Montgomery County Public Schools’ World Studies Mythology

29 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

Tags

Comfort Food, Common Core, Common Core State Standards, Crock, Curriculum 2.0, Curriculum Development, Eurocentric Perspective, Eurocentrism, Falsehoods, Latin America, Maryland, MCPS, Middle Ages, Middle School, Montgomery County Public Schools, Multicultural Education, Multiculturalism, Mythology, Teaching and Learning, Technocrats, Western Civilization, Western Dominance, World History, World Studies

Satirical cartoon of Rudyard Kipling’s The White (?) Man’s Burden (“white” colonial powers being carried as the burden of their “colored” subjects), Life Magazine, March 16, 1899. (Travb via Wikipedia). In public domain.

My son is taking Advanced World Studies in seventh grade this year. As a historian — and one that’s taught World History fifteen times over the years — I thought it was a good thing that he would have exposure to world history and cultures before engaging in US history in eighth grade and in high school. Once again, the technocrats in K-12 education have proven me dead wrong. While there may be some exposure to the rest of the world, the frame for the curriculum is one that not-so-subtly implies that world studies, advanced or otherwise, cannot exist without a European or Western frame to tell students how to think about the non-Western part of the globe.

I noticed it the first week, but didn’t pay much attention to the brief synopsis (what teachers call their “syllabus”) of the course until Back to School Night last week. The four units for my son’s course are

Unit One: The Foundation of Modern Political Systems: Europe in the Middle Ages
Unit Two: The Influence of Culture in Africa: The Middle Ages and Today
Unit Three: Geography Shapes Latin America
Unit Four: The Impact of Economics: One World Past and Present

When I finally read through it, I was incensed. It sunk in with my experiences with AP World History and with World History at the college level why so many of my own students were almost completely ignorant of world history that wasn’t about ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, or Western Europe. School districts, even ones as above par as MCPS, have helped lull students into a false sense of security through the exchange of knowledge as comfort food, rather than a higher protein diet of actual history.

Unit One is fine, for the most part, although the idea of a nation-state or some sort of constitutional democracy doesn’t entirely come from Europe. But it’s downhill from there. Culture, Africa and the Middle Ages for Africa? Really? The Middle Ages is a specifically Western and Central European experience, as no civilization from the classical world experienced a greater decline or collapse than Rome in the fifth century CE. To just take that term and paste it unto another continent, another group of people, and their different history is just plain wrong. How about Culture and Africa, 1000-1500 CE? You don’t need the frame of Europe’s Middle Ages to discuss Africa, unless your point is to embed some sense of Western dominance as a subliminal theme within the curriculum.

Or unless the curriculum developers in Rockville were thinking about making the Age of European Discovery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade Africa’s “Middle Ages.” The period between 1450 and 1800, in which the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spanish, the English, and the French helped stoke the fires of intertribal and cross-kingdom warfare to obtain millions of slaves for their colonies in the Western Hemisphere. That’s probably too much for the advanced twelve-year-old, though, no?

Storming of the Teocalli by Hernán Cortez and His Troops (1848), painting by Emanuel Leutze, January 11, 2012. (Penelope37 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Unit Three and the term “Latin America?” Seriously? It covers the Maya, the Mexica (or rather, Aztecs), and the Inca, all prior to European contact in the sixteenth century. So technically, there’s no Latin in the Americas before 1500. MCPS, ever heard of the Americas, the Western Hemisphere, Mesoamerica, and Andean civilizations, all terms that are more accurate alternatives to Latin America in the time before Columbus and conquistadors? Unless, again, the point of curriculum designers here was to bake into the recipe for this course a sense of inevitability. That is, that the pre-Columbian cultures of the Western Hemisphere, no matter how sophisticated, were doomed to fall by the wayside in the wake of Western dominance over the globe.

Unit Four and “One World Past and Present” in the context of trade, economic systems, and communication bring the themes of European dominance together in the period since 1450. The MCPS curriculum designers do hint that “the cultural diffusion between many ‘worlds’ had both positive and negative consequences.” But for the most part, the technocrats provide a sense of progress to market-based economies and positive globalization in this unit, as Europeans led the charge to make the world one and whole.

