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Tag Archives: Montgomery County Public Schools

When Plagiarism Isn’t Plagiarism, When Teachers Are Assholes

11 Thursday Feb 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, race, Youth

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Anxiety, Bad Teaching Habits, Gaslighting, High School, K-12 Education, MCPS, Montgomery County Public Schools, Pandemic, Plagiarism, Policies, Silver Spring Maryland, Teacher-Parent Relationship, Teacher-Student Relationship, Weaponization


A gas pilot light (what gaslighting and other weaponized behaviors can feel like when one’s on receiving end), February 11, 2021. (https://generalparts.com/)

I have been truly miffed and hurt before. But not like this. At least, not since my senior year of high school and my first year as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon. But it is for my 17-year-old son that I am feeling this pain, this anger that ebbs, but doesn’t quite go away. It is apparent to me that so many teachers and staff in K-12 education are operating without a net with a pandemic all around them — and making the most of their ability to make life easier for their students anyway.

But there are others for whom the pandemic and all that has come with it literally means “students should just work as normal” or “even more than normal,” because they are “at home.” I already have colleagues at American University who think that they can take their 2.5-hour block classes and do what they did before the pandemic, lecturing for two hours at a time without giving students breaks, even assigning more work. I didn’t think I’d learn of the same stubbornness to adapt from high school teachers, too.

This story is one about my son’s struggles with school this year and off and on over the past few years. But it is also very much about how a high school in East Silver Spring, Maryland can let even a slightly above average student slip through the cracks, and then punish him, once noticed. It is about how teachers and administrators can circle the wagons like the NYPD or any other “blue wall of silence” police institution and gaslight the parents of such a child when confronted about how they have neglected and abused this child academically. My educated guess as an educator is that this issue with our own kid can easily be multiplied by a factor of a couple thousand across Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), and by hundreds of thousands in the 14,000 school districts across the US.

The story begins with our son in his senior year in a virtual remote learning environment, with some teachers (like his Creative Writing teacher) offering flexibility with due dates and other concerns, and other teachers (like his gym teacher and honors 12th grade English teacher), not so much. Our son has had his ups and downs throughout his high school years, but still was roughly a 3.0 or so student through his first three years. Even with the pandemic setting in last spring, he managed three As in his core courses. His combination of anxiety, social isolation, and (at times) inattention and laziness kept him from doing as well as he likely could’ve those years.

With schools in virtual remote mode for at least the first half of his senior year, we expected it to be pretty rough for our son. But not this rough. It seemed as if MCPS flipped a switch, and as a rule expected teachers, administrators, students, and parents to carry on this 2020-21 school year as if everything was normal. Daily attendance checks, more homework piled on top of homework, constant testing, points off for any late assignments, all part of the normal and toxic routine of rote discipline in the Common Core era.

And so it was for our son. In his gym class, his teacher marked him absent at least three times on days he opened his Zoom more than five (5) minutes past his start time. In the first three weeks, our son switched from Anatomy, Marine Biology, and Calculus to Creative Writing and Intro to Statistics, putting him behind in his courses overall.

But by the end of the first month, of all the classes, we did not expect honors English to be an issue. He had been taking honors English classes since seventh grade, after all. His honors English teacher for the first half of 12th grade, though, was not impressed with our son’s work. Even his A+ work:

You need to be more specific here. There is way to much generalization and because of that lack of specificity you kind of repeat the same ideas over and over again.

…you really didn’t follow the layout that we reviewed in class for this narrative. You need to show and not tell. Use a scene to demonstrate the theme rather than just telling the reader what they should know.

A little more detail as to the character and the setting would have been helpful here.  This goes back to the “show don’t tell” conversations we’ve had about the project.

I’d like to hear a little more discussion with the group next time – that’s what I am assessing.

Because I have electronic access to our son’s assignments, grades, and comments, I read these off and on throughout his months with this honors English teacher. I figured that our son wasn’t quite doing his best work. But then again, who would be these days? I was busy grading my own students and their papers. Although I thought this teacher’s commentary was a bit tough, I assumed it was because our son kept making the same errors again and again.

Until I started reading his assignments and answers in more detail. Even when our son understood the assignment or essay and showed understanding, it was never enough for his honors English teacher. The last quote in the string above was about an assignment in which this teacher had assigned a perfect score. That was in December, just before the holiday break.

I emailed his honors English teacher, in fact, all of our son’s other 12th grade teachers and his counselor at that point. I wrote that we “fully understand your frustrations with [our child], and share them as well.” We asked for them to keep a look out for him, to not let him “blend into the background.” Notice that we did not say that we condoned this teacher’s frustrations or his “terse language” toward our child. Nor did we say to give him a grade he doesn’t deserve. We simply wanted the flexibility that any of us would want in the middle of a pandemic, in the midst of death (including the death of his grandmother at the beginning of December), on top of his ongoing issues with sleeplessness and anxiety.

