Posts by Tom Panarese
Showtime, D.C.!
Published August 06, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT
As it is with every August in the greater Washington, D.C. area, the forecast is a consistent high-80s/low-90s with humidity and a chance of some sort of thunderstorm just about every day, Congress has skipped town for the better part of a month, and anyone still in the city is staring a hole through the tiny little "September" portion of the August page of his calendar. There are things to do, but there's nobody around to help get them done. It's, quite frankly, a hint at what hell might be like on certain days (except Hell doesn't have a Starbucks or a Cosi on every other corner).
In fact, the only people doing much of anything at this point in time are educators. And in the District of Columbia's school system, the prep for the upcoming school year seems to have higher stakes than usual. Chancellor Michelle Rhee has received an enormous amount of attention since arriving a couple of years ago, and her third year might be a "do or die" year in terms of her public image and future success: it's what most teachers consider their "tenure year"; there's a Democrat in the White House with a new Secretary of Education who supposedly has it in him to get things done instead of drafting NCLB II: The NCLBening; and as the Washington Post reported on Sunday, she's hired some contractors to "fix" some of the District's high schools ("A D.C. Schools Awakening," by Bill Turque, 8/2/09).
Those brought in to fix Coolidge, Dunbar, and Anacostia High Schools, referred to as "takeover agents" in the article's subhead, have met with success before in cities such as New York and Los Angeles, taking over schools marred by failing scores under NCLB and turning them around, and the task ahead of them is substantial.:
This summer, Friends of Bedford, which operates a Brooklyn public high school that has become New York City's most successful, has taken control of Coolidge and Dunbar senior high schools. Friendship Public Charter Schools, which serves about 4,000 students on six D.C. campuses, is running Anacostia Senior High School.
Rhee has also started discussions with Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Schools, which operates Locke Senior High School in Los Angeles, one of the city's largest and most troubled schools, about working in the District. Barr recently toured Eastern High School on Capitol Hill, although District officials said discussions are in an extremely preliminary stage.
Anacostia, Coolidge and Dunbar are all stark examples of the challenge [Arne] Duncan describes, places where scholarship and discipline flicker weakly at best. Fewer than a third of students read and write proficiently, according to citywide tests. A 2008 review of Dunbar by District officials said, "Evidence of effective teaching and learning was limited to a few individual teachers." On a single day in November, 19 girls were arrested for fighting.
The Way It Is: How Walter Cronkite Makes Us Better Educators
Published July 19, 2009 @ 06:04PM PT
I did not grow up watching Walter Cronkite. I was born in 1977, so when Cronkite stepped down from the CBS Evening News in 1981, I was four years old and spent my childhood watching Peter Jennings; however, being the child of two Baby Boomers and having a genuine interest in what took place in the couple of decades before I was born, I knew who Cronkite was and understood his reputation. I also understood that in a huge way, he represented an entirely different era of America, one that is long gone.
Mr. Obama, Tear Down This School!
Published June 28, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT
Someone needs to tell Arne Duncan and company that the Berlin Wall didn't come down because Germany wanted to simply "rebrand" itself.
The Washington Post has reported, tongue a bit in cheek, that the Obama administration recently tore down one of the more theatrical symbols of President Bush's No Child Left Behind law -- a red schoolhouse that served as the backdrop for NCLB's signing and for the last seven years has sat on the corner of Maryland Avenue SW, in front of the U.S. Department of Education building.
Tearing down the building is a symbolic gesture ...
"It's like the new Coke. This is a rebranding effort," said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. "The feng shui people believe you need to take the roof off buildings to allow bad chi to escape. Let's hope this helps."
... and the next act will be to try and change the name of the now-infamous law ...
Matthew Yale, deputy chief of staff for Duncan, said the department is considering a contest to rename the law.
"We want to think about something that's forward-looking instead of something that seems to have a negative connotation," Yale said. "We want to think of something that talks about future and potential."
You know, that's all well and good, but why do I have a feeling that the people in charge of our educational system are working from the Cliff's Notes on "How to Run General Motors"?
Watching Michelle Rhee
Published June 14, 2009 @ 05:47PM PT
For those who follow education, and maybe even for those who simply follow the news, Michelle Rhee's name should be very familiar. Brought in as the Washington, D.C. schools' superintendent two years ago, she has the job of turning around what has to be one of the most notorious school systems in the country. She obviously knew this coming in and did so with guns blazing, proposing changes that would clean out the garbage and begin to make D.C. schools the type of place that one would expect in the nation's capital.
