How to protect your kids from Google predators Share, by Michelle Malkin

Michelle Malkin is feeding my paranoia. Maybe she'll feed yours too.

Canvas (by Instructure) is one of myriad “learning management systems” that stores students’ grades, homework assignments, videos, quizzes and tests — all integrated with almighty, all-powerful, omniscient Google. Google apps such as ClassDojo collect intimate behavioral data and long-term psychological profiles encompassing family information, personal messages, photographs and voice notes. The collection of such data is a nanny state nightmare in the making, as a new Pioneer Institute report on “social, emotional learning” software and assessments outlined this week. (See also: Who’s data-mining your toddlers.)

Meanwhile, preschoolers are being trained to flash “Clever Badges” with QR codes in front of their Google Chromebook webcams. These Badges “seamlessly” log them into Google World and all its apps without all the “stress” of remembering passwords. Addicted toddlers are being indoctrinated into the screen time culture without learning how to exercise autonomy over their own data.

Yeah, there's more. I was in that classroom situation. I didn't know about all of the data collection. I did know that for the most part, students on their laptops weren't really learning that much. Learning is no longer a consideration though. Who needs an education when the machines can do it all for us, and Google will even talk to us, avoiding the need to read 'cuz readin' is fer squares, man. It's strictly L - 7.

Results of Poor Teacher Training

A couple of articles caught my eye recently. I've probably mentioned in previous posts that the greatest reason for the failure of American public education is poor teacher preparation. Teachers are not taught to teach correctly.

So students don't learn.

So standards are lowered.

So the next generation of teachers knows less than their predecessors.

So their training has to be dumbed down.

So students learn even less.

So standards are lowered.

So the next generation . . .

This became evident to me years ago when it was decided that spelling wasn't important. Teachers were instructed to reduce emphasis on proper spelling. On the State of Michigan's M-Step test, spelling doesn't matter on the essay portion of the test. Neither does grammar, because that too, along with punctuation no longer matters. Students shouldn't get bogged down in those non-essentials. They should merely express themselves.

There is no consideration for the fact that due to lack of writing mechanics, it's extremely difficult to understand what many students write. In some cases, the day after they wrote it, some students can't even understand what they wrote. And generally, these students can't understand what they read out of a grade-level text because the punctuation, which helps establish meaning is not read. They haven't learned it, so it has no meaning to them. For them, those commas, periods, question marks, and quotation marks don't exist.

Reading, writing, and spelling all go together. They are the elements of literacy. For some students, all three skills are missing.

Then there is the effect on school discipline. There are a lot of really bright students, who, because they were never taught in the way they need in order to learn, can't read. They are frustrated, and they act out. It gets worse as they get older and fall further behind every year. This doesn't apply to all students who are discipline problems, but I believe it applies to a large portion.

And education schools are going more and more in the direction of being the problem instead of the solution.

To anyone acquainted with the history and quality of American ed schools, this should come as no surprise. Education schools have long been notorious for two mutually reinforcing characteristics: ideological orthodoxy and low academic standards. As early as 1969, Theodore Sizer and Walter Powell hoped that “ruthless honesty” would do some good when they complained that at far too many ed schools, the prevailing climate was “hardly conducive to open inquiry.” “Study, reflection, debate, careful reading, even, yes, serious thinking, is often conspicuous by its absence,” they continued. “Un-intellectualism—not anti-intellectualism, as this assumes malice—is all too prevalent.” Sizer and Powell ought to have known: At the time they were dean and associate dean, respectively, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

More than three decades later, a comprehensive, four-year study of ed schools headed by a former president of Teachers College, Arthur Levine, found that the majority of educational-administration programs “range from inadequate to appalling, even at some of the country’s leading universities.” Though there were notable exceptions, programs for teaching were described as being, in the main, weak and mediocre. Education researchers seemed unable to achieve even “minimum agreement” about “acceptable research practice,” with the result that there are “no base standards and no quality floor.” Even among ed school faculty members and deans, the study found a broad and despairing recognition that ed school training was frequently “subjective, obscure, faddish, … inbred, and politically correct.”

