My name is Clyde Gaw.
I have been a teacher for 30 years now.While
there are many reasons to vote for you, the education platform you have
embraced, predicated upon high stakes standardized testing is not one of them.
Let's be clear. There are two kinds of education in this
World. The first is to provide children with experiences that will educate them for greatness by optimizing the
development of their talents, gifts and innate capacities endowed to them through the forces of the Universe. The second form
of education can be seen in oppressed societies where totalitarian states
imprint onto the minds of children a narrow, select curriculum valued by the
state.
The keystone of current U.S. education policy, Race to the
Top and the proposed Common Core State Standards that will be accompanied with high stakes standardized tests, promotes such a narrowed curriculum. Children will
be forced to comply with non-consensual learning experiences and an
intensification of high stakes standardized testing. Teachers whose jobs are dependent upon their students test scores will be forced to teach to the
test and will have little opportunity to engage children in creative or multi-sensory
learning experience because the they will need to prepare children for the tests and cover material children will be tested on. RttT and CCSS ensures children are left outside the
decision making processes central to the learning activities they engage in. This is problematic and thousands of teachers have been telling you it is problematic but you keep ignoring them.
I
understand in order to promote the healthy mental and physical well being of
children, learning should be a joyful adventure and the acquisition of
knowledge should be vivid and engaging. Due to biological and environmental
conditions, every child has a unique cognitive structure. I have yet to meet a
class of children who are homogeneously constructed. One size does not fit all
and the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. Learning, fragmented
outside the strengths and interests of the child is doomed to be forgotten.
This
business about educational rigor and grit is a joke. Rigor is a buzz word for
radical behaviorism where children have no voice in curriculum decision making. As if the folks mandating radical behaviorism are going to
"stick it" to spoiled children who come from "white suburban moms."
Rigor for those folks who have not had experience practicing child centered education, is a boot strapping capacity developed "with" children, and anytime the experience is non-consensual, one risks disengaging children. Rigor is cultivated from the inside out and developed by engaging children in educational experiences through their interests and passions. What RttT proposes is an approach to rigor force fed from the top down by
an authoritarian state. Since when have we become enamored with top down
authoritarianism? Are we emulating the Chinese when it comes to educating our
children?
Teachers must be allowed flexibility and support in how they
deliver educational experiences. Children’s intellectual, imaginative and
psycho-emotional predispositions should be considered before the state’s
prescription for standardized learning experience is enacted upon them.
Children's minds are organic entities yet your mandates for high stakes testing
insure they will not have a voice in the learning activities they will be
compelled to participate in.
I was shocked to learn that Common Core architect David
Coleman, a literary scholar and corporate edu-entreprenuer with no background
in child development or classroom teaching experience, disdains emotional
connectivity to children’s learning. In a 2011 presentation to N.Y. Dept. of
Education officials, he made the statement, “People don’t give a ‘sheet’ what
you (students) feel or what you think (http://usny.nysed.gov/rttt/resources/bringing-the-common-core-to-life.html),”
describing his rationale for the de-emphasis of personal expression in the development
of language skills in the new Common Core. This statement provides insight
into Coleman’s view of children, teaching and learning. He infers that a steady
stream of non-consensual, depersonalized text oriented seat work is the remedy
to solve America ’s education crisis.
We know from Eric Kandel’s research that human beings are
biologically hard wired for multi-sensory learning experience. The idea that children’s passion’s for learning S.T.E.M. subjects is going to
be stimulated, while structuring learning experience around text laden
standardized test prep is not conducive to developing creativity or innovative
thinkers. Coleman’s anesthetic, layman's view of learning is simplistic at best where a
static cacophony of text based content can be plugged into children’s brains
without the learners consent with the expectation that long term memory
formation will occur.
Research is clear; learning that is transformative, that lasts for the learner's life time is developed
through emotional connectivity which requires teachers to use humanistic, holistic
approaches to learning. From my perspective we are witnessing further, the
marginalization of teacher, student and community voices in the determination
of educational processes central to the activities that take place in our
schools. Where is democracy at work in our educational system? Whose voices
determine what goes on in our schools?
It is disingenuous to suggest to the general public that the
Common Core will improve educational quality. How will it facilitate children's
receptivity and motivation to learn? It does nothing of the sort! What it will
improve is the ability of high stakes test publishers and their corporate
counterparts throughout the country to see how well children are able to take
timed, stress inducing tests. Parents and children are duped by a steady flow
of misinformation and propaganda from a U.S. corporate mass media industry
intent on duping the general public that high stakes testing and the narrowed
non consensual educational experience which accompanies it is a good thing.
Under your presidency, we have seen American Public Education undergo a crisis
of funding and a crisis of leadership and a crisis of morale. U.S. public
education is best left to the parents and citizens who inhabit the myriad of
public school districts across the country and to the expert professional
teachers who know, work and teach daily with their students.
Assessment should be done in the service of the learner, not
test publishing companies who do not know the children. How much money have we
spent on high stakes testing and CCSS? Billions....and for what? Data points?
Our country and planet are in economic, environmental and biological crisis and
your administration's strategy to prepare the next generation to solve this
wicked problem is multiple choice questions on high stakes tests?
Preparing the next generation of STEM professionals must
include creativity development, trans-disciplinary and multi-sensory learning
experiences, yet art and music programs have been cut throughout the country.
This will lead to further failures of imagination.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the
United States has the highest rates of mental illness in the industrialized
world. What are the common experiences of the American People that would cause
such conditions? Might toxic stress induced in the formative brains of children
have anything to do with this statistic? What are the affects of toxic stress
induced on children due to non consensual learning experiences? I submit to you
that learning is not just about what we are putting into the minds of children.
Learning is what is happening to the brain during the learning process. Each
child will learn what he/she lives. He/she will learn educational content to the degree that he/she
lives educational content. Mandate test taking and you will have developed a nation of test takers.
Radical behaviorism, the national pedagogy you have mandated for our Nation's
teachers is not the way to develop the full capacities of our youngest
citizens.
I submit to you, the current direction of education reform,
predicated upon high stakes testing as embraced by Secretary Duncan subverts
the teaching and learning process and is detrimental to the natural development
of children who attend public schools in the United States.
Sincerely,
Clyde Gaw