Instead, our son’s honors English teacher became more frustrated, and never addressed us as his parents directly in response to my email. It all came to a head on our son’s last assignment, an essay on satire. Apparently the teacher expected our son to roll with one example on satire and point to how many methods of satire this one example checks off. Instead, our son used four examples, and went through those methods with those examples. In the end, the teacher scored it a 50/100.

At first, I really wasn’t that surprised, given our son’s history with this teacher. But then, in the middle of his comments, the teacher wrote:

As for the elements of satire that you explore, in order to address sarcasm you must include the term irony in order to fully demonstrate your understanding of the device- you also don’t give specific examples.  A caricature is a satirical device but the example you give is not satire, it’s racist.

That was when I read the essay. What our son wrote was meandering, not well organized, but not exactly a disheveled mess either. It was pretty middle-of-the-road, like he wrote it in a rush (given the state of things, I’m certain he wrote it at the last minute). But it did contain a thesis, a mediocre and incomplete one, yet I clearly knew his topic and some of what he intended to cover just from reading it. He addressed the issue of irony in his second paragraph, and went on in detail to describe it in his fifth paragraph. The racism charge was ridiculous, given that our son had immediately pointed out that caricatures of groups like Jews were historical “stereotypes” as part of his essay. Plus, the nerve of this man to write, “I really wish I could’ve done more to help. With this assignment in particular I can help you with these types of essays- that help will prepare you for college if that’s the route you’re thinking of taking.” Tone deaf, with -isms and assumptions at his educator core.

I emailed our son’s honors English teacher, again, this time to ask him to take a second look, to note what our son did correctly in his essay, not just what our son didn’t do. Based on this teacher’s own rubric and nearly three decades of teaching students between 13 and 80 years old, our son’s score should’ve been between a 70 and a 79.

Instead, the teacher doubled down and accused our son of plagiarism, which was now the real reason for his score. My guess was that the teacher deliberately found another weakness in his essay, once confronted by me via email. He offered, though, to knock our’s son’s score up to 66/100, even though this wouldn’t change our son’s grade in the course.

I had to really, really contain myself in my follow-up email. As a father and an educator, I know all the tricks that teachers and professors use to get students and/or parents off their backs. But plagiarism is a very serious charge, the kind that requires evidence, and not mere accusation. That, and the fact that our son’s honors English teacher had not mentioned plagiarism, not at all, until I confronted him about our son’s grade and his unsubstantiated commentary.

I called for a conference with the teacher, our son’s counselor, the English Department chair, and (if available), our son’s 12th grade principal. I did it having already read our son’s essay, and having run it through Turnitin.com myself. Nine-tenths of the assignment was in our son’s own words. The other 10 percent? Parts of three sentences — about 55 words in all — included definitions that our son had not put quotes around. Two others had links to sources, ones our son clearly identified as sources. Inconsistent citing of sources, something I deal with from my own students so often it barely raises an eyebrow. It would have been enough for me to take off some additional points, but it is not a plagiarism offense.

As expected, the conference call that was supposed to be about the honors English teacher’s ill-treatment of and accusations toward our son was really an exercise in gaslighting him and us as his parents with the plagiarism accusation. Expected, but very disappointing. They kept telling us that our son was lucky to have not received a 0 and failing grade in the course. I said that they should be ashamed of themselves as educators, that they were “circling the wagons” like law enforcement. Our son’s honor’s English teacher said nothing for 35 minutes, and kept playing his TV in the background, which kept cutting in and out throughout the call (what a coward!). He was the only person on the call who didn’t speak.

They offered to share their so-called evidence. The “evidence” was exactly the same as when I ran our son’s essay through Turnitin the week before. If this is plagiarism, I would dare say three-quarters of the students I’ve taught since 1992 should be accused of such. MCPS’s definition of plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty? It includes the key phrase, “the willful giving or receiving” of an academic advantage of some sort, meaning the act has to be an intentional one. It can’t just be a couple of citation errors; evidence of intent must be involved. The wanton theft of other’s words must be involved. I seriously doubt three partial sentences in an average essay granted our son any “advantage” at all (having been a victim of plagiarism myself, I know the signs).