A study from 2004, “Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers,” examined the course syllabi used in the nation’s top-rated ed schools and found with distressing regularity one-sided curricula in which complex issues were trivialized and narrow ideological viewpoints treated as settled fact. Un-intellectualism seemed to have given way to anti-intellectualism: “The foundations and methods courses we reviewed suggest that faculty at most of these schools are often trying to teach a particular ideology—that traditional knowledge is repressive by its very nature—without directing their students to any substantial readings that question the educational implications of this view,” concluded the study’s authors, David Steiner, now executive director of the Institute for Education Policy at the Johns Hopkins University, and an associate, Susan Rozen.

And speaking of school discipline:

Valley Oak Middle School teachers were asked to answer two questions about the school's climate and culture.

Overwhelmingly, the teachers said the school's discipline model is broken.  

At a special meeting Thursday night, Visalia Unified School District teachers resoundingly agreed, saying there is a "crisis" in classrooms across the city. 

Parents backed them up on almost every concern. 

Just one teacher spoke in favor of the current discipline model. 

Like many campuses in California, Visalia Unified School District follows the Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports system when students misbehave or act out.

With PBIS, students are placed in intervention programs, counseling, and alternative programs before a suspension or expulsion is recommended. Teachers say it's rare that a student ever receives support to address their issues. 

In most cases, they're sent back to class after a brief trip to the office. In some instances, teachers say they are held to answer for why they sent the student, rather than dealing with it themselves. 

Visalia Unified began adopting the model in 2013. Teachers had high hopes. They've been met with disappointment. 

As incidents on campuses have worsened, teachers and parents are pushing back.

We implemented "Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports" or PBIS as it is known, at my school when the last principal I worked under came in. I was even one of the "fortunate" PBIS committee members. We went to regular off-site meetings throughout the year for four or five years, first to learn to implement PBIS, then to "recharge" PBIS, because wouldn't you know, it just never worked as advertised. Inbetween the offsite meetings, we had all day committee meetings in school, in which we collected and aggregated data on students' misbehaviors, came up with positive non-confrontational strategies to deal with students who misbehaved, wrote scripts to teach students (even fourth and fifth graders) proper behavior in all areas of the school, and decide on rewards for students who kept their noses clean.

We also received many binders full of many books and many papers throughout the years of offsite meetings that sat on shelves and in closets when we returned from these meetings. It was all a waste. The one aspect that wasn't considered and that is never considered is proper instruction so that students actually learn what they are in school to learn. These children are not stupid, but constant failure makes them think that they are. So they act out.

How difficult is that to understand?

At some point, a new discipline system will replace the failed PBIS. It too, will fail.

Teacher tests can right past wrongs - or can they?

According to Emery Patchauer in the Detroit News:

In 2013, the State Board of Education attempted to increase the readiness of new teachers by revising the exams they have to pass in order to earn a license. The results were a disaster. In the first round of testing, pass rates for the history exam fell from 71 percent to 25 percent. Social studies fell from 65 percent to 22 percent. Elementary education fell from 83 percent to 49 percent

Does this mean that teachers are less ready, that the new tests showed that teachers needed more education before they walked into the classroom?

Don't be silly.

First, we must resist the logic that says pass rates drop because teachers today are less prepared compared to years past. This is wrong. A sudden drop in scores like we saw in 2013 happens when exams are hastily adopted or not properly piloted. This sudden drop also happens when the exams are made by a company with little connection to the deep work of teaching.

It's all the new test's fault.

Truthfully, I don't know the difference between the pre and post 2013 tests. I do know that it's way too easy to blame a test for a person's shortcomings. I also know that teachers need a knowledge base before they step into that classroom. They can't teach what they don't know, and staying one day ahead of the students you are teaching is not a sound strategy. Later in the article, Patchauer takes race and gender into account. The stats aren't given, but we're made to understand that there are some testing discrepancies between races and genders. Assuming that each class of prospective teachers is made up of students of various races and genders, one should look at students' previous education to discover why this is. Study habits and reading skills might also be issues here.

It seems to me that Patchauer wants a dumbed down test that anyone can pass.

