How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses

• By Joshua Davis
• 10.15.13- wired.com
• NOTE:  There are lot of pedagogical and curricula lessens to glean/learn from this article. One of many things is clear: you don't have to teach to the test to have your students excel on standardized tests. They need selfconfidence. developed critical thinking skills and a teacher who believes in their true geniuses. Our current challenge is: do we have public school educators, parents and students ready to resist the Common Core-Race-to-the-top-NCLB-privatizing-eurocentric-school-to-prison-pipeline madnes of the current corporate "Ed Deform"?-- SEA

These students in Matamoros, Mexico, didn’t have reliable Internet access, steady electricity, or much hope—until a radical new teaching method unlocked their potential. Peter Yang

José Urbina López Primary School sits next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school serves residents of Matamoros, a dusty, sunbaked city of 489,000 that is a flash point in the war on drugs. There are regular shoot-outs, and it’s not uncommon for locals to find bodies scattered in the street in the morning. To get to the school, students walk along a white dirt road that parallels a fetid canal. On a recent morning there was a 1940s-era tractor, a decaying boat in a ditch, and a herd of goats nibbling gray strands of grass. A cinder-block barrier separates the school from a wasteland—the far end of which is a mound of trash that grew so big, it was finally closed down. On most days, a rotten smell drifts through the cement-walled classrooms. Some people here call the school un lugar de castigo—”a place of punishment.”

For 12-year-old Paloma Noyola Bueno, it was a bright spot. More than 25 years ago, her family moved to the border from central Mexico in search of a better life. Instead, they got stuck living beside the dump. Her father spent all day scavenging for scrap, digging for pieces of aluminum, glass, and plastic in the muck. Recently, he had developed nosebleeds, but he didn’t want Paloma to worry. She was his little angel—the youngest of eight children.

After school, Paloma would come home and sit with her father in the main room of their cement-and-wood home. Her father was a weather-beaten, gaunt man who always wore a cowboy hat. Paloma would recite the day’s lessons for him in her crisp uniform—gray polo, blue-and-white skirt—and try to cheer him up. She had long black hair, a high forehead, and a thoughtful, measured way of talking. School had never been challenging for her. She sat in rows with the other students while teachers told the kids what they needed to know. It wasn’t hard to repeat it back, and she got good grades without thinking too much. As she headed into fifth grade, she assumed she was in for more of the same—lectures, memorization, and busy work.

Sergio Juárez Correa was used to teaching that kind of class. For five years, he had stood in front of students and worked his way through the government-mandated curriculum. It was mind-numbingly boring for him and the students, and he’d come to the conclusion that it was a waste of time. Test scores were poor, and even the students who did well weren’t truly engaged. Something had to change.

He too had grown up beside a garbage dump in Matamoros, and he had become a teacher to help kids learn enough to make something more of their lives. So in 2011—when Paloma entered his class—Juárez Correa decided to start experimenting. He began reading books and searching for ideas online.

Soon he stumbled on a video describing the work of Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in the UK. In the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s, Mitra conducted experiments in which he gave children in India access to computers. Without any instruction, they were able to teach themselves a surprising variety of things, from DNA replication to English.

Elementary school teacher Sergio Juárez Correa, 31, upended his teaching methods, revealing extraordinary abilities in his 12-year-old student Paloma Noyola Bueno.

Juárez Correa didn’t know it yet, but he had happened on an emerging educational philosophy, one that applies the logic of the digital age to the classroom. That logic is inexorable: Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think.

Decentralized systems have proven to be more productive and agile than rigid, top-down ones. Innovation, creativity, and independent thinking are increasingly crucial to the global economy.

And yet the dominant model of public education is still fundamentally rooted in the industrial revolution that spawned it, when workplaces valued punctuality, regularity, attention, and silence above all else. (In 1899, William T. Harris, the US commissioner of education, celebrated the fact that US schools had developed the “appearance of a machine,” one that teaches the student “to behave in an orderly manner, to stay in his own place, and not get in the way of others.”) We don’t openly profess those values nowadays, but our educational system—which routinely tests kids on their ability to recall information and demonstrate mastery of a narrow set of skills—doubles down on the view that students are material to be processed, programmed, and quality-tested. School administrators prepare curriculum standards and “pacing guides” that tell teachers what to teach each day. Legions of managers supervise everything that happens in the classroom; in 2010 only 50 percent of public school staff members in the US were teachers.

The results speak for themselves: Hundreds of thousands of kids drop out of public high school every year. Of those who do graduate from high school, almost a third are “not prepared academically for first-year college courses,” according to a 2013 report from the testing service ACT. The World Economic Forum ranks the US just 49th out of 148 developed and developing nations in quality of math and science instruction. “The fundamental basis of the system is fatally flawed,” says Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford and founding director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. “In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills.”