They did so much terribly wrong here, to our son, and to us as our son’s parents. They cared not about the teacher’s escalation of comments to our son. They cared not that the other accusations proved to be false. They cared only about three sets of quotation marks missing from a 900-word essay. They cared only about this, because they knew they could do nothing institutionally that would help students struggling with the pandemic. They cared only about the accusation because K-12 institutions care more about protecting a mediocre White male teacher than they do about Black and Brown students, as these institutions are racist and ableist to their core.

Luckily, our son has a different honors English teacher this semester, his final one at his Silver Spring high school. But as damaging as this could have been for him, at least I can say I stepped up as his dad, right? Except that this has conjured up lots of bad memories about the assholes who were my administrators at Mount Vernon HS, about folks whom I’ve known to be assholes in the education field over the years. Given this, why would anyone want to see these toxic sites of social control open up again for in-person instruction? I don’t.

I had thought about volunteering at our son’s high school this semester, with a smaller teaching load at my institutions this spring. But after this, why in hell would I want to volunteer with these uncaring shits who call themselves educators? They can all kiss my middle-aged Black ass!

However, if our son, a slightly above-average student, had to endure the bullshit of a bullshit-artist-as-certified-teacher, I can only imagine the number students across the achievement spectrum who are catching hell from teachers who have not adjusted well to teaching virtually in the midst of this pandemic. So maybe, just maybe, once I stop thinking about putting our son’s former teacher in a chokehold, I’ll see about volunteering once more. 

But, even if everyone at our son’s soon-to-be-former high school is vaccinated by late this spring or by Fall 2021, I’m still wearing two masks and a face shield. The place is way too toxic for us.

======================================

I truly would like to hear from parents, students, even teachers, in Silver Spring, in Montgomery County, MD, in the DMV, in general. Tell me I’m wrong, that these aren’t examples of education as punitive and gaslighting. Or, conversely, tell me if you have had similar experiences with this high school and this school district, especially since the pandemic.

Namby-Pamby Land

18 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work

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Class Privilege, Contradictions, DC, DMV, Gentrification, Montgomery County MD, Montgomery County Public Schools, Silver Spring Maryland, Struggling Middle Class, Suburban Toxicity, Washington DC, White Privilege


The Sound of Music (1965) poster with Julie Andrews. (Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy/AP; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/)

Last week marked an all-time milestone. Me and my future wife moved to the DMV on Tuesday, August 10, 1999, and moved into our luxury high-rise apartment in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland the next morning. It was a crazy move, done between two jobs and the crossroads of two careers, and with bronchitis on top of that. It was also two days after I proposed to Angelia. Lucky me, she was very, very kind in saying yes, despite my sometimes manly, trash-ass flaws!

Twenty years here in DC, in Suburban Maryland, and (mostly for work) in Confederate Northern Virginia has been both good and terrible at the same time. Living around here has been an exercise in outsized cosmopolitanism. The expensive apartments and homes, the high-salaried jobs that come with stress that will age you right into the grave, side-by-side with examples of poverty that reminded me of my Mount Vernon growing-up years. I’ve seen it happen, to 23-year-olds and 60-year-olds of every stripe. Not much different from what I’ve seen of New Yorkers over the years.

United Therapeutics headquarters (a block long, across from high-rise apartments), Silver Spring, MD, August 23, 2018. (https://moretocome.net).

Living in the DC-area has also been an exercise in patience. The area’s penchant for urban and suburban elitism is matched by its Southern and East Coast colloquial nature. Gentrification in NE and SE DC would be a case in point, with Trader Joe’s and restaurants serving osso bucco within a sniff of an old fried fish or crab shack. Or watching downtown Silver Spring, once dotted with dimly-lit bars and mom-and-pop eateries, turn into a gentrified nightmare, with two-dozen new luxury high-rise apartment buildings and a Star-Trek-like office starship that United Therapeutics had built across the street from our former place. All as Silver Spring has no mayor, save the Silver Spring Chamber of Commerce and Montgomery County executives selling off county buildings and parking lots to the lowest bidder. Only to see DC government match the suburbs in driving out its residents living with poverty, to rename neighborhoods in an effort to get White-suburbanite bodies and dollars while giving the trillion-dollar businesses of the world significant tax breaks.

But since I (mostly) left AED and the nonprofit world to go back into academia as a part-time and (since 2012) full-time contingent faculty member at two universities, I really don’t spend that much time in DC. Working on nationwide initiatives and programs tends to distort one’s view of DC, and it certainly did mine, at least in my time here before about 2006. Really, it shouldn’t have. I had lived in Shepherd Park while dissertation-ing for several months in 1995, and regularly visited across various communities between 1992 and 1998. Still, being solidly middle class after years of growing-up, welfare, and self-imposed-via-grad-school poverty does create a bias.