Students can find sample questions on the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification website. There is also an option to buy practice tests. Other options would include studying harder and longer and even getting together with colleagues to study together.

The issue here is that these future teachers attended public schools that did not prepare them to succeed academically. I've already ranted in previous posts about the lack of phonetic reading instruction crippling students' reading abilities. Those skills not learned as a child, will most likely never be learned, and if these teachers someday do pass the test and do enter a classroom, they will do so without the skills needed (because they were never taught them) to truly teach their students.

And that is not the fault of any test.

Diversity First—Education, Whenever

Over the past few generations, school has become less and less about education, and more about all kinds of other things. Even so, teachers, administrators, government officials, schools of education, and parents all insisted that no, children are in school to learn. When they graduate, they're supposed to be able to function as intelligent adults in an increasingly complex society. Graduates are supposed to have the tools they need to earn a living, vote intelligently, raise a family, and entertain themselves. They should be able to read, write understandable prose, and know enough math to shop, manage their finances, read a graph, and know when their being snowed by government officials or other shysters trying to part them from their hard earned money. It also doesn't hurt if they know enough science and history to catch a glimpse of how the world works.

That's what everyone pretended. Now, in New York, they've stopped even pretending.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s school-integration task force just dropped its initial report—a multilayer cake of mostly impenetrable social-justice jargon, interspersed with a dangerous idea or two, and with a dismaying lack of emphasis on the enduring value of teaching children to read, write, and do numbers. In fact, the report represents a significant victory of show over substance, establishing “diversity” as the principal goal of public education in New York City while exiling accountability—teacher accountability, parent accountability, student accountability—to the ash heap.

In its willingness to sacrifice function to form, the School Diversity Advisory Group’s initial report (a second is expected later in this school year) is a classic example of an old trope—to a hammer, the world looks like a nail. As panel member Matt Gonzales told the New York Times: “The idea of a good school versus a bad school is based on narrow assumptions [including tests and attendance].  We wanted to shift the narrative about how we measure school quality. Good schools are integrated schools.”

Or, as the report itself puts it at one point, “the use of exclusionary admissions screens . . . which judge . . . kids on behavior, test scores, and other biased metrics, is the biggest contributor to . . . segregation.” Get rid of “biased metrics,” in other words, and— presto—the problem is solved. But good luck educating children in an environment where behavior and other quantifiable performance standards are deemed an objective impediment to progress.

That's what it's come to. The best and brightest will no longer be allowed to excel. Everyone must be equal, even if that equality leads to a Harrison Bergeron society.

Teacher’s fired for giving zeros to students who didn’t turn in work – leaves goodbye note on board

It has been decided, I'm not sure by whom, but it has been decided in some school districts, including the one I retired from, that no zeros should ever be given on any assignment, ever. Even the assignments that aren't turned in should be given 50%. Our online grade book was set up to handle this requirement.

Unlike the Florida teacher in the article, we all mostly went along with it eventually. I didn't at first, because it is stupid, and because we were never trained on how to make it work in our grade book. Eventually I figured it out.

Part of the rationale for this practice is that it makes it harder for the student who has a bunch of zeros to their grade up once they decide to start doing the work. Or, if they have a bunch of scores below 50% that on work that they did turn in, it makes it hard for them to raise their grades once they understand the concepts and start getting better grades on things.

The problem is that most of the students who turn in little or no work don't care, and they continue to not to most of the work. Yes, there are exceptions, but very few of them. There are ways to work with those students in order to raise their grades to an acceptable level. And the students who continually score very poorly do so because they don't do the class work. And again, most of them never will.

Another part of the rationale for not giving zeros is based on the mathematical difference between a percentage scale, and the four point scale. Yes, there is a difference, and yes it is harder to raise one's grade from a zero than it is from a 50%. But it's also true that in order to show understanding of a concept, knowing something to less than 50% accuracy is not really knowing the concept. The percentage scale, including a zero for not turning the work in, gives the teacher that more accurate picture of a student's abilities and needs.

Then there is the matter or personal responsibility. At some time, in order to become a functioning adult, one must learn and adapt to this concept.

When it comes right down to it, however, she does not regret stand up for what she believes in. 

