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Associated Press via the San Jose (CA) Mercury News
Nov. 25, 2004

CUPERTINO, Calif. - A public school teacher is suing his district and principal for barring him from using excerpts from historical documents in his classroom because they contain references to God and Christianity.

Steven Williams, who teaches fifth grade at Stevens Creek Elementary School in the Cupertino Union School District, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Jose on Monday.

In the suit, Williams argues that he had a First Amendment right to teach the history of the country and its founding fathers, which includes religious references.

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The lawsuit alleges the school's principal prevented Williams from using handouts from several documents, including the Declaration of Independence, "The Rights of the Colonists" by Samuel Adams and George W. Bush's presidential 2004 Day of Prayer proclamation.

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Williams' attorney, Terry Thompson of the Alliance Defense Fund, said the principal's policy violates the teacher's First Amendment rights and is blatant censorship of the writings of great men because they mention God or Christianity.

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Williams probably does have a constitutional right to teach history with religious content to fifth graders, but courts have deferred to school officials in controlling course content, said Daniel Farber, a constitutional law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

"I think his claim that he has a constitutional right to use these materials in a classroom is an uphill battle," Farber said.

Can you believe that government school administrators have the right to censor the Declaration of Independence and remove it from the curriculum because of references to a divine power? You are witnessing a rewriting of American history before your very eyes. Administrators around the country have decided that religion must be purged from school materials. See, e.g., Schools Say 'No Thanks' to Teaching About God. It's generally easier to stifle the speech than to risk a lawsuit except in the rare case where the teacher challenges the censorship. Government schools are on a mission to create a new generation of American children who are ignorant about the role of religion in our history, with the possible exception of Dr. Martin Luther King.

In schools designed for The 21st Century Student, students could chose whether to have their history lessons include or exclude the religious context. Those desiring a distorted view of history could have it and those who prefer truth wouldn't have to participate in a conspiracy to rewrite American history.

Williams told the Oakland Tribune that the problems started last year after he responded to a student who asked why the Pledge of Allegiance includes the phrase, "under God." After a parent complained, the principal started requesting his lesson plans and handouts.

A 21st Century Student Article of Vision
By Ronald A. Wolk / Teacher Magazine
Vol. 16, Issue 03, Page 4; November 1, 2004

Educators are fond of saying it's more important to do right things than to do things right. This article questions whether educators are doing the right things, let alone doing them right.

Confronting the need to mass produce an educated public, early educators adopted Industrial Age approaches to learning. Rather than realize the pragmatism that drove the choice, modern educators cling to an 18th century model of education as if it were one of Plato's ideal forms. It's more like a Gordian knot or a 200-year saga of Pickett's Charge. Nothing beats the personal attention of a wise and highly educated tutor. Many to this day would prefer an education with Socrates to that offered in public schools. The 21st Century Student initiative is an attempt to replicate unsurpassed personal tutoring for all students at a price we can afford. The longer we wait to transform our schools, the longer our children will continue losing the international education battle. See, e.g., Night Study Becoming Par for Course in S. Korea and China boys and girls. The Public Schools "Good Old Days" Never Were.

We’ve spent more than two decades trying to improve public schools and raise student achievement, the longest sustained reform period in history. We haven’t made significant progress. Willie Herenton, mayor of Memphis, Tennessee, and once superintendent of that city’s schools, told fellow mayors at their October summit on urban education that “the school budget keeps going up, and student performance keeps going down.”

People who think rising scores on state standards exams show we are making significant progress are being misled by statistical models that are designed to detect small changes in outcomes. At a macro level, nothing has changed. When you put student performance under the microscope with statistical techniques, you can detect small changes that are mostly the result of narrowing classroom learning to what's tested on state exams. This is an indication of neither improved learning nor an improved education. Rather, it indicates a shift in teaching from what is not measured or not measurable to that which is. See, related, High-Stakes Editorializing.

School administrators and teachers don’t like to hear that kind of criticism. They feel they are being blamed for problems they didn’t create and cannot solve. And, for the most part, they’re right.

I agree, which means that teachers and administrators are partly responsible for creating problems and ignoring productivity issues that have damaged public education.