Stainless steel Crock-Pot, September 29, 2015. (http://amazon.com).

This is a crock of a curriculum, MCPS, a shameful attempt at world studies. The course might as well be called, Advanced and Expanded Western Civilization, How Europeans Went From the Middle Ages to Dominating the World. The point of any world history or world studies course is supposed to be the study of specific bits of history of the world, without imposing a Western model, frame, or sense of progress and comparison on the rest of the world in the process. Otherwise, what’s the point? You might as well teach Western Civ in middle school, then, and save world history to teachers and curriculum designers who understand that the world is a bigger place than Western-culture-navel-gazing.

Though the pressures of Common Core may have birthed this new curriculum as part of MCPS’s Curriculum 2.0 efforts, it’s not specifically a Common Core-inspired curriculum. One of the problems with Common Core State Standards and PARCC assessments is that they mask the problems that existed in America’s K-12 education long before. One of which is fake efforts at diversity and a multicultural curriculum, of which MCPS’s World Studies is but one example. It may well be true that virtually all world history curriculum is bs, however. But that is an article for another day.

ETS Using Test Results To Justify Its Test-Filled Vision

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

"America's Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future", Closing the Achievement Gap, Common Core State Standards, ETS, High-Stakes Testing, Income Inequality, Meritocracy, Millennials, OECD, PARCC, PIAAC, SAT, STEM Fields, Testing

America’s Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future (cover), February 17, 2015. (ETS).

I actually like the Educational Testing Service (ETS). I’ve done work for them as a consultant and as an AP Reader over the years. I enjoyed most of my testing experiences with them, especially the AP US History Exam of 1986. I like many of the conferences that they host and sponsor, and they beat almost all with the spreads of food that they provide at their events. Yet even with all that, ETS’ agenda is one of promoting the ideal of a meritocratic society with a repressive regime of testing that shows beyond a shadow of a doubt the socioeconomic determinism of standardized assessments. Or, in plain English, tests that favor the life advantages of the middle class and affluent over the poor, Whites and assimilated East Asians over Blacks, Latinos, and only partially assimilated immigrants of color.

Such is the case with a nearly unreported new report from ETS. They had scheduled a press release for the “America’s Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future” on Tuesday, February 17th at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The organizers postponed the event, though, because of the phantom snow storm that was really a typical snow shower. So I didn’t get to ask my preliminary questions about the findings of researchers Madeline J. Goodman, Anita M. Sands, and Richard J. Coley, that despite the educational gains of the generation born after 1980, they sorely lack the skills they need for life and work in the twenty-first century. My questions? How could anyone have expected millennials to develop independent thinking, critical thinking, innovative thinking, writing and other analytical skills if they spend precious little time in their education actually doing any of these things? How would the constant barrage of high-stakes tests from kindergarten to twelfth grade have been able to instill in students ways to think outside the box, to look at issues with more than one perspective, to stand in opposition to policies based on evidence, and not just based on their gut or something they picked up from a test?

Mass of students taking high-stakes test, September 4, 2014. (http://newrepublic.com via Shutterstock).

Well, the report is worse than I thought. Goodman, Sands and Coley put together an argument that makes circular reasoning look like a Thomas the Tank Engine episode. The authors produced this first in a series of reports for ETS, relying solely on “data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).” The PIAAC, developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is a survey that assesses the skill levels of a broad spectrum of people between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five, the primary working population in most developed countries (meaning the US and Canada, the EU, the Baltic states, Australia, Japan and South Korea). ETS and the authors claim that this survey instrument is better at assessing how far behind millennials in particular are when compared to “their international peers in literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology-rich environments (PS-TRE)” than the international testing of high school students alone. And as such, the authors concluded that

PIAAC results for the United States depict a nation burdened by contradictions. While the U.S. is the wealthiest nation among the OECD countries, it is also among the most economically unequal. A nation that spends more per student on primary through tertiary education than any other OECD nation systematically scores low on domestic and international assessments of skills. A nation ostensibly based on the principles of meritocracy ranks among the highest in terms of the link between social background and skill level. And a nation with some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world houses a college-educated population that scores among the lowest of the participating OECD nations in literacy and numeracy.

