Four years ago, we held our first Day of Silence, an annual event where students at schools across the country take a vow of silence in support of LGBT students who are harassed and bullied.
That first Day of Silence was an anxious experiment for our suburban private school. We followed resources offered by the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN). Our diversity club faculty sponsors and student leaders planned a series of announcements, acquired administrative approval and fielded concerned questions from faculty members who didn’t embrace the event and felt it would disrupt their classrooms.
Still, apprehension grew from the unknown.
We weren’t sure how students would react. We worried about what parents might say. We feared there could be incidents during the day. We didn’t know how many students would participate. Each unknown added to our anxiety.
On that day, 15 percent of the student body took the pledge of silence for the entire school day. An additional 15 percent signed up to be allies, a designation we created for students who wanted to pledge support but were not comfortable taking a vow of silence.
Almost a third of the school had joined us; I was elated.
We also planned a “Breaking the Silence” event. We offered a silent countdown to the end of the day and shared our experiences, struggles and challenges encountered during that day. It was a way to embrace a new sense of acceptance and awareness within the community.
Waves of relief rolled over the crowd as we began to talk, laugh and share our stories. Amid the stories of frustration and difficulty, the waves of relief built into a crescendo of empathy and acceptance. One of the final students to speak that afternoon came out to the group as a lesbian, becoming only the second “out” student at the school at that time.
That day mattered.
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While I share the concerns of many of my colleagues that the new standards are a Trojan horse for further standardized testing, narrowed curriculum and hierarchical control of what happens in the classroom, I think the standards themselves represent the greatest opportunity for history teaching and learning to be widely re-imagined since theCommittee of Tenset the basic outlines for American education over a hundred years ago.
The standards offer an opportunity to broaden the conception of social studies from one that focuses on helping students acquire an established body of knowledge to one that emphasizes the historical thinking skills that are central to constructing this knowledge.However, none of this will matter if the Common Core’s implementation is not paired with a dramatic change in how the state holds students accountable for learning social studies.
The standards clearly articulate the disciplinary skills necessary not only for reaching the relatively low bar of “college and career readiness,” but also for the much greater calling of creating an informed and critical citizenry
I haven’t looked at the social studies common core standards for middle school and high school. I have looked mostly at the L.A. common core standards since Florida uses them. I’m pretty iffy on them. For some, I think the standards are watered down. Furthermore, I worry about the corporate influences that will arise with the common core, and as the writer mentions the windows and doors that may be opened to more standardized testing. However, I think as professionals we need to look at both sides of the issues. Helping students become critical thinkers is an important goal for teachers. At the same time, how critical are we going to help them be when we have to get them ready for more and more standardized tests that may not require critical (and other higher order) thinking.
New York City’s Education Department will spend $51 million to open more than two dozen new charter schools next year, according to a report released on Thursday by the Independent Budget Office.
Although the common-core standards are calibrated to ensure that students leave K-12 schools ready for work and college, they are also posing challenges for the educators who work with children just starting out their school careers.
As 46 states and the District of Columbia work this year to put the new curricular guidelines in place, preschool and early-childhood educators are determining how to balance the common standards’ emphasis on increasing and measuring academic rigor with research findings on young children’s developmental needs, which place a high value on play, the arts, social skills, and integrated instruction.
“We have to be careful that those standards, particularly as they extend downward, appropriately recognize these important social, communication, and self-regulation skills that are really as critical for kids’ learning in those early and later years as whether they know the alphabet,” said Robert C. Pianta, the dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.
Every state has guidelines outlining what preschool-age children should be able to do in a number of developmental domains, according to a 2007 review of states’ policiespublished in the journal Early Childhood Research & Practice. But in the 2011-12 school year, fourteen states rolled out the common-core standards for kindergarten, K-1, or K-2, according to Carrie Heath Phillips of the Council of Chief State School Officers, and that puts issues of school readiness and the content of those preschool skill guidelines in the spotlight.
Standards at the Pre-K level (they already exist here) make me nervous. I feel like they should be more like targets. At the beginning of the year some of my students had only turned 4 years old 2-3 weeks prior to school beginning, while others turned 5 a month after school began. There is such a big difference between what the two ages are ready for developmentally, and then you add in how much families are able to do at home. I feel like prek, more than any other grade, you begin with such very different levels. I think approaching it as a target board makes a lot more sense. I fear how this will impact the way the child develops a sense of self the more standards that are pushed into this grade level.