"A grade in Mrs. Tirado's class is earned," she said. 

"I'm so upset because we have a nation of kids that are expecting to get paid and live their life just for showing up and it's not real," she added. 

If we are concerned with motivating students, we need to concentrate on using more effective teaching strategies (phonics and beginning with basic skills) so that students can actually learn the material. Once they know they can learn and that they are learning, they will be less apt to give up, thinking that's it's all just too hard.

This controversy is just another dodge to avoid addressing the curriculum issue.

NPR Gets It Mostly Right

In the long ago days when I first learned to teach reading phonetically, I truly did not know what to expect. I know what I hoped for, but with phonics being frowned up in favor of "whole language," I thought that maybe there was a good reason. Before that, when I first began teaching and became aware of the controversy, I naively assumed that the educational experts had the best interests of children at heart. I thought that the only reason for teaching children was because one truly wanted students to learn. I was not aware of the political and economic considerations, and over the years, I've discovered that I was wrong in my assessment. There is too much money to be made and too much political advantage to be made in educational failure. People and companies make bundles of cash on remedial education and on NEW! and IMPROVED! reading programs. Politicians and reading "experts" become heroes, riding to the school districts' rescue - again.

There isn't much money to be made with pencil and paper. There's even less to be made when students are proficient readers and don't need extra reading programs.

NPR has profiled a Bethlehem PA school district in which a school official has decided to do his own research to figure out why so many students can't read, and why the failure in reading instruction is so wide-spread. The answer has nothing to do with adding technology to the classroom, or increased use of "leveled books," or self esteem, or more student-centered learning. It's got to do with learning what sounds the letters make. In some of the new basal reading programs, a token amount of phonetic instruction has been added to the curriculum, but not enough to insure that students become proficient readers. And teachers still aren't learning the phonetic structure of English. Teacher instruction is still based on methods that have failed for generations.

This was a class on the science of reading. The Bethlehem district has invested approximately $3 million since 2015 on training, materials and support to help its early elementary teachers and principals learn the science of how reading works and how children should be taught.

In the class, teachers spent a lot of time going over the sound structure of the English language.

Since the starting point for reading is sound, it's critical for teachers to have a deep understanding of this. But research shows they don't. Michelle Bosak, who teaches English as a second language in Bethlehem, said that when she was in college learning to be a teacher, she was taught almost nothing about how kids learn to read.

"It was very broad classes, vague classes and like a children's literature class," she said. "I did not feel prepared to teach children how to read."

Even though NPR doesn't use the word, perhaps fearing that it is still a word of ill repute, the teachers are learning phonics, how to teach reading phonetically, the way it should be taught if students are to learn. But, as teachers can't teach what they don't know, teachers must first learn the letter sounds. From the article, it's not clear as to whether students are explicitly and systematically taught the letter sounds and then led to practice them, but-

At the end of each school year, the Bethlehem school district gives kindergartners a test to assess early reading skills.

In 2015, before the new training began, more than half of the kindergartners in the district tested below the benchmark score, meaning most of them were heading into first grade at risk of reading failure. At the end of the 2018 school year, after the science-based training, 84 percent of kindergartners met or exceeded the benchmark score. At three schools, it was 100 percent.

Silva says he is thrilled with the results, but cautious. He is eager to see how the kindergartners do when they get to the state reading test in third grade.

"We may have hit a home run in the first inning. But there's a lot of game left here," he says.

Since they've made such huge investments in technology, and since standardized testing is now done on computers, I fear that most districts will still cling to the vain hope that laptops, tablets, and smart boards will save the educational day.

They won't. Explicit phonics instruction will.

Single Moms

Way back in September, at Aretha Franklin's funeral (yes, I should update more often) many of the eulogists used their speaking opportunity to slam Trump. They brought politics into a forum that should have been free from politics. Funerals, which are for the living, are supposed to events that recall and honor the dead. We need that ritual in order to say goodbye to our loved ones. It is not something that should be subject to partisan politics, no matter how self-righteous the speaker may be.