I don’t about anyone who reads my blog, but I find these conclusions smack of so much hypocrisy that they’re stomach-ache-inducing. Really? Years of promoting testing at every level of K-12 education, everything from state and district-level assessments to PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessments, and it’s only because of growing economic inequality that US students-turned-adults don’t score well in the super-advanced, highly skilled categories? Not to mention, the SAT, AP exams, GREs, LSATs, GMATs, MCATs, Praxis I, Praxis II, and so many other ETS exams that it would cause the average psychometrician’s head to explode? Seriously?

Terrier dog chasing its own tail, March 3, 2015. (http://webmd.com).

This is yet another case of the dog chasing its own tail. A case where the $3-billion-per-year nonprofit just outside Princeton, New Jersey is sounding a clarion call for a crisis that it helped create. Not the one on the rapid rise of inequality, though its promoting of a false meritocracy through constant testing has served to lull affluent America into an intellectual coma. But in the cutting of history and social studies, literature and art, theater and music classes, from kindergarten really all the way through a bachelor’s degree program.

In the promotion of testing as the way to address achievement gaps, to deal with the so-called education crisis, so much of what was good about K-12 and even higher education has fallen away. Reading for the sake of reading and learning has drifted away, with more English and less literature in schools and at many colleges and universities than ever. Want to teach someone how to express themselves in writing, to express their numeracy in proofs? That thinking runs counter to what goes on in the Common Core school systems of 2015, meaning most people will either never develop these skills, or, if lucky, might develop them somewhere between their junior year of college and in finishing a master’s degree or doctorate. We emphasize STEM fields with billions of STEM dollars without realizing that great STEM is much more than equations and formulas. It’s also imagination, applying the ability to break down pictures, ideas, words and sentences contextually to the world of numbers and algorithms.

And don’t give me this whole “the SAT now has an essay section on it” spiel! Fact is, everyone knows that expressing their words on paper, on a screen or in speech is critical in modern societies. After almost seven decades of testing, ETS figured this out, too? What they haven’t figure out yet, though, is how to make standardized high-stakes testing a necessary for the entire working adult population in the US. Believe me, that’s where they want to head next.

Common Core Advocacy As A Job Requirement?

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Assessments, Common Core State Standards, Corporatized Education Reform, Education, Education Reform, Employment Practices, High-Stakes Testing, North Carolina, Partisan Politics, Teacher Effectiveness, Teacher Evaluations, The Hunt Institute, The James B. Hunt Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy

The James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy (aka, The Hunt Institute), building and logo, 1000 Park Forty Plaza, Durham, NC, January 16, 2014. (http://www.beacondevelopment.com and Facebook.com).

A few months ago, I applied for a Director of Programs job with The Hunt Institute in Durham, North Carolina. I know, I know. I should’ve known better, considering their ties to the Common Core, but I didn’t. In my defense, I did it through the University of North Carolina job website. I received an email on Monday to set up a Thursday interview, followed by another email on Tuesday asking me to write a hypothetical two-page brief “intended for a state legislator that describes why standards and assessments are important; how they interact; and what legislators need to understand about implementation.” (Keep in mind, The Hunt Institute is supposed to be a nonpartisan nonprofit organization).

Below is the brief I wrote in response (also, here):

Over the past decade and a half, you have been a key advocate of public education reform. You have helped pave the way for the adoption of Common Core Standards and a series of comprehensive assessments for students across the state. You have also served on committees that have urged the implementation of new measures for teacher effectiveness, measures based in no small part on the resulting scores that students and schools obtain on the new comprehensive assessments. Your rationale and that of your colleagues has been to cite the need to close the achievement gap between low-income students and students of color on the one hand, and high-income and White students on the other. Although this goal remains laudable, the means that you have advocated and the state of North Carolina has adopted will do more harm than good on the path toward educational equity and the nurturing of high academic achievement regardless of race and socioeconomic status.

