Washblog

(Applause) Thank you Dana for that warm welcome. You know--Dana and I go back a few years, and one thing we have always fought for is a vision of schools that takes us beyond merely responding to the crisis of the moment. Dana has asked me here today to speak before the Thundering 36th (hoots, cheers)--she asked me to speak about my vision for schools in the 21st century.

In my experience as a teacher, who comes from a family of teachers, and in my experience as a legislator, I know that our schools need more than just the latest technology--though that's important--and they need more than just smaller classroom sizes--though that's important, too. We--and I mean all of us--we need to see our schools as learning communities within communities. Our children don't grow and learn just within the four walls of the school. They learn within their neighborhood, within their city, within their country, and on the planet. Schools should be refuges where children feel safe enough to discover their own talents, take risks, be creative and learn about the world they live in. These refuges, like a wetland in a forest, belong to the community they're surrounded by.

In our schools, children should learn the practices they'll need for the 21st century. They should be able to set up an experiment like a scientist, write for creative expression and practical clarity, practice an art form, speak an extra language or two, research like a historian, engage as a citizen, and do the math they need for a career or college. The world we're sending our young people into is profoundly multicultural. I say profoundly because the cultures of the globe are not just represented in our neighborhoods; pieces of cultures live within each of us. I'm a white, middle-class city guy. But I also have within me something from African American, Italian, German, Spanish, Jewish, Muslim, Christian and any number of other cultures.

What do I want to see when I enter a school of the future? I want children's voices to be central to the life of the school. Their projects, poems, photos, achievements, biographies, artworks, graphs, charts should on the walls and in the halls. Children should not only work quietly when it's appropriate, they should also work together on projects, exercise every day, do presentations, interview their peers and adults, create magazines, conduct experiments, measure and analyze their world. They should be active, and their teachers should be active. The isolation of the teacher must end--they should have the time and freedom to team-teach, collaborate on projects, inspire each other with new ideas. The members of the community--guest speakers, parents, volunteers--should be present in the school, and the school should be present in the community. We're teaching our students about the world, and so they should learn within it--not only on traditional field trips to museums and mountains, but also on service-learning projects, like advocating bills in Olympia or rebuilding migrant living quarters.

We should all want our children to be good citizens. In the fall, seniors should work on campaigns of their choice. We need a resurgence of civic engagement that starts with our young people. There is simply no way to tackle our deeply-structured societal problems without their help. I can't believe it's 2011, and we've yet to close the achievement gap. Some politicians act like it's a matter of putting a few computers in a few schools. Yes, African American and Hispanic children need computers, but they also need trained teachers to help them use today's technology as part of larger projects, like creating a student publication or analyzing data from a scientific experiment. And as the latest round of class-action suits against the WASL has shown, high-stakes testing doesn't work. Various children have various learning styles, and teachers should adapt their teaching methods to their multicultural classrooms instead of trying to force their multicultural classrooms to adapt to a flawed, resource-sucking test.

Classrooms--and meeting halls--have all kinds of personalities. We are intuitive or analytical or emotional or expressive or contemplative or gregarious or hyper-organized or perceptive or easy-going--you name it. We need not only a range of learning styles in our classrooms, but a range of teaching styles. We need brilliant teachers for gifted students, and we need brilliant teachers for students with learning disabilities and physical handicaps. We must understand the painful world some of our children live in and help them come into themselves. We must have the courage to see as they do and help them discover their own latent gifts.

And that's ultimately what I'm talking about. Our dream--our lofty dream--should be to unleash the full-flowering of human capability. With our troops bogged down on three fronts and our economy in deep recession, I know this sounds impossible. I know we fear the loss of freedoms and the ruin of our civilization. But where we begin is with our youth. Their flowering is our flowering. Their community is our community. And their humanity is our humanity. For in them we will find our hope for a more decent, more humane world. In them, we will find ourselves and our way to the future.

Peace. Thank you. (Applause.)

My view is that the governor's most recent proposal to spend $197 million on math and science education will only exacerbate that spending inequities. This proposal, as I've said, flows directly out of the Washington Learns report, which was supposed to address the question of education financing, as outlined by the legislation that enabled the report. Instead, the governor, as I contend, has delayed final recommendations for education financing until after the 2008 election. Here is what Russ Lehman has to say about the Washington Learns report and related issues:

You can't fool all the people all the time. The use of blue-ribbon committees to stall the inevitable may buy you a little time, but that's it. The unremarkable Washington Learns study group was the last straw for many districts. The group spent $800,000 on an economic study that was then ignored, buried and "peer reviewed" by well-known adversaries of the original authors (also at taxpayers' expense). Then, the committee ran away from its finding that a substantial state investment is essential for our education system. Even the judge in the special education litigation felt compelled, after first holding out hope that significant recommendations would be forthcoming, to reject the state's stall tactics on the grounds that the committee was not likely to yield meaningful results.

Lehman makes an interesting allusion to the "special education litigation." I'm not familiar with this case, but one of my professors recently said that she believes the "special needs" community will also be bringing suit over the WASL. As I understand it, the issue at work is the state's testing of students with learning disabilities and its failure to accommodate more than a percentage of those students. Anti-WASL activists, such as Mothers Against WASL, has long predicted the state will get hit with class-action suits when passing the WASL becomes a graduation requirement.

The general principle at work here is that if the governor and legislature don't make sensible education policy, then the courts will be drawn in to make the decisions the politicians didn't have the courage to make.

(should the world be like this? no.

yawn. )

Tests ... tests... tests.

I hated the fact that the SAT was THE gateway over 30 years ago when I was a teenager ... yawn. What has changed?  ummmm...

thousands of edu-crats have been paid for 30+ years to make things work better,

and, btw, they were paid way better than I was ever paid as a cook / chef for 20 years,

and we are still stuck with SAT and WASL and and

curriculum that doesn't prepare them for the test or competing or thinking.

why are any of those people employed?

BTW, on tests.

life is a test.

stick your tongue in an electric socket & get fried.  wear dark clothes in the middle of I-5 in a rainstorm at night & get run over.  

beat the next guy / gal with the good idea or ... work for them!

Ideally, we wouldn't need a motivator of

"hey mr./ms. screw off freshman ... you are going to be going to night school in 2 years cuz you won't have a junior's worth of credits, AND

you'll be taking 3 math classes to pass WASL cuz you wasted so much freaking time since you were in middle school that you missed whatever was good about our education system."

anyone got any ideas they are gonna PAY for? No?

o.k. professional pontificators - get thee to a school of education, or, work in some headquarters issueing edicts.

I agree with so many of your points DWE, but

I haven't seen ANYONE cost out the implementation of idea x,y,z  

and how the hell are we gonna get the money to implement the great idea if we don't know the details and the costs?

I actually skimmed the Washington Learns report - with the page down key.  

If I did not see any math, I did not stop, so I skimmed in about 1 or 2 minutes.

I'll try again.

rmm.

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