Category: The Whole Truth

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An Open Letter to District Administrators

Dear School District Administrators,

Most open letters are written as a passive criticism or open critique of a large institution. I have no wish to be passive in my critique and observations.  They are intended to spur conversation and reflection.  These are the tools of our trade as teachers.  I was hired to critique and foster reflection.

 

 

 

After studying and researching in your administrative offices over the previous year, you have embraced personalized learning as a targeted result, as we deploy technology throughout the district.  It is a goal widely acknowledged to be systemic in scope and paradigm shifting by its nature. So with all sincerity, I applaud your willingness to step bravely into a well-reasoned approach to 21st-century learning.

It is widely agreed that personalized learning is also a new pedagogical mindset that must extend beyond the classrooms; that fact pushes forward my primary question “How does the leadership of a personalized learning environment shift itself to accommodate the new network of change?”

pass or failAs I continue learning to apply a more personalized approach to my teaching. I have found that many of those same skills can be used to reflect and evaluate options. So I have tried here to apply a similar cognitive approach, an open critique and sincere question on eight observations I have noted as my school, and our district has embarked on a journey of blended and personalized learning.

In the classrooms we are, approaching the close of another school year, you at the District offices are approaching the hiring season. As you do so, I would ask that you perhaps take some time to consider the qualities your prize as you develop a leadership team for the future.  It is commonly understood that there is a shortage of new teachers in the US, as well as a disconcertingly high number of experienced professionals leaving our classrooms. But that is not the case for program administrators and principals. The number of people earning Masters Degrees’ in educational leadership or seeking an administrative endorsement is higher now than at any time in the past 25 years. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics

You have the opportunity to look broadly and consider carefully those that will help lead us through this systemic paradigm shift.

Personalized learning achieved through a blended curriculum keeps students engaged; it pushes them to grow and demands that they understand both themselves as learners and our curriculum as it pertains to their lives. In a very real sense, PL embodies the vision that led so many of us into teaching as a profession. The opportunity to connect not just with a child, but with a child through teaching and learning.

Personalization is full of hard data, human connections and an intricate web of lessons, apps, and projects. Peel back that top layer and the overwhelming nature of the idea begins to surface, PL disseminates the control of the learning within a classroom, the students practicing to take control of their own path. The teacher building supports and taking them away.

That complex dance of adding and subtracting scaffolding while it is being used is being successfully done. But it is severely limited when it has to fall within blocks of time and for a set number of minutes each week.

  • Where once our administration needed to be skilled at defining, defending and delineating blocks of time we are now asking them to find flexibility within a rigid structure and extra time where the was never enough.

?  How do we as a district support the required complexity of a school schedule while still offering the time to rigorously dig deeply into an area of study?

Underneath the popular jargon and interview buzzwords that you will hear, like Grit and Mindset, are classrooms where those life skills are being developed.  In those rooms, both students and teachers are failing, examining their efforts and sometimes failing again.  Learning to fail and from failure is important for real success.

  • As an institution, we are built to reward success and admonish failure. As a culture of educators, we are largely populated by those that thrived in that climate exemplifying their own successes and hiding their failures.

? How do we insure ourselves and reassure others that our district leadership understands the role of failure and exploration as we move into a new mindset?

We do not work in an industry where taking chances, innovating or finding a creative alternative is celebrated, least of all at the administrative level. Rather we as a profession, are accurately profiled as safe, steady, stable, predictable types.  Our administrators even more so than those of us in the classroom.

  • We are now in an era where we will need to be inventive, take calculated chances and create new ideas. We will need to look for those traits in our leaders as we move into uncharted paths with impressionable cargo.

? What are the important character trait of a 21st-century school administrator, and how do we ensure that the status quo does not continue to be the status quo?

?  How will the changing power dynamic in classrooms impact both our schools and our district as a whole?

One of the most powerful aspects of personalized learning is that it is, out of necessity, powered from the classroom up.  Teacher-leaders are the ones moving the bar and setting the standards. Those classroom maestros will need strong support and stronger feedback.

  • Please remember as you consider the next steps for those that will be leading the dwindling number of magnificent classroom teachers that we are a profession built on the artful combination of personal connections, honest feedback, and transparent agendas with all of our students, not simply those in the most need.

?  How can we use our transition into personalized learning, as an opportunity to both support and capitalize on the prowess of our teacher-leaders?

