So they're taking disruptive students out of their classrooms and putting them all into one big room together, where they're on their honor to not go full Breakfast Club meets Daybreak?
And also, too, can't stress this enuff, love of READING!! (I also have an unrequited love of italicizing, but no can do these dayz...) Even if you don't know that you're (ital)learning(/ital), reading is its own separate love.
I suppose I shouldn't worry because all my grandchildren are out of school and my great grandchildren aren't old enough yet, and besides, they live in Colorado.
I recently got a letter from the state, saying that since my retirement is through the Texas Teacher Retirement System (though I was never technically a teacher (I did do a lot of teaching, among other things) they put all their professional staff in the University system into the TRS) and I am over 70, that I will get a $2400 one-time stipend in September.
At the time I said, "Fuckers are trying to make it look like they are improving teacher salaries, but of course only for retired teachers over 70 and not teachers actually teaching, because that would be "woke" to do something like that.
Mind you, I'll take the damned money, but it makes me furious. And now this.
I am too old for this shit. I really am. My blood pressure meds usually keep me on an even keel, but this shit? This shit is too much for me
LISTEN TO ME, YOU TEXAS MOTHERFUCKERS. YOU HAVE TO VOTE. YOU CAN'T SIT ON YOUR ASSES. YOU CAN'T COMPLAIN ABOUT "CORPORATE DEMS" OR "NOT PROGRESSIVE ENOUGH FOR ME". We can have that fight later. Right now that asshole in Austin is trying to turn us into Florida. I know we're bad, but we are NOT Florida. Not quite yet.
GAAAAH I despise bean-counters and number-crunchers who obsess over metrics. It drives me absolutely insane.
Look at it in business: You can either focus on single-sale numbers or customer experience. The former maximizes your immediate sale, but the latter has a MUCH higher probability of creating a long-term, repeat customer. In academics, you either teach a student the answers to a test or teach them a love of learning. Me, I am glad my teachers focused more on long-term achievement over just getting the right answers.
As a librarian, what I found most exasperating was that the data about how having a qualified library media specialist with an MLS, doing the work of a librarian (which is to say, not providing “release time” or supervising study hall, but working with the teachers to provide resources and instruction, providing print and digital materials to support the curriculum and student interests, etc) actually improves test scores and educational outcomes. The research is there, recent, repeated, and solid, but administrators and the general public just ignore all that data in favor of what they imagine to be the effect of a librarian. It is infuriating to be able to say “Ah, but someone doing this work exactly fulfills what you say you need, and here is the proof that by your standards you should add to the number of librarians and the funding of the libraries,” and be shunted aside in favor of ever more reading specialists and consultants and canned STEM program teachers who sound cooler to admin. Librarians also add to love of learning and reading interests, but even if they didn’t, the data they value supports having librarians. They just don’t care, because of the stereotype of librarians, and because smart people (mostly women) stand up to their bs, so those outspoken advocates for learning and literacy must go!
The reading specialist at my school is just about useless. Wouldn't it be great to have a librarian you can meet with and discuss different books for different level readers, instead of being sent to the basement to find leveled books in Ziplock bags.
30-year sped guy here. What they want (even in my liberal district in Oregon) is not teachers, but "modules." Solutions they can plug in anywhere and have "valid and reliable" results.
I am pretty valid, but "reliability" is often up to the students. I have students for four years in high school, very difficult students in terms of behavior at times. I get to know them, pull them aside for talks, get to know them and their families.
The idea of shunting "behavior kids" into a corral, Zoom or otherwise, should be anathema to any educator. The kids need engagement, not isolation.
I always knew that librarians were sexy, but now that I know they are the evil phalanx set to destroy our great republic, am I wrong to now think they are the sexiest?
My school librarian IS sexy, but she had me at "smart and dedicated to the kids."
She really is great. I have known her for more than 20 years, since we were in a teaching program for language arts, which neither of us does (I am a sped guy). She does not wait for kids to come to her, either. She's a hunter-seeker!
I actually did a year at Kline Forest High School in Houston in the 80's and even then I was shocked to sit in a civic's class (back when there were civic's classes) where the teacher and students openly discussed the awesome times they had at KKK picnics and family events. Being one of those "coastal elites" (thank god) I was appalled. That was one of the worst years of my life between the racist teachers and the tobacco chewing wanna be cowboy rapists, I was willing to do anything to get out of there.
I spent 30 years car-less and have nearly 20K miles under my belt as a self-contained bicycle tourist. More of a runner now and don't go to an office... Good work!
