(Part 4) Top products from r/education

Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto

The opening essay of this short read is a condemnation of traditional schooling techniques---and it's also the speech he delivered when he (again) won the NY Teacher of the Year award. Gatto gets at the heart of why public schools consistently produce pencil pushers, not leaders. Every teacher should read this book.

How to Survive in Your Native Land by James Herndon

If Dumbing Us Down is the manifesto in favor of a more liberal pedagogy, Herdon's book is a memoir of someone trying to put that pedagogy in action. It's also a simple, beautiful easy to read book, the kind that is so good it reminds us just how good a book can be. I've read the teaching memoir that made Jonahton Kozol famous, this one is better.

The Montessori Method by Maria Montessori

In the early 1900s, Maria Montessori taught literacy to children that society had otherwise assumed were unreachable. She did this by using the scientific method to study each child's learning style. Some of what she introduced has been widely incorporated (like child-sized furniture) and some of it seems great but unworkable in overcrowded schools. The bottom line is that the Montessori method was one of the first pedagogical techniques that was backed by real results: both in test scores and in growing kids that thrive on learning and participation.

"Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity by Beverly Daniel Tatum

While not precisely a book on how to teach, this book is incredibly helpful to any teacher working with a diverse student population, or one where the race they are teaching differs from their own. It explains the process that white, black, and children of other races go through in identifying themselves as part of a particular race. In the US, race is possibly the most taboo subject, so it is rare to find a book this honest and straightforward on a subject most educators try not to talk about at all. I highly recommend this book.

If there is any chance you will be teaching history, definitely read:

Lies My Teacher Told Me and A People's History of the United States (the latter book is a classic and, personally, changed my life).

Also recommend: The Multi-player Classroom by Lee Sheldon and Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov

Finally, anyone who plans to teach math should read this essay, "Lockhart's Lament" [PDF at the bottom of the page].

PS, I was tempted to use Amazon affiliate links, but my conscious wouldn't let me.

Some good resources:
http://www.rome.mrdonn.org/ (the site looks clunky but there's a TON of good information, kid's level, activities and games and free cute illustrations)

Also: http://www.amazon.com/Usborne-Encyclopedia-History-Internet-Linked/dp/1409519074/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1345802116&sr=8-3&keywords=usborne+internet+linked+encyclopedia+of+world+history This book is a constant favorite.

http://www.amazon.com/Classical-Kids-Activity-Ancient-Greece/dp/1556522908/ref=pd_sim_b_19 (check the library for this one)

Another activity book http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Rome-Exploring-Powerful-Kaleidoscope/dp/1885593600/ref=pd_sim_b_8

http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Rome-DK-Eyewitness-Books/dp/075663766X/ref=pd_sim_b_2 (library will also have this one, and the clip art CD included is pretty cool)

Some kids will dig this level of detail http://www.amazon.com/City-Story-Roman-Planning-Construction/dp/0395349222/ref=pd_sim_b_18

Okay I don't know why these are kind of hard to find, but they ROCK. Just gross enough to fascinate kids! http://www.amazon.com/You-Wouldnt-Want-Roman-Gladiator/dp/0531162044/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345802331&sr=1-1&keywords=you+wouldn%27t+want+to+be+a+roman+gladiator

http://www.amazon.com/You-Wouldnt-Want-Roman-Soldier/dp/0531124487/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345802331&sr=1-2&keywords=you+wouldn%27t+want+to+be+a+roman+gladiator

> I said they were about average for the city. Which they are.

Show me. Though I fear we're treading into confirmation bias territory, I would be interested in any city-wide data comparisons you can provide.

> That would be a much better way to tell if they're helping their kids learn than this snapshot.

A series of snapshots is called a motion picture but, still, I agree: oranges to oranges comparisons are always preferable. This school, however, isn't an orange, it's a miniature kumquat, making it hard to draw direct comparisons.