The devices, the web resources, the alignment of lessons and project to a standard, all of these pieces are new and as unfamiliar as they are integral to this shift.  As a teacher, I know there is no shame in saying I don’t know, and that I will not be able to master all of those elements of the job I love without support.  I am confident and comfortable say that my principal and school as a whole will need support as well.

It is not an uncommon critique to observe that the current structure of our educational system was built with management in mind rather than support and growth. Nor is it an uncommon refrain for teachers ask for support. It is uncommon, however, to have the opportunity to create the needed change.

?  What structures of support can we enhance or establish to best help our schools thrive as centers of blended and personalized teaching?

?  How do we find a way to structure and support creativity while still managing growth and learning?

If you are overwhelmed by the questions and standards set before you if you feel as though the task is disproportionate to the tools available. Please know that I, and every classroom teacher, that works for you is familiar with those insecurities. We grapple with them every fall, we understand, from experience I can tell you that the while the challenge never fades the overwhelmed feeling does.

With sincere thanks for all that you do to move us forward,

Brian Cleary  @oldbrainteacher

 

Continue reading “An Open Letter to District Administrators”

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#BlackLivesMatter and the myth of a postracial America

David Theo Goldberg, University of California, Irvine

The prevailing response from white politicians such as GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush to #BlackLivesMatter has been “all lives matter.”

Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley were heavily criticized for initially responding to audience chants that “Black lives matter” with the response that “all lives matter.”

“All lives matter” is a given, almost a cliché. So why would an audience boo a presidential candidate expressing that thought? Because the phrase “All lives matter” dismisses racially structured conditions disadvantaging black people.

As I demonstrate in my most recent book, Are We All Postracial Yet?, insisting that black lives matter is necessary because – unlike “all lives” in this society – black lives are too often taken not to matter.

Presumed to be up to no good

Black people in the US are considered to not fully belong. Some people – Dylann Roof said it explicitly to the Charleston nine he murdered – consider black people not to belong at all. Black people are far too readily denied decent education and employment, stopped and frisked, apprehended, incarcerated, criminalized, animalized, killed.

Black people in America are objects of social suspicion. Blacks are presumed to be up to no good, to be no good. Black lives are flippantly extinguished, not least by the institutions of law and order, for no good reason other than being suspected because they are black. We need to insist “black lives matter,” to organize around it, because this society provides proof on a daily basis that for it, for many, blacks don’t.

“Black lives matter” is not a cliché. The truth it expresses is far from a given. Its anti-truth is evidenced in the fraught everyday of black lives: Walking while black, driving while black, speaking “as” black, speaking b(l)ack, shopping while black, being at home while black, being black at school, at the pool, in the hands of police, in prison. Just being black.

Black lives matter because this country was founded on black labor, the nation’s great wealth built on black suffering. Black lives matter because, as human life, black lives are often disacknowledged in the insistent universalization that “all lives matter.”

Further, we are a better humanity because of the deep insight black intellectuals and artists provide about what it means to survive in the face of repression, humiliation and death. Black lives matter in exemplifying dignity in the face of its denial, humanity in the face of humiliation. Black humanity matters in celebrating life in the face of suffering, contributing extraordinarily to science, letters and culture. Consider Benjamin Banneker’s contributions to astronomy and clockmaking, Kenneth Clark’s work evidencing the psychological effects of racism on children, W E B du Bois’s challenges to traditional sociology, Marian Anderson’s operatic brilliance in the face of white rejection, Toni Morrison’s extraordinary writing, and on and on.

Black people have represented the country in the highest of ways while being maligned in the most malicious of ways. Black lives matter because the historical struggle for rights, justice and full citizenship has been America’s struggle to fulfill itself, the rights achieved on black backs ultimately the rights of all.

Black lives matter because black people continue to exemplify what it means to be human in the face of inhumanity and dehumanization, to live a human life against the constraints of “racialization,” in the face of insistent institutional violence and (social) death.

Gathering steam

And so, it is not surprising that some have begun to attack the movement.

Bill O’Reilly, self-proclaimed defender of black civil rights, has called the movement’s leading organizers “loons.” He dismisses the movement for “using Gestapo tactics.” Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade has characterized #BlackLivesMatter as a “murder mob” that should be branded a “hate group.”

Conservative commentator John McWhorter, repeatedly declaring racism over in America, has likened the anti-racist movement to a “religious cult.”

Pushing back against this dismissal, “#BlackLivesMatter” has moved steadily from the margins to contest the mainstream. They mix streetwise protest and savvy social media use, legal challenge and advocacy. They disrupt, shout down, resist.