That’s why a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.

At home in Matamoros, Juárez Correa found himself utterly absorbed by these ideas. And the more he learned, the more excited he became. On August 21, 2011—the start of the school year — he walked into his classroom and pulled the battered wooden desks into small groups. When Paloma and the other students filed in, they looked confused. Juárez Correa invited them to take a seat and then sat down with them.

He started by telling them that there were kids in other parts of the world who could memorize pi to hundreds of decimal points. They could write symphonies and build robots and airplanes. Most people wouldn’t think that the students at José Urbina López could do those kinds of things. Kids just across the border in Brownsville, Texas, had laptops, high-speed Internet, and tutoring, while in Matamoros the students had intermittent electricity, few computers, limited Internet, and sometimes not enough to eat.

“But you do have one thing that makes you the equal of any kid in the world,” Juárez Correa said. “Potential.”

He looked around the room. “And from now on,” he told them, “we’re going to use that potential to make you the best students in the world.”

Paloma was silent, waiting to be told what to do. She didn’t realize that over the next nine months, her experience of school would be rewritten, tapping into an array of educational innovations from around the world and vaulting her and some of her classmates to the top of the math and language rankings in Mexico.

“So,” Juárez Correa said, “what do you want to learn?”

In 1999, Sugata Mitra was chief scientist at a company in New Delhi that trains software developers. His office was on the edge of a slum, and on a hunch one day, he decided to put a computer into a nook in a wall separating his building from the slum. He was curious to see what the kids would do, particularly if he said nothing. He simply powered the computer on and watched from a distance. To his surprise, the children quickly figured out how to use the machine.

Over the years, Mitra got more ambitious. For a study published in 2010, he loaded a computer with molecular biology materials and set it up in Kalikuppam, a village in southern India. He selected a small group of 10- to 14-year-olds and told them there was some interesting stuff on the computer, and might they take a look? Then he applied his new pedagogical method: He said no more and left.

Over the next 75 days, the children worked out how to use the computer and began to learn. When Mitra returned, he administered a written test on molecular biology. The kids answered about one of four questions correctly. After another 75 days, with the encouragement of a friendly local, they were getting every other question right. “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.”

A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.”

“The bottom line is, if you’re not the one controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well.”

Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before. The exterior of his schools will be mostly glass, so outsiders can peer in. Inside, students will gather in groups around computers and research topics that interest them. He has also recruited a group of retired British teachers who will appear occasionally on large wall screens via Skype, encouraging students to investigate their ideas—a process Mitra believes best fosters learning. He calls them the Granny Cloud. “They’ll be life-size, on two walls” Mitra says. “And the children can always turn them off.”

Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity. Einstein spent a year at a Pestalozzi-inspired school in the mid-1890s, and he later credited it with giving him the freedom to begin his first thought experiments on the theory of relativity. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin similarly claim that their Montessori schooling imbued them with a spirit of independence and creativity.

In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen. The screen was blurred out except for a small, movable square through which subjects could glimpse objects laid out on a grid. Half the time, the subjects controlled the square window, allowing them to determine the pace at which they examined the objects; the rest of the time, they watched a replay of someone else moving the window. The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.

In 2009, scientists from the University of Louisville and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences conducted a study of 48 children between the ages of 3 and 6. The kids were presented with a toy that could squeak, play notes, and reflect images, among other things. For one set of children, a researcher demonstrated a single attribute and then let them play with the toy. Another set of students was given no information about the toy. This group played longer and discovered an average of six attributes of the toy; the group that was told what to do discovered only about four. A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.

Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says.

 

Brooklyn Free School Students here direct their own learning. There are no grades or formal assignments. Brian Finke

Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.”

Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations.

Nicholas Negroponte, cofounder of the MIT Media Lab, is taking this approach even further with his One Laptop per Child initiative. Last year the organization delivered 40 tablets to children in two remote villages in Ethiopia. Negroponte’s team didn’t explain how the devices work or even open the boxes. Nonetheless, the children soon learned to play back the alphabet song and taught themselves to write letters. They also figured out how to use the tablet’s camera. This was impressive because the organization had disabled camera usage. “They hacked Android,” Negroponte says.

One day Juárez Correa went to his whiteboard and wrote “1 = 1.00.” Normally, at this point, he would start explaining the concept of fractions and decimals. Instead he just wrote “½ = ?” and “¼ = ?”

“Think about that for a second,” he said, and walked out of the room.

While the kids murmured, Juárez Correa went to the school cafeteria, where children could buy breakfast and lunch for small change. He borrowed about 10 pesos in coins, worth about 75 cents, and walked back to his classroom, where he distributed a peso’s worth of coins to each table. He noticed that Paloma had already written .50 and .25 on a piece of paper.