I thought DC was great those first years as a result. This despite the poverty I saw. This no matter the homelessness I breathed in, regardless of the LGBTQ discrimination I witnessed. This in contrast with the education “reforms” occurring in PG County and in DC itself, as politicians like Adrian Fenty and school supers like Michelle Rhee and John Deasy letting the corporate education reform vultures into the school districts. Only to create money-leeching charter schools that would only leave another generation of students with less educational resources and not improve their life chances while also decimating teachers’ autonomy and teachers unions.

I thought the same of Silver Spring and Montgomery County, especially after Angelia gave birth to our one and only egg in 2003. After all, we lived in middle class section of an upper-middle-class community in one of the best school districts in the US, and easily the best in the state. What I didn’t realize until we moved our son from daycare at a federal agency in DC to one adjacent to his eventual elementary school in Silver Spring was the level of White-bred provinciality our near-immediate neighbors possessed. Yes, even the Black ones. Whether Ivy League-educated, PhD-ed, JD-ed, school teacher, firefighter, nonprofit entrepreneur, lawyer, or government bureaucrat, they all seemed to know very little about the world beyond a two-square mile radius.

Now, some of this was because our kids were four or five years old. I didn’t watch anything other than PBS Kids Sprout, Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon (with the exceptions of The Wire and Grey’s Anatomy) between 2003 and 2010, except for news, of course. But as our kids became preteens and then teenagers, I knew it was more than that. My neighbors, though struggling through the Great Recession and a general downshift of the US middle class throughout the past two decades, still expressed little concern beyond their own day-to-day, as if nothing impacted them as individuals or a family. As our conversations did shift toward politics and -isms, they would cliché their way through them with platitudes like “If we could just get rid of the hate” and “Things have gotten better since the ’60s.” These conversations were so White that I sometimes clicked my tongue to signal to my prefrontal cortex that it was time to go in Standby mode.

That provincial laziness in thinking and general willful ignorance of the relationship with the world outside the community made me more aware of Namby-Pamby Land as a whole. From my fellow drivers (some I’ve recognized while driving) driving too slow, taking seconds to react to a green or red light, and blowing through stop signs, to my neighbors walking down sidewalks six abreast and forcing people into streets to go around them. And of course, their general resistance to changing intra-district boundaries because they didn’t want to “go over the bridge” across 495 to have little Johnny or Maddie attend school with less-well-off Latinx kids.

That’s the price I’ve paid for living in a suburban community of relative class privilege. The toxicity of it all has left me wanting for the New York of my youth (not Mount Vernon, mind you) as I’ve gotten older. But I guess it could be worse. It could Potomac or Bethesda, Maryland-worse.

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

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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.

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.Screen Shot 2015-09-29 at 7.12.09 AM

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.

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).

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.

Middle School Teachers, Middle School Memories

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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A.B. Davis Middle School, Algebra, Bad Teaching Habits, Duquesne University College of Education, Good Teaching Habits, Humanities, Humanities Program, Life Lessons, MCPS, Middle Schools, Montgomery County MD, Montgomery County Public Schools, Mrs. Mignone, Ms. Jeanne Longerano, Research, Science, Silver Spring Maryland, Sligo Middle School, Teacher Expectations, Teaching and Learning


A.B. Davis Middle School, Mount Vernon, NY, November 21, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins). Built in 19226, it used to be Mount Vernon High School before Black migration, the Brown decision and ending some discriminatory ability grouping practices forced the school board to build a new high school after 1954.

A.B. Davis Middle School, Mount Vernon, NY, November 21, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins). Built in 1926, it used to be Mount Vernon High School before Black migration, the Brown decision and ending some discriminatory ability grouping practices forced the school board to build a new high school after 1954.

There’s a reason why much of the recent research on middle schools has called for the elimination of middle schools long-term, that instead, K-5 or K-6 ought to become K-8. It’s a transitional period for kids, one that even with the best of parents, most preteens face mostly unprepared. It’s based on a system that educators and policy makers designed a century ago, when the average student completed their formal education in seventh or eighth grade (only one in five students living in the early twentieth century went on to high school).

The teachers traditionally prepared by schools of education really aren’t prepared specifically for sixth, seventh or eighth grade, but for secondary education. Meaning, teachers either have higher social and emotional expectations of 10-to-14-year-olds than they have prepared for, or they have higher academic expectation of their students than the students have been prepared for, or both. These are among the reasons why middle schools can easily become a black hole for students too young to be dealing with teachers trained really for high school, and a black hole for teachers who simply aren’t as prepared for tweeners and thirteen-year-olds as they like to pretend.

Sligo Middle School, Silver Spring, MD, August 2014. (http://montgomeryschoolsmd.org/).