“#BlackLivesMatter” is gathering steam as the compelling rights movement, a liberation struggle of our time. The social movement is surfacing rampant subterranean police violence and discrimination toward black people, holding police accountable for the stream of killings suffered by innocent, unarmed black folk by officers and their surrogates.

“#BlackLivesMatter” challenges political leadership to realize blacks’ full rights. They have prompted the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign to take seriously the concerns they are pushing, to engage with the affiliated Campaign Zero seeking to transform policing culture and its oversight. Likewise Hillary Clinton.

Is Bernie Sanders out of touch with black issues?
Jay Paul/Reuters

“#BlackLivesMatter” works to advance the longstanding liberation struggles of black folk. Taking its cue from the abolition to the civil rights movements, they have built global networks of moral and material support. In a world in which white people are a shrinking minority, fully recognizing that black lives matter is both a political and moral imperative. This is no longer a world, if it ever was, one can endlessly dominate or suppress by militarizing the police locally or globally.

All this is not to say the social movement that is “#BlackLivesMatter” is beyond criticism. Movement spokespeople have largely failed to link the trials of black life in America to a critique of prevailing political economy producing the structural conditions reproducing inequality for blacks. There are slippages in strategy, sometimes a lack of clarity on what is being demanded of political candidates, occasionally inconsistencies between various representatives. All of this may be attributed to the growing pains of a liberation movement that includes horizontally distributed decision-making, soft leadership and widespread use of social media. This is a social landscape in sharp contrast with that of the civil rights movement.

Compelling social movements are struggles against entrenched structures and cultures of entitlement, self-protected privilege and unquestioned institutional access for the anointed to the exclusion of the unbelonging.

Everyone is humanized both by the work of “#BlackLivesMatter,” the social movement, and especially as a result of actualizing the realization that black lives matter as much as those with full social standing. Establishing in full that black lives matter, as social value, civil rights commitment and liberation struggle, makes for the sort of society we should be striving collectively to realize.

The Conversation

David Theo Goldberg, Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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How the justice system fails us after police shootings

Caren Morrison, Georgia State University

Two weeks ago, the police officer who shot Laquan McDonald in Chicago was charged with first-degree murder. Since then, the police superintendent was fired, and the Department of Justice announced that it will begin a large-scale investigation into the Chicago Police Department. Meanwhile, in Baltimore, one of the police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray is standing trial.

You might think these high-profile cases mark a turning point in the nation’s response to fatal police violence. But 1,058 people have been killed by police this year to date alone, and most of the time, no legal charges follow. In my own state of Georgia, 171 people have been shot dead by police since 2010, and there have been zero prosecutions.

As a former federal prosecutor and a criminal procedure professor, I’ve been studying how prosecutors handle police violence cases. How do they deal with the conflict of interest raised by investigating the police departments they work with? Who determines whether a civilian death is justified, as the vast majority are found to be?

The results are not pretty.

A more typical example

The prosecutions in the McDonald and Gray cases are actually quite unusual. Many more cases are like that of Caroline Small, a 35-year-old mother of two who was shot to death in her car by two police officers in Brunswick, Georgia in 2010.

Small was unarmed. She was not suspected of any serious crimes. After a low-speed chase, her car ended up wedged tightly between two police cars and a utility pole. When she tried to pull forward, the officers shot her eight times.

Local TV told Small’s story.

The police officers said that they were afraid that Small was going to hit them with her car. The grand jury found the shooting was justified.

Small would have ended up as just another statistic if Brad Schrade, an investigative reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, hadn’t tracked down some of the former grand jurors and Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents who investigated the case.

The lead agent called it the worst police shooting he’d ever seen. But that was not what the district attorney, Jackie Johnson, told the grand jury – the people responsible for deciding if the officers should be charged with a crime.

Instead, Johnson showed them a blatantly inaccurate computer-animated reenactment of the scene, produced by the police department. The animation showed Small’s car turning sideways and hitting the officers. But, as one of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents swore in a deposition, “There is no way on this Earth that car could have moved in one swift motion through that gap.”

No one was ever prosecuted for the killing of Caroline Small. But the case exemplifies the toxic combination of powerful district attorneys and shadowy grand juries that has undermined public confidence in the criminal justice system’s ability to respond to cases of deadly police violence.

The secrecy of grand juries

Grand juries in all states have the power to investigate crimes, but the way they function is unusual in our mostly open justice system. Prosecutors go into grand juries alone, without opposing counsel, question witnesses in secret, and only release transcripts of the proceedings in limited circumstances.