“One peso is one peso,” he said. “What’s one-half?”

Juárez Correa felt a chill. He had never encountered a student with Paloma’s level of innate ability.

At first a number of kids divided the coins into clearly unequal piles. It sparked a debate among the students about what one-half meant. Juárez Correa’s training told him to intervene. But now he remembered Mitra’s research and resisted the urge. Instead, he watched as Alma Delia Juárez Flores explained to her tablemates that half means equal portions. She counted out 50 centavos. “So the answer is .50,” she said. The other kids nodded. It made sense.

For Juárez Correa it was simultaneously thrilling and a bit scary. In Finland, teachers underwent years of training to learn how to orchestrate this new style of learning; he was winging it. He began experimenting with different ways of posing open-ended questions on subjects ranging from the volume of cubes to multiplying fractions. “The volume of a square-based prism is the area of the base times the height. The volume of a square-based pyramid is that formula divided by three,” he said one morning. “Why do you think that is?”

He walked around the room, saying little. It was fascinating to watch the kids approach the answer. They were working in teams and had models of various shapes to look at and play with. The team led by Usiel Lemus Aquino, a short boy with an ever-present hopeful expression, hit on the idea of drawing the different shapes—prisms and pyramids. By layering the drawings on top of each other, they began to divine the answer. Juárez Correa let the kids talk freely. It was a noisy, slightly chaotic environment—exactly the opposite of the sort of factory-friendly discipline that teachers were expected to impose. But within 20 minutes, they had come up with the answer.

“Three pyramids fit in one prism,” Usiel observed, speaking for the group. “So the volume of a pyramid must be the volume of a prism divided by three.”

Juárez Correa was impressed. But he was even more intrigued by Paloma. During these experiments, he noticed that she almost always came up with the answer immediately. Sometimes she explained things to her tablemates, other times she kept the answer to herself. Nobody had told him that she had an unusual gift. Yet even when he gave the class difficult questions, she quickly jotted down the answers. To test her limits, he challenged the class with a problem he was sure would stump her. He told the story of Carl Friedrich Gauss, the famous German mathematician, who was born in 1777.

When Gauss was a schoolboy, one of his teachers asked the class to add up every number between 1 and 100. It was supposed to take an hour, but Gauss had the answer almost instantly.

“Does anyone know how he did this?” Juárez Correa asked.

A few students started trying to add up the numbers and soon realized it would take a long time. Paloma, working with her group, carefully wrote out a few sequences and looked at them for a moment. Then she raised her hand.

“The answer is 5,050,” she said. “There are 50 pairs of 101.”

Juárez Correa felt a chill. He’d never encountered a student with so much innate ability. He squatted next to her and asked why she hadn’t expressed much interest in math in the past, since she was clearly good at it.

“Because no one made it this interesting,” she said.

Our educational system is rooted in the industrial age. It values punctuality, attendance, and silence above all else.

Paloma’s father got sicker. He continued working, but he was running a fever and suffering headaches. Finally he was admitted to the hospital, where his condition deteriorated; on February 27, 2012, he died of lung cancer. On Paloma’s last visit before he passed away, she sat beside him and held his hand. “You are a smart girl,” he said. “Study and make me proud.”

Paloma missed four days of school for the funeral before returning to class. Her friends could tell she was distraught, but she buried her grief. She wanted to live up to her father’s last wish. And Juárez Correa’s new style of curating challenges for the kids was the perfect refuge for her. As he continued to relinquish control, Paloma took on more responsibility for her own education. He taught the kids about democracy by letting them elect leaders who would decide how to run the class and address discipline. The children elected five representatives, including Paloma and Usiel. When two boys got into a shoving match, the representatives admonished the boys, and the problem didn’t happen again.

Juárez Correa spent his nights watching education videos. He read polemics by the Mexican cartoonist Eduardo del Río (known as Rius), who argued that kids should be free to explore whatever they want. He was also still impressed by Mitra, who talks about letting children “wander aimlessly around ideas.” Juárez Correa began hosting regular debates in class, and he didn’t shy away from controversial topics. He asked the kids if they thought homosexuality and abortion should be permitted. He asked them to figure out what the Mexican government should do, if anything, about immigration to the US. Once he asked a question, he would stand back and let them engage one another.

A key component in Mitra’s theory was that children could learn by having access to the web, but that wasn’t easy for Juárez Correa’s students. The state paid for a technology instructor who visited each class once a week, but he didn’t have much technology to demonstrate. Instead, he had a batch of posters depicting keyboards, joysticks, and 3.5-inch floppy disks. He would hold the posters up and say things like, “This is a keyboard. You use it to type.”

As a result, Juárez Correa became a slow-motion conduit to the Internet. When the kids wanted to know why we see only one side of the moon, for example, he went home, Googled it, and brought back an explanation the next day. When they asked specific questions about eclipses and the equinox, he told them he’d figure it out and report back.