That's a bad person using the name of a good idea to pretend he gives a shit.
"Science of reading" is an important idea that is well past due. It's the notion that researchers should influence how ELA is taught.
It matters because teachers' colleges and thus most teachers resisted the massive amount of data that told us in the early 90s (through today) that most of the way reading is taught is exactly wrong and actually harmful. in-a-nutshell: Whole language, the dominant idea since Horace Mann started the whole "progressive education" movement, teaches a phonic language as though it were Chinese and pretends that phonic-based decoding lies in opposition to reading good lit. There's been like 100 years of that. When research started showing decades ago that whole language didn't work, they moved on to "balanced literacy," based on teaching all kids to read like bad readers do (i.e., guessing, with a soupcon of phonics).
Now that 30 years of knowing that was garbage have passed, finally MS had nothing to lose and actually started moving toward phonics for decoding and had sort of an unbelievable turnaround. And regular parents started noticing that rich parents were sending their kids to Kumon to learn phonics while our kids were losing out.
The reason this went on so long is that some kids actually do learn to read one way or the other, so the teacher theory was that 40 percent of kids are just not able to learn to read to fluency. But researchers suggest that that number goes to 5-10 percent if taught correctly.
There are other ideas to "science of reading"; the big one is providing kids with information-rich curriculum in all subjects, as having rich information alrleady in your brain improves reading comprehension dramatically. As opposed to the progressive edu model of teaching "thinking" without having any basis information to syncretize, because you can "just go look it up." Turns out that kids who know about baseball have better reaching comprehension of written pieces on baseball, as an example, because they don't have to go look up half the words and they already have a picture in their mind into which they can sort the new information they're reading.
So school systems have invested heavily in materials that don't support most kids learning well and they've invested in teachers who weren't trained to teach that way either, and in many cases are actually morally opposed to teaching that way.
SO yeah, there's actually a need for media specialists in many schools right now, and there's a tremendous monetary need to get the right materials and to train and even convince teachers to change course.
I'm not saying this guy is right to get rid of librarians, but "science of reading" was just his shield for his crap. We have decades of kids who can't read properly, and as a democratic nation, that's a very pressing issue.
I am currently a high school sped guy (in Oregon, thank Crom), but I have taught in juvenile detention as well as in the adult county jail and I sense that you are correct.
“ Houston ISD’s new superintendent, Mike Miles, announced his goal was to transition the district’s schools to using a “New Education System” (NES) modeled on that used by a network of charter schools he founded, as the Texas Observer explains:”
Let me guess, schools have to purchase all of their scripted materials from a company Miles also just happened to have founded.
This guys was previously the superintendent of the metro Dallas area. There’s a Tribune article I can’t locate about how he ran this same scheme up there. Of course, the results were disastrous.
Austin ISD has not been taken over by the State of Texas Reichsministeriat fur Ausbildung-yet. Special Ed in AISD is under state supervision, because there have been problems with them. There are problems because of staffing shortages. There are staffing shortages because the state won't give the district adequate funding. Property taxes are insane in Travis County trying to fund the schools.
While getting the ol' PhD, there was a bit of rivalry between the chem and physics grads over the ancient texts held by the university library the professors would use for homework problems. We'd have to return the bloody things every two weeks. So, I learned to remove the magnetic strips and just borrow them, forever-ish. Mind you, I returned them all at the end of the semesters. Nonetheless, libraries are how people teach themselves, the way it eventually turns out. This shit is going to backfire. Writing on the wall, and all that.
This whole library detention center thing is just Abbott's way of saying don't you forget about me.
So they're taking disruptive students out of their classrooms and putting them all into one big room together, where they're on their honor to not go full Breakfast Club meets Daybreak?
I'm pretty sure they're all just like Tai in "Questionable Content". ( www.questionablecontent.net )
I have been teaching for almost 30 years now. If I were faced with treating kids this way I would retire, period.
I am not the droid they are looking for anyway.
And also, too, can't stress this enuff, love of READING!! (I also have an unrequited love of italicizing, but no can do these dayz...) Even if you don't know that you're (ital)learning(/ital), reading is its own separate love.
I am...
Nope. I really can't even.
I suppose I shouldn't worry because all my grandchildren are out of school and my great grandchildren aren't old enough yet, and besides, they live in Colorado.
I recently got a letter from the state, saying that since my retirement is through the Texas Teacher Retirement System (though I was never technically a teacher (I did do a lot of teaching, among other things) they put all their professional staff in the University system into the TRS) and I am over 70, that I will get a $2400 one-time stipend in September.
