Monday morning, time to browse the news in the Pacific Northwest, something I try to do several times a week.
The Oregonian (Portland) is reporting that Portland State University’s athletic director will make a decision soon on whether to fire football coach Jerry Glanville, who took over at PSU after a stint as defensive coordinator for the UH football team under June Jones.
Also from the Oregonian, a good story on the wake held for a local photographer. And he attended.
“Why bother when I’m dead?” was his reaction.
I’m becoming a fan of Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large, after reading another of his columns that makes a tremendous amount of sense. This time he’s writing about education (“Red flags on the road to reform“), as Washington finds itself in the same type of self-examination spurred by a competition for new federal funds for schools.
Large cites the world of the late Gerald Bracey, whose long list of publications have provided insight into public education for decades.
Bracey’s most recent and final report, published after his death last month, challenged the notion that schools should be held primarily responsible for the achievement level of students, and that testing is the way to measure that achievement.
According to Large, the underlying issue is poverty.
You can’t improve education without addressing poverty. And the effects of poverty are made worse when poor students are concentrated in a school.
Our city needs to take that into account. When those boundary lines are set this week, schools in high poverty will need services that reach beyond the campus and into homes if they are to succeed.
Large continues:
Any effort to improve education has to take into account the ways in which money matters. It’s not always the dollars spent in the classroom, though that’s important. The economic status of the school community may matter even more.
Counteracting the effects of poverty, especially multigenerational poverty, is a must.
As to testing, Large points to Bracey’s example of the $30,000 a year Sidwell Friends School attended by President Obama’s daughters, where creativity and thinking skills take center stage instead of our obsession with the abstract minutiae of test results.
This is a part of the conversation largely lacking in the public debate over Hawaii’s educational system.
“The Bracey Report On the Condition of Public Education, 2009” is jointly published by the University of Colorado at Boulder and Arizona State University. More of Bracey’s writings can be found via his Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency.
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This has nothing to do with your post…
However for me, reading your blog for a few years now… I found it very ironic to see a “Google Ad” with a big picture of Sarah Palin’s Face promoting her interview w/ Barbara Walters on your blog this morning when I opened it up.
Thanks for the interesting education article. The ideas are worth promoting in our multi-cultural economic society.
Thanks for covering the Pacific Northwest wrangles on education. They are of compelling interest to all, and particular interest to Quilly and myself, as we are moving there at the start of the New Year, and Q. is an elementary-school educator.
The link between poverty and educational performance was actually getting some traction in the press before the crash took every word but “Cut!” out of the school-funding vocabulary. The worst consequence of refusing to confront this issue is the institutionalization of that poverty:
“Elves and Dragons! Cabbages and potatoes are better for me and you. Don’t go getting mixed up in the business of your betters.”
It is my opinion that, until Hawaii and Hawaiians close all the Sidewells, all the Punahous, yes, all the Kamehamehas, and recognize that the education of the populace is the common responsibility of all, including those who create educational disequity in the public schools and then use that disequity as an excuse to opt out and thus protect their own exalted class, there can and will be no progress on educational issues in this state (or elsewhere in these Untied States).
I agree with the amoeba. This is my strong belief. And this person has worded it much better then I have. The proliferation of private schools in Hawaii is the biggest problem with the public schools. The fact that it is accepted here that the elected representatives of the people, in the main, do not participate in the public school system is an anomaly. The mentality of people who say they support public schools and in the next breath say their children attend a private school are total hypocrites. I know that my child’s education suffered by being in the public schools in Hawaii (academics at the blue ribbon elementary here was a year behind the average school we left behind on the mainland). But despite that, I still think the child gained from the experience as a whole. Public education is important, to opt out is to abandon democracy.