Sligo Middle School, Silver Spring, MD, August 2014. (http://montgomeryschoolsmd.org/).

Despite the advances in teacher preparation in the past couple of decades, this reality still exists at most middle schools, including my son’s Sligo Middle School in Silver Spring. Common Core, PAARC assessments, a wide variety of fatty lunch options, all make students feel that education matters and yet it really doesn’t. My son has already had a couple of teachers whose first and second instinct for controlling their classrooms has been to yell early and often, to the point where I’m convinced that at least one of his teachers this year had Tourette’s (at least, until we had the school move him out of that class). At least two others could be accused of unconsciously labeling their students, as their expectations of their students have gone unmet.

Through meeting these teachers, I’ve re-recognized something that used to be wrong in my own teaching, back when I first started teaching in Duquesne University’s College of Education in the late-1990s. To have high expectations and standards of conduct isn’t enough. Teachers need to communicate it, through examples, through their lessons, through a rubric, quite frankly, and not just a laundry list of expectation. Simply put, given the age of the students, teachers need to positively and consistently encourage students to meet those expectations, and lay out why these expectations will help them, academically and practically.

I had precisely two teachers at A.B. Davis Middle School in Mount Vernon, New York in the early 1980s who did exactly that. My eighth-grade science teacher, Mrs. Mignone, and my first-year, eighth-grade Algebra teacher, Ms. Jeanne Longerano were the best two teachers I had in two years of middle school Humanities-style. Both were committed to the idea that every student in the classroom deserved their undivided attention, which meant that we as students — even us fidgety ones — had to give our maximum preteen attention to what was happening in the classroom as well. Both had high expectations of us, academically and otherwise. I don’t think I got away with much of anything in their classrooms that 1982-83 school year, not even as much as scratching my pubescent balls because the hair was coming in that year.

I learned a life lesson about internalized racism and having high standards for human decency from Mrs. Mignone at the end of eighth grade. Not to mention, the applications of math to science, and science to history, which I carry with me to this day. From Ms. Longerano, I renewed my love for math, began my technical understanding of computer science (we had a computer science club that she started that year), and had a neighbor that I talked to from time to time. Ms. Longerano had given us such a strong foundation in Algebra that it wasn’t until AP Calculus in twelfth grade when I ran into any serious math troubles again.

In all, though, I had twelve different teachers in two years of middle school. I had an art teacher who was also the Humanities coordinator for A.B. Davis in Doris Mann who graded us on the quality of our art, “not just for trying,” to use her words. I had a seventh-grade science teacher whom I’d based some of the nutty stories I told my son over the years, about him eating raw clams in class or coming in after being sprayed by a skunk that same morning. I had a music teacher in Mrs. Mallory for two years who was flat-out goofy to the point of seriously immature, only to find out years later that she had done her same song-and-dance when she taught second-graders. I had a seventh-grade social studies teacher in Mr. Court who was the teacher who probably made his class the most fun, but not necessarily the most educational.

In contrast, Ms. Simmons (seventh-grade math), Ms. Fleming (Italian), and Dr. Demon Travel (eighth-grade social studies), were teachers who cared more about discipline and/or quick-and-dirty rote memorization than anything else. Simmons actually intimidated me, until one day near the end of the school year, I stood next to her. Only to find that I’d grown two inches, to five-foot-four, and that I was now at least an inch taller than her curly mini-fro. Mrs. Sesay, my homeroom and seventh-grade English teacher, was the opposite, a teacher who had little control over her classroom. Almost every incident of taunting and humiliation I experienced in seventh grade had its origins in 7S homeroom or English first period.

Still, I survived, mostly because of a crush in seventh grade, more maturity in eighth, and two really wonderful teachers in that latter year. I don’t want my son, though, to look back at his middle school years and go “Meh.” Unfortunately, he can already do that for sixth grade. Seventh and eighth will have to be better, even if it means I have to home-school him.

How High-Stakes Testing Strangles Motivation and Competition

31 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ability Grouping, Competition, Education Reform, High-Stakes Testing, K-12 Education, MAP-M, MAP-R, Montgomery County Public Schools, Motivation, Mount Vernon public schools, MSA, SRA, Teacher Effectiveness, Teaching and Learning, Teaching Styles, Testing, Tracking


Homer strangles Bart (again), The Simpsons, February 2011. (http://www.goodwp.com/).

Homer strangling Bart (again), The Simpsons, February 2011. (http://www.goodwp.com/).

