Lefty Parent

Starting in third grade with learning the multiplication tables, our son Eric started having a problem with school. By seventh grade he would not do any homework, had been diagnosed with ADD, was taking Aderall, had been through an IEP, and had had a number of sessions with an educational therapist. When he got to the point in eighth grade of writing “F**k Math” on his standardized math test, we pulled him out of school. continue reading »

Teacher magazine published the results of a survey of 40,090 K-12 teachers, possibly the largest national survey of teachers ever completed and including the opinions of teachers in every grade and every state. The survey, “Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on America’s School,” was conducted by Harris Interactive and paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Scholastic Inc. You can download the full report at: www.scholastic.com/primarysources/pdfs/100646_ScholasticGates.pdf.

Here are some of the results I found most interesting… continue reading »

I saw in the most recent Public Education Network “NewsBlast” that Part 1 of the “MetLife Survey of the American Teacher 2009: Collaborating for Student Success” has been published, this part focused on “Effective Teaching and Leadership”. It reminds me once again of the issues faced by our democratic system of governance and whether our public school systems promote or run counter to the ideals of democratic governance.

To set the context (and as I have said repeatedly in other posts) we are in a historic transition in the world and its institutions from patriarchy to partnership, from hierarchical pecking orders to circles of equals. In a patriarchy, the governance model exists within a hierarchy of “superiors” and “inferiors”. At the top of that hierarchy are the people considered to be “leaders”, below them are the rest as “followers”. The “leaders” are charged with making the important decisions and exercising control over (and have responsibility for) all the “followers” below them. continue reading »

I ran across a summary of a report from a Los Angeles based non-profit group called the Advancement Project (www.advancementproject.org/) on the Public Education Network (PEN) “NewsBlast” (for February 26, 2010) that comes out every several days. Their white paper is titled “Intertwined policies cause widespread alienation & worse” and can be viewed and or downloaded at www.advancementproject.org/digital-library/publications/test-punish-and-push-out-how-zero-tolerance-and-high-stakes-testing-fu. continue reading »

For her graduate school thesis, our friend Brenda opened an alternative charter school in the fall of 2000 which our daughter Emma attended for her three middle school years.   Emma’s mom worked as the school counselor for four years, the first two as an unpaid intern, the last two as a paid staff member, and also served for a time on the school’s Board of Directors.  The school was launched with about 120 students, offering kindergarten through sixth grade, which grew to include seventh and eighth by the third year.

As a person who believes that our education system is way too “One size fits all”, from the beginning I applauded this experiment to create a school on a different model than the conventional instructional school.  In fact, many people can’t even conceive that there could be any other sort of school than ones that focus on… continue reading »

History confirms that our conventional instructional public schools were developed on an industrial model invented in the 19th Century, which seems pretty obvious to me when you think about all the structure in those schools of periods, bells, uniform classrooms, desks in rank and file, standardized curriculum, etc. At the end of the 19th Century, universal public K-12 education with no tuition, paid for by the taxpayer, had become such an expensive proposition that school district executives and school boards went to great lengths to attempt to employ the latest best practices from the business world to justify that all that money was being “efficiently” spent. It may in fact be worth considering if some of the business methodologies developed toward the end of the 20th Century might appropriately be applied to today’s conventional schools. continue reading »

I am concerned about the unfolding process of working out changes to our healthcare system, and particularly how it is being covered in the media as a contest with winners and losers rather than an exercise in compromise to find a working consensus. I think the framing of the debate in the coverage reflects a conventional wisdom that our political and legislative process is more akin to a spectator sport (where our political elite are alone on the playing field) rather than a societal effort to mitigate conflicting interests and find a compromise that can begin to improve the healthcare context for all of us. I for one, put a lot of blame on our education system.

My personal preference would be to treat healthcare basically as a public utility and adopt a single-payer system like they have in Canada, which I think would unleash the currently tamped-down entrepreneurial spirit in our country and liberate a great deal of pent up creative energy that could be directed toward starting more small businesses and reinvigorating our economy. Short of single-payer, some sort of government-run “public option” would be a step in that direction, and I imagine that fact is why so many conservatives and others vested in our for-profit medical establishment are fighting so fiercely against any sort of additional “toe in the door” alongside Medicare, the VA, and Medicaid. continue reading »

Just read the Associated Press story out today, “More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation”. I have a lot of thoughts as a former kid (who lived for summer vacation each year and felt that that last day of school each June was a day of liberation) and more recently as a parent who used to dutifully send my kids to school as well.

Obama says American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage with other students around the globe. “Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas… But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.” continue reading »

So what the heck does it mean to be an “internally motivated learner”? Is such an animal the exception or the rule? And can internal motivation drive even formal academic learning? In a culture where conventional wisdom seems to think that most of formal education needs to be mandated and externally motivated to be successfully undertaken, I think these are very important questions.

Certainly infants and toddlers learn most or all of what they learn for internal reasons. Infants don’t need to be motivated or instructed in how to walk, they are driven to do so and through practice, trial, and error they figure out how to do so. Toddlers learn to speak with a minimum of instruction, by listening to people speaking around them and learning to vocalize words and put them together into phrases and sentences. They learn a myriad of other skills involving coordination of their bodies with their brains on their own as well. continue reading »

I thought it was appropriate to follow up yesterday’s discussion launched by my thoughts about trying to sort out a few of the societal issues around homeschooling, and whether it is an appropriate educational path for some kids.

Confessing again my position up front, I gravitate to the educational path of “unschooling”, where the learner sets their own curriculum and works at their own pace, generally outside of a formal educational setting. But I have come to the conclusion that “unschooling” is not for everyone. The truth as I see it, and this seems to be something that a lot of people have trouble grasping, is that no one educational path, even the conventional instructional academic school, is for everyone. continue reading »