A tiny all-white Appalachian church in rural Kentucky has voted to ban interracial couples from joining its flock, pitting members against each other in an argument over race.
What the hell?
Early Tuesday Morning volunteers from many different companies joined together for one common interest, our children. Between 16 and 33 percent of children and adolescents are obese, it is up to us to help encourage our youth to stay active, get outside and stay healthy. Obesity is one of the easiest diseases to diagnose but could be the hardest to treat, which is why our youth need our help.
United Way along with GMC have come together to build Healthy Kid Zones in nine NFL markets as part of GMC’s Monday Night Football Tour. Tampa Florida being the second stop on the tour welcomed them with open arms. United Way chose the Drug Abuse Comprehensive Coordinating Office (DACCO) to be the location for Tampa’s Healthy Kids Zone. DACCO houses women that are a part of the program who want to live a drug free lifestyle. DACCO helps them achieve that by giving them the tools that it takes to promote positive relationships with the community and amongst their families. The women of DACCO were more than willing to break a sweat to help build the Healthy Kids Zone that their own children would be utilizing.
I am very interested in helping to teach kids good health practices. It really concerns me the rate of childhood Type 2 diabetes. The lack of education among adults on the increase of children with diabetes or at risk for diabetes is alarming (only 4 years ago I had a co-worker screaming at me in anger because she believed children could ONLY get juvenile diabetes). The more we can get kids out moving, and making healthy choices the better. (Ohmuffins, you are a hero.)
EXCERPT FROM: TurlockJournal.com
By Jonathan McCorkell
Merced County Sheriff Mark Pazin boiled down his visit to an Atwater preschool site in two points: “Education, not incarceration. We want to take care of the first part — education — before we later have to incarcerate.”Pazin, along with State Senator Anthony Canella (District 12), Merced County District Attorney Larry Morse II and Merced Chief of Police Norm Andrade took a united stance in favor of education on Tuesday with a visit to an Atwater Elementary School District preschool campus at Shaffer Elementary.
During the visit the four met with officials from the Merced County Office of Education and discussed the importance of early education as an effective crime and high school dropout prevention strategy.
According to Fight Crime: Invest in Kids California, students who attend high-quality preschools are up to 44 percent more likely to graduate from high school, later leading to reductions in homicide and assault numbers. Children who did not attend preschool are 70 percent more likely to be arrested for a violent crime by the age of 18.
(emphasis mine)
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Imagine the difference we could make in people’s lives and the development of our society if we could spend more money on early childhood education than we do on prisons.
Even Mitt Romney, who in 2008 ran for president defending No Child Left Behind, the federal law that vastly expanded Washington’s role in public schools, now says, “We need to get the federal government out of education.”
For a generation, there has been loose bipartisan agreement in Washington that the federal government has a necessary role to play in the nation’s 13,600 school districts, primarily by using money to compel states to raise standards.
But the field of Republican presidential candidates has promised to unwind this legacy, arguing that education responsibilities should devolve to states and local districts, which will do a better job than Washington.
It can seem like an eon has passed since George W. Bush aspired to be the “education president.” Mr. Bush’s prized No Child Left Behind law used billions of dollars of federal aid to compel schools to raise student achievement on standardized tests.
President Obama’s own signature education initiative, Race to the Top, similarly used federal money to leverage change that many Republicans had long endorsed — charter schools and teacher evaluations that tied effectiveness in the classroom to tenure.
But now, the quest to sharply shrink government that all the Republican candidates embrace, driven by the fervor of the Tea Party, has brought a sweeping anti-federalism to the fore on education, as in many other areas.
Basically, I feel like many politicians have no idea what to do with education so they just make stuff up because they think it sounds good. That’s why it is so easy for them to jump fences.
I spent a few hours down there tonight.
The crowd is diverse, not as predominately young as I perceived from afar. They’re well organized, they have places set up for medics, food, media, etc. The General Assembly hosts a wide variety of speakers, of all ages, gender, race and…