I'm a fan of schools experimenting with ways to color outside the box and I like the premise of mastery based education. The unanswered question isn't whether or not this school is doing anything radically experimental (it isn't) or whether or not what they are doing is radically effective (it isn't.) The question calls up a simple cost-benefit decision: whether or not it's fair to divert resources from the rest of the population to fund a program that is going to see many of any cohort age out before they achieve mastery. Imagine if every school had two teachers in each classroom and a 7:1 ratio.

Sometimes it sucks to be a square peg in a round hole world but that doesn't mean we should be retooling every hole to accommodate the outliers. The job of the public schools isn't to balance the scales to assure equal outcomes, it's to provide equal treatment and opportunity. This school is the proverbial thumb on the scale that inherently means other schools are underserved.

> I have yet to hear a better plan

I find it hard to believe no one provided any examples. Perhaps they're just not telling you what you want to hear. But, even if the current system (not that there is a single current system) is not great, that doesn't justify changing it for the worse - which is what VAM would do.

While you can readily find lots of stuff online and in old-fashioned books to answer this yourself, I'll list some off the top of my head that are better than VAM:

• use a sampling approach based on tests and/or reviews of work - like other countries use and like how NAEP is used in the US.
  
• Conduct audits by a team of experts (educators, researchers, administrators) - where they visit a sampling of classes. Also done successfully in other countries
  
• Peer review and collaboration which can also be effective.
  
• Principal review. Should be supplemented with some of the above
  
• VAM might also be used in a non-high stakes manner. This is still pretty dangerous since teachers and administrators would likely not be trained to understand the nuances.
  
  Nebraska was using a very innovative student and teacher assessment system (until it ran aground on NCLB requirements) which emphasized locally designed assessments that were reviewed by assessment experts. Many districts provided much more transparency and in-depth info to parents about what was going on thru these assessments. Refer to the book Reclaiming Assessment.
  
  Linda Darling-Hammond has written extensively on teacher evaluation and prof development. Refer to her book The Flat World and Education.
  
  

Let me just provide an ‘antithesis’ -

• by the data, spending public money on education for at-risk kids yields little to no return.
  
  
• by the data, 40% of California kids are ready for college.
  
  
• by the data, 35% of bachelors seekers drop out of college
  
  
• women are more likely to choose a degree that pays less than other degrees:
  
  http://www.aei.org/publication/highest-paying-college-majors-gender-composition-of-students-earning-degrees-in-those-fields-and-the-gender-pay-gap/
  
  
• college has become a place for job training - or at least that’s the expectation
  
  http://www.theedadvocate.org/poll-many-americans-no-longer-view-college-as-very-important/
  
  
• degrees only serve as signals. Referencing the above, if 40% of kids are ready for college (as per a test of 11th grade mastery) but grad rates are 92%- 95%, a diploma is not about proficiency.
  
  Why tax and spend money when the return is so low? A liberal knee-jerk would be Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love.
  
  As teachers we confuse good feelings with productive members of society. Here’s a book written 22 years ago:
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Why-Johnny-Cant-Read-about/dp/0060913401
  
  Our kids can’t read. They can’t engage in our democracy and we have been trying the same tactics for close to 100 years. Put them in a brick and mortar building. Keep them there, in a single room, 99% of the time. Separate by age. Separate by subject. Pre-digest information we think is important. Listen to 1 source for 180 days. 1 source becomes the expert as to whether a kid learned something. Assign them a meaningless (from their perspective) letter. Then set the standard that they must work a majority of their waking day performing activities that may pay off.
  
  I’m not putting this squarely on teachers: but there is an irony, we’re so used to taking blame that we end up feeling responsible.
  
  And, as a society, we’ve yet to solve poverty.
  
  So what do we expect? Conservatives and corporate interests look at the caliber of employee they get and want to squeeze as much productivity out for as cheaply as possible.
  
  But just like the Democrat/liberals, there is a paralysis. We’ve shifted so far to the right that the actual conservative stance, status quo/ moderation, has become the liberal stance.
  
