter schools.  I am an advocate of choice–that is why my kids are in private school.  I put them in the best school for them and one that I believe offers the best education.  Would I put them in public school?  Yes, if I felt they could get a great education, I would be happy to not pay tuition.

The problem I have with these two movies and the media in general is that charter schools are being touted as the silver bullet for our educational system woes.  Charter schools are no different than regular public schools in most ways.  For every great charter school there are 15 that are poor performing.  Charters have been lifted up and parents think that by sending their kid to a charter school the education is automatically better.  We have parents lining up to send their kids to charter schools here who are doing no better at educating students than the traditional public school they would attend.  I am for innovation (which is what charter schools are suppose to be) but I am tired of seeing charter schools open who look no different than a traditional public school.  Every kid in the US deserves to get the kind of education I am paying 5 figures to get for my kids.  I fully believe that.  But how do we make that happen?  We have to start by changing education.  Changing our view of it.  Changing the way we deliver it.  Our world has changed vastly, but students still attend schools that were build in the early 1900’s.  Buildings that don’t have computers, etc. Teachers and administrators who are ineffective and poorly trained.

One of the answers is better administrators.  I have friends who are administrators and some of them are amazing.  I have other friends who are administrators and most certainly should not be.  I have lots and lots for friends who are teachers and many of them should be and are effective or are working hard at developing the skills that will help them be effective (teaching isn’t something we learn overnight and we need better teacher prep programs that allow new teachers to develop their skills with a truly amazing mentor teacher).  We need better teacher education programs.  We need better teacher evaluation systems.  We need to re-evaluate the practice of tenure.  We need administrators who are effective and who can encourage teachers and inspire teachers.  We need measures of success that are relevant to our students lives.  The list goes on and on.  Firing all the bad teachers is one answer–but many teachers who are deemed “bad” could be good or great with some targeted and practical professional development that happens over the course of a year and not in a two hour block at the end of a school week.  There are no easy answers.

Charter schools are not the answer, they might be a part of the answer.  Trying to replicate a suburban upper-middle class school in an urban center isn’t the answer.  There is no one-size fits all approach.  We need to look at education with new eyes and redefine what it is our children need to be successful in the world.

Sorry Superman, I can’t wait for you.

Why We’ll Never Have That Vacation Home

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / Leave a comment

Just when I think that maybe, I could not sent my kids to the private school Noah attends.  Maybe we could then buy that vacation home we want (okay we really don’t want one–but we could have one).  Maybe Bill could get a new car.  Then I listen to something like this and am reminded of all the reasons why I decided to send my kids, not just to any private school, but to this private school. This was about the importance of kindergarten (a good kindergarten–the kind where kids play and learn) but applies to so much more.

The guest on Radio Times, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, spoke directly to the reasons my children are at TCS.  In research, she and another psychologist, have come up with what they call the 6 C’s.  This is based on both psychological science. learning outcomes and the business world–that place so many of our kids will try to get jobs.  As I listened, she could have been describing Noah’s school.

  • Collaboration–it is imperative that our children learn how to work in teams and to build community
  • Communication–not just speaking but also listening.  Being able to write (not the 5-paragraph essay so many schools teach) but persuasively.
  • Content–content is important but it can’t be the only thing.  Reading and Math scores are not all that matter–and really barely matter outside of schools.  Content should include music, history, STEM subjects.  The information/content of our world is said to double every 2 1/2 years–can we really drill all these facts into our kids?
  • Critical Thinking–need to be able to create “recipes” for problems.
  • Creativity–we can’t only be analytical.  We need and the business world wants more creative innovation.  Look how long it took BP to come up with a solution–we need to teach our kids to be creative innovators.
  • Confidence–the students need confidence to try, not to fill in the right blank.  They need to have the confidence to know there are many, many routes to get to the same destination.

So, I’m happy to know my kids are getting the best education they can.  This isn’t to say that their school is the only place they could get this education but it is the only place I can guarantee they’ll get this education every year in everything they do at their school.