I just wanted to try out posting something.

Enjoy the beautiful day!

October 2009

Inner City Is Not an Excuse

Success Is Not an Address The achievement did not make the headlines in the local newspaper; there wasn’t a mention on the evening news; and nary a tweet was twittered. This past school year all of Marco Campos’ students passed the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test in Math. Every.  Single.  One. So, what makes this newsworthy?  Marco Campos teaches in what some people refer to as an inner city school attended by low-income, minority students. The general assumption for the inner city label is, it is in the central part of the major city and its residents have high levels of poverty, are exposed to violence, and witness drug trafficking. Some teachers blame their classroom problems on the fact that their school is in the inner city, or that their students come from a certain neighborhood. Can you imagine a doctor who complains about patient demographics, or a Peace Corp volunteer who complains about the culture of the people he has been sent to serve? Marco Campos looks beyond the physical address of a child and sees his students as seeds of potential greatness.  Every.  Single.  One.

Inner City Is Not an Excuse

In many major cities such as Chicago, Manhattan in New York City, San Francisco, Paris, London, Berlin, Istanbul, Stockholm, Hong Kong, Sydney, Toronto, and Montreal, the most affluent residents reside in expensive homes in an established, inner city neighborhood.  Less affluent residents reside in suburban areas.  Poverty and crime are, to a greater degree, associated with the distant suburbs.  The recent riots in France took place in the suburbs, yet media coverage would have one believe the students were marching on the streets of Paris.

Address is not a factor in student achievement. The research of Theodore Hershberg at the University of Pennsylvania found

Good instruction is 15 to 20 times more powerful than
family background, income, race, gender,
or any other explanatory variable.

It is how the teacher instructs that impacts student learning and achievement.  The assorted variables some teachers like to point to for students not learning or achieving are merely excuses. These excuses are what we call the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Once and for all, please, let’s stop using the demographics or culture
of our students as an excuse for the lack of
student learning and achievement.

Marco’s Journey

Marco started teaching nine years ago via an Alternative Certification Program.  He was full of passion, but lacked the essential tools to start his new career.  Thrust into a classroom with no instructions, he was terrified.

Marco says, “I had no experience at all, and did not know what to do.  Fortunately, my school district gave me a copy of The First Days of School. I devoured the book that weekend!

“I learned how to be prepared for my students and to manage a classroom with procedures and routines.  More importantly, the knowledge I gleaned from this book gave me the confidence I needed to teach and grow to be an effective teacher.

“I can honestly say, ‘Reading that book and implementing the concepts saved my career!’”

A Culture of Collaboration

Fortunately for Marco, there was another very important factor in his favor when he started teaching—his school.  Marco teaches bilingual third graders at Blanche Kelso Bruce Elementary Music Magnet School in Houston, Texas.  The school serves a predominantly lower socioeconomic area, with 99% of students qualifying for a free or reduced priced lunch and 85% of students living in government housing.  Forty-two percent of the students are considered “at-risk.”

What makes Bruce Elementary School such an opportune place to be?  The school has an effective school culture.

Marco shares, “There is collaboration all over the place! We have

• A Weekly Bulletin where the principal shares important information for the week.  It is subtitled News You Can Use.
• A Great Idea section in the Weekly Bulletin to share good practices.
• Professional Development every Wednesday.  Teachers present procedures that have worked well in their classrooms, as well as ideas for adapting and modifying these procedures.
• Common planning times for all grades.
• School wide procedures:
  • Students learn how to walk in Bulldog Position in the hallways—proudly and quietly on the right hand side, with their left hands behind their backs, and their right hands on their lips to indicate silence.  This procedure facilitates orderly and efficient transitions between classes.
  • Students learn how to go to lunch in a pre-determined order.
  • Students know exactly what to do in the library, computer labs, and science labs.
  • Students enter and exit the school, pods, and classes in the same way that is taught, rehearsed, and reinforced from the first day of school.”

Click here to see a copy of Bruce Elementary School’s Weekly Bulletin and Good Idea section.

