EDU 111—Perspectives on American Education

Monday, January 20, 2020

Opinion: Why SC lawmakers must address education reforms that work

Thursday, January 16, 2020

An old debate over religion in school is opening up again

Monday, January 6, 2020

RYOT and HuffPost Films premieres a new short documentary about the man behind a 1982 school shooting attempt.

Monday, December 16, 2019

Spring 2020 MWF Schedule

Session	Class Focus	Assignment
January	Week 1
M/ 13	Introduction to course; assignments (http://edu111furman.blogspot.com/2010/08/fall-2010-edu-111-assigments.html) Katherine Christie, Berea Middle School Apply for "Level 1" volunteering in order to tutor here: https://apps.raptortech.com/Apply/MzE6ZW4tVVM=
W/ 15	"Theme for English B," Langston Hughes “Eleven,” Sandra Cisneros
F/ 17	Course Rationale: http://edu111furman.blogspot.com/2008/02/welcome-to-occupation-teaching.html Foucault, “The Means of Correct Training” Poverty and Testing in Education: “The Present Scientifico-legal Complex”
January	Week 2
M/ 20	MLK Day (no class)
W/ 22	Groups formed, topics chosen “Banking concept”; Freire, Ch .2 Pedagogy of the Oppressed Topic 1: The Teaching Profession http://edu111furman.blogspot.com/2012/07/topic-1-teaching-profession.html	Topic 1 reflection email DUE before class session
F/ 24	Topic 1, Freire continued Choice text 1 UPDATE 20 October 2019: Grit, Education Narratives Veneer for White, Wealth Privilege	Read, share choice text 1 in-class
January	Week 3
M/ 27	Topic 2: Educational Philosophies http://edu111furman.blogspot.com/2012/07/topic-2-educational-philosophies.html “A generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure”: Deleuze	Topic 2 reflection email DUE before class session
W/ 29	Topic 2 continued
F/ 31	Group assignment workshop in-class Out of town
February	Week 4
M/ 3	Poverty and the ideological imperative: a call to unhook from deficit and grit ideology and to strive for structural ideology in teacher education, Paul Gorski
W/ 5	Topic 3: Historical Foundations of Education http://edu111furman.blogspot.com/2012/07/topic-3-historical-foundations-of.html	Topic 3 reflection email DUE before class session
F/ 7	Thomas Jefferson on Education (http://edu111furman.blogspot.com/2012/01/idealistic-and-elitist-roots-of-public.html) and “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm) Choice text 1 Out of town	Read, share choice text 1 in-class
February	Week 5
M/ 10	Corridor of Shame (documentary) excerpt http://www.corridorofshame.com/
W/ 12	Topic 4: Diversity, Multiculturalism, Poverty/Privilege, Class, and Race http://edu111furman.blogspot.com/2012/07/topic-4-diversity-multiculturalism.html Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The danger of a single story	Topic 4 reflection email DUE before class session
F/ 14	James Baldwin on education (1974) A Talk to Teachers, James Baldwin James Baldwin’s Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil, Clint Smith Choice text 1	Read, share choice text 1 in-class
February	Week 6
M/ 17	Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later (documentary)
W/ 19	Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later (documentary) continued
F/ 21	LRC discussion Midterm assignment/explanation
February	Week 7
M/ 24	Choice text 1	Read, share choice text 1 in-class
W/ 26	Group Presentations Workshop
F/ 28	Midterm Class discussion: Read But That's Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Gloria Ladson-Billings and 74 Interview: Researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings on Culturally Relevant Teaching, the Role of Teachers in Trump’s America & Lessons From Her Two Decades in Education Research Email to professor BEFORE class 5-10 key talking points from your first choice supplemental reading with evidence (quotes and/or page numbers). Connect as many aspects of the first half of the course as possible—topic readings, class discussions, documentaries, tutoring. Have key points in class to discuss in small groups before opening discussion to the whole class.	Email to professor BEFORE class 5-10 key points per midterm assignment Choice Text 1 Reflection DUE
March	Week 8
M/ 2	Group Presentations 1. 2. 3.
W/ 4	Group Presentations 4. 5. 6.
F/ 6	TBD
March 7-15	Spring Break
March	Week 9
M/ 16	Topic 5: Legal, Political, and Financial http://edu111furman.blogspot.com/2012/07/topic-5-legal-political-and-financial.html	Topic 5 reflection email DUE before class session
W/ 18	Topic 5 continued Cited essay, APA discussion
F/ 20	Choice text 2	Read, share choice text 2 in-class
March	Week 10
M/ 23	Black Folk Hate White Tears and Blatant Racism More Than Charter Schools, Andre Perry
W/ 25	Ruby Payne, deficit perspective http://rubypayneiswrong.blogspot.com/ Debunked! Return of the Deficit, Curt Dudley-Marling “What These Children Are Like”: Rejecting Deficit Views of Poverty and Language
F/ 27	Deficit perspective continued
March/ April	Week 11
M/ 30	Choice text 2 The Truth about Effort/Education?	Read, share choice text 2 in-class
W/ 1	Topic 6: Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment http://edu111furman.blogspot.com/2012/07/topic-6-curriculum-instruction-and.html Seven ‘great’ teaching methods not backed up by evidence	Topic 6 reflection email DUE before class session
F/ 3	Topic 6 continued Evolution as Design
April	Week 12
M/ 6	Topic 7: Current Issues and the Future of Education http://edu111furman.blogspot.com/2012/07/topic-7-current-issues-and-future-of.html Choice text 2	Topic 7 reflection email DUE before class session Read, share choice text 2 in-class
W/ 8	Topic 7 continued Essay WORKSHOP Sample APA essay with notes
F/ 10	Good Friday (no class)
April	Week 13
M/ 13	Easter Break (no class)
W/ 15	Essay draft DUE In-class peer review	Essay draft DUE
F/ 17	Virtual Schools Report DUE/ share in class	Virtual Schools Report DUE
April	Week 14
M/ 20	Choice text 2 Hard Times at Douglass High (documentary)	Read, share choice text 2 in-class
W/ 22	Hard Times at Douglass High (documentary) continued Current Education Reform Perpetuating, Not Curbing, Inequity
F/ 24	Hard Times at Douglass High (documentary) continued/ discussion
April/May	Week 15
M/ 27	Tutoring share Choice text 2 (last MWF class session)	Read, share choice text 2 in-class Choice Text 2 Reflection DUE
W/ 29
F/ 1
May	EXAMS
Tu/ 5	8:30-11:00 AM	Final Portfolio (see below) submitted with all assignments included