We are in a bind. Our education system is not as productive or successful as it needs to be, but no single reform effort has worked. More than 25 percent of our students (and twice that number in many urban districts) continue to drop out. Most students do not achieve proficiency in reading, math, or science, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And standardized test scores tend to decline between 4th and 12th grades.

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In the late 1980s, state and federal leaders successfully launched our nation’s de facto reform strategy: Set high standards, hold students accountable for mastering them, test regularly to assess progress, and attach consequences based on performance. A similar approach had helped American businesses compete with Germany and Japan, and it was widely expected to turn the tide in education. In 2002, President Bush and Congress “kicked it up a notch” with No Child Left Behind. There is disagreement over how much progress has been made, but—for good or ill—states have now identified a stunning number of “poorly performing schools.”

The paradox is that we want to reinvent our schools for the new century without making fundamental changes. We prefer tinkering our way to Utopia. If we truly rethink what we want schools to achieve and seriously analyze the premises on which the U.S. education system is built, we might realize that tinkering won’t get us there. Consider some of the major premises:

• Students should be grouped according to age and move sequentially through a common curriculum.

See, Grouping Kids by Age Should Have Vanished With the Little Red Schoolhouse, Third-graders may be held back for the second time and Education officials vow to halt grade-based dividing of classes.

• There is a comprehensive, detailed, grade-specific body of knowledge (i.e., academic content standards and the curriculum) that children need if they are to be successful in life and, therefore, must master.

There is a core body of knowledge and skills all students need to master. The core is pretty small and it consists of what every student needs to know to independently learn anything s/he wants to know or do.

But to say that there is a core is not the same as saying core knowledge can only be learned by one approach. There are an infinite number of ways to acquire core knowledge, as the next premise suggests.

• That body of knowledge must be segregated into distinct disciplines, or subject areas, that are taught separately.

Some believe learning should begin with synthesis--an understanding of the connectedness of the world. Knowledge and skills are added as the exploration of connections deepens. This approach contrasts with teaching students subject-defined knowledge and skills which they later add to attempts at synthesis. See, e.g., A rigorous way to teach and System Dynamics and Learner-Centered Learning in Kindergarten through 12th Grade Education.

• Because there is so much knowledge to master and school is the only place students can learn, they should be required to spend six or so hours a day in school until age 16.

Hidden within this premise is a reference to The Root Cause of Education Mediocrity. There's also a challenge to the false idea that time spent on task must be a constant and the quality of academic outcomes must be variable.

Most students don't need more time in school. What they need is an opportunity to use the time they spend learning more efficiently and more effectively. Removing wasted time from education resulting from just waiting on others to finish tests or to catch up on missed or misunderstood material could add the equivalent of a full academic year's worth of instruction to the education of many students.

According to Thomas Jefferson, schooling should be voluntary rather than compulsory. Modern education is based on coercion: coerced attendance, coerced school assignments, coerced acceptance of students by schools and by teachers.

In my opinion, when education is done right for each student it becomes a consuming passion needing little encouragement.

• Teachers are responsible for educating children [in classrooms]—generally by providing them with the information dictated by the standards and the curriculum.

It's the core fallacy that prevents the creation of schools for The 21st Century Student. Teachers should be coaches, advisors and diagnosticians. They should be capable of evaluating the course of a child's learning--no matter the sequence followed or the content included--and making recommendations for improvement. They should be experts in how people learn and use their expertise to write lessons which are turned into interactive, multi-media productions for delivery over the Internet. Studios like Dreamworks and Pixar should be churning out lessons as fast as teachers can write them.

Teachers should monitor the effectiveness of these lessons using a variety of techniques and periodically revise them to improve learning efficiency and effectiveness as well as the ability to "pull" students into them and motivate them to get to the next lesson as quickly as possible.

While some teachers would still run classrooms for the courses where it makes sense and for the students who thrive in them, other teachers would run small-group seminars, or become academic advisors, or become specialists in diagnostics, lesson development and producing computer-delivered instruction. Of course, some teachers will still be subject-area experts.

The second biggest fallacy underlying current reform efforts is the belief that we can replicate 3.2 million outstanding classroom teachers. It's flatly impossible.

