Vital Core Standard 1

Standard 1: Yourself

A) You  Students focus on familiarity with and an understanding of their own personal information, history, current situation, and how these things inform their approach to and interaction with others, their community and the world. Definitions, descriptions, measurements, experiences/projects all focus on building greater depth in these understandings.


B) Your Family   Students focus on familiarity with and an understanding of their family, guardians and living situation, and how these things inform their approach to and interaction with others, their community and the world. Definitions, descriptions, measurements, experiences/projects all focus on building greater depth in these understandings.

     The first of the Vital Core Standards focuses on the developing learner knowing themselves, their own strengths, and their own challenges. Progressing from the early stages of development and a focus on identity and self-awareness, expanding to integrating that self awareness into a pursuit of interest and building of skills that facilitate that pursuit.  For successful student outcomes the understanding of self is co-dependent with a understanding of the many community systems a developing learner and future citizen belongs to and participates in throughout their lives starting with their family and then moving onward to their own adult community and career choices.

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Goals, understandings, performance indicators

Pre K- 1st grade (K1)

1) Personal Identifying Information (K1.1)  

    

    Students will demonstrate knowledge of their full name, birth-date, address, phone number and contact information.

    Students will be able to describe the color of their eyes, their hair, the things that identify them physically. Students will

More vital and responsive core standards

Last November I was thinking about the common core standards movement. I love the idea of continuity, and a carefully scaffolded path that helps build on student skills, but the reform movement being carried by presumptuous standards (back-applied from some ephemeral "college and career" end point) have ignored the child and the true needs in learners and society. Our philosophy of education is no longer driven by the goals of strong society, sustained democracy and self-motivated learners. 

There is no philosophy of education in current education reform. Instead it's a corporate-driven standardization model meant to force public schools to fill in pre-defined slots where teachers and learners will serve the market. Masters of the market place loyal ambassadors in politics and policy to enforce their model upon the citizens, beginning with state agencies that must obey (like public schools)-even when policies come from those who know nothing of the job of teaching and obeying means going against much of what experienced educators know.

So I found myself thinking about the actual reform needed. We do need to refocus our efforts with students, but it cannot continue to serve the market that has already failed us. Anyone who believes that the 1% of our population holding 40% of the nation's wealth wait anxiously for workers to hire into careers and pay good middle class wages to is living in a fantasy world. We don't need to reform our schools to redouble efforts to churn out more victims to exploit in a speculative investors' economy, we need to create the creators. 

But first, we need to wake them up to themselves, their world, and the task ahead. We need to pull our families out of the spell of the market, and enable them to focus on themselves, their world, and not only what they can get out of it, but also what they can contribute to it. To prepare them for success as continually developing citizens we need the foundation of more socially focused academic goals.

Here is my original post about the standards I want to write.

At this point there are four. Standard number 1 is yourself, with the focus areas of : A) You (self) and B) Family.

As the student matures and progresses, their understanding about themselves progresses from the essential facts in the primary levels (name, address, phone number, birth-date...) to somewhat more complex understandings and self-reflections in middle-school and junior-high (their understanding of their own skills, their interests, their schedules and activities and how they'd like to further develop in them...) to more purposeful reflections about themselves as high-schoolers and young adults (what they know about themselves already and how they intend to use their skills and interests to further develop and contribute to their future and their family/community).  A similar progression can be used to develop an understanding of B) Family, but it is getting late. I want to flesh these out with better language and some performance indicators. If you have any good ideas for these, or any of the other 3 standards areas, please contribute. I think the names of actual public school educators, and parents/family members of public school students would be more impressive on a standards document. More so than political appointees and business people. All of the same academic skills we want students to have can be encouraged with these standards, technology and collaboration would be a must, and reform-the kind we really need, would likely be the result.

Help, or get out of the way.

Dear Mr. King, Bloomberg, Cuomo, Gates, Stephen Perry, Ms. Rhee...

     We don't need you to tell us how to teach, or what children need. The very fact that you don't actually seem to know yourself should be the red velvet rope that keeps you out of our way, watching if you want, snapping pictures if you'd like, but basically staying out of our business. We don't hide our kids in gated communities or well-funded private schools while we systematically destroy the schools other people's children attend (all the while criticizing the victims).

     We show how we care for the children of others every single day. All children-not just the ones we hope to measure and filter in a corporate/profit oriented system. So pitch in and take the shovel and sandbags we'll hand you, or get out of our way and just watch.

Some history and our present situation.

History

Lloyd Blankfein testifies that he deserves every damn penny
Goldman Sachs pays him for screwing investors.

     The current  attack on public schools had its beginnings in the financial crisis of 2008. At that time the blame for the economic woes of the nation had appropriately been pinned on the financial games and the players within the investment community. Everybody knew whose fault it was and that the people to blame had made out very well at the country's expense. There were congressional hearings, the country was hopping mad, and it was about time-thank you very much.
     Unfortunately, the tone of the game players was not apologetic, in fact it was dismissive. You got the feeling watching that they felt put out by this congressional hearing silliness, and that the way they do business is the industry standard...a "ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances" midway challenge. Little time was spent dealing with the fact that as industry insiders, the heads of big banks and finance industry insiders had not only been instrumental in designing the rules to be almost impossible to understand, they had designed it so they would win even when their customers and the economy lost.
     So we all