yes! P owerful I deas , P ractical A ctions
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Creator of No Child Left Behind: “I Was Wrong” How Corporations Created the Education Crisis
2014
Education Uprising The New Rebels Taking Back Our Public Schools
Restorative Justice in Oakland Making dignity part of the school day
Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. William Butler Yeats
Vira Mylyan-Monastyrska / shutterstock
ISSUE 69 YES! MAGAZINE THEME GUIDE
Education Uprising For decades the myth of failing public schools justified industrial-scale testing and a privatization agenda. Now radical educators are bursting the bubble test, getting culturally relevant, and restoring justice to the classroom. Welcome to Education Spring.
18 Debunking the Failure Myth. A privatization agenda skewed the research and set schools up for a fall.
20 Corporate Takeover. Education costs $600 billion a year. There’s plenty in it for the corporations.
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28 Natural Progression. Preschoolers at the forest kindergarten are wet, muddy, happy, active, and learning from nature.
40 Learn Like a Creative. Get in touch with your inner artist to make adult education a DIY project.
Restorative Justice. When dignity comes to school, both students and teachers win.
45 Practice, not Theory. Diane Ravitch is rewriting the book on her own policy, No Child Left Behind.
shutterstock Photos by Jillian Cain, Willequet Manuel , Ingrid Balabanova
22 Testing the System. The high school teachers who boycotted a standarized test and sparked a rebellion.
42 36 Emotional IQ. Poverty is the biggest barrier to achievement. Lessons in empathy help kids get past it.
46 Teaching Arizona. Curtis Acosta on how culturally relevant studies help his students connect. yesmagazine . org
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ISSUE 69
Diverse, Delicious, Endangered New Mexico’s traditional landrace chile varieties have adapted to hot days, cold nights, and long dry spells. But can they survive modern agribusiness? Nina Bunker Ruiz
YES! illus trations by julie notaRIANNI
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For New Mexicans, chile is more than just a food: it is an icon, a passion, a tradition.
H
ere in New Mexico, autumn starts with the smell of roasting chile. In parking lots and on roadsides, aproned vendors turn the cranks on rotating gas-fueled drums filled with fragrant chile peppers. Even as a young child, before I could get through a whole plate of my aunt’s spicy enchiladas, before I enjoyed my father’s piquant chile caribe, before undergoing the New Mexican rite of passage from tender-tongued child to ardent chileeater, I savored the wafting smell of chile that enveloped my hometown every harvest season. It was then, and always will be, the smell I associate with shorter days, returning to school, wood-gathering time, and most of all, home. For New Mexicans, chile is more than just a food: it is an icon, a passion, a tradition. But New Mexico is losing its traditional landrace varieties of chile, due largely to modern agribusiness and the societal shift away from small farms. “Landrace” is a term for domesticated plants and animals that have been raised in a specific area for long periods of time and have adapted to a particular region. They have a much broader genetic spectrum than modern hybrids, which are bred for a narrow range of specific traits. These older landrace varieties are remarkably resilient and their DNA is a valuable genetic resource, especially as we face climate change and increasingly unpredictable weather.
Worldwide, we are losing traditional, local varieties of domesticated plants at an alarming rate. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that “Since the 1900s, some 75 percent of plant genetic diversity has been lost as farmers worldwide have left their multiple local varieties and landraces for genetically uniform, high-yielding varieties.” Chile was first cultivated in Central and South America— the word chilli is from the Aztec language, Nahuatl. Spanish Captain General Don Juan de Oñate, who colonized the Rio Grande, is generally credited for bringing chile seed from Mexico in 1597. Since Oñate’s arrival, successive generations of Native and Hispanic farmers in New Mexico have been selecting and planting chile that exhibit characteristics favorable to their particular locale. Dozens of distinct chile landraces have developed along the Rio Grande Valley, each named for the place it has been cultivated: Cochiti, Escondida, Jemez, Puerto de Luna, and so on. And in the higher altitudes of northern New Mexico—where summer afternoons that soar to the 90s are often followed by nights that cool to the 50s—local varieties cope much better with the temperature range than lowland varieties. It’s not just about survival. “The cool nights and hot days are what give our chile its incredible flavor,” claims farmer Matt Romero, dangling a specimen of his family’s Alcalde chile variety between his thumb and forefinger. He adds, “This chile is ready to harvest in 70 days.” I met with Romero at his farm in the village of Alcalde on a hot lateAugust morning. The Rio Grande rumbled just a couple hundred yards away, beyond an impressive stand of cottonwood and locust trees. Romero’s lush fields of cauliflower, eggplant, squash, and chile contrasted with the dry, naked bluffs rising across the river. High-desert mountains, like the Sangre de Cristos that surround my hometown of Santa Fe and the Romero family farm in Alcalde, offer conditions that can augment greater levels of genetic diversity. I learned this one fall afternoon while I sat underneath a narrow-leafed cottonwood tree. I had taken my two daughters to Little Tesuque Creek so they could play on their favorite swing, a tire suspended by a thick rope from a large limb of the cottonwood. The creek is dry in early October, and autumn leaves filled the narrow creek bed. The girls shrieked in delight as they swung over the silent stream of leaves, golden in the glow of late afternoon, while I sat nearby in the sun and read. I had taken along Gary Paul Nabhan’s book, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End yesmagazine . org
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ISSUE 69
$607 billion
2
$322 billion goes to instruction
“Failing” public schools are closed, opening the door for privatization. A company sets up a charter school and receives the same per-student payment that public schools get to run the school, about $11,000 on average.