The culture at Bruce Elementary is one of teacher and student success.  Everyone is working together with one goal in mind—student achievement.

Project Aspire

Recently, Marco was asked to participate in the Houston Independent School District’s Highly Effective Teacher Study, also known as Project Aspire.  Teachers in grades three to eight, who had facilitated the highest levels of student academic growth from 2006 – 2008, were asked to share and discuss their teaching methods.

Marco’s first reaction was, “Wow!  What do I tell them?”

At the meeting, Marco told himself, “These are the ‘real experts,’ I had better listen carefully!”  But he soon realized he had one thing in common with these ‘real experts’:

All of them are motivators.
All of them understand the importance of
building solid relationships with their students.

The teachers had numerous discussions and shared techniques.  They agreed on the importance of teaching practices as diverse as metacognition, multi-sensory teaching, role play, and small group instruction.  Yet, by the end of the meeting, the discussions had boiled down to one simple takeaway:

The most important ingredients for teaching success are
motivation, perseverance, compassion,
and PROCEDURES.

Marco says, “I was not surprised.  It was implementing the suggestions in The First Days of School, after all, that made my participation at the meeting possible.”

Beg, Borrow, and Steal for Success

Marco is constantly on the lookout for new procedures that he can implement in his classroom.  When he hears teachers mention that something they’re doing is working in their classrooms, he drops everything and asks them for information.  Without exception, he has found that effective teachers are always eager to share good ideas.

Once Marco learns a procedure, he adapts it for his classroom and students, and implements it.  Then, besides keeping his eyes and ears open—observing and monitoring—he asks his students for feedback.  If students like the new procedure, and Marco finds that it helps him do more in his classroom, then the class will keep using the procedure.

Marco says, “Here at Bruce Elementary, we’re lucky to have young, enthusiastic, and charismatic teachers that are eager to share new procedures and ideas.

“Another wonderful source of procedures is my son.  He is always telling me what he likes about school, his teachers, and his classes.  It is easy for me to ask questions and get his input.”

Introducing Classroom Procedures to Students

Marco spends several days at the start of school showing and modeling his classroom procedures.  He engages his students by using funny, real life examples and demonstrations of how things need to be done.

One place he looks to for inspiration is TV.  Marco says, “I was watching Sesame Street with my son.  In one scene, Elmo was telling Dr. Noodle how to use a banana.  (Click here to see the video clip that inspired Marco.) It was funny, and my son and I laughed a lot.  This gave me a good idea of how to introduce procedures to my students.

“My goal is for my students to understand that classroom procedures are for their benefit, and that if they follow these procedures, school will be less confusing,” says Marco.

Marco’s most effective procedure is his Homework Conduct Control Sheet.  A weekly task list is given to students to work on with their parents or an adult at home.  Each day, the adults work with his students on Reading, Spanish, Math, and English.  The adult must sign the document daily.

This document helps maintain home involvement, allows the teacher to give daily feedback on the student’s classroom conduct, and serves as a tool for adults to communicate with the teacher.  The Homework Conduct Control Sheet reinforces what was taught in school and is an effective form of home learning.  Click here to see Marco’s Homework Conduct Control Sheet.

A Bump in the Road

Five years ago, Marco was diagnosed with lymphoma, a blood related cancer.  Unbelievably, he managed to teach that school year while receiving treatment.  His students were his greatest motivation to work hard, keep fighting, and keep positive expectations.  His students knew the procedures and routines of the classroom, and that helped a lot during those difficult months.

Marco did not have to expend energy each day with the minutia of running a classroom—his students already knew what to do.  Marco could just teach.  And teach he did.  That year, all of his students passed both Reading and Math TAKS. His students’ success was just what the doctor ordered to put Marco on the road to remission.

An entry from Marco Campos’ notes while working with Project Aspire reads:

To be an effective teacher,
you must make a conscious decision to be positive
and to set high expectations—for both your students and yourself.

Marco has walked the talked in his personal life and his professional life.

Never Give Up

Marco Campos is an inner city school teacher and his students are successful.  Elmo Sanchez featured in our August 2007 column is an inner city teacher and his students are successful.  Alex Kajitani featured in our December 2007 column teaches in one of the poorest performing school districts in all of California, yet his students are successful.