One of the biggest casualties in the current K-12 education reform effort — otherwise known as measuring teacher effectiveness through high-stakes testing — is the notion of competition, academic and otherwise. At least, students competing to make themselves better students, better athletes and even better people in the process of matriculating through elementary, middle and high school. Competition suffers when the teaching, motivational, psychological and financial resources necessary to level the K-12 playing field have gone instead to testing companies and psychometricians.

So much has been the emphasis on testing and raising test scores that most in education reform now think competition among students on the K-12 stage is an abomination that must be rooted out, and not part and parcel of the learning and human development process. This is really too bad. For what often makes school fun for children is a healthy dose of competition throughout the process.

To use myself and my ten-year-old son as but two examples of what has occurred in K-12 education reform over the past three and a half decades, it is apparent to most educators how much has changed as a result of the fear of competition and lack of autonomy to motivate students. Testing, of course, was part of my educational experience growing up. From third grade through sixth grade in Mount Vernon, New York’s public schools, the school district tested us with the SRA (Science Research Associates, Inc.) exam in reading comprehension and mathematics every spring. At the end of the school year, we’d learn how well or not so well we tested in these areas in terms of grade level.

Data mining (one of the hallmarks of reduced teacher autonomy), cropped and edited, September 2006. (http://www.qualitydigest.com).

Data mining (one of the hallmarks of reduced teacher autonomy), cropped and edited, September 2006. (http://www.qualitydigest.com).

The Mount Vernon Board of Education used the test for two purposes. One, it was a diagnostic exam, as it would show students with reading and math comprehension skills at, above or below grade level. When I took the SRA in third grade, for example, I read at the 3.9 grade level, or on par as a third marking period third-grader. When I took the fourth grade version of the SRA the following year, I had jumped up to a 7.4 in reading, or the equivalent of a mid-year seventh-grader.

The district used the SRA for a second purpose, though, at least by the end of sixth grade. It was part of a package that determined what academic track a student would take as they moved on to middle school. In my case, my straight A’s and my SRA scores (which put me at the 12th grade level in reading comprehension and 11th grade level in math) put me in the gifted-track magnet program called Humanities in 1981. For some of my elementary school classmates, it meant general education classes, or, in a couple of cases, remedial or special education classes.

Ability tracking through an examination and grades over four years has its own sinister flaws in terms of race and class — it has tended to disadvantage Black students, especially poor Black kids. But it at least wasn’t the constant mantra of testing that millions like my ten-year-old son has faced since he began kindergarten in August 2008. For nearly every year, my son has taken a school-level, county-district level, or state-level exam in Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools, including MAP-M and MAP-R, TerraNova and the MSA assessments. What’s more, teachers have administered practice versions of these exams (including unit guides and what they call formatives) about once every six weeks during the school year since my son began second grade.

The constant testing would be meaningful if teachers could get together and decide at the classroom level how best to address students’ needs in areas like reading comprehension and mathematics. These determinations now are tightly controlled at the state, district and school leadership levels, leaving teachers with little room to use their abilities to, well, teach. Really, motivating students — the most critical tool a teacher has in challenging students to become better learners — has become a secondary tool. Especially since these test scores only count in favor or against individual teachers and individual schools, and not specifically for or against students.

Robot teaching math 3d illustration, July 31, 2013. (http://www.123rf.com).

Robot teaching math 3d illustration, July 31, 2013. (http://www.123rf.com).

The last piece is a good thing. Most educators now agree that ability grouping or tracking has fostered too much competition for a school district’s resources among students, teachers, administrators and parents. K-12 education reform has leaned so far the other way, though, that teachers have virtually no say in the curriculum from which they teach, even in kindergarten, and have little from which to motivate their students as learners. In fact, teachers and school-level administrators are the only ones with some motivation and sense of competition, as dollars and jobs are at stake every spring as a result of annual testing. This motivation, though, is all about teaching students how to get better test scores, and not about actual learning, development or academic improvement, a poor way to reform K-12 education.

And it is the motivation to learn that sparks the competition necessary for students to improve themselves, to work with each other to become better students. Another student’s success can even encourage other students to work harder, to make themselves better academically, athletically or even socially. In the current K-12-as-laboratory-experiment-environment, this theme of motivation and healthy competition leading to student success is not only missing. For reformers, it’s been deliberately omitted, as if poor kids and students of color in urban environments don’t need motivation and competition to become better students and people.