Of course, she hasn't exactly made friends with everyone and her noteriety, such as a now-famous (infamous, even?) Time magazine cover story, has both helped and hindered her quest to make the improvements that the system so desperately needs. A story on the front page of today's Washington Post reflects on her first two years as superintendent, detailing her successes and setbacks and predicting where her initiatives may take D.C. schools in the future.
10 Years after Columbine: What’s Been Learned, What Should Be Taught?
Published April 19, 2009 @ 08:04AM PT
An affluent suburb … 3:30 in the afternoon … 64 degrees and cloudy …
It did seem stranger than fiction in some sick way. Two teenagers, heavily armed, walked into a crowded high school and killed thirteen people before killing themselves. Of course, what Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did to Columbine High School exactly one decade ago was not fiction and the truth behind it is more complex than the plot to any way Hollywood could have portrayed it.
That this happened ten years ago seems hard to believe, and the anniversary itself has received attention in the media (USA Today has done some quality in-depth reporting); however, I don’t expect more out of major media outlets on Monday beyond interviews with survivors, commentary from “experts” on bullying, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly blaming it all on “liberals,” and narcissistic recollections of people who remember what they were doing that day.
What may not be asked, to be quite frank, is if we have learned anything, and the legacy of these shootings seems to be that we haven't or might never will.
Free Speech? Not in Schools
Published April 13, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT
"Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of ..." - NOT SO FAST!!!
It's one of the most wonderful times of the year here in Charlottesville, the home of our third president (whom my wife and her fellow Wahoos refer to as "Mr. Jefferson"), as the Thomas Jefferson Center has announced the winners of the 2009 Muzzle Awards. The awards "honor" the most egregious First Amendment infractions across the country. This year's recipients range from the corralling of protesters at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions to three high school-related incidents.
The first involves the suspension of a teacher for using Erin Gruwell's The Freedom Writers Diary in her class:
[A]t the beginning of 2008 a 27-year veteran high school teacher in Indianapolis was placed under administrative leave for assigning the book to her at-risk 11th grade students ... because the Perry Meridian High School Board indefinitely delayed granting her permission to teach the book.
Also among the honorees is the Horry County School District in South Carolina, who refused to allow the distribution of an issue of the student newspaper because it contained an editorial advocating same-sex marriage:
Ronnie Burgess, the principal of the Academy for Arts, Science & Technology, was concerned that the front-page article and accompanying photo of two young men holding hands would be disruptive to his student body. He gave the [student newspaper's editors] $500 to reprint 500 copies of the paper without the article, even though they normally financed the newspaper independently through ad sales and not through school support.
Finally, the issue of "disruptive" clothing on school grounds came up in Omaha:
Nearly two-dozen Millard South High School students in Omaha, Nebraska, were suspended last year for wearing t-shirts with the phrase 'R-I-P Julius,' honoring a former classmate who was murdered in May ... school officials thought the shirts violated the dress code that barred 'disruptive' clothing. The ACLU soon got involved, defending the shirts as an expression of the students’ grief, not as a message intent on disrupting learning.
The three cases here seem to hit right at the heart of three major issues that concern how far the First Amendment reaches into our schools, and the latter two come into direct conflict with Tinker v. Des Moines and Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, the two most important Supreme Court cases on record concerning the First Amendment. The first ... well, that seems more the result of bureaucratic incompetence than anything (seriously ... I wasn't too hip to the movie Freedom Writers, but you're really going to suspend someone who used the book for at-risk students, who are essentially the same students who wrote the "diaries" in the first place?). The T-shirt case is less puzzling, although I do wonder what it was about the shirts that was so "disruptive" (it's not like there were swastikas on the shirts ... and in some schools in the south, shirts with the Confederate Flag on them aren't considered "disruptive").
The newspaper story hits closer to home, especially since I have taught journalism and been a newspaper adviser. Now, according to the story, the editors did not get the cover story pre-approved by the administration, so in the realm of Hazelwood they probably don't have a leg to stand on, and the principal could say that he was offering compensation in paying to reprint the issue.