Annual education budget funded by taxpayers
Huge growth of U.S. charter schools in the last 10 years:
National Center for Education Statistics elementary and secondary expenditures, 2009-10
Why Corporations Want Our Public Schools 1 By controlling standardized testing, corporations set themselves up as arbiters of success or failure. A few corporations already control the $20 billion to $30 billion a year textbook and standardized testing industry.
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district, they held steadfast. By May, the district caved, telling its high schools the test was no longer mandatory. Garfield’s boycott triggered a nationwide backlash to the “reform” that began with Friedman and the privatizers in 1980. At last, Americans from coast to coast have begun redefining the problem for what it really is: not an education crisis but a manufactured catastrophe, a facet of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” Look
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6,000 2,500
6.3% of all public schools are charters. That’s 2.3 million students—more than $25 billion a year of taxpayer money already going to private companies.
HOW IT WORKS
Pearson is the largest test assessment corporation in the United States (National Assessment of Educational Progress, G.E.D., Stanford Achievement). It is also one of the world’s largest textbook publishers.
closely—you’ll recognize the formula: Underfund schools. Overcrowd classrooms. Mandate standardized tests sold by private-sector firms that “prove” these schools are failures. Blame teachers and their unions for awful test scores. In the bargain, weaken those unions, the largest labor organizations remaining in the United States. Push nonunion, profit-oriented charter schools as a solution. If a Hurricane Katrina or a Great
Gates Foundation money pushed states to adopt national Common Core testing standards. Gates partnered with Pearson to produce K-12 courses aligned with Common Core. Then, Pearson made the tests and testing standards.
Recession comes along, all the better. Opportunities for plunder increase as schools go deeper into crisis, whether genuine or ginned up. The reason for privatization
Chris Hedges, the former New York Times correspondent, appeared on Democracy Now! in 2012 and told host Amy Goodman the federal government spends some $600 billion a year on education—“and the corporations
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WHAT’S NEXT, WALL STREET?
Where’s the big money in privatization? Take it from the teachers.
$20 billion
In Michigan: Charter schools cut instruction money, raise administration costs, and come out ahead by $366 per student.
$774 more per student spent on administration
Real estate investment trust EPR Properties (NYSE: EPR) includes charter schools in the firm’s $3 billion portfolio along with retail space, golf complexes, and movie megaplexes.
At $366 per student, the nation’s 55.4 million K-12 students represent yearly potential profit of $20 billion.
$1,140 less per student spent on instruction
In Ohio: Charter school teachers make 59% of what public school teachers make.
$118 billion
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59% $56,992 public school teacher pay
U.S. public school teacher pay and benefits are 89% of instruction costs, $287 billion a year. If corporations paid all teachers at the Ohio charter school rate, potential profit could reach $118 billion.
$33,888 charter school teacher pay
Meanwhile, are they turning around the failing schools? Stanford University studied test data from 27 states. Charter schools showed: Reading Better results
25%
Math Better 29% results
HOW MUCH PROFIT IS THAT?
75%
71%
Wal-Mart 2012 profit: $17 billion
No improvement or “significantly worse” results
No improvement or “significantly worse” results
Bank of America 2012 profit: $4 billion
2014 YES! Magazine infographic
SourceS: yesmagazine.org/jtf69 SHUTTERSTOCK Illustrations from svet13, Leremy
want it. That’s what’s happening. And that comes through charter schools. It comes through standardized testing. And it comes through breaking teachers’ unions and essentially hiring temp workers, people who have very little skills.” If you doubt Hedges, at least trust Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul and capitalist extraordinaire whose Amplify corporation already is growing at a 20 percent rate, thanks to its education contracts. “When it comes to
K through 12 education,” Murdoch said in a November 2010 press release, “we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.” Corporate-speak for, “Privatize the public schools. Now, please.” In a land where the free market has near-religious status, that’s been the answer for a long time. And it’s always been the wrong answer. The problem
with education is not bad teachers making little Johnny into a dolt. It’s about Johnny making big corporations a bundle—at the expense of the well-educated citizenry essential to democracy. And, of course, it’s about the people and ideas now reclaiming and rejuvenating our public schools and how we all can join the uprising against the faux reformers. y Dean Paton is YES! executive editor.
