Some favorite recent tweets from Alfie Kohn

Useful advice for someone who's learning to drive: Do not go as fast as you think the car in front of you SHOULD be traveling

When teachers complained to Ted Sizer about a kid, he’d gently reframe by asking “What does this student need from you?”

The late James Moffett suggested this slogan for elite, selective schools: "Send us winners and we'll make winners out of them!"

Too few H.S. students realize that the % of colleges placing "considerable importance" on applicants' SAT/ACT scores continues its slow decline & has now fallen below 1/2. (In fact, >1,000 colleges no longer require these tests at all.) See Table 7 of https://is.gd/F9z5rH

My favorite quip from the late Jerry Bracey: "There is a growing technology of testing that now permits us to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn't be doing at all"

Thanks @alfiekohn !

Teaching & Assessing Reflection VT-HEC

Presenter: Bill Rich
After a brief and compelling exploration of why and how the human brain reflects, participants will experience and explore strategies and systems for engaging students in meaningful and varied reflection that improves performance.  This is a WORKshop, so arrive ready to draft a plan for refining your approach to teaching and assessing reflection.  All educators are welcome, regardless of the age of your learners.

Participants will leave this WORKshop ready to:

• Describe how and why the human brain reflects...and what this tells us about how to teach and assess reflection.
• Diagnose what's working and what needs work in the current ways we teach and assess reflection.
• Apply specific strategies for engaging students in meaningful and varied reflection. 
• Access a wide range of helpful digital resources to share with colleagues and sustain the journey. 

Bill Rich is a longtime VT-HEC consultant and instructor.  He began our TASS (Teaching All Secondary Students) Program, as part of a design team and member of the TASS Steering Committee.  A recognized expert in the area of differentiated instruction, Bill's work is featured in Carol Tomlinson's book, The Differentiated School: Making Revolutionary Changes in Teaching and Learning.  His focus is recently on the many facets of Proficiency-Based Personalized Learning.  Bill received his Masters from the Breadloaf School of English at Middlebury College.  He has taught for over 20 years in Vermont.   

Date:  May 13, 2020

Place: Delta Hotel, South Burlington, VT

Cost: $190 (includes lunch

Time: 8:30 - 3:30

Register Here

brought to you by the Vermont Higher Education Collaborative (VTHEC)

On Schools & Taxes: VT Rural Life Survey

In general, which is more important to you: keeping property taxes as low as possible, OR keeping the public schools in your community?

33%   Property taxes
43%   Public schools
19%   Equally important
5%    Don’t know/Refused
801   Total Respondents

Vermont Rural Life Survey - August/September 2019

Equity

"Uniformity is not the same thing as excellence - or equity." 
     Alfie Kohn

"We (GSP) believe educational equity means ensuring just outcomes for each student, raising marginalized voices, and challenging the imbalance of power and privilege."
     David Ruff, Great Schools Partnership

"GSP definition of equitable community engagement: an ongoing and intentional process of building trusting relationships, sharing power, and working collaboratively with all stakeholders toward educational equity."
     David Ruff, Great Schools Partnership

Taking Full Advantage of the Freedom that ESSA Provides

          In this Phi Delta Kappan article, former superintendent Joshua Starr says that most current district leaders cut their teeth under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, with compliance a big part of the job. The passage of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) should have freed leaders to be more creative and daring, but Starr fears the habits of the last 20 years are proving difficult to unlearn. Here are the “mental models” he believes need to be tossed out if we are to maximize ESSA’s liberating potential:

            • Unlearn #1: Command and control – The previous era had the central office imposing procedures, regulations, and paperwork on schools, collecting data, monitoring progress, and dispensing rewards and punishments. Instead, district leaders must be dedicated to helping front-line educators do their best work and holding themselves accountable to the community they serve.

            • Unlearn #2: Top-down leadership – Newly appointed superintendents often replaced the previous agenda with their own, focusing mostly on raising test scores. The post-NCLB era “doesn’t need Lone Rangers and slash-and-burn leaders,” says Starr. “Unless superintendents secure real involvement and commitment from a critical mass of supporters – including district staff, teachers, parents, and others – then all their great ideas and plans will disappear with them the day they get chased out of office and run out of town.”