At the time I said, "Fuckers are trying to make it look like they are improving teacher salaries, but of course only for retired teachers over 70 and not teachers actually teaching, because that would be "woke" to do something like that.
Mind you, I'll take the damned money, but it makes me furious. And now this.
I am too old for this shit. I really am. My blood pressure meds usually keep me on an even keel, but this shit? This shit is too much for me
LISTEN TO ME, YOU TEXAS MOTHERFUCKERS. YOU HAVE TO VOTE. YOU CAN'T SIT ON YOUR ASSES. YOU CAN'T COMPLAIN ABOUT "CORPORATE DEMS" OR "NOT PROGRESSIVE ENOUGH FOR ME". We can have that fight later. Right now that asshole in Austin is trying to turn us into Florida. I know we're bad, but we are NOT Florida. Not quite yet.
Please get off your asses and vote.
I am a sped guy, could retire but won't. What Texas is doing is outrageous, and I find it hard to believe even Texas is doing it.
This insanity for what they call "evidence-based teaching" will destroy education in places where it is implemented.
It's bad enough as it is, and I can just imagine what you need to document in SPED.
I made a decision long ago to write the quickest, crappiest IEPs I could and spend my time on the kids and their families.
My dirtiest secret is I rarely read the IEPs of the kids I get. I prefer to "read" the kids.
Well, in her defense, we are talking about Round Rock here.
Ugliest damned town in Texas.
They made movie about a library as a discipline center . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breakfast_Club
GAAAAH I despise bean-counters and number-crunchers who obsess over metrics. It drives me absolutely insane.
Look at it in business: You can either focus on single-sale numbers or customer experience. The former maximizes your immediate sale, but the latter has a MUCH higher probability of creating a long-term, repeat customer. In academics, you either teach a student the answers to a test or teach them a love of learning. Me, I am glad my teachers focused more on long-term achievement over just getting the right answers.
As a librarian, what I found most exasperating was that the data about how having a qualified library media specialist with an MLS, doing the work of a librarian (which is to say, not providing “release time” or supervising study hall, but working with the teachers to provide resources and instruction, providing print and digital materials to support the curriculum and student interests, etc) actually improves test scores and educational outcomes. The research is there, recent, repeated, and solid, but administrators and the general public just ignore all that data in favor of what they imagine to be the effect of a librarian. It is infuriating to be able to say “Ah, but someone doing this work exactly fulfills what you say you need, and here is the proof that by your standards you should add to the number of librarians and the funding of the libraries,” and be shunted aside in favor of ever more reading specialists and consultants and canned STEM program teachers who sound cooler to admin. Librarians also add to love of learning and reading interests, but even if they didn’t, the data they value supports having librarians. They just don’t care, because of the stereotype of librarians, and because smart people (mostly women) stand up to their bs, so those outspoken advocates for learning and literacy must go!
The reading specialist at my school is just about useless. Wouldn't it be great to have a librarian you can meet with and discuss different books for different level readers, instead of being sent to the basement to find leveled books in Ziplock bags.
30-year sped guy here. What they want (even in my liberal district in Oregon) is not teachers, but "modules." Solutions they can plug in anywhere and have "valid and reliable" results.
I am pretty valid, but "reliability" is often up to the students. I have students for four years in high school, very difficult students in terms of behavior at times. I get to know them, pull them aside for talks, get to know them and their families.
The idea of shunting "behavior kids" into a corral, Zoom or otherwise, should be anathema to any educator. The kids need engagement, not isolation.
Amen!
Follow Texas Lege for more tips on doing fascism.
I always knew that librarians were sexy, but now that I know they are the evil phalanx set to destroy our great republic, am I wrong to now think they are the sexiest?
My school librarian IS sexy, but she had me at "smart and dedicated to the kids."
She really is great. I have known her for more than 20 years, since we were in a teaching program for language arts, which neither of us does (I am a sped guy). She does not wait for kids to come to her, either. She's a hunter-seeker!
Yep, sorry. I am a high school special educator, teacher and case manager.
Not a gig for everyone, but I like it.
I actually did a year at Kline Forest High School in Houston in the 80's and even then I was shocked to sit in a civic's class (back when there were civic's classes) where the teacher and students openly discussed the awesome times they had at KKK picnics and family events. Being one of those "coastal elites" (thank god) I was appalled. That was one of the worst years of my life between the racist teachers and the tobacco chewing wanna be cowboy rapists, I was willing to do anything to get out of there.
