What "Good" Education Means Today

[Jcrowley]

What "Good" Education Means Today

L.A. teachers Marisol Alba and Sean Strauss, of the Celerity Nascent Charter School, were fired after supporting students who wrote a letter of protest about the school's decision not to let students read a poem about Emmett Till during a school-wide assembly for Black History Month. In defending the decision to both censor the students and fire the two teachers, the executive director of this "school" said:

"Our whole goal is how do we get these kids to not look at all of the bad things that could happen to them and instead focus on the process of how do we become the next surgeon or the next politician," said Celerity co-founder and Executive Director Vielka McFarlane. "We don't want to focus on how the history of the country has been checkered but on how do we dress for success, walk proud and celebrate all the accomplishments we've made."

Welcome to "No Child Left Behind" schooling in the United States: you need to drill and skill to learn information for standardized tests, creativity isn't welcome, and history, when ugly, need not be part of the curriculum. Because nothing says "Let's Celebrate Black History Month" like erasing the ugly history of racism and deluding kids into thinking the racism they see everyday isn't in any way connected to the history of the U.S.

http://fervidus.typepad.com/lingual_tremors/current_affairs/index.html

Read the whole disgusting incident here:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-newcharter19mar19,1,4441680.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Update:
http://fervidus.typepad.com/lingual_tremors/2007/03/controversy_at_.html

[southerncrone]

1. We are living in a time akin to the Spanish Inquisition, when books were burned

because they didn't support the ruling class (Vatican) at the time. Today the "conservative" stance is to wipe out any shred of argument that disagrees with them, therefore making their ideas "correct".

Help us all!
:banghead:

[bluestateguy]

2. I've said it before, and I'll say it again (this won't be popular)

Some of the dumbest people I have ever met were school administrators.

[Jcrowley]

3. This brings back haunting memories for me

I participated in this and watched the ugly scene unfold:
http://www.cissylacks.com/

This is the story of St. Louis veteran teacher Cissy Lacks, who was fired from Berkeley High School by the Ferguson-Florissant School Board in March, 1995, and whose case is scheduled for Federal Appeals Court in early November, 1996. It is an important story to watch, for it has many lessons for teachers:

1. Cissy Lacks did everything right and still got fired.

2. Her teaching went unchallenged in the same community for 21 years: she was "safe."

3. Her school district has a strong, clear academic freedom policy protecting teachers and students from arbitrary limits on "`the study, investigation, presentation, and interpretation of facts and ideas in the classroom,' provided that the work falls within the framework of district curriculum objectives and school board policy" (Education Week, June 21, 1995, p. 41). Books on the board approved curriculum include Wright's Black Boy.

In an interview with Cissy Lacks in November, 1995, I learned that she continues to suffer the consequences of her refusal to control her students' creative writing. A multicultural studies grant that she has written and had funded and renewed for three years in a row was denied funding this year on the grounds that the proposal was "too vague." She has applied for other jobs in area schools to teach her specialties, journalism and creative writing; but so far there have been no offers. She is hard at work on her case, which she and the NEA, representing her, feel is the companion case to Hazelwood in that it has the potential to affirm or revoke the teachers' right to due process.

When I asked Cissy Lacks what she has learned from this episode that she would pass on to other teachers, particularly beginning teachers, her advice was clear: "Don't stop teaching well. And don't apologize for teaching well. Document everything, especially good reports you get from your administrators." About control of student writing, she said, "People ask me if I couldn't have predicted that the kids would write as they did. I say, `No.' I'm talking with them about technique and style. If you're really good and you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, then you can't predict what the kids will write. The only way you could predict is if you assigned the writing. But then that wouldn't be real writing."

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/winter96/cenCONN.html

So here it is. They broke into her classroom, while she was out of the country receiving an award for teaching excellence, and opened her locked cabinets to examine recorded classroom footage held within and used it against her. Ultimately the expletive laced poem that they used as the quintessential example of her violations of Missouri State Law was the quintessential example of the excellence of her teaching techniques.

That very poem, three drafts later, won the State poetry contest. The first black to win the award. And Cissy quit teaching at the elite schools years earlier for reasons you can imagine.

By the way ALL the people on the school board were white and Christian. Almost the entirety of Berkeley is Black. I was there.

[no_hypocrisy]

4. Second the motion, with fries.