Coleman was perhaps the night’s most outspoken panelist, at one point suggesting that those who believe that poverty is an insurmountable obstacle to improving student achievement should offer to cut teacher salaries and redistribute those funds to the poor.
“We have to get serious with each other. It is not okay to say that since poverty matters so much we should use that as a reason to evade reform. It’s not responsible,” Coleman said.Notice the straw man argument Coleman sets up?
To say that the conditions children live in every day and the family circumstances they come from matter in how well they do in school means that you think poverty is insurmountable.
That is not what opponents to the current reform movement say at all.
Rather it is that these things matter very much and the current spate of test-based/Common Core reforms do not address these problems and indeed, make them worse.
Here's an example:
Take a child who comes from a family background where there has been alcoholism and abuse - mostly emotional, but some physical abuse too.
That child carries sadness and fear and anger in her and cannot block those feelings out as she attends her classes.
She has a difficult time paying attention, focusing on her work or working collaboratively with others because of the maelstrom of fear, sadness and hurt boiling within her.
The one emotional outlet in school she once had for these feelings is gone now that even in her art class, where she could use her drawing talent, she is forced to read complex informational texts and write argumentative essays.
She's completely unhappy in school, even in the one class where she used to feel happy because she got to express herself and her truths with her art.
In addition, this student has no outlet for talk either because her counselor is inundated with data work and has no time to counsel and her teachers are inundated with Common Core PD and have no time to talk.
She hates school, she hates all the test prep, she hates all the Common Core projects and has just given up trying to do her work.
This is not a hypothetical - I have seen this happen.
If schools were given the resources to support students emotionally as well as academcially, many of the students currently struggling would thrive.
Schools need more time and money for art and music, physcial education and social and emotional learning. Schools need more counselors who actually have the time to counsel, not just track academic data. Schools need more social workers and school psychologists.
But schools are not given the time or money for these supports.
Rather, these supports have been cut - Bloomberg is letting 2,500 guidance counselors and other teachers go through attrition in his latest budget.
So while many students come to school with deep psychological and emotional wounds that they need help healing, schools and teachers have fewer and fewer resources to handle these issues and more and more mandates that makes these issues worse.
I have said this before, but I will say it again.
I have never seen so many instances of depression, suicidal feelings, self-harm, eating disorders and drug and alcohol problems in my 12 years of teaching as I have in this past year.
It is not a mistake that as the pressure mounts on children and teachers and schools from the feds and the state and the city and the media, everybody is feeling more anxiety and fear that is making performances worse, not better.
The solution is to provide more time and resources for social and emotional learning and support.
We need to help these children emotionally and psychologically so that they will be ready to learn emotionally.
George Lucas, an erstwhile education reformer, gets this.
Why can't the rest of the reformers?
The cynic in me says it's because there's another agenda at work here - that the Colemans and Kings are simply doing the privatization work of the corporate forces and don't really care about children or their academic achievement at all.
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