Thank their fucking Baby Jesus I am old and should be dead soon...
At 62, I find my thoughts wandering thither as well.
We are the same vintage! Feb. '61 here... (longtime cyclist too...)
I am not too humble to say that this summer marks my 30th year of being car-less.
My students sometimes ask "What will you do when you are 70, SCC?" And I tell them: "Get on my bike!"
I am August 1961, old timer!
I spent 30 years car-less and have nearly 20K miles under my belt as a self-contained bicycle tourist. More of a runner now and don't go to an office... Good work!
We are probably a pretty rare breed. Good on ye!
29K for me since 2012 (14 mi./day, 190 school days a year, 11 years). My commute was somewhat shorter than that previously.
“The science of reading “.
Can’t argle with that bargle
That's a bad person using the name of a good idea to pretend he gives a shit.
"Science of reading" is an important idea that is well past due. It's the notion that researchers should influence how ELA is taught.
It matters because teachers' colleges and thus most teachers resisted the massive amount of data that told us in the early 90s (through today) that most of the way reading is taught is exactly wrong and actually harmful. in-a-nutshell: Whole language, the dominant idea since Horace Mann started the whole "progressive education" movement, teaches a phonic language as though it were Chinese and pretends that phonic-based decoding lies in opposition to reading good lit. There's been like 100 years of that. When research started showing decades ago that whole language didn't work, they moved on to "balanced literacy," based on teaching all kids to read like bad readers do (i.e., guessing, with a soupcon of phonics).
Now that 30 years of knowing that was garbage have passed, finally MS had nothing to lose and actually started moving toward phonics for decoding and had sort of an unbelievable turnaround. And regular parents started noticing that rich parents were sending their kids to Kumon to learn phonics while our kids were losing out.
The reason this went on so long is that some kids actually do learn to read one way or the other, so the teacher theory was that 40 percent of kids are just not able to learn to read to fluency. But researchers suggest that that number goes to 5-10 percent if taught correctly.
There are other ideas to "science of reading"; the big one is providing kids with information-rich curriculum in all subjects, as having rich information alrleady in your brain improves reading comprehension dramatically. As opposed to the progressive edu model of teaching "thinking" without having any basis information to syncretize, because you can "just go look it up." Turns out that kids who know about baseball have better reaching comprehension of written pieces on baseball, as an example, because they don't have to go look up half the words and they already have a picture in their mind into which they can sort the new information they're reading.
So school systems have invested heavily in materials that don't support most kids learning well and they've invested in teachers who weren't trained to teach that way either, and in many cases are actually morally opposed to teaching that way.
SO yeah, there's actually a need for media specialists in many schools right now, and there's a tremendous monetary need to get the right materials and to train and even convince teachers to change course.
I'm not saying this guy is right to get rid of librarians, but "science of reading" was just his shield for his crap. We have decades of kids who can't read properly, and as a democratic nation, that's a very pressing issue.
That's one way to streamline the school-to-prison pipeline
I am currently a high school sped guy (in Oregon, thank Crom), but I have taught in juvenile detention as well as in the adult county jail and I sense that you are correct.
“ Houston ISD’s new superintendent, Mike Miles, announced his goal was to transition the district’s schools to using a “New Education System” (NES) modeled on that used by a network of charter schools he founded, as the Texas Observer explains:”
Let me guess, schools have to purchase all of their scripted materials from a company Miles also just happened to have founded.
Don't get hysterical. In a situation like this it's usually kickbacks.
I first read 'scripted materials' as 'scripture materials.' But given the context, I'm pretty sure both will apply.
Wild guess...
This guys was previously the superintendent of the metro Dallas area. There’s a Tribune article I can’t locate about how he ran this same scheme up there. Of course, the results were disastrous.
He's a real piece of work. I remember him.
Austin ISD has not been taken over by the State of Texas Reichsministeriat fur Ausbildung-yet. Special Ed in AISD is under state supervision, because there have been problems with them. There are problems because of staffing shortages. There are staffing shortages because the state won't give the district adequate funding. Property taxes are insane in Travis County trying to fund the schools.
While getting the ol' PhD, there was a bit of rivalry between the chem and physics grads over the ancient texts held by the university library the professors would use for homework problems. We'd have to return the bloody things every two weeks. So, I learned to remove the magnetic strips and just borrow them, forever-ish. Mind you, I returned them all at the end of the semesters. Nonetheless, libraries are how people teach themselves, the way it eventually turns out. This shit is going to backfire. Writing on the wall, and all that.