OUR Children OUR Classrooms

As a mother with 2 chidren in DCPS, I created OUR children OUR Classrooms blog to support and empower all teachers and parents in DCPS to take their rightful seat (front and center) in all educational decisions that will affect OUR children's education, locally and beyond. All decisions that affect OUR children should be firmly grounded in the best educational practices and, with a commitment to equity, justice and opportunity for ALL children.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

This is what learning should look like.....

Posted by Miriam Cutelis at 10:48 PM

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Labels: education, food, project-based learning

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ARE DC SCHOOLS THE NEW KATRINA?

Duncan remarked that Katrina was the "best thing" for the New Orleans school system.

"This despicable statement by Duncan represents a common motif among Democrats and Republicans alike, and validates Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine thesis, namely, that ruling elites create or opportunistically use crises to implement policies that would otherwise be blocked. In the case of New Orleans, it’s the wholesale privatization of the school system, with the schools being turned over to large charter school chains. " - Michael Fiorillo

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Miriam Cutelis

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MOVIE FUNDED BY CHILD-CENTERED STAKEHOLDERS

NO, THIS IS NOT THE CORPORATE-FUNDED 'WAITING FOR SUPERMAN' MOVIE

AUGUST TO JUNE-BRINGING LIFE TO SCHOOL

Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. . . when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.”

"excuse" is the straightforward statement that kids run more slowly in flip-flops than they do in Nikes, no matter how hard I coach them, and that it's pure, cowardly nonsense to say this nation can't give every kid in flip flops a better pair of shoes. When did it become fashionable to throw in the towel on equality in the USA? When did we all agree that Thomas Jefferson missed the mark when he said "All men are created equal"? When did we decide that egalitarianism was no longer a worthy aim for our democracy?"

-John Kuhn

“There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people. . . . These foundations, no matter how worthy and high-minded, are after all, not public agencies. They are not subject to public oversight or review, as a public agency would be. . . .The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one. If their plans fail, no sanctions are levied against them. They are bastions of unaccountable power.”
-Diane Ravitch wrote in her book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System”

"Standardized tests do not, cannot, measure the above essential learnings. They measure what is measurable. Or worse, if not measurableprime facie, they bastardize/reduce these to be measurable/quantifiable numbers, e.g. scoring student essays. As a result, only the “measurable” is counted. And, if it is not “measurable”, it does not count, is not supported by these tests to be placed into the curriculum, is not taught by teachers, [e.g., music, art, emotional education]. Then, these non-measurables are not used to train, evaluate, hire or fire teachers, do not count for most funding sources – bankrupting schools that are not teaching the measurable. Thereby, our society’s institutions of transfer of learning, schools, only bolster the transfer of learning of one side of our brains." -Howard Seeman

“We all have personal and professional reasons to be educators,” Gavrielatos commented, “ but we all have to embrace the third ‘p’ – the political. We do have a political role to play – even just to be rigorous in pointing out the absurdities of the ideas about teaching coming out of the so-called reform movement. We must not shy away.”

“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,”

-Sean F. Reardon, Stanford University sociologist.

"Any school can become a good school when its teachers have made the connections to life in the outside world that I have been talking about. It operates as an organic entity—not a machine—moving always to expand its basic nature rather than to tack on artificial appendages. A good school is like a healthy tree. As it grows, it sinks its roots deep into its native soil: it adapts to the surrounding climate and vegetation; its branches thicken for support and spread for maximum exposure to the sun: it makes its own food; it heals its own wounds; and, in its season, it puts forth fresh leaves, blossoms, and fruit." - except from McDonogh 15: Becoming a School by Lucianne Bond Carmichael

"A public education system is based on the principle that you care
whether the kid down the street gets an education." Noam Chomsky

"Mr. President, keeping these kids in a school system that is failing miserably and lacks relevance to their lives will not solve anything."

-Nikhil Goyal, 16-year-old junior at Syosset High School in Syosset, New York

"In what other profession are the licensed professionals considered the LEAST knowledgeable about the job? In what other profession is experience viewed as a liability rather than an asset? In what other profession is the desire for competitive salary viewed as proof of callous indifference towards the job?" -David Reber

”To take away the school would rip out the heart and soul of our community. New residents won’t move in. New businesses won’t come in. To close the school would be catastrophic for a community.” -Andy Searles, who has a daughter in second grade at Casselberry Elementary in Florida

"A 2010 Phi Delta Kappa poll found that 54 percent of Americans think the best thing to do about low-performing schools is to keep the school open with the same staff and give it more support. Only 17 percent wanted to close the school and reopen it with a new principal, and just 13 percent wanted to replace it with a charter school." -Parent Across America

The truth is that education policy is often driven by analysis of “…pretty unreliable measures." -Official Spokesman for the MCPS system, Dana Tofig

"I am growing convinced that President Barack Obama doesn't know what Race to the Top is. I don't think he really understands what his own administration is doing to education. In his State of the Union address last week, he said that he wanted teachers to "stop teaching to the test." He also said that teachers should teach with "creativity and passion." And he said that schools should reward the best teachers and replace those who weren't doing a good job. To "reward the best" and "fire the worst," states and districts are relying on test scores. The Race to the Top says they must.
Deconstruct this. Teachers would love to "stop teaching to the test," but Race to the Top makes test scores the measure of every teacher" -Diane Ravitch

"opt out is pro child, pro teacher and pro public school. We want the end of punitive high stakes testing that labels children, teachers and schools as failures. We do not want our tax dollars going to the pockets of testing and data companies. We refuse to allow our community-based public school be labeled as "failing." -Timothy D. Slekar

Information about testing OPT OUT for parents

Getting Started in Education Organizing

21st Century School Fund critique of the IFF study

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