And the biggest fallacy is the belief that current system design doesn't importantly limit the achievement of academic excellence for all students. The education system produces precisely the kind of results it is designed to produce. It's a fundamental, irrefutable law. While there are permutations and variability within the system, the outcome possibilities map is fundamentally constrained by the design of the system. A tractor is not a car. You can't plow a field successfully with a car and you can't travel across the nation very fast or comfortably on a tractor.

See, also, ED unveils new educator training site, which talks about providing teacher training in ways that should be used for educating students.

• Standardized tests alone adequately measure skill development and academic achievement in young people and should determine promotion and graduation.

In 21st Century Schools, students will not be in "grades." (They will also not have bells in classrooms to signal a mandatory transition of thought and focus). Two possibilities for change exist. First, for courses where learning proceeds sequentially within a subject--like math, for example--the student's computer will tell the student where s/he is at relative to a typical student. A student who is traditionally thought of as a third grader may well be performing math at level 4.3 (roughly equivalent to what a 4th grader in the third month of school knows today). Students will progress through levels of learning, not grades.

Second, for students traveling a less traditional path through knowledge--and that will be a majority of them after a time--exams will tell them what their core skill and knowledge levels are.

The great majority of policymakers, educators, and even reformers accept these fundamental principles almost without question. Because they are largely a given in most state and district efforts to improve schools, reform is confined to the margins.

We’re often unclear about what we expect of our schools, but I’d argue that there are a few primary goals. Schools should help kids learn to think critically and creatively; teach them to gather, analyze, and assess information, then draw logical conclusions from that information and defend their conclusions publicly; stimulate students’ curiosity and expose them to the humanities and sciences; and help them develop the commonly agreed-upon values of good human beings and responsible citizens.

The idea that schools "teach" is also problematic. Schools should provide effective, easy access to knowledge and skills and the focus must be redirected to students as learners, not teachers as instructors. All education is self-education.

Moreover, the concept of a school as a "place" for learning has to change. School is anywhere the student is when s/he is learning.

An education system built on the premises listed above will never accomplish these goals.

Absolutely, 100% correct. Because Ronald has arrived at the correct answer through an analysis that is fairly comprehensive and mostly correct, he gets an:

A changing economy and an influx of aid are spurring the radical transformation of a faltering American icon
by Kathleen Vail / Senior editor of the American School Board Journal
November 2004 issue

This is a sad story of how educators, using modified 19th century ideas and approaches, think they can climb the Mt. Everest of academic improvement by using toothpicks. It's ridiculous.

Fifty years ago, the American high school was doing fine. Most students weren't headed for college. If they earned a high school diploma, they could land a well-paying job. If they didn't graduate, they could still find good work.

The fact that this still isn't the case has a lot to do with the education lobby and the rejection of apprenticeships for formal college degrees.

"But today it's a disaster," says Tom Vander Ark, director of education for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "A third of American students drop out, half of Hispanic and African Americans drop out. That's a civic, social, and economic disaster."

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While different in philosophy and approach, reform models all seek to change the basic building blocks of high schools: their size and how and what they offer. The Gates Foundation and other private groups, as well as the U.S. Department of Education, are pouring millions of dollars in research and technical assistance into districts willing to change how they run high schools.

The most important reform--and it's being completely ignored--is changing how they teach, not just what they teach. The only way to dramatically improve high school outcomes is to create schools for The 21st Century Student.

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In June 2004, Robert Balfanz and Nettie Letgers, two researchers with Johns Hopkins University's Center for Social Organization of Schools, found that graduation is not the norm in 20 percent of U.S. high schools. Looking at high school "promoting power" -- the schools' ability to get their ninth-graders to 12th-grade graduation in four years -- Balfanz and Letgers identified 2,000 weak schools that they dubbed "dropout factories." These schools, which have 40 percent or fewer seniors than the number of freshmen four years earlier -- are attended by nearly half of the country's African-American students and two out of five Hispanic students.

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According to the American Diploma Project (ADP) -- a partnership of three education advocacy groups, including the Education Trust -- more than 70 percent of high school graduates go immediately to two- or four-year colleges or universities. But 28 percent of them have to take remedial English and math courses before they can start their regular college work.