Sugata Mitra’s research on student-led learning inspired Juárez Correa.

Juárez Correa also brought something else back from the Internet. It was the fable of a forlorn burro trapped at the bottom of a well. Since thieves had broken into the school and sliced the electrical cord off of the classroom projector (presumably to sell the copper inside), he couldn’t actually show them the clip that recounted the tale. Instead, he simply described it.

One day, a burro fell into a well, Juárez Correa began. It wasn’t hurt, but it couldn’t get out. The burro’s owner decided that the aged beast wasn’t worth saving, and since the well was dry, he would just bury both. He began to shovel clods of earth into the well. The burro cried out, but the man kept shoveling. Eventually, the burro fell silent. The man assumed the animal was dead, so he was amazed when, after a lot of shoveling, the burro leaped out of the well. It had shaken off each clump of dirt and stepped up the steadily rising mound until it was able to jump out.

Juárez Correa looked at his class. “We are like that burro,” he said. “Everything that is thrown at us is an opportunity to rise out of the well we are in.”

When the two-day national standardized exam took place in June 2012, Juárez Correa viewed it as just another pile of dirt thrown on the kids’ heads. It was a step back to the way school used to be for them: mechanical and boring. To prevent cheating, a coordinator from the Ministry of Education oversaw the proceedings and took custody of the answer sheets at the end of testing. It felt like a military exercise, but as the kids blasted through the questions, they couldn’t help noticing that it felt easy, as if they were being asked to do something very basic.

Ricardo Zavala Hernandez, assistant principal at José Urbina López, drinks a cup of coffee most mornings as he browses the web in the admin building, a cement structure that houses the school’s two functioning computers. One day in September 2012, he clicked on the site for ENLACE, Mexico’s national achievement exam, and discovered that the results of the June test had been posted.

Zavala Hernandez put down his coffee. Most of the classes had done marginally better this year—but Paloma’s grade was another story. The previous year, 45 percent had essentially failed the math section, and 31 percent had failed Spanish. This time only 7 percent failed math and 3.5 percent failed Spanish. And while none had posted an Excellent score before, 63 percent were now in that category in math.

The language scores were very high. Even the lowest was well above the national average. Then he noticed the math scores. The top score in Juárez Correa’s class was 921. Zavala Hernandez looked over at the top score in the state: It was 921. When he saw the next box over, the hairs on his arms stood up. The top score in the entire country was also 921.

He printed the page and speed-walked to Juárez Correa’s classroom. The students stood up when he entered.

“Take a look at this,” Zavala Hernandez said, handing him the printout.

Juárez Correa scanned the results and looked up. “Is this for real?” he asked.

“I just printed it off the ENLACE site,” the assistant principal responded. “It’s real.”

Juárez Correa noticed the kids staring at him, but he wanted to make sure he understood the report. He took a moment to read it again, nodded, and turned to the kids.

“We have the results back from the ENLACE exam,” he said. “It’s just a test, and not a great one.”

A number of students had a sinking feeling. They must have blown it.

“But we have a student in this classroom who placed first in Mexico,” he said, breaking into a smile.

Paloma received the highest math score in the country, but the other students weren’t far behind. Ten got math scores that placed them in the 99.99th percentile. Three of them placed at the same high level in Spanish. The results attracted a quick burst of official and media attention in Mexico, most of which focused on Paloma. She was flown to Mexico City to appear on a popular TV show and received a variety of gifts, from a laptop to a bicycle.

Juárez Correa himself got almost no recognition, despite the fact that nearly half of his class had performed at a world- class level and that even the lowest performers had markedly improved.

His other students were congratulated by friends and family. The parents of Carlos Rodríguez Lamas, who placed in the 99.99th percentile in math, treated him to three steak tacos. It was his first time in a restaurant. Keila Francisco Rodríguez got 10 pesos from her parents. She bought a bag of Cheetos. The kids were excited. They talked about being doctors, teachers, and politicians.

Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.”

Like Juárez Correa, many education innovators are succeeding outside the mainstream. For example, the 11 Internationals Network high schools in New York City report a higher graduation rate than the city’s average for the same populations. They do it by emphasizing student-led learning and collaboration. At the coalition of Big Picture Learning schools—56 schools across the US and another 64 around the world—teachers serve as advisers, suggesting topics of interest; students also work with mentors from business and the community, who help guide them into internships. As the US on-time high school graduation rate stalls at about 75 percent, Big Picture is graduating more than 90 percent of its students.

But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented.