So when grand juries failed to indict the police officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the ensuing protests were not just a reaction to the decisions themselves. They were also a reaction to the way these issues of public concern are decided behind closed doors, without explanation.

In response, California became the first state to bar grand juries from investigating fatal police use-of-force cases, a rule that will come into effect in the new year. Instead, California prosecutors in police homicide cases will now present their evidence at a preliminary hearing before a magistrate judge, a proceeding that is adversarial and open to the public.

The power of prosecutors

But the problem goes beyond secrecy. The real issue is that the prosecutor controls whether a case goes forward at all. This is true whether the case proceeds by indictment or preliminary hearing. Other than public opinion and the possible pressures of reelection, no one oversees the prosecutors.

When a police officer kills a civilian, prosecutors have a number of options. Often, they simply do nothing, letting internal police department procedures handle the issue. No one can force them to prosecute. A prosecutor’s discretion to pick and choose among cases is absolute, and their reasons may not be second-guessed.

Sometimes, if a police killing is highly publicized – like when a dashcam video is released – a prosecutor may feel the need to do something, even if they don’t want to pursue the case.

Going into the grand jury and coming out without an indictment shifts apparent responsibility from the prosecutor to the grand jury. Prosecutors can say they tried, but the grand jury decided against them.

Except that’s not how grand juries work.

I was a federal prosecutor for five years and made dozens of grand jury presentations. Prosecutors see the same grand jurors week in and week out, on all different cases. They control the evidence the grand jury hears. Grand jurors can ask to hear additional evidence, but the prosecutor can talk them out of it. And if – God forbid – the grand jury refuses to issue an indictment, the prosecutor can go back in front of a different grand jury. It’s poor form, but it happens.

So when a prosecutor says, “The grand jury has spoken,” that usually means that the grand jury has reached the only conclusion the prosecutor allowed it to reach.

After the officers involved in Caroline Small’s death were cleared, Johnson commented, “I don’t control the results,“ as if she hadn’t deliberately tanked the case.

A former prosecutor from her office was blunt, telling a reporter, “This was a murder and it was covered up.” But at that time, Johnson was a recently appointed DA, and civil court records show that the police chief had sent a letter to the governor supporting her candidacy.

California’s plan is a start

California’s approach, making prosecutors proceed by public preliminary hearing rather than by grand jury, should help protect against the most blatant forms of sabotage by prosecutors.

But the law stops well short of requiring prosecutors to present evidence in all cases of police homicide. If states were serious about taking absolute discretion out of the hands of prosecutors, they could mandate that all cases of fatal police violence go to a public hearing to determine whether the case should proceed to trial.

After all, we can’t expect investigative journalists to uncover all the mishandled cases.

When a police officer causes the death of a member of the public, it shakes our faith in our public institutions and underscores the fragility of community-police relations. These incidents are matters of intense public concern. A more transparent process, one that addresses all police homicides, not just the ones that make headlines, would be an improvement.

The Conversation

Caren Morrison, Associate Professor of Law, Georgia State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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The #1 Reason Young Black Boys Face Trouble in School

A new study produced by researchers at the University of Iowa reveals that black boys are seen as more threatening than white boys.

While that’s not necessarily breaking news, the research was conducted to investigate why so many black men are shot and killed by the police. In doing so, they found that racial stereotypes play a large factor into why incidents of that nature happen.

This may not be surprising, but here’s what is:

Their research also revealed that the racial prejudices we show against black men really begins much earlier. The study found that racial stereotypes are first felt by black men when they are just boys.

Delving deeper into the study, the findings get even more disturbing. The researchers polled more than 60 white college students and showed them separate pictures of five-year old black and white boys.

As they were shown the images of the children, the students were also given pictures of a gun or a toy.

The analysts revealed that the white college students were more likely to partner the photo of a gun with a black child and the picture of a toy with a white kid.

While white children are seen as less threatening, black children face the crushing weight of being racially stigmatized.

This study explains why so many black students are suspended from school compared to that of their white counterparts. It’s why Oakland started a program geared towards black boys in order to help deal with the crisis of black students being disproportionately kicked out of school.

It’s also why President Obama has a plan to try to decrease the number of black kids who are expelled from school.

But I’m not sure that a national program will change the way we view black children. We often associate innocence with the face of children, but the reality for black kids–at least according to this study–shows that we believe them to be dangerous and a threat to our safety.

Even if that child is just five years of age.

