Category Archives: Activism

April 17, 2014 · 12:33 pm

A Quick Charge to the Millennials

A quick few thoughts:  I teach education students in their first year, and about three years ago, I had a student, somewhat randomly, ask me what I thought about Occupy Wall Street.  I thought for a moment and then improvised a version of a short talk that I have made sure to tell my students ever since:

I graduated from college in 1991.  My class entered the workforce in a recession, and I periodically read little admonitions from Gen. X to “kids today” that amount to “Hey kid, everyone had it hard getting started in life.  We had to deal with a recession AND the suicide of Kurt Cobain. Get over yourself.”

Increasingly, such pronouncements make me see through a red mist of outrage.

Look, getting started in life is never easy, and yes, every generation can point to struggles that they had to endure, but compared to today’s 20 year-olds?  My generation had it easy — and today, college classmates of mine are major figures in media and politics.  It isn’t at all fair to look at the Millennials and call them whiners while my generation is in the process of becoming the leaders of society.

What is going on with these kids, today?  Well, the cost of college has gone through the roof even as the amount of support available to pay for it without taking out loans has dropped.  In order to pay for college, more and more students graduate burdened with ruinous debt, but the job prospects for college graduates have diminished and not solely because of the recession. Meanwhile, what modest gains in median household income were made since 1990 were gone by 2011. As a result, more Millennials live at home and are delaying what previous generations would have considered signs of independent adulthood.

So this is a reality for Millennials in college — they are starting further behind than any generation since their great grandparents were born, and they will have to work hard, very, very hard to make any progress at all.  This is not fair, but it is also the hand they have to play, and to their credit, most of them who I meet accept that the passage to adulthood will be a longer and harder slog, but they also know they have to do it.

But what is not fair is the criticism being hurled at them for daring to make note of these realities.  They did what they were told to do from a young age.  They worked at their schooling.  They played sports.  They joined activities.  They volunteered in their communities.  They took endless tests.  They took jobs to pay for school.  They sought out and competed for scholarships and unpaid internships.  And they did it all because the adults in their lives, the parents, the teachers, the principals, the guidance counselors advised them like it was 1985 — only on steroids.  Distinguish yourself.  Compete to get into college.  Graduate.  And the world will bestow the rewards of hard work upon you.

It’s dawning on them that a lot of the grown ups in their lives don’t get it.  They don’t get that scheduling kids from dawn to dusk with organized activities doesn’t teach them how to manage their free time.  They don’t get that mastering the art of doing three hours of homework on Monday that is due on Tuesday doesn’t teach them how to plan and complete a long term project.  They don’t get that increased numbers of people BAs and changes in international trade make available work less lucrative.  They don’t get that the college as the ultimate means to get ahead is undergoing a sea change. Grown ups need to start raising kids to succeed in the 2014, not 1984, 1974, 1964, 1954 or whatever decade our memories of youth got frozen in.

And to those Millennials?  You have another task other than recognizing and tackling the difficulties of being a young adult today: You have to become leaders and faster than my generation did.  I don’t think Generation X had any real “crisis” to galvanize our experience.  Millennials have had 9/11, 13 years of war and the Great Recession to define having grown up.  But the powers that be won’t pay attention to them unless they demand it by voting and by becoming active in work, community and politics.  It is fashionable to assume that voting and politics don’t matter, but just because people have a lot of money does not mean they always win.  If money always wins, then Linda McMahon would be a U.S. Senator.  If money always wins, then the Bill Gates funded Common Core and accompanying testing would not be running into trouble with the public. People can push back.

So I want those Millennials to get teaching jobs.  Become school principals and superintendents.  Join community organizations.  Run for public office.  And I want them to do it younger than other generations.  They have to — they won’t have money to influence politics for decades, but they have numbers.  There are 56 million people ages 12-24 in the country.  Another 42 million between the ages of 25-34. If they don’t use those numbers to gain attention to their needs, they will get ignored, and this is a generation that cannot afford that.

So – lead.  I don’t care in what capacity or towards which politics.  Lead.

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April 11, 2014 · 12:57 pm

Parents Protest Testing Outside P.S. 87 in NYC

I was walking my daughter to school this morning, and we walked past parents and students holding a rally outside PS 87:

This is part of coordinated movement of parents in PTAs across the city who are joining to voice concerns about the nature of and the amount of testing that have become paramount as New York moves to implement both the Common Core Standards and accompanying tests.  Why does this bother them?  I think Principal Elizabeth Phillips of PS 321 said it very well in her recent opinion piece in the New York Times:

In general terms, the tests were confusing, developmentally inappropriate and not well aligned with the Common Core standards. The questions were focused on small details in the passages, rather than on overall comprehension, and many were ambiguous. Children as young as 8 were asked several questions that required rereading four different paragraphs and then deciding which one of those paragraphs best connected to a fifth paragraph. There was a strong emphasis on questions addressing the structure rather than the meaning of the texts. There was also a striking lack of passages with an urban setting. And the tests were too long; none of us can figure out why we need to test for three days to determine how well a child reads and writes…..

….At Public School 321, we entered this year’s testing period doing everything that we were supposed to do as a school. We limited test prep and kept the focus on great instruction. We reassured families that we would avoid stressing out their children, and we did. But we believed that New York State and Pearson would have listened to the extensive feedback they received last year and revised the tests accordingly. We were not naïve enough to think that the tests would be transformed, but we counted on their being slightly improved. It truly was shocking to look at the exams in third, fourth and fifth grade and to see that they were worse than ever. We felt as if we’d been had.

So we have a very lucrative contract with Pearson that has led to another round of high stakes testing that will ultimately be used to evaluate students, teachers, principals and schools, and what we are able to learn does not indicate any substantial improvement over the previous year’s tests — which led to a student scores in NYC and across the state falling off the cliff.  If this is the trend, we will see fewer students qualified for middle and high school, more teachers labeled as ineffective and more schools closed as “failures” with charter school operators waiting to take over their space.  All based on tests that are poorly aligned with the new standards and reportedly consist of truly eyebrow raising items such as those reported by Principal Phillips.

Meanwhile, New York State Education Commissioner John King, Jr. is quite adamant that the state is “not retreating” from this path. He was accompanied by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who continued his campaign to insult and diminish parents’ concerns about standards and testing by calling the protests “drama and noise.”

Is it any wonder that we’ve reached a place where normally comfortable and affluent parents are protesting?  If Common Core advocates want to salvage it in any form whatsoever, they need try things that they have so far found unnecessary: open up a public and balanced dialogue, invite all stakeholders to the process, slow down implementation and increase resources available for teachers, decouple the standards from burdensome and poorly designed testing, address the needs of schools that have high levels of children in poverty, and stop pushing the dire failure narrative on parents who, nationwide, actually like and appreciate the work their children’s teachers are doing.

I personally doubt that Secretary Duncan is able to do this, but I’ve been teaching for 20 years and believe that anyone is capable of learning.

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