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Thread by @James_S_Murphy: SAT

Thread by @James_S_Murphy: "The latest WSJ journal piece about the SAT is the usual sloppy mess (what on earth is an adjusted SAT score?) but how a high school's average SAT score correlates with socioeconomic advantage powerfully knocks down the myth […]"

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale

Marianne Bitler, Sean Corcoran, Thurston Domina, Emily Penner

NBER Working Paper No. 26480
Issued in November 2019
NBER Program(s):Program on Children, Economics of Education Program

Estimates of teacher “value-added” suggest teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student learning. Prompted by this finding, many states and school districts have adopted value-added measures as indicators of teacher job performance. In this paper, we conduct a new test of the validity of value-added models. Using administrative student data from New York City, we apply commonly estimated value-added models to an outcome teachers cannot plausibly affect: student height. We find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and reading achievement, raising obvious questions about validity. Subsequent analysis finds these “effects” are largely spurious variation (noise), rather than bias resulting from sorting on unobserved factors related to achievement. Given the difficulty of differentiating signal from noise in real-world teacher effect estimates, this paper serves as a cautionary tale for their use in practice.

Pete Buttigieg Is a Lying MF

Monday, November 25, 2019

Racial Slurs in Academic Spaces: A Reader

Nearly half of New Orleans' all-charter district schools got D or F grades; What happens next?

Historic Lynching and Corporal Punishment in Contemporary Southern Schools Geoff Ward, Nick Petersen, Aaron Kupchik, and James Pratt

Historic Lynching and Corporal Punishment in Contemporary Southern Schools, Geoff Ward, Nick Petersen, Aaron Kupchik, and James Pratt

Sunday, November 10, 2019

What US Schools Can Learn From Finland’s Approach to Education

Friday, November 8, 2019

A U.S. SECRET SERVICE ANALYSIS OF TARGETED SCHOOL VIOLENCE

A U.S. SECRET SERVICE ANALYSISOF TARGETED SCHOOL VIOLENCE

Most School Shooters Showed Many Warning Signs, Secret Service Report Finds

Atlanta Public School Officer Derrick Hammond walks through the cafeteria greeting students during a lunch break at Grady High School in Atlanta, Ga.

—Melissa Golden/Redux for Education Week-File

By Stephen Sawchuk

November 7, 2019

Most of the violent attacks in schools over the past decade were committed by students who telegraphed their intentions beforehand—and could have been prevented, a new report from the U.S. Secret Service concludes.

Most of those students were motivated by a specific grievance, and every single one was experiencing extreme stress. But there remains significant variation among the perpetrators, and schools should use a comprehensive analysis to detect true threats rather than trying to profile students, the report says.

The report, released Nov. 7 by the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, analyzes 41 violent incidents in schools between 2008 and 2017. The devastating school shootings in 2018 in Parkland, Fla., and Santa Fe, Texas, helped prompt the study, but were not included in the report.

The analysis generally confirms the conclusions of the agency’s influential 2002 publication on school safety, which said checklists of characteristics supposedly common to school shooters were not helpful in preventing violence.