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In kids, even low lead levels can cause lasting harm

Robert L. Fischer, Case Western Reserve University and Elizabeth Anthony, Case Western Reserve University

The recent firestorm over lead exposure from drinking water in Flint, Michigan is a reminder of the enduring risk posed by environmental lead. While we can all agree that it is unacceptable for children to be exposed to dangerously high levels of lead, there is less awareness of what this means.

Flint is just one of many cities in the country where lead exposure is a serious issue. For cities with an industrial past and much pre-1978 housing stock, like Cleveland, where we work, the risks to today’s children is of continuing concern. In recent years, we and our colleagues have been examining the incidence and effects of lead exposure on young children in Cleveland and its first-ring suburbs.

Even though lead paint was banned in 1978, many old homes still have it.
Thester11 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Lead is a known neurotoxin that is associated with cognitive deficits in children – even at low levels of exposure. In fact, reports indicate that most of the harm may occur at levels of exposure well below current standards for concern. Though lead is no longer used in household paint and has been removed from gasoline, there is still plenty of it out there. Lead leaching into water pipes, in paint dust and chips, and soil remains a serious threat to children.

Children living in low-income neighborhoods, children of color and children whose families live in rental housing are statistically at the greatest risk of exposure to lead. That means the children most at risk of lead exposure also disproportionately face the effects of poverty, low-resource communities and trauma.

Lead’s effects never go away

Often attention is focused on the number of children who have an elevated lead test result in a given year. This is an important metric, but it can mask the cumulative role of lead exposure on child development.

For example, in Cuyahoga County, where nearly 25,000 children are tested each year, we have seen the number of children with an elevated blood lead level (above 5 micrograms per deciliter) drop from 35 percent in 2004 to 9 percent in 2013. This is a very encouraging trend showing success from public health efforts.

Despite the fact that the number of children with high lead level rates seems to be going down, it is important to think about the overall share of children that have ever had a positive lead test. These children carry those effects with them as they age.

In a recent unpublished analysis using integrated data from multiple sources, we found that fully 35 percent of children in a sample of preschool classrooms had an elevated blood lead level at some point in their lives.

The treatment options for children with elevated blood lead levels include dietary approaches and dealing with the effects of lead by managing sensory exposures. At greater exposures, chelation therapy – in which a synthetic compound is injected into the bloodstream which binds itself to the heavy metals – can be used. Though chelation has been shown to significantly reduce blood lead levels in the short term, there is evidence of a rebound in lead levels after therapy has concluded. Also, blood lead levels do not fully capture the retention of lead in bone and deep tissue.

Kids with lead exposure start behind nonexposed kids.
Children image via www.shutterstock.com.

Long-term consequences

Children exposed to lead are at elevated risk for learning delays and academic issues. We have also found that students with confirmed early childhood lead exposure have lower kindergarten readiness scores.

In tracking the experiences of children in our community, we find that lead-exposed children entering high-quality preschool start the year significantly behind their nonexposed peers.

In our ongoing research, we have found that on standardized measures these children score 10-30 percent below their peers on skills such as identifying letters, numbers and shapes. More sobering is the reality that while these children show significant progress during preschool they still finish the year, on average, below where their nonexposed peers start the preschool year.

This disparity is likely to grow as children age unless special efforts are made to address it. Results from Detroit show that these children are much more likely to experience academic challenges as they age.

And it looks like it doesn’t take much lead to cause harm. Other research has shown that blood levels well below the current standard for intervention can also cause negative effects on school readiness for young children.

There is no known safe level of lead exposure

Until a few years ago, the federal standard for action was 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood, and in 2012 it was lowered by half in recognition of evidence showing a lower threshold of concern.

But the truth is there is no known safe level of blood lead for children, and the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said as much.

The medical research community has documented negative impacts on children with even lower levels of lead exposure than the current 5 micrograms per deciliters standard. With that view, we might consider every child with a confirmed nonzero lead test as at-risk.

Based on our analysis of lead data in our county, we calculate that if this standard were adopted in the U.S., our lead exposure rate for kids younger than 6 in a single year would climb from 9 percent to 3-4 times this rate.

Short of ensuring that every housing structure has been certified as lead-safe, parents and caregivers should be the first line of defense in keeping children from this exposure. Testing lead blood levels in children is simply too late.

This is akin to the TSA searching for lethal weapons after the passengers have boarded the flight and the plan has taken off. Once the lead is in the bloodstream, the damage is real and lasting for these children, and the options for response are far fewer and less effective.

The Conversation

Robert L. Fischer, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, Case Western Reserve University and Elizabeth Anthony, Research Assistant Professor, Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.