Immigration Assignment & Montgomery County Public Schools

29 Wednesday May 2013

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

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Administrators, American History, Fiction, History, Immigration, MCPS, Migration, Montgomery County Public Schools, Parenting, Pedagogy, Personal Stories, Teachers, US History, Woodlin Elementary School, Woodlin ES


Immigrants In Own Words, Woodlin ES, May 28, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Immigrants In Own Words, Woodlin ES, May 28, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Well, the two-month long ordeal that was my son’s fourth grade immigration/migration segment and assignments concluded at the end of last week. While my son’s teachers at Woodlin ES and administrators at MCPS were well-meaning, this was probably the single worst assignment I’ve seen given by them to my son and his classmates. As I said in my post on this project from earlier this month, teaching undergraduates and graduate students the big and nuanced differences between two enormously important trends in American history is difficult. Teachers with an average understanding (at best) of historical trends and patterns like immigration and migration teaching nine and ten-year olds? That’s an almost impossible task.

It was a thoroughly frustrating assignment to watch my son go through and for me as his helper. It was a terrible set of tasks pedagogically, and just plain bad history, even for elementary school. Their so-called Wax Museum immigration project (they also titled it the 4th grade Legacy Project) called for each student to interview a relative that immigrated to the US. After our complaints, the school modified the assignment to include “a composite of several of your family members, with a mix of fact and fiction to tell the story” (emphasis added). Sorry, but encouraging “realistic” fiction for a big social studies assignment is beyond unacceptable. It shows a complete misunderstanding of US history and proper teaching methods for this subject.

In getting ready for my version of summer academic enrichment for my son (where he can build on his reading, writing and math skills while also doing fun summer camps), I ordered textbooks and other grade-appropriate materials. One of these was the activity workbook for The American Journey textbook, typically US history taught between sixth and eighth grade. I have tons of US history textbooks — I wanted the activities workbook to help guide and calibrate what my son should read and learn without going into every college-level historical nuance.

"An Immigrant's Experience" worksheet from The American Journey activity workbook, May 28, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

“An Immigrant’s Experience” worksheet from The American Journey activity workbook, May 28, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

When I leafed through the workbook last week, I found a worksheet activity titled “An Immigrant’s Experience.” The worksheet directions asked for students to “[i]nterview someone in your community who immigrated to the United States from another country or research the life of an immigrant to your state.” I realized that the questions from my son’s “Immigrants in Their Own Words” assignment were similar to the ones from this worksheet meant for kids at least two grade levels above his.

That sounds great in some respects, but it’s not. Not really. Not when I considered the fact that this was my son’s (and his classmates’) first real foray into US history at his school. Not when I figured that even this material from Glencoe McGraw-Hill mixed up immigration and migration, and yet the questions were specifically about immigration. These questions were obviously meant to cover either the 1870-1920 period or (in some cases) the period since 1965.

And certainly not when I thought about what my son told me about his teacher’s negative response to changing his assignment questions to specifically reflect migration, in his case, Black migration. Really? I didn’t think that asking his grandmother about what her folks thought about the differences between the US and their home country was an appropriate question.

As part of this social studies segment, my son also had to complete an assignment on waves of immigration, one that listed immigration to the Western Hemisphere in four phases or waves. One being from 1492-1820, then 1820-1890, then 1890-1950, then 1950 to today. This just made me shake my head. The periodization — as we historians call it — was so far off that slaves and conquistadors could be considered immigrants in the same way as Scotch-Irish living in the hills of Kentucky! Apparently MCPS produced this handout in 2001 as part of their social studies focus.

Focus Questions For Waves of Immigration (2001), MCPS, May 28, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Focus Questions For Waves of Immigration (2001), MCPS, May 28, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Now I’ll have to do something I hoped I’d never have to do, at least prior to my son going to high school. I must now correct what my son has been taught in school for the past two months. Good thing, though, that most of what my son learned on this topic will be forgotten by July 4th. It’ll make it easier for me to correct the incorrect.

K-12 Curriculum as a Mystery Novel

02 Thursday May 2013

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

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Tags

4th Grade, Facts of Life, Head of the Class, High-Stakes Testing, History, Homework, Immigration, Jacob Lawrence, K-12 Curriculum, K-12 Education, K-12 Education Reform, MAP-M, MAP-R, Maryland, MCPS, Migration, Montgomery County Public Schools, MSA, Mystery Novels, Parenting, Phillips Collection, Sherlock Holmes, Silver Spring, Social Studies, Student Development, Teacher-Parent Relationship, Teaching and Learning, Textbooks, The Migration Series, Washington DC, Writing


Unsolved Mysteries, December 19, 2011. (http://news.discovery.com).

Unsolved Mysteries, December 19, 2011. (http://news.discovery.com).

This week, my son will complete a fourth-grade project in which he interviewed his Pittsburgh grandmother about her migration experience from rural Arkansas to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during the Depression decade. Sounds pretty good — and very advanced — on the surface of things. But the reality of how this school project evolved shows how much has changed — and not for the better — regarding schools and curriculum. For my son’s school in Silver Spring, Maryland, for Montgomery County Public Schools and for schools across the country.