There is mounting evidence across the state – indeed, across the country – that more and more comprehensive testing and assessments have failed to achieve the desired result of closing the achievement gap. Teachers and principals have noted that the time devoted to testing and to preparing students for testing has grown to the point where they have time for little else in terms of student learning. Recent surveys of students have shown that student motivation for learning has declined as the amount of testing has increased. And the most undeniable statistic is that nearly half of the state’s veteran teachers (i.e., teachers who have been in the profession for more than five years) have resigned or retired since we began introducing new state standards and assessments a little more than a decade ago.

This isn’t to suggest that we go back in time to the period before the rise of new state standards and assessments in the late-1990s. Rather, this is a time in which we should reflect on the deficiencies of the current model and take the following steps to ensure that our standards and assessments actually encourage student learning and thus a closing of the achievement gap. Below is a list of recommendations before continuing to move forward with Common Core State Standards and school district/statewide testing regimen:

1. Reconsider the Common Core, or at the very least, disconnect the relationship between it and the state assessments. States all over the country, including North Carolina, have reported problems in taking these standards and using them to develop appropriate curricula for their students. The use of these standards, developed in less than a decade, with little input from teachers, administrators, in some cases including administrators in Raleigh, has meant little to no ability for teachers on the ground to match up the standards with the curriculum or the needs of their students. It is simply a too big, one-size-fits-all approach to teaching and learning that results in neither teaching nor learning. The effect has been to reduce our classrooms to laboratories, where our teachers serve as principal investigators, and our students as lab rats. We should have standards, but ones that better fit our state and the needs of our students. Not to mention ones that allow for teacher adaptations to encourage learning.

2. Revise the number, frequency and kinds of assessments that we are doing for our students. As it stands now, we are doing entirely too many assessments too early and too often for students in the state. Assessments start as early as the second grade, with school district and state level assessments occurring throughout the year, approximately once ever six weeks. For students, the psychological effect has been to turn education into a torturous and boring chore, rather than a fun and imaginative process of learning and development. Nearly every study that nonpartisan groups have conducted in the past seven years has shown this to be true. To be sure, we need to do assessments, but not two or more levels of assessment six or seven times a year, especially in the elementary grades. Rather, we should be doing one set of diagnostic assessments twice a year at the elementary school level, and once a year at the middle and high school levels, so that the students in greatest need of academic help can get that help. In practical terms, the money the state legislature currently has devoted to testing and the testing companies for our regimen of assessments could be better spent on diagnostic testing and additional tutoring for students in need of it.

3. Resist the need to tie teacher evaluations to assessment scores. This is simply the wrong way to go about determining a teacher’s ability to reach their students. Even the best researchers in the field on teacher effectiveness have shown that the best teachers can only improve a classroom’s performance on any given assessment regimen by about two (2) percent. From poverty to eating a healthy breakfast and getting a good night’s sleep, there are plenty of factors in assessment scores in which individual teachers have no control. Yet the irony is that because the state has adopted this form of teacher evaluation, it has all but eliminated the ability of teachers to be teachers – to think independently and to act with enough autonomy to best determine how to reach their students. This kind of teacher evaluation process has encouraged every teacher in the state to “teach to the test.” This has significantly reduced the amount of time teachers devote to such tasks as independent reading, geography, social studies and other subjects that, ironically, stimulate student learning. We certainly need better trained teachers. What this means, though, is that the state needs to create a process by which the standards for entering the profession are higher. This could include the use of National Board for Professional Teaching Standards assessments of teacher excellence early on, as well as consistent mentoring and professional development as early as their first day in the classroom.

In summary, the best way to move forward in terms of standards and assessments is for our state not to rely on them as a substitute for actual teachers and actual teaching as the means for improving student performance. What we have in terms of standards and assessments is cost-ineffective, and it actually defeats the goal of closing the achievement gap, the very goal we in this state are all after.

It’s difficult to respect a job process in which a prospective employer isn’t up front about a key component of the position, in this case, the need to promote Common Core State Standards and teacher evaluations based on student assessments. It’s also difficult when they insist they’re nonpartisan, even though taking on the role of advocate for this brand of education reform is decidedly a centrist-conservative position. But being asked to not interview after writing this hypothetical brief is the best example for why education, politics and a job search should never come together. Especially if we really care about education and kids.