            • Unlearn #3: Off-the-shelf programs implemented with fidelity – “Sure, it’s sometimes helpful to purchase a new curriculum,” says Starr, “but if you really want to improve teaching and learning, then you have to do the slow, complex work of recruiting, onboarding, and developing great teachers and principals; supporting them over time; building healthier school cultures; making good use of performance data, and so on.”

            • Unlearn #4: Outdated community engagement – Perfunctory, compliance-driven parent involvement consisted mostly of one-way communication that seldom resulted in really listening to the public, says Starr: “Families and community members will want to know what school and district leaders believe and why they make the decisions they do. And stakeholders will expect a real back and forth, not a sales pitch.”

            • Unlearn #5: Data-driven equity – Test scores, graduation rates, attendance data, and climate surveys don’t tell the full story of achievement gaps, he says: “School leaders ought to take a much broader perspective on the ways our public schools privilege some students and underserve others, looking not just at numerical data but also at the assumptions educators make about children from differing backgrounds, the differing ways in which rewards and punishments are handed out to those children, and all the subtle ways implicit biases enter the classroom.”

“Unlearning NCLB” by Joshua Starr in Phi Delta Kappan, October 2019 (Vol. 101, #2, pp. 58-59), no e-link available

(Please Note: The summary above is reprinted with permission from issue #807 of 
The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.)

Why Small Schools Matter

          In Section 3 of Act 46 our legislators said it was not their intent to close Vermont's small schools.  But the cynics among us thought otherwise.  Now, with promises of millions and millions of dollars in tax savings, small, rural elementary schools in towns across Vermont are starting to see their necks put on the chopping block. When these small schools close, it will have nothing to do with good academic outcomes or affordability. It will, in the end, be about votes. The biggest towns win.  The students lose, and if we look to the experience of other states such as West Virginia and Maine, in the end, we all lose. Here is why:[1]

1.  In the elementary grades small schools provide a better education
Despite all of the talk about increased programs at large schools, schools with enrollments of under 50 students keep pace with larger schools, in fact outperforming all categories in reading proficiency. [2]
A study commissioned by the State of Vermont reported:
“Seventy four percent of the principals from small schools report that most of their students (80-100%) were adequately prepared to make the transition to middle or high school compared with only 58 percent of principals from larger schools.”
The same study concluded: “Small schools in Vermont cost more to operate than larger schools but they are worth the investment because of the value they add to student learning and community cohesion.”[3]
2. Economically disadvantaged students are far better served in small schools
In four separate studies of seven states, researchers Craig Howley, of Ohio University and the Appalachia Educational Laboratory, and Robert Bickel, of Marshall University, repeatedly found that disadvantaged students do better if they attend a small school. In the most recent four-state study, the correlation between poverty and low achievement was ten times stronger in larger schools than in smaller ones in all four states.  [4]
The same report found that teachers expected more from their students because they knew them better and were more involved with their learning.
Teachers reported more collaboration with colleagues and more-regular professional development activities at their schools. They also had greater contact with parents and understood them as an important element in student success. Lack of parental involvement in schools is often a problem in less affluent communities, and the further the school is from the community the bigger the problem.
3. Young families with children don't move to small communities without a school
In one of the most comprehensive studies of what a school means to a community the results indicated:
*That for the smallest rural communities, housing values were considerably higher in small villages with schools.
*Towns with schools had more people employed in more favorable occupational categories and more engagement in civic affairs.
*Income inequality and welfare dependence was lower in villages with schools.
*Money that might be saved through school consolidation could be forfeited in lost taxes, declining property values, and lost business. [5]
4. The savings touted by promoters of closing small schools tend to be illusory
West Virginia spent 10 years and over a billion dollars to build consolidated schools absorbing students from over 300 closed schools. Promises about improved curriculum never materialized. Costs did not decline. They increased. Administrator numbers did not decrease.  They increased. None of that mattered until an investigative reporter from the Charleston Gazette started to look into the facts. He began with the first pupil, a kindergartener, to be picked up in the predawn darkness and get on the bus for a ride of more than an hour.  [6]   
Despite all of the promises of savings, the research from early consolidations in Vermont
and ten years of experience with consolidations in Maine indicates, as a result of less transparency, less oversight and expanded administration, those savings are almost never achieved.[7]
Most importantly, the digital revolution has changed small rural schools.  Today small rural schools are positioned to be the model of 21st century schools with all the advantages of being embraced by a community, where people all know each other, and having almost instant access to programs and resources around the world.
[1]   Most of the language below is a direct quote from the material that is cited.
[2] https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG05-05Hylden.pdf
[3]  Report of the Vermont Commissioner of Education, Small Schools Study, pursuant to Section 93 of Act 60, January, 1998.  See also Mara Casey Tieken, Why Rural Schools Matter, University of North Carolina Press, 2014, p. 57 and 186-188.
[4] https://www.educationworld.com/a_issues/issues108.shtml; see also https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Chapter03-Howley-Final.pdf  
[5]   https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED464777
[6] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2274&context=greatplainsresearch; The investigative reporter referred to in this study is now the President of Vermont Public Radio,
[7]   See pages 6 and 7 at https://ed.psu.edu/crec/policy-brief;  see also https://www.pressherald.com/2014/09/28/tax-relief-scarce-in-school-consolidations/