For the time being, we can see what the future looks like in places like Juárez Correa’s classroom. We can also see that change will not come easily. Though Juárez Correa’s class posted impressive results, they inspired little change. Francisco Sánchez Salazar, chief of the Regional Center of Educational Development in Matamoros, was even dismissive. “The teaching method makes little difference,” he says. Nor does he believe that the students’ success warrants any additional help. “Intelligence comes from necessity,” he says. “They succeed without having resources.”

More than ever, Juárez Correa felt like the burro in the story. But then he remembered Paloma. She had lost her father and was growing up on the edge of a garbage dump. Under normal circumstances, her prospects would be limited. But like the burro, she was shaking off the clods of dirt; she had begun climbing the rising mound out of the well.

Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement.

---------------------------------
 

A Brief History of Alternative Schools

Alternative Schools, a History · New research shows what educators have long intuited: Letting kids pursue their own interests sharpens their hunger for knowledge. Here’s a look back at this approach. —Jason Kehe

470BC | Socrates is born in Athens. He goes on to become a long-haired teacher who famously let students arrive at their own conclusions. His questioning, probing approach — the Socratic method—endures to this day.

1907 | Maria Montessori opens her first Children’s House in Rome, where kids are encouraged to play and teach themselves. Americans later visit her schools and see the Montessori method in action. It spreads worldwide.

1919 | The first Waldorf school opens in Stuttgart, Germany. Based on the ideas of philosopher Rudolf Steiner, it encourages self-motivated learning. Today, there are more than 1,000 Waldorf schools in 60 countries.

1921 | A. S. Neill Founds the Summerhill School, where kids have the “freedom to go to lessons or stay away, freedom to play for days … or years if necessary.” Eventually, such democratic schools appear around the world.

1945 | Loris Malaguzzi volunteers to teach in a school that parents are building in a war-torn Italian village outside Reggio Emilia. The Reggio Emilia approach—a community of self-guided learning—is born.

1967 | Seymour Papert, a protégé of child psychologist Jean Piaget, helps create the first version of Logo, a programming language kids can use to teach themselves. He becomes a lifelong advocate for technology’s role in learning.

1999 | Sugata Mitra conducts his first “hole in the wall” experiment in New Delhi, India. On their own, slum kids teach themselves to use a computer. Mitra dubs his approach minimally invasive education.

2006 | Ken Robinson gives what will become the most frequently viewed TED Talk ever: “How Schools Kill Creativity.” Students should be free to make mistakes and pursue their own creative interests, Robinson argues.

2012 | Forty-five US states adopt the Common Core, new curriculum standards that include student-centered learning. Math students, say, should “start by explaining to themselves the meaning of a problem.”

-----------------------------------

The Coalition for Public Education Speaks Out Against Charter Schools

Junebug Jabbo Jones asks this simple question to the Charter School-loving Black and Latino Parents: “If Charter Schools are so great, why aren’t white parents asking for them?”

As last spring’s state exams indicated, with very few exceptions (most of whom were mere test prep factories)- charter schools are no better than traditional public schools. Their performance had to disappoint every charter school parent, teacher, and administrator. Given the poor outcomes, charter school parents should demand and expect a renewed focus on improving learning for already-enrolled students.  

But these schools are not about educating our children. They exist only to maximize the political influence - and the associated profits of their investors.

So... these privately-owned, “public schools” can declare a holiday -forcing their unwilling staff, parents, and students to parade across the Brooklyn Bridge for a media photo-op. Privatization, whether of prisons, healthcare, social security, or education has been shown to be a pro-business gimmick that is against the broader public interest.

The protesters here today are well meaning but unwitting pawns of the charter school operators. Some parents, frustrated with the failing system, see charters as the only alternative. They fight to get their children in, and aggressively oppose anyone critical of the policy.

The counterfeit “parent associations” and “students first” groups are management-financed, management-run, and management-controlled. They take no direction from parents, who have no say in setting the agenda or priorities. These groups are replicas of the “company unions,” they prevent real parent involvement.

 

The Coalition for Public Education (CPE/CEP) is here today in support of public education and in opposition to charter school expansion and co-location programs. We support policies that require private, for-profit and nonprofit corporations to identify, develop and finance their own facilities. Charter schools should pay rent for the use of publicly owned buildings – in the same way that the Mets pay for using Citifield or the USTA rents Louis Armstrong tennis Stadium.  

Charter schools are well financed, highly-resourced corporations. They have the ability, and the willingness to find and operate facilities to pay for their operations. Of course, they will also seek and accept corporate welfare in the form of rent-free space. Many neighborhoods, for example have recently-closed private or parochial schools that are specifically designed for school use. These corporations are capable of identifying their own facilities.

Charter School expansion – was originally sold as a type of education laboratory; where new teaching methods could be developed for incorporation into the existing system of public schools. Under Bloomberg (and, regrettably, U.S. Education “Czar” Arnie Duncan,) charters have become a tool in the battle against teacher unions. They also serve to divert scarce public funds into the hands of profiteering charter school corporations. A new form of political patronage; these school charters are often used to reward go along, get along politicians who follow the orders of the corrupt political machine.