You see, the bulk of testing season is over for MCPS’ elementary schools. So instead of practice tests, formative assessments (otherwise known as “formatives”) and the actual exams (MSA, MAP-M and MAP-R), the teachers now have to focus on lesson plans that aren’t test-driven. For April, the fourth-grade teachers at my son’s school decided to do a social studies project on immigration. They started with a wax museum project at school, as well as a field trip to the Phillips Collection in DC.

This was where things began to get interesting for me as a parent. The permission slip for the field trip presented this unit as immigration. Yet in my son’s trip to the Phillips Collection, him and his classmates would peruse a set of Jacob Lawrence’s paintings on migration. For those of you who don’t know, Lawrence’s most famous paintings were of the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between roughly 1915 and 1930.

Jacob Lawrence: Migration Series, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (1993), May 1, 2013. (Elizabeth Hutton Turner; http://ucdavis.libguides.com/).

Jacob Lawrence: Migration Series (Cover Art), Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (1993), May 1, 2013. (Elizabeth Hutton Turner; http://ucdavis.libguides.com/).

I could barely contain the historian side of me when I read such an obvious and unbelievable error. But I decided to not assume that the fourth-grade teachers made the decision to treat immigration the same as migration. So I hand-wrote a note that politely suggested that they make a correction on the permission slip and for the overall assignment, since immigration and migration aren’t the same at all.

This was the response I received by email on April 4:

“We have had this wonderful trip planned for the 4th grade for the past 4 years and we always make sure to front load the students with information about the migration process.”

When teachers go into placating-mode without actually addressing my concerns as a parent (and an educator, for that matter), it’s usually a sign of trouble where there otherwise shouldn’t have been any trouble.

Then, nearly two weeks ago, my son brought home his interview/presentation assignment based on the wax museum project and his Phillips Collection field trip. It was titled “Immigrants in Their Own Words.” The fourth-grade teachers had charged the students — including my son — with the task of finding a family member who had immigrated to the US, interviewing them and asking them questions like “In which year did you come to America?” and “What is the biggest difference between America and your country of origin?”

Flabbergasted is just the beginning of my deep sense of puzzlement over the assignment. It was an assignment straight out of a Facts of Life or Head of the Class episode from the 1980s, culturally and racial insensitive to the core. After all, the height of White immigration to the US ended nearly a century ago. For Blacks, well, if I have to explain it, then it may be worth the while of those of you who do teach to take my History of American Education course (that is, whenever I get to teach it again).

My wife wrote an email about this follow-up assignment, to which my son’s teacher replied, “[e]migration and [i]mmigration are almost splitting hairs.” Really? In what history or ed foundations course? With some prodding, we were given the opportunity to adapt the assignment so that my son could work on migration. Of course, even without that note, I would’ve insisted on him doing migration anyway.

Mysterious...the new Sherlock Holmes, January 17, 2011. (H. Armstrong, Roberts/Corbis; http://www.guardian.co.uk/).

Mysterious…the new Sherlock Holmes, January 17, 2011. (H. Armstrong, Roberts/Corbis; http://www.guardian.co.uk/).

That this process was poorly executed is only part of the story. For nearly five years, my son’s curriculum has been a mystery to me, as it jumped around from pre-algebra to basic addition, from writing letters in which he could write phonetically to having to write about beetles in grammatically correct but short sentences. After five years, my son has never brought a textbook home. The weekly emails from teachers and postings on the neighborhood school website and the MCPS website tell me a lot about nothing.

In sum, I know quite a bit about test dates, subject areas and sometimes subject matter in which the state of Maryland and the school district will test the students. What we don’t know from day one of any school year are the themes for each subject for the year or for any given marking period. Because of the priority of testing above all else, the amount of time in the curriculum on subjects like social studies has narrowed, and with it, a teacher’s ability to be autonomous and to think through curriculum in a critical manner. And without textbooks, I as a parent can’t truly anticipate how to help prepare my son for any new or potentially challenging materials.

It’s difficult, though, to anticipate that your son will come home with an assignment on immigration in the fourth marking period of fourth grade. Especially when I as a history professor know how complicated these processes are for undergraduate and graduate students to wrap their brains around. Especially since my son has yet to write a full-fledged book report on any any book he has read for school. Or spent significant time on history or other, non-test-related subjects. Education should always be a journey, but never a mystery.

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Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below:

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Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

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Boy @ The Window on Apple's iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/boy-the-window/id643768275?ls=1

Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

You can also add, read and review Boy @ The Window on Goodreads.com. Just click on the button below:

Boy @ The Window

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