These teachers and countless others in the trenches do not use a student’s environment, heritage, or any categorical label as a rationale for poor performance.  These teachers do what all effective teachers do:

• Have plans, goals, and visions.
• Position themselves where they can learn and contribute.
• Collaborate with people to make things better
• Are “we” people, constantly using the word “we,” as in:
  • We need to work in our learning teams to find a solution.
  • Let’s analyze the students’ work to see how we can improve student learning.

Students of these effective inner city teachers fill the pages when researched on the Internet.  These seeds of potential greatness include politicians, film icons, song writers, doctors, lawyers, novelists, comedians, magicians, war heroes, and scientists.  Some are household names like Jennifer Lopez and Colin Powell; others are rather obscure like Rosalyn Sussman Yalow.  Yet all occupied a desk in a setting that most would describe as bleak and hopeless and went on to leave their stamp on the world.

We often hear the quote, “A teacher affects eternity.  He can never tell, where his influence stops.”  Such is the case of Rosalyn Sussman Yalow.  Dr. Yalow is a product of the schools in Bronx, New York, and went on to become a medical physicist.  In 1977, she received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing a tracing technique for measuring quantities of various substances in the blood.  This technique is used today in the detection and the treatment of cancers.

Although we can’t say with certainty, perhaps in some small way, Rosalyn Yalow played a part in Marco Campos’ successful battle with cancer.  But, we know for sure, Marco Campos will always believe that all of his students are capable of greatness.  Every.  Single.  One.

Currently New Bedford High School (NBHS) is experiencing academic, financial and behavioral challenges which directly impact student population, faculty, and the entire NBHS community. NBHS suffers from a high dropout rate, large numbers of failure in core subjects, low MCAS scores, and fails to meet average yearly progress goals in Math, English Language Arts, and attendance.  In 2009, New Bedford High School was deemed chronically underperforming by the state of Massachusetts.  Although these challenges are deeply entrenched and wide in scope, its designers believe the NBLA is the first essential step toward positive, long term change.

The mission of NBLA aligns with the district, which is ‘We are committed to developing a community of learners who are academically proficient, demonstrate strong character and exhibit self confidence.’ The proposed academy will accomplish its mission by involving stakeholders in providing the support students require in order to realize their individual potential.  The vision of NBLA is to maintain an autonomous small learning community (SLC) which provides personalized instruction and leadership skills training in an academically challenging and innovative learning environment.   The academy will enable students to become well-adjusted, high functioning adults able to lead effectively in the 21^st century.  Educators in the NBLA will possess the knowledge, skills, and values required to achieve its vision and mission.

The NBLA curriculum and instruction will employ integrated, inquiry-based, and constructivist strategies delivering relevant content across disciplines. Students will work collaboratively, lead by example, take initiative, demonstrate entrepreneurship, and gather and analyze information. Development of higher level, critical thinking and real-world problem solving will be an integral part of planning and facilitating lessons. Standards-based instructional systems will be fully integrated in delivering and assessing classroom learning. Daily lessons, activities and projects of all classes will thoroughly integrate leadership skills and values.  Specific leadership strands – law and criminal justice, education, business, politics, health, and community-activism – will inspire student internships, graduation portfolio projects, and community partnerships.

The NBLA will offer five blocks with 67 minutes per block. Students will have an advising leadership block each day to facilitate leadership electives with the assistance of a staff advisor.   The NBLA design team is composed of teachers, administrators and community leaders who recognize the critical need for change and are committed to the success of the proposed academy.  The design team’s collective vision is one founded on practical teaching experience, demonstrated commitment to the execution of NBLA mission, and adherence to progressive, research-based education.  Members of the design team consistently strive to make a positive impact on the lives of students and express a genuine passion to lead the NBLA school community toward excellence.  Members of the design team are certified by the state of Massachusetts in respective content areas and, in some cases, possess dual licensure as well as having experience teaching students with diverse backgrounds and academic abilities.