BUT ... wasn't he also trying to buy them off?
I'm not the only person out there who thinks Hazelwood is hindering budding journalists, and this is a prime example. Unfortunately, I'm not a constitutional lawyer so I have no idea what it would take to overturn this decision.
Because the thing is, it's wrong. And not just because students need a forum in which to express themselves. In teaching journalism, I teach that the First Amendment is sacrosanct and journalists should have a sense of professionalism, responsibility, and ethics; the power a principal or other administrator has with the Hazelwood decision is censorship, and what often happens is that advisers, editors, and writers give up before they even try and a student newspaper does become a public relations arm for the school. Furthermore, with the internet a dominant public forum for so many students, the student newspaper is quickly becoming obsolete and while some papers have gone online in recent years so many are still trying to raise hundreds upon hundreds of dollars each year for printing either becuase the school doesn't have the means to put its newspaper online or is hesitant to create an online student voice under the auspices of "protecting" those students.
In cultivating young minds, we're supposed to be encouraging them to explore and think for themselves. "As long as it isn't disruptive" doesn't seem to make much sense.
Tom Panarese is currently in his fourth year as an English and journalism teacher and yearbook adviser in Virginia. Prior to a career in education, Tom worked in marketing as a proposal writer for a a variety of companies in technology, telecommunications, and law. Tom's essays have been published in print and on Education Week. He blogs at the often gut-busting The Uninspired Teacher.
The "Twilight" of Serious Teen Reading?
Published March 13, 2009 @ 03:00PM PT
[Guest-blogger Tom Panarese is currently in his fourth year as an English and journalism teacher and yearbook adviser in Virginia. Prior to a career in education, Tom worked in marketing as a proposal writer for a a variety of companies in technology, telecommunications, and law. Tom's essays have been published in print and on Education Week. He blogs at the often gut-bustingly funny The Uninspired Teacher.]
In the Washington Post, Ron Charles wonders aloud what has become of the radical youth because college students of today, instead of reading seminal counterculture works by Jack Kerouac, Abbie Hoffman, and Anais Nin, are reading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. Apparently, the idea that the younger generation rebel against the older generation, rise up and challenge the status quo was smothered to death in a cul-de-sac somewhere in the last 30 years ("On Campus, Vampires are Besting the Beats"):
Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they're choosing books like 13-year-old girls -- or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.
Where are the Germaine Greers, the Jerry Rubins, the Hunter Thompsons, the Richard Brautigans -- those challenging, annoying, offensive, sometimes silly, always polemic authors whom young people used to adore to their parents' dismay?
He goes on to lament that college campuses don't seem to be what they were 40 years ago when his generation was stirring up trouble in protest for equal rights or against the Vietnam War (in fact, he mentions that a tour guide at Kent State University doesn't mention the infamously fatal 1970 riot on his tour), and that the average college student has become more conservative in some ways, but simply less active in others. Even though he does admit that they way today's youth participates in politics isn't the same way their parents or grandparents did, he doesn't seem to approve:
"As young people shift toward the Internet and away from exploring their political activism in books, the blood drains from their shelves. For the Twitter generation, the new slogan seems to be 'Don't trust anyone over 140 characters.' What you see at the next revolution is far more likely to be a well-designed Web site than a radical novel or a poem. Not to be a drag, but that's so uncool. For those of us who care about literature and think it still has a lot to offer, it's time to start chanting, 'Hell, no! We won't go!'"
I've read this article three times now, plus what people have written in the Post's comments sections (well, except for those beating the "liberals are destroying learning ... all college is radical ... teachers are communists ... and what do we do with witches? BURN THEM!" drum, which ... *yawn*. Wake me up when you come off it) and I'm still vascillating between two thoughts: yes, we're all doomed, because sometimes I'm amazed that my students read at all; and no, you're just another whining boomer that I had to hear from when I was in high school in the '90s and you people were calling everyone between 15-30 a "slacker." While I honestly admit that I've never read On the Road, I took enough writing classes in college to be around people who had read both Kerouac and Plath -- and discontent coming from a kid at a private Catholic college whose biggest problem is telling mom and dad that he ran up the Visa buying clothes from J. Crew doesn't exactly come off as genuine. (And most of the Plath lovers seemed to have already preheated the ovens in their dorms.)
(click "Read more" below....)