The Coalition for Public Education supports efforts to get independent analysis of the true performance, the costs and benefits of charter schools. Such an analysis cannot be done under the biased watch of the Bloomberg administration.  

The Coalition hereby calls for the new Mayor, whomever that may be, to immediately implement a moratorium on any new charter schools and perform an open, inclusive, transparent analysis of the impact of charter schools on the education of our children.

We call on charter school parents to sit down with us in order to respectfully discuss our different views on education, and develop a consensus-reached way forward to a stronger more democratic parent-teacher-student led public school system.

www.forpubliced.org and www.forpubliced.blogspot.com

Chicago Teachers Union Prez 

-Karen Lewis- 

Speaks Truth to Power!

 

May 23, 2013 Rally

CHARTER SCHOOLS: 
A PRIVATIZING WEDGE

The Coalition for Public Education/Coalición por la Educación Publica's Stance on Charter Schools

Common Core State Standards Corporate Connections

The Common Core: A Poor Choice for States

The Problem(s) with the Common Core State Standards
 FROM: http://heartland.org

NOTE: This is a critique of the Common Core coming from the Right. One of the major things it lacks is how the Common Core Standards will have a deepening negative impact upon Black & Latino students by its re-enforcement of Eurocentric curriculum and pedagogical practices. 

Problem

Most states have traded their education standards for Common Core national standards. State leaders were told Common Core would not infringe on state and local control, would establish high academic quality, and would improve student performance. Unfortunately, none of this became true when the standards were actually written.

Common Core was written behind closed doors, largely by four education consultants employed by private organizations. Because of this, most state lawmakers and citizens did not hear about Common Core until after state boards and departments of education had quickly adopted it and corresponding national tests, with the Obama administration having presented adoption as the surest route to eligibility for federal Race to the Top money.

As they have learned how Common Core will affect curricula, teaching, and testing, state lawmakers and citizens have objected strenuously, leading more than a dozen states to consider withdrawing, while others have dropped their involvement with federally funded tests. The main concerns include Common Core’s questionable academic quality, nontransparent creation and quick adoption, federal involvement, links to a vast expansion of student data-mining, and further erosion of state and local control.

Policy Solution

States should replace Common Core with higher-quality, state-controlled academic standards and tests not funded by the federal government. They should secure student data privacy and ensure national testing mandates do not affect instruction in private and home schools.

Policy Message

• Point 1: Common Core is of mediocre academic quality, according to nationally known experts, and research shows education standards do not improve student achievement.

• Point 2: Common Core was not created by states in any meaningful sense. It was written behind closed doors by unelected committees inside organizations funded largely by the federal government.

• Point 3: Most states have agreed to subject their laws to federally funded and monitored Common Core testing groups, largely through contracts legislatures have not reviewed.

• Point 4: Many states promised the federal government they would trade their standards for Common Core before a draft or final version of the standards was published.

• Point 5: The national Common Core testing groups have not specified what data they will require of states within their student assessments, but they have promised the federal government will receive full access. The Obama administration has removed federal protections that in the past limited student data-sharing and required schools to inform parents of it.

• Point 6: Common Core threatens school choice, private schools, and home schools by creating a national market for education in which all tests—including the SAT, ACT, Iowa Basic, and Stanford 10—and most curricula are structured according to one system.

• Point 7: Common Core is entirely experimental. No state or school has ever tested it.

• Point 8: Education standards are not curriculum, but they determine what children will and will not learn. They define curriculum. And the federally funded testing consortia are creating a model Common Core curriculum, although federal curriculum creation is illegal.

• Point 9: Almost no state has analyzed how much retraining teachers, new curriculum, and upgrading technology by 2016 for online-only Common Core tests will cost taxpayers.

• Point 10: There is no process for parents, teachers, and school boards to provide feedback or gain flexibility on all or part of Common Core as students begin encountering it.

• Point 11: Common Core assumes one schedule of learning fits all children, and a small group of paid experts know what it is. It also rests on the premise, rejected by many communities and parents, that the sole purpose of public education is workforce training.

References

“The Common Core: A Poor Choice For States,” The Heartland Institute: http://heartland.org/policy-documents/common-core-poor-choice-states.

For more information on education policy, contact Joy Pullmann, research fellow, at jpullmann@heartland.org or 312/377-4000.

The Mis-Education Of My Son

Bukola Shonuga 

May 29,2013

Editor's Note  milton@blackstarnews.com: The following Op-Ed article was written by a concerned parent who voiced grievances to the Chief Operating Officer Katie Duffy at Democracy Prep Charter school and some teachers about what she believes is psychological abuse of her son there. This newspaper sent questions to Ms. Duffy to give the school an opportunity to respond. She declined to comment, writing: "Thank you so much for your email. Per our network policy, we do not comment on specific scholars or incidents related to specific scholars. Thank you for understanding."