Read the whole prospectus here: http://www.engineofsouls.com/file-323.pdf

1. Reagan Conservatism: Reagan, PBS – Major Speeches – NY Times Articles – Presidential Library

2. The Iran-Contra Affair: Reagan, PBS, Iran Contra – Iran/Contra from the National Security Archive – The Secret Government (Iran/Contra Affair) Video – Time: The US and Iran

3. US/Soviet Relations:

4. Reaganomics

5. Woman’s Rights

6. Environmentalism

7. The Persian Gulf War

8. The LA Riots

9. NAFTA

10. Clinton Foreign Policy

11. The 2000 Election

12. September 11, 2001

13. The Computer & Internet

14. Multiculturalism

15. Poverty & Wealth

16. The Iraq War

17. The Afghanistan War

18. Bush Foreign Policy

19. The Great Recession

20. The Stimulus Plan

Now that the approval process is over and a new administration (superintendent) begins in New Bedford, the real work begins.  In almost five months, the NBLA will open as an autonomous small learning community within New Bedford High School.  As always, much work needs to be done.  The difference now is that we have moved from a proposal to a plan.  Almost 100 meetings, 2500+ emails, over 1000 hours and lots of dedication from teachers, administrators, and students, have produced a path that the NBPS have placed themselves on.  It is our obligation and our shared responsibility to make that journey productive.  We look forward to that work, and to the future…

WASHINGTON — The right is rewriting history.

The most ballyhooed effort is under way in Texas , where conservatives have pushed the state school board to rewrite guidelines, downplaying Thomas Jefferson in one high school course, playing up such conservatives as Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation and challenging the idea that the Founding Fathers wanted to separate church and state.

The effort reaches far beyond one state, however.

In articles and speeches, on radio and TV, conservatives are working to redefine major turning points and influential figures in American history, often to slam liberals, promote Republicans and reinforce their positions in today’s politics.

The Jamestown settlers? Socialists. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton ? Ill-informed professors made up all that bunk about him advocating a strong central government.

Theodore Roosevelt ? Another socialist. Franklin D. Roosevelt ? Not only did he not end the Great Depression, he also created it.

Joe McCarthy ? Liberals lied about him. He was a hero.

Some conservatives say it’s a long-overdue swing of the pendulum after years of liberal efforts to define history on their terms in classrooms and in popular culture.

“We are adding balance,” Texas school board member Don McLeroy said. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

The effort in Texas and nationwide is controversial, however, even among many conservatives. McLeroy was defeated in a recent primary after he led the campaign for a more conservative version of history, a defeat that the National Review , a leading conservative organ, called “sensible.”

While even some conservative intellectuals say that some of the revisionist history is simply wrong, at the core, the effort reflects the ever-changing view of history, which is always subject to revision thanks to new information or new ways of looking at things, and often is viewed through a political lens.

“History in the popular world is always a political football,” said Alan Brinkley , a historian at Columbia University . “The right is unusually mobilized at the moment.”

“Part of the tide of history is that it’s contested terrain,” said Fritz Fischer , a historian at the University of Northern Colorado and the chairman of the National Council for History Education . “We should always be arguing and questioning what happened in the past.”

It’s not just historians who contest history, however. It’s also politicians and pundits.

The left has done it.

Fischer cited the case of controversial former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill , whose essay claiming that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were the fruit of illegal U.S. policies became a cause celebre. Fischer said Churchill “ignored a lot of evidence and made some up to promulgate a particular political belief.”

Now, it’s the right.

“There’s clearly a political impetus behind this that connects to the issues of today,” Fischer said, such as labeling President Barack Obama a socialist. “But when history is ignored to do it, that can be dangerous.”

Here are five recent examples of new conservative versions of history:

JAMESTOWN

Reaching for an example of how bad socialism can be, former House of Representatives Majority Leader Dick Armey , R- Texas , said recently that the people who settled Jamestown, Va. , in 1607 were socialists and that their ideology doomed them.

” Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow,” he said in a speech March 15 at the National Press Club .