"Why Small Schools Matter" was spotted on Save Our Schools-Addison Central School District. The piece was prepared by David Kelly, who lives in Greensboro with his wife. He attended a small rural elementary school in Pittsford, Vermont. He graduated from UVM and Georgetown Law School and has practiced law for 40 years. His primary clients have been ski areas. He was a co-founder of PH-International (one of the largest teacher and student exchange programs between the U.S. and Eastern Europe). He has also been a volunteer high school debate coach for 20 years and was formerly Chair of the Hazen Union Board.

Children's Books about Diverse Families

          In this feature in Language Arts, Grace Enriquez and Erika Thulin Dawes (Lesley University), Katie Egan Cunningham (Manhattanville College/Purchase), Gilberto Lara (University of Texas/San Antonio), and Laura Jiménez (Boston University) recommend novels, picture books, and graphic novels about families that don’t fit conventional stereotypes. Images of each book’s cover and capsule reviews are available at the article link below.

-   Carmela Full of Wishes by Matt de la Pena, illustrated by Christina Robinson (Putnam’s Sons, 2018)

-   A Different Pond by Bao Phi, illustrated by Thi Bui (Capstone, 2017)

-   A Gift from Abuela by Cecilia Ruiz (Candlewick, 2018)

-   A Most Unusual Day by Sydra Mallery, illustrated by E.B. Goodale (Greenwillow, 2018)

-   Grandma’s Purse by Vanessa Brantley-Newton (Alfred Knopf, 2018)

-   Night Job by Karen Hesse, illustrated by Brian Karas (Candlewick, 2018)

-   My Beijing: Four Stories of Everyday Wonder by Nie Jun, translated by Edward Gauvin (Graphic Universe, 2018)

-   Ana Maria Reyes Does Not Live in a Castle by Hilda Eunice Burgos (TU/Lee & Low, 2018)

-   My Father’s Words by Patricia MacLachlan (Katherine Tegen/Harper Collins, 2018)

-   The Dollar Kids by Jennifer Richard Jacobson, illustrated by Ryan Andrews (Candlewick, 2018)

-   Love Like Sky by Leslie Youngblood (Disney/Hyperion, 2018)

-   Running on Empty by S.E. Durant (Holiday House, 2018)

-   Ashes to Asheville by Sarah Dooley (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2017)

-   Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett Krosoczka (Graphix/Scholastic, 2018)

“Family Stories and Diverse Children’s Literature” by Grace Enriquez, Katie Egan Cunningham, Erika Thulin Dawes, Gilberto Lara, and Laura Jiménez in Language Arts, September 2019 (Vol 97, #1, pp. 42-50), https://bit.ly/2nHQHtX

(Please Note: The summary above is reprinted with permission from issue #805 of 
The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.)