Mother Says Son Trailed And Videotaped In Charter School To Crush His Spirit
Here is the parent, Ms. Bukola Shonuga's article:

It's time to examine the police state structure of some of the charter schools model in the minority community in New York.

While I was gathering the facts to write this article, the stalemate situation at my son's school, Democracy Prep middle school in Harlem is unraveling faster than I can keep pace. On May 22nd, my son told me that at lunch time, his teachers were directed to video tape him in every classroom. One of the teachers according to him followed him with a camera into the lunch room when he went to pick up his lunch, followed him up the stairs into the hallway and continued videotaping him while he was eating lunch. I was so outraged. I couldn't believe the school would actually break the law by videotaping a scholar without parental consent.

So I emailed the principal and copied all the teachers including the superintendent of the Charter Schools in District 5 in Harlem. I also spoke with the Principal who told me that it's routine to place  a camera in the classrooms to which I responded that it had never been the case for the last nine months and assuming that it's routine, why was my son singled out and followed with a camera and made uncomfortable while he was eating lunch?

There was no response to that question.  I also emailed the particular teacher involved and copied every relevant party. I have not gotten any reply to that email message either.

Earlier, last Friday, May 18 my son stormed into the house from school - in another outburst of frustration with his school. "This School sucks," the 12 year old blurted. "Can you believe we didn't attend  regular classes today? They separated 46 bad students including me into two groups of 26 and sent us to a special class called 'Prep Academy''.

Normally it takes a while for certain information to register in my brain, particularly the endless daily discipline saga at Democracy Prep where my son has been attending for the past nine months. But he persisted, "So Mommy, they think we are bad kids and had to separate us from the good kids right"?

That caught my attention so I  stopped and looked him in the eyes and reassured him that he's a very smart, kind and loving young man, and that he's going to realize his dream by becoming one of the best scientist of his generation.

And more importantly he should never allow anyone to define or label him as a "bad-kid".

Nurturing and preserving my son's self-esteem has become a daily routine in the last five months due to the covert psychological abuse he's been experiencing daily at school.

Democracy Prep Charter Middle School in Harlem was an attractive choice when I was searching for school for my son about a year ago, having just moved from Brooklyn where I'd lived for over 20 years. I was rudely awakened by the shortage of good middle schools in the Harlem area and particularly in district 15.

A friend of mine informed me of Democracy Prep and I went to the open house and decided that it sounded like a good fit for my son. I remember sitting in the orientation session and marveling at the no-nonsense and sound academic model presentation. For starters I like the idea that students have to wear a uniform and that accessories and other distracting personal effects are not allowed.

The scholars must abide by school rules and orderliness and so on. I fell in love with their reading marathon program called  "word count " where scholars are rewarded based on how many words they read per month. I love reading and I thought it'd be a huge incentive for my son who loves to write but needed to do more reading.

Fast forward: the first trimester was like Xmas. My son got mostly A and Bt  grades and everyone was happy including the school of course.

But as the second trimester begun in January I noticed that he started to complain about how he didn't fit in with the kids and how some used "bad" language - and how they didn't like him because he's different and so on.

Yes, my son's different in the sense of not being street smart. He was never allowed to venture out by himself because I was a little too paranoid about him traveling alone. Not to mention that he's sort of an absent-minded professor. But academically, he's very smart.

I started to notice frequent behavioral comments on his weekly progress report. I eventually learned that those comments adds up  to detention, then interrogation (called reflection) and then suspension.

I went to a colonial boarding school in Nigeria and when you got suspended it meant you'd committed a serious crime - like skipping school for days, stealing, falsifying your report card, cheating on exams, or having boys over in your dormitory.

So when my son told me he'd been suspended, I was outraged.  I demanded to meet with the principal immediately. She explained that once a scholar is sent out twice in one day, he or she is automatically suspended.

I was really shocked to hear this so I asked why my son was sent out at all in the first place? And I found out a the litany of allegations ("deductions," "detentions," and "interrogations") called reflections, then suspension.

I couldn't believe the extreme disciplinary system; akin to taking a suspect to a police station where offenders are booked and then jailed. But in this situation, scholars are suspended.

I was flabbergasted and my journalistic instinct was automatically activated telling me there's something worth investigating here. So I  decided to take advantage of the "open door" policy and started showing up unannounced to observe the classes in session to find out what rules my son was breaking that's resulting in him being sent out almost daily, which had led to three suspensions in three months.