A Private School Future For My Son?

21 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Common Core State Standards, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Education Reform, High-Stakes Testing, Homeschooling, Imagination, K-12 Education, Parochial Schools, Private Schools, Public Education, School Choice, Schools Overseas

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Universal Orlando, January 8, 2011. (Ian Boichat via Flickr.com). In public domain.

I’ve written so many times already about the state of education reform and how corporate interests via private philanthropy, government conservatism and the technocratic generation have been hell-bent in deforming public education. I’ve even given some glimpses into my own son’s journey through elementary school in Montgomery County, Maryland over the past five years, as they’ve watered-down their curriculum and grading system while ratcheting up their testing regimen. It’s all led me to one conclusion. We need to do something for my 10-year-old son that neither me nor my wife would’ve ever gone through ourselves, especially with middle school a few months away.

The way I see it, we have four choices going into the 2014-15 school year and beyond:

1. Finding a private school for our son to attend, especially for seventh and eighth grade;

2. Finding an appropriate parochial school for our son to attend, especially for seventh and eighth grade;

3. I become a certified home schooler in time for my son’s sixth, seventh and eighth grade experiences, and educate him myself for a year or two;

4. Somehow find work overseas so that my son can get a proper, non-US public education in say, Canada, the UK, even Hong Kong or Cuba at this point.

Gonzaga College High School, Washington, DC, April 12, 2010. (AgnosticPreachersKid via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons.

There are certain drawbacks to all of these options, of course. A good private school in the DC area is a $15,000 per year prospect or more (as much as $30,000 per year at the upper end). And though my son can and sometimes does excel, he’s just a slightly above-average student (at least, according to MSA, MAP-M, MAP-R and a whole bunch of other tests), meaning scholarship money isn’t likely. The past two years of constant testing have sucked the joy of learning out of my kid’s memory banks. The only reason he reads at home at all is because we make him, not because he’s bought into the idea of reading and the world of imagination that it connects to. Not exactly the way to glide in for a tour of a school in Bethesda, Chevy Chase or DC.

With parochial schools, though definitely within our budget, the question becomes how much constant retraining would we have to do on the religious side. We’re non-denominational Christians, and ones would do not regularly go to church, either. Between the Catholic and Jewish schools, it could get confusing for our school. Yes, I know that they’ve become more secular since my days in K-12, but it does beg the question of whether we’d be trading in one set of endless headaches for another. On the other hand, going to a parochial school’s still likely better than a constant battery of tests for students-turned-lab-rats.

I’ve given homeschooling a lot of thought. It would be a piece of cake for the state to certify me. But it would reduce my income, already up and down since I became an adjunct professor and part-time consultant five years ago. It would curtail my ability to find new and additional work, as my days would be filled with teaching my son myself. Heck, my son might resent not being around kids his own age after a couple of months! But a year of homeschooling from me might be all my son needs. I have the potential to do in one year what my son’s public education couldn’t do in three. Especially if I could resuscitate his joy for learning.

What about finding work that would allow us to escape America’s badly damaged public education system? Sure, but I’d be (and am) competing with folks who already live in Canada, the UK and Hong Kong (among other places). My skills include teaching US, African American and World History and grad courses in Education Foundations, writing articles and books and a decade as a nonprofit manager. Unique, but not so in-demand and so unique that Canadians would beat down my door to hire me just because of my skills. Yet, all it takes is finding one job, one position overseas that could change all of our life trajectories.

A student fast asleep, or the future with Common Core, December 21, 2013. (http://www.medicalxpress.com).

With all of that, it appears that these are all better choices than sticking with Montgomery County Public Schools for the next seven years. The Common Core — really, the Common Snore of killing students’ imaginations, teachers’ autonomy and the attempt at critical thinking all at once — has arrived. And it is truly a not-so-silent death knell to public education as a vehicle for social change or social justice. So we need to make some life-altering choices, not the kind our federal and state governments and local school boards provide. And we need to make them soon.