Instead, that earlier study popularized the idea of threat assessment, in which teams of educators, administrators, counselors, and school resource officers compile academic, behavioral, and other evidence to decide whether a student who’s made a threat is acting out or actually poses one.

“The implications for schools seems to be the same,” including using those teams to triage threats, said Anthony Petrosino, a school safety expert and director of the WestEd Justice & Prevention Research Center. Schools should also consider broader strategies such as trying to connect every youth to at least one caring adult in the school, he added.

Still, some areas of emphasis in the report differ from the past—most notably its attention to the attackers’ social and emotional health.

The analysis comes as school safety remains a top issue for school districts—and a contested one. Many districts have struggled with two, often competing philosophies: one, to “harden” schools through physical measures and school police, which nearly half of all schools now employ; or two, to invest in efforts to improve school climate, such as through restorative justice programs favored by civil rights groups who note that discipline policies and the presence of school police too often lead to the disproportionate punishment of black students and students with disabilities.

On that tension, the report effectively punts: “Schools should implement a threat assessment process in conjunction with the most appropriate physical security measures as determined by the school and its communities,” it states.

Ryan Petty, whose daughter Alaina was killed in the Parkland shooting, said he hoped the report could help bridge those debates.

It’s not about figuring out, ‘Boy this student is a threat, let’s get law enforcement involved,’ he said. “That’s the perception a lot of educators have and it couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

Social and Mental Factors

Here are some of the report’s key findings:

Secondary schools were the most frequently targeted. Just 2 percent of the incidents occurred at elementary schools, while 75 percent occurred at high schools.
Attackers were usually white and they were overwhelmingly male. Mirroring the characteristics of U.S. mass shootings in general, 83 percent of the school attacks were carried out by males and 62 percent of the attackers were white.
Police presence varied. Nearly half of the schools with incidents employed at least one full-time school resource officer.
Guns were the most often used weapon. In what’s sure to add fuel to the gun-violence debate, of the 25 attacks involving firearms, 19 of the attackers obtained firearms from the home of a parent or relative. Nearly all the other attackers used knives.
Most attackers had a grievance. At 83 percent, grievances were the perpetrators’ most common motivation, usually against peers. Forty one percent were suicidal, and 37 percent had a desire to kill. (Attackers had multiple motivations.)
Many attackers had a plan. Half the attackers engaged in observable planning of their attacks, like researching weapons, documenting their plans, trying to recruit others, or packing a bag with weapons.

An eye-opening section of the report likely to kick up debate also details the combination of social, emotional, and behavioral factors that may have been linked to the attacks.

At least 40 percent of perpetrators had a mental-health diagnosis; 54 percent had received some kind of mental-health treatment; 80 percent had been bullied; and all but two came from homes with adverse childhood experiences, such as an incarcerated parent, abuse, or financial difficulty.

And every single attacker had faced high levels of stress from social, family, or academic problems. Almost three-quarters also had been disciplined at school within five years of the attack.

Those issues will resonate in the wake of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Some families of the slain students there have blamed the tragedy in part on the district’s alleged failure to act on a record of the shooter’s mental-health problems, and its decision to put him in a program meant as an alternative to suspension and expulsion.

No Guarantee

The report also noted that four attackers had been referred to their school’s threat-assessment team, three of them within a year of the incident. In some cases, the team didn’t review all the available data, and in one case, a team considered a student low risk despite several troubling pieces of data.

That’s a good reminder that risk-mitigation approaches shown to be effective, like threat assessment, aren’t foolproof, and they depend on good implementation to work.

Petty said threat assessments teams need to be meeting regularly. That way they can be comfortable with each other, with the threat assessment process, and be willing to share pieces of relevant information when a threat occurs.

“My guess is where these are failing, you’ll find threat teams that are meeting only when there’s an identified threat. Where they’re working, they’re meeting on a regular basis,” he said.

Many states have considered or passed legislation requiring schools to conduct threat assessments since the Parkland incident, though there is considerable variation in their policies.

Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, and Texas required all schools to begin it in the 2019-20 school year. Washington state schools will join them in 2020-21.

WEB ONLY

“Arts of the Possible,” Adrienne Rich (2001)

Universal public education has two possible—and contradictory—missions. One is the development of a literate, articulate, and well-informed citizenry so that the democratic process can continue to evolve and the promise of radical equality can be brought closer to realization. The other is the perpetuation of a class system dividing an elite, nominally “gifted” few, tracked from an early age, from a very large underclass essentially to be written off as alienated from language and science, from poetry and politics, from history and hope—toward low-wage temporary jobs. The second is the direction our society has taken. The results are devastating in terms of the betrayal of a generation of youth. The loss to the whole of society is incalculable. (p. 162)

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