In the "age of Trump" though, that admonition has gone out the window. Politics are perfectly acceptable if they are of the "Trump is a chump" variety. We saw that most recently in commentaries related to George H. W. Bush's funeral. Pundits (and Facebook and Twitter mobs) made it about Trump. This is the age of Trump in which everything is about Trump. And while this will annoy some readers (assuming there are any readers) the fault for this can be laid squarely at the feet of the Trump haters. They are the ones creating the "every story is a Trump story" atmosphere.

Even the murder of eleven Jews by a lunatic Jew hater who also hated Trump, was blamed on Trump.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

While anti-Trump speeches were found appropriate, Reverend Jasper Williams spoke the wrong politics. He condemned single mothers. Statistically, children of single mothers suffer more from pathologies of poverty, drug use, teen pregnancy, dropping out of school, and criminal behavior than children of two-parent families. Anecdotally, it was part of my daily life as a teacher in a small "urban" school district. I worked with some of these children. And yes, they had issues that children from two-parent families never had to deal with.

It cannot be denied that these children have a much harder time of it. Although, Nancy Kaffer, in a Detroit Free Press editorial does try to deny it. The problem is that she has no facts to prove Rev. Williams wrong.

It's actually a rather confused (or maybe just confusing to me) piece that tries to make the case that single parenthood is not as bad as we're led to believe.

That's not a problem with the Census; its purpose is to quantify. The problem lies with folks who use a simple measure of marital status and primary custody to draw sweeping conclusions about family relationships, the people in them, and what it all means — and who prescribe solutions for a social problem diagnosed using the wrong tools. 

While half of such children living in single-parent households don't live in poverty, half do — a much higher rate than the children of married parents. 

And that's the problem that misconceptions about single moms fuels: attacking single moms, or single parents of any gender, looks past the real problems parents face — and that means solutions to those problems will continue to elude us.

The problem is that when you bring in actual statistics on the effects of growing up in a single parent household, those statistics show that there are problems that come with growing up minus a father.

Was Moynihan right in suggesting that children whose parents divorce or never marry have more than their share of problems? This question has been hotly debated ever since the publication of Moynihan’s report. On the one hand, growing up without both biological parents is clearly associated with worse average outcomes for children than growing up with them. Specifically, children growing up with a single mother are exposed to more family instability and complexity, they have more behavior problems, and they are less likely to finish high school or attend college than children raised by both of their parents. On the other hand, these differences in children’s behavior and success might well be traceable to differences that would exist even if the biological father were present.

In recent years, researchers have begun to use what they call “quasi-experimental” approaches to estimate the causal impact of growing up apart from one’s biological father. Some studies compare the outcomes of children living in states with liberal versus restrictive divorce laws. Others compare siblings who were different ages in the year when their father moved out. Still others compare the same child before and after the father left the child’s household. One important limitation of these studies is that while they all focus on children who are not living with both of their biological parents, they differ with respect to their comparison group, whether it is children raised by their mother alone, by their mother and a new spouse, or by their mother and a new partner to whom she is not married. Nonetheless, when taken together these studies are beginning to tell a consistent story. A recent review of 45 studies using quasi-experimental methods concluded that growing up apart from one’s father does reduce a child’s life chances in many domains.

The review’s authors examined the effects of a father’s absence on outcomes in four domains: educational attainment, mental health, labor market performance, and family formation. Growing up with only one biological parent reduces a child’s chances of graduating from high school by about 40 percent, which is similar to the effect of having a mother who did not finish high school rather than one who did. The absence of one’s biological father has not been shown to affect a child’s verbal and math test scores, however.  The evidence for other indicators of educational performance, such as high school grades, skipping school, and college aspirations, is mixed, with some studies finding that father absence lowers school attendance and aspirations and others finding no effect. Most studies find larger effects on boys than on girls.

There are other places to find these same facts. Ann Coulter has written a lot about single mothers based on the same government statistics mentioned above. A blogger has reposted some of her columns and a chapter from one of her books here. I understand that the name "Ann Coulter" is as big a turn off to some people as the name "Donald Trump," but if you are one of those people, be brave. Don't be afraid to read ideas you disagree with, or are automatically prejudiced against based on the writer.

Like it or not, a child's life is more difficult when there is no father at home.