On my first visit to observe class I was struck by the robotic and monotonous style of teaching whereby teachers are programmed to literally clock every second of the class through a count down, while simultaneously monitoring every movement and body language of the young students.

The students are supposed to respond in non-verbal coded signals called :  spirit fingers - a twirling of all ten fingers in the direction of the scholar being supported - means a 'show of support,' brain match  - is the simultaneous waving of the thumb and the pinkie - it means 'I agree with you,' track your speaker means 'focusing on who's speaking,'  pound it out  - a chorus of pounding on the desks -  means 'the question is answered correctly'; and so on.

So now I understand fully well why my 12 year old who is very creative and loves to be in motion would feel like he's in prison; having to endure ten hours of monotonous class sessions daily without any sports activities or recess. Scholars have to eat their lunch in their respective classroom/homeroom and are only given fifteen to twenty minutes.

I don't know many adults who would survive these conditions.  I sat in about about 15 sessions and observed my son and the other students. Yes, some of the them were very quiet and not interactive; and yes, some, including my son, were somewhat restless after awhile.  The latter category - in which my son belongs - was very interactive, usually enthusiastic and tended to raise their hands all the time to answer a question.

The endless list of reasons for which students can get railroaded into detention and ultimately suspension include: "not spontaneous on queue," "clapping three times instead of twice as prompted," "slouching over the desk," "looking back at another student," "talking," "mumbling to yourself," "fake coughing or sneezing," "asking to go to the rest room," "raising your hands too long," "clearing your throat" or "breathing too hard."

I found this preposterous.

So the process of suspension usually starts as follows.  A teacher would declare "that's one," meaning a deduction, then if a student interjects "what did I do,"?  The teacher would respond: "that's two."

The third deduction automatically sends a student to "COLUMBIA," the detention room managed by two African-America male coaches.

All the Advisory/home rooms are named after a University. My son is in UCONN. I'm not sure why the detention room is called COLUMBIA. And by the way all the teachers at this charter school are white and from out of state. The  school's administrators did manage to get two coaches that are African-American from the New York City area. They are the two in charge of the detention room.

Is there something wrong with that picture? Yes, in my opinion. These coaches are more like interrogating officers who hand students a three- to five- page packet called a "reflection packet,"  asking the students to give an account of the incident that led them to detention.

In most cases students are held for hours and not allowed back in class for the rest of the day the "detainees" account of the incident differs from that of the teacher who sent them out.

My son says he's treated unfairly. Most of the time his account the incident differs with the teacher's. So he winds up being held in detention for hours and missing an average of five hours of classwork a week and his homework begins to accumulate and become overwhelming.

It becomes impossible to catch up with hours of class assignments -- for classes he missed while he was "detained." He would have to make the best guesses; meanwhile the pile of homework that normally takes three hours per night -- he now spends endless hours catching up, not getting enough sleep at night. His grades are sliding as a result.

It's a vicious cycle that has to stop. And not just for my son but for over 50 or more scholars who have been labeled "bad kids".

My own investigation entailed hours of playing mom-detective/social worker about three hours on average per week. I spent time at the school and combed through 40 pages of documents that I demanded by force from the detention coaches/officers. I exchanged about 75 sometimes contentious e-mail messages with teachers, the principal, the assistant principal.

I discovered that one particular teacher, my son's writing teacher, was responsible for most of the "sent-outs" that had resulted in suspensions. I had already noticed a pattern of disciplinary excessiveness in her comments on the weekly progress reports. I had also raised numerous concerns about what I deemed an abuse of authority but the principal and the assistant principal defended her fiercely.

This particular teacher continued to find a litany of reasons to send my son out of her class; daily railroading him into detention knowing for sure that it would lead to suspension. She's succeeded in stigmatizing my son and that has led to him being teased by some of his classmates and other students.

My son now suffers anxiety and has nightmares. Some of the current writings in his personal journal reflects the covert psychological abuse that he's had to endure up until present.

To stop the abuse I recently demanded that my son be taken out of the writing class taught by this particular teacher;  the school adamantly refused. When I informed them of all the evidence that I've gathered to formally address this issue, they began to coach other teachers to establish a case against my son.

For example, all his teachers were directed to place a camera in all the classes he attends and one of the teachers videotaped during the lunch hour early this week.

I believe this school broke the law by targeting and exclusively videotaping my son, a minor, without my consent. I believe this is a careless action on their part to intimidate, harass and further traumatize a 12 year old whose passion is to go to school, to work hard and to become a roboticist one day.

Is this the model of charter schools in all communities of color?

In the case of Democracy Prep Charter Middle School in Harlem, there are systemic problems.

Having examined the school closely these past five months, I found that there is a cultural discord and a police-like system of discipline that's highly incompatible with the demographic it serves.

Bukola Shonuga is an independent journalist listed with the US Foreign Press Center.