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ISSUE 69
EDUCATION UPRISING
Kris McBride, Garfield’s academic dean and testing coordinator, at left, and Jesse Hagopian, Garfield history teacher and a leader of the school’s historic test boycott.
YES! Photo by betty Udesen
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Pencils Down How One School Sparked a Nationwide Rebellion Against a Test-Obsessed Education System Diane Brooks
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ISSUE 69
EDUCATION UPRISING
Old school punishments are giving way to more respectful resolutions. As executive director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, Fania Davis can see programs like hers working to stop the school-to-prison pipeline.
Fania Davis
T
o m m y , a n a g i tat e d 14-year-old high s c h o o l s t u d e n t in Oakland, Calif., was in the hallway cursing out his teacher at the top of his lungs. A few minutes earlier, in the classroom, he’d called her a “b___” after she twice told him to lift his head from the desk and sit up straight. Eric Butler, the school coordinator for Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY—the author is executive director of the organization) heard the ruckus and rushed to the scene. The principal also heard it and appeared. Though Butler tried to engage him in conversation, Tommy was in a rage and heard nothing. He even took a swing at Butler that missed. Grabbing the walkie-talkie to call security, the principal angrily told Tommy he would be suspended. “I don’t care if I’m suspended. I don’t care about anything,” Tommy defiantly responded. Butler asked the
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principal to allow him to try a restorative approach with Tommy instead of suspending him. Butler immediately began to try to reach Tommy’s mother. This angered Tommy even more. “Don’t call my momma. She ain’t gonna do nothing. I don’t care about her either.” “Is everything OK?” The concern in Butler’s voice produced a noticeable shift in Tommy’s energy. “No, everything is not OK.” “What’s wrong?” Eric asked. Tommy was mistrustful and wouldn’t say anything else. “Man, you took a swing at me, I didn’t fight back. I’m just trying my best to keep you in school. You know I’m not trying to hurt you. Come to my classroom. Let’s talk.” They walked together to the restorative justice room. Slowly, the boy began to open up and share what was weighing on him. His mom, who had been successfully doing drug rehabilitation, had relapsed. She’d been out
for three days. The 14-year-old was going home every night to a motherless household and two younger siblings. He had been holding it together as best he could, even getting his brother and sister breakfast and getting them off to school. He had his head down on the desk in class that day because he was exhausted from sleepless nights and worry. After the principal heard Tommy’s story, he said, “We were about to put this kid out of school, when what he really deserved was a medal.” Eric tracked down Tommy’s mother, did some prep work, and facilitated a restorative justice circle with her, Tommy, the teacher, and the principal. Using a technique borrowed from indigenous traditions, each had a turn with the talking piece, an object that has a special meaning to the group. It moves from person to person, tracing a circle. The person holding the talking piece is the only one talking, and the
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YES! PHOTO BY LANE HARTWELL
FANIA DAVIS “Punitive justice asks only what rule or law was broken, who did it, and how they should be punished. It responds to the original harm with more harm. Restorative justice asks who was harmed, what are the needs and obligations of all affected, and how does everyone affected figure out how to heal the harm.�
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ISSUE 69
EDUCATION UPRISING
The secret to learning empathy, emotional literacy, selfawareness, cooperation, effective communication and other “social and emotional learning” skills lies in experience, not in workbooks and rote classroom exercises.