About 58 percent of students will take remedial English or math courses sometime in their college career. In 2002, the California State University system had to place 59 percent of its incoming freshman class in remedial math and English courses. According to ADP, 60 percent of employers question whether a diploma means students have learned academic basics.

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Much of the money from the Gates Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and groups such as the Carnegie Foundation is geared toward breaking down large high schools or starting new smaller schools. The small size is not an end, but rather a means to make other reforms work better.

It's a wasteful and costly step. When schools are reformed for 21st century learning, they will need less space, not more.

"If a school is relatively small, it's easier to create a coherent curriculum, easier to create a high-performance culture, to create a personalized environment," says Vander Ark. "All those things get exponentially more difficult the bigger the school gets."

That's why an effective school size of 1 is best. When students are guided by teacher-coaches through a rich, high-quality, consistent, online, interactive, multi-media curriculum supplemented with seminars, field trips, labs and conferences, and they have year-round access to lessons with the freedom to work at their own rates and complete as much college as possible before leaving high school, then, and only then, will full achievement and excellence be possible. As long as students are stuck in classrooms moving through the materials at uniform rates, taking breaks and vacations that fit teacher contracts and the holidays of organizations to which they don't belong, then high performance, personalization and maximum learning are impossible. The system defines the outcome possibilities map and no system substantially based on the current model can dramatically improve performance.

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High school teachers often aren't prepared to teach in teams, act as advisers, or teach across subjects. "We're asking people who work in high schools to do something they haven't signed up for. They say, 'Dropouts aren't my fault. Kids have issues at home.' Now we are asking teachers to be responsible for it. The nature of the job is different," says Joseph DiMartino of the Education Alliance at Brown University.

Just FORGET IT! You are not going to get 1 million high school teachers to the level they need to be for our children's greatest success. Why not take the best teachers, and one lesson at a time, create the absolutely best interactive, computer-delivered instruction possible with different versions for different perspectives, interests and learning styles AND BE DONE WITH IT? The path educators are on is absolutely the most expensive kind of insanity money can buy. It is insufficiently flexible, offering too few choices in too few subject areas.

Once these lessons are prepared, professionals can monitor and test learning speed, comprehension and retention for each lesson and modify them as needed for different kinds of students, who will access the lessons on a schedule that makes sense for them and that meets a minimum threshold for progressing through the curriculum.

Union rules about seniority and other work-related issues can be a barrier, unless the union decides to work with the district on reform, as has happened in San Diego and the Mapleton School District, near Denver.

Union rules are mostly a barrier when you still have classrooms. Do away with classrooms for most students in most subjects and you bypass the union barrier.

Nostalgia can also be an obstacle. Parents and community members who fondly remember their high school days often protest when changes are proposed. It can be especially hard to reform old, historic high schools. Some districts solve this by allowing a revered old school to maintain its name, mascot, sports teams, and colors while breaking it into smaller learning communities.

True. But my guess is if the trade-off is having the entire curriculum with all the lessons available for parents to watch, learn from and comment on from their own homes, the overwhelming majority would say, "What's taking you so long?" Parents could watch the lesson on condom instruction and decide whether or when to include it in their children's curriculum. Everyone would not have to have the same lessons, and opting out of some wouldn't require any downtime like it does today. This 19th century, mass-production, uniform-content approach to education must end.

Sometimes, too, the doubt that students can perform to rigorous standards will impede change. "The biggest resistance to improving high schools is a deep-seated belief that many of our students cannot learn much. We've created a system that allows them to validate that," says Gene Bottoms, executive director of High Schools That Work, a reform effort now in about 1,000 schools in 30 states. "When adults decide to change that, wonderful things happen."

The system teaches students early on that working hard and excelling don't get them much. Consequently, the system conditions them to stop trying and to do the minimum needed to get by. See, The Root Cause of Education Mediocrity.

Most students are capable of learning far more than they do. I estimate that the fastest test-takers could receive three-quarters of a year more instruction over 12 years if they didn't have to wait for the slowest test-takers to finish their tests!

It is true that psychological conditioning and system design limit what students are capable of achieving. If you want them to achieve to their fullest potential, you MUST change the system.

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