UCLA SMP EdBlog

I’m posting again the op ed piece from the Washington Post by the teacher. And the question is how do we not get too far away from our clients while moving toward a middle or upper class education for their students with the accompanying test scores? When we provide a template for teachers to use with their students, how do we move to them making their own templates - and how do we avoid templates that become fill-in-the-blank working class education?

Washington Post op-ed on NCLB:

Classroom Caste System

by David Keyes
Monday, April 9, 2007; A13

I thought that the article about the LAUSD reforms might offer some opportunities for SMP. In particular, the issue of teaching EL students (something like Bridges)

Finding: “The use of multiple, often duplicative, and sometimes conflicting programs, such as those for students who are not fluent in English, fragments instruction and confuses students who are not conversant in English in the first place, by teaching them skills in different ways with different programs.”

And maybe some work helping district leaders see a bigger picture (like what we are doing in Antelope Valley).

Here’s the link to the Times article:

Brewer promises reforms after critical LAUSD review

By Joel Rubin and Howard Blume, Times Staff Writers

Interesting analysis of the results of sanctions or the threat of sacntions on teacher attitudes - in the TC Record.

It seems to mirror what I see out there, mostly in MS and HS, less in ES. If this is common, what can we do as an organization to change this?

Findings:

Analyses of interview and observation data indicate that faculty in both schools enacted numerous changes in response to district sanctions. Whether these changes become institutionalized as part of school or classroom practice depended on the principals and teachers abilities to mobilize schemas, material resources, and legitimacy. The changes that sanctioning prompted, however, had little impact on faculty efforts to address course failure. Course failure remained bound to a moral causality that located its cause in students moral deficiencies and that justified the attenuation of the schools responsibility for it.

This is the link to the article.