Lennon Flowers
E
ach week, in hundreds of classrooms around the world, elementary school students sit cross-legged in a circle, surrounding a baby clad in a onesie with the word “Teacher” on the front. Over the course of a year, students learn to label the baby’s feelings and to interpret his or her actions. They learn to look beyond language to identify underlying emotions, whether joy, fear, frustration, or curiosity. In so doing, they learn to understand their own emotions and those of others. They’re in a program called Roots of Empathy, part of a growing education trend broadly referred to as “social and emotional learning” (SEL), where children—and often their teachers and parents—learn to manage emotions, and to develop the skills required to establish relationships, de-escalate and resolve conflict, and effectively collaborate with others. Kids burdened by loss, anger, and feelings of rejection need, proponents suggest, a way to regulate those emotions. A growing number of educators and social entrepreneurs across the country are discovering that the secret to learning empathy, emotional literacy, self-awareness, cooperation, effective communication, and many of the other skills classified as “social and emotional learning,” lies in experience, not in workbooks and rote classroom exercises. Mary Gordon is Roots of Empathy’s founder and president. (Full disclosure: She and others mentioned in this article
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photo by Jjustas / shutterstock
ISSUE 69
EDUCATION UPRISING
It’s Not the Test Scores, It’s the Poverty U.S. international rankings for 2009 Program for International Student Assessment tests
Reading
Math
14th
25th U.S. rank
Low international rankings are often cited to prove U.S. schools are failing. But they don’t take this into consideration: There’s a higher percentage of poor kids in the U.S. than in most any other developed country. Students living in poverty, in every country, get lower test scores. So the Economic Policy Institute calculated what scores would look like if the U.S. had the same percentages of kids in poverty as better-scoring countries. The result: U.S. rankings adjusted for poverty
Reading
Math
6th
13th
Source: Economic Policy Institute 2013 report: What Do International Tests Really Show About U.S. Student Performance Illustrations by ponsuwan / Shutterstock
2014 yes ! magazine infographic
» Community Living, the school’s local
mental-health-care partner. As a result of the partnership with Turnaround, “I have a better pulse on where students are,” says Fresh Creek’s principal, Jacqueline Danvers-Coombs. “We have far fewer incidents in which students come to the principal’s office simply because teachers don’t know what to do. There are systems that have been put in place that are just part of how we are doing things now.” Turnaround is part of an effort to wholly reengineer schools to respond directly to the unique psychological and emotional needs of young people growing up in poverty. It holds vast implications for how we train teachers,
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for how we approach school culture, and for the very way in which we design a school. L i k e R o o t s o f E m p a t h y , Turnaround for Children reflects a growing recognition of the role of empathy in fostering effective learning environments and healthy child development. Empathy has long been seen as key to effective teaching. Addressing the host of unmet social and emotional needs that students carry into the classroom demands that teachers be able to look below the surface and understand what’s driving a particular set of behaviors.
It’s not just teachers who can benefit. According to a recent Harvard study, cultivating empathy among students has been linked to a variety of desirable outcomes, including positive peer relationships, better communication skills, and fewer interpersonal conflicts. Yet the study’s authors found that the stresses caused by trauma—including feelings of inferiority, envy, and depression—can act as obstacles to empathy. Children confronting acute stress may struggle to take on others’ perspectives, not out of an inherent lack of ability, but because of the way stress impacts the brain. While Turnaround makes no attempt to “teach” empathy directly, its efforts to remove the obstacles to empathy help to create the kind of environment that naturally encourages acts of empathy. Increasingly, schools themselves are taking up the charge and working to cultivate empathy less through what they teach than by how they teach. Kathy Clunis D’Andrea teaches 4- to 6-year-olds at Mission Hill School in Boston. Founded by celebrated education pioneer Deborah Meier, Mission Hill is one of 21 Public Pilot Schools in the city, established expressly to serve as models of educational innovation. Situated in Jamaica Plain, a mixed-income neighborhood, the school has a diverse student body; roughly half of the students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. Mission Hill was founded with the goal of helping students develop “democratic habits of mind”: the capacity to step into the shoes of others and to listen to and examine other viewpoints with an open mind; to evaluate evidence, and to understand the many possible consequences of a particular action; and to grow up to be—to quote its mission statement—“smart, caring, strong, resilient, imaginative and thoughtful.” In the fall of each presidential election year, Clunis D’Andrea and her students study a theme called “Who Counts,” examining voice: who is
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EDUCATION UPRISING
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New approaches to kindergarten offer us a glimpse of what childhood used to be, and still could be—the modern re-creation of the children’s garden: the nature preschool and the forest kindergarten. If we looked to these examples, we might be able to rescue childhood.
David Sobel
T
he
original
k i n d e r g a r t e n —the
children’s garden—
conceived by German educator Friedrich Froebel in the 19th century, was a place where children learned through play, often
in nature. That idea is fast eroding. Children aren’t playing in the garden anymore; instead they’re filling in bubbles on worksheets. Kindergarten is the new first grade. Its teachers are required to focus on a narrowing range of literacy and math skills; studies show that “some kindergarteners spend up to six times as much time on those topics and on testing and test prep than they do in free play or ‘choice time,’” writes jour-
nalist David McKay Wilson in the Harvard Education Letter. Instruction is pho to by Jod y Dingle / shutterstock
teacher-proofed as teachers are required to use scripted curricula that give them little opportunity to create lessons in response to students’ interests. Many schools have eliminated recess or physical education, depriving children of the important developmental need to move and exercise. The efforts to force reading lessons and high-stakes testing on ever younger children could actually hamper them later in life by depriving them of a chance to learn through play.
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“YES! is my absolute favorite magazine.� Pete Seeger 1919-2014 Activist, folksinger, longtime YES! supporter
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