  Yes, college should be the new high school.
  
  Yes, we should specialize children starting in 6th
  
  Yes, we need actual people from the fields we teach in schools.
  
  Yes, subjects should be cored
  
  Yes, we should board at-risk kids. The parent to prison pipeline would become moot.
  
  Yes, get rid of grades and in place assess skill sets.
  
  We defend a broken system and get pissed when people try to put it out of its misery. Education has stage 2 cancer. Either we treat it or let it die.
  
  

http://www.amazon.com/English-Teachers-Companion-Fourth-Edition/dp/0325028400

My teaching companion. It is great and written by a great teacher.

For one thing, Communists did infiltrate the US government during the Cold War, read The Sword and the Shield or more modern biographies of Cold War-era luminaries, like Robert Oppenheimer. This should be in a high-school level text book, as should the controversy over how much or little they affected policy.

The problem is that these decisions are decided at the state level (and would be compounded at the federal level) instead of where they should be: the local level. There are something like 15,000 school districts in the US. That's 15,000 attempts to get it right, which means that some will be wrong, but also that some will be excellent. When things get homogenized, they always seem to be in the direction of the lowest common denominator. If there are 15000 places some group with an agenda has to fight for a particular view in a textbook, then there had better be wide-spread support for that view. Leave it to some 5 or 7 member board in some large-population state capital, and you make the group's job much easier.

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These are all good books to start with ^^

Seven Myths About Education by Daisy Christodoulou is solid and a good starting point.

The Baffler never fails to amuse. They have a good, if somewhat dated, book out here: http://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler/dp/0393316734/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377804239&sr=1-3&keywords=The+Baffler

Except for a correlation IS a relationship. Though I understand your need for research. I would recommend Spark by Dr. John Ratey and Brain Rules by John Medina. Here's a little web-based snippet of the Exercise chapter from Brain Rules.

The experiment was not an actual measure of ability (which the WSJ doesn't seem to understand), it was about student responses to perceived expectations, in this case based on their gender. The concept of "stereotype threat" is undergoing an enormous amount of study in the field of psychology and has profound implications for educators. The book Whistling Vivaldi is a great layman's introduction to the concept.

Learning to Teach in the Primary School Series by Teresa Cremin would be your best first point of call for British schools. I've been to 2 different universities, both of which recommend books from this series. They are all 'argument-based' books.


Learning to Teach in the Primary School

Teaching English Creatively

There are more, but those two are the ones I know best.

If I were you, I'd focus on reading a wide range of books, and avoid having any pre-disposed aversion to a style of argument, until you're able to compare many authors.

It was on RadioLab a while back and there's a book about it, too: http://www.amazon.com/Harvard-Unabomber-Education-American-Terrorist/dp/0393020029/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293051065&sr=1-5

Appropriately titled: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

I think the more pressing question is: What does this mean for 21st century brains?

Dibs is a touching, non-fictional book.

while these students may be unaware of the philosophies behind Occupying, they make some valid points that align with a turn towards spatial consciousness in the social sciences.

did anyone else notice that they're at a school named after Paul Robeson...and the diversity of the student representatives?

>One of the most disheartening experiences for those who grew up in the years when Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall were alive is to visit public schools today that bear their names, or names of other honored leaders of the integration struggles that produced the temporary progress that took place in the three decades after Brown v. Board of Education, and to find out how many of these schools are bastions of contemporary segregation. (Jonathon Kozol)

spatial justice, the right to the city, inclusive/dialogical democracy. these kids know what's up--even if they don't. ...and it's even sadder if they don't.

>How men and women act in the world is largely related to how they perceive themselves in the world, and … the existent potential to transform our internal neocolonial condition will remain unrealized if we fail to appropriately perceive and develop a consciousness of this condition and its possible undoing. (Tejeda et al.)

i would have cited this in my thesis about the need for spatial praxis in schools, if i hadn't finally turned it in yesterday.