It was a good, strong story, helping Armey, a former economics professor, illustrate the dangers of socialism, the same ideology that he and other conservatives say is at the core of Obama’s agenda.

It was not, however, true.

The Jamestown settlement was a capitalist venture financed by the Virginia Company of London — a joint stock corporation — to make a profit. The colony nearly foundered owing to a harsh winter, brackish water and lack of food, but reinforcements enabled it to survive. It was never socialistic. In fact, in 1619, Jamestown planters imported the first African slaves to the 13 colonies that later formed the United States .

ALEXANDER HAMILTON

At the same event, Armey urged people to read the Federalist Papers as a guide to the sentiments of the tea party movement.

“The small-government conservative movement, which includes people who call themselves the tea party patriots and so forth, is about the principles of liberty as embodied in the Constitution, the understanding of which is fleshed out if you read things like the Federalist Papers,” Armey said.

Others such as Democrats and the news media, “people here who do not cherish America the way we do,” don’t understand because “they did not read the Federalist Papers,” he said.

A member of the audience asked Armey how the Federalist Papers could be such a tea party manifesto when they were written largely by Alexander Hamilton , who the questioner said “was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government.”

Armey ridiculed the very suggestion.

“Widely regarded by whom?” he asked. “Today’s modern, ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case, in fact, about Hamilton.”

Hamilton, however, was an unapologetic advocate of a strong central government, one that plays an active role in the economy and is led by a president named for life and thus beyond the emotions of the people. Hamilton also pushed for excise taxes and customs duties to pay down federal debt.

In fact, Ian Finseth said in a history written for the University of Virginia , others at the constitutional convention “thought his proposals went too far in strengthening the central government.”

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Theodore Roosevelt was long an icon of the Republican Party , a dynamic leader who ushered in the Progressive era, busting trusts, regulating robber barons, building the Panama Canal and sending the U.S. fleet around the world announcing ascendant American power.

Fox TV commentator Glenn Beck , however, says that Roosevelt was a socialist whose legacy is destroying America. It started, Beck said, with Roosevelt’s admonition to the wealthy of his day to spend their riches for the good of society.

“We judge no man a fortune in civil life if it’s honorably obtained and well spent,” Roosevelt said, according to Beck. “It’s not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it only to be gained so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.”

Actually, Roosevelt said, “We GRUDGE no man a fortune … if it’s honorably obtained and well USED.” But either way, Beck saw the threat.

“Oh? Well, thank you,” Beck said with scorn during his keynote speech to the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington . The presidential suggestion that the wealthy of the Gilded Age should contribute to the good of society was a clear danger that must be condemned, Beck said.

“Is this what the Republican Party stands for? Well, you should ask members of the Republican Party , because this is not our founders’ idea of America. And this is the cancer that’s eating at America. It is big government; it’s a socialist utopia,” Beck said.

“And we need to address it as if it is a cancer. It must be cut out of the system because they cannot coexist. … You must eradicate it. It cannot coexist.”

There’s no doubt that Roosevelt was a domestic policy liberal by today’s standards. In a 1910 speech in Kansas , he acknowledged that his “New Nationalism” meant “far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had.”

The 26th president insisted, however, that he wanted the government to guarantee opportunity, not a handout.

“The fundamental thing to do for every man is to give him a chance to reach a place in which he will make the greatest possible contribution to the public welfare,” he said.

“Give him a chance, not push him up if he will not be pushed. … Help any man who stumbles; if he lies down, it is a poor job to try to carry him; but if he is a worthy man, try your best to see that he gets a chance to show the worth that is in him.”

In his autobiography three years later, Roosevelt went on to dismiss the tenets of socialism as taught by Karl Marx as “an exploded theory.”

“Too many thoroughly well-meaning men and women in the America of today glibly repeat and accept,” he wrote, “various assumptions and speculations by Marx and others which by the lapse of time and by actual experiment have been shown to possess not one shred of value.”

In addition, Roosevelt didn’t advocate government ownership of the means of production, the definition of socialism.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

It’s long been debated how well Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal government programs countered the Great Depression, but now a prominent conservative has introduced the idea that Roosevelt CAUSED the Depression.

“FDR took office in the midst of a recession,” Rep. Michele Bachmann , R- Minn. , told the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. “He decided to choose massive government spending and the creation of monstrous bureaucracies. Do we detect a Democrat pattern here in all of this? He took what was a manageable recession and turned it into a 10-year depression.”

A year before, Bachmann went to the House floor to blame FDR and what she called the “Hoot-Smalley” tariffs for creating the Depression.

“The recession that FDR had to deal with wasn’t as bad as the recession (President Calvin) Coolidge had to deal with in the early ’20s,” she said.

Coolidge cut taxes and created the roaring ’20s, Bachmann said.

“FDR applied just the opposite formula: the Hoot-Smalley act, which was a tremendous burden on tariff restrictions. And of course trade barriers and the regulatory burden and of course tax barriers.

“That’s what we saw happen under FDR. That took a recession and blew it into a full-scale depression. The American people suffered for almost 10 years under that kind of thinking.”

The truth? Historians agree that tariffs hurt trade and worsened the depression.

However, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act — not Hoot-Smalley — was proposed by two Republicans, Sen. Reed Smoot of Utah and Rep. Willis Hawley of Oregon . A Republican House and a Republican Senate approved it. President Herbert Hoover , a Republican, signed it into law.

The facts also show that the country was in something far worse than a “manageable recession” in March 1933 when Roosevelt took office.

Stocks had lost 90 percent of their value since the crash of 1929. Thousands of banks had failed. Unemployment reached an all-time high of 24.9 percent just before Roosevelt was inaugurated.

JOE MCCARTHY

Sen. Joseph McCarthy , R- Wis. , burst onto the national stage in the early 1950s with accusations that he had a list of names of known Communists in the federal government. He didn’t name them, was censured by the Senate eventually and his name became synonymous with witch hunts — McCarthyism.

Now, the end of the Cold War has opened up spy files and identified many Communist spies who operated inside the government during the era. Some conservatives argue that this proves not only that McCarthy was right, but also that he was a hero and that he was smeared by liberals, the news media and historians.

“Almost everything about McCarthy in current history books is a lie and will have to be revised,” conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly said.

“Liberals had to destroy McCarthy because he exposed the entire liberal establishment as having sheltered Soviet spies,” conservative commentator Ann Coulter said in one interview.

“The myth of ‘McCarthyism’ is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times,” she said in another. “Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. … If the Internet, talk radio and Fox News had been around in McCarthy’s day, my book wouldn’t be the first time most people would be hearing the truth about ‘McCarthyism.’ ”

Yet even some prominent conservatives say that McCarthy’s defenders go too far, and that even from a conservative perspective, McCarthy was no hero and damaged the country.

“A dangerous movement has been growing among conservative writers to vindicate the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy and his campaign to expose Soviet spies in the U.S. government,” Ronald Kessler wrote for the conservative Web site Newsmax.com.

“The FBI agents who were actually chasing those spies have told me that McCarthy hurt their efforts because he trumped up charges, unfairly besmirched honorable Americans and gave hunting spies a bad name.”

Kessler said the release of secret Cold War files under the Venona Project confirmed that there were Soviet spies in the U.S. government.

“The problem was that the people McCarthy tarnished as Communists or Communist sympathizers were not the real spies,” Kessler wrote.

“The cause of anti-communism, which united millions of Americans and which gained the support of Democrats, Republicans and independents, was undermined by Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin ,” wrote William Bennett , who was the conservative secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan .

“McCarthy addressed a real problem: disloyal elements within the U.S. government. But his approach to this real problem was to cause untold grief to the country he claimed to love,” Bennett wrote in his book “America: The Last Best Hope.”

“Worst of all, McCarthy besmirched the honorable cause of anti-communism. He discredited legitimate efforts to counter Soviet subversion of American institutions.”

ON THE WEB

More on Jamestown

Armey’s speech at the National Press Club

Treasury Department history of Hamilton

University of Virginia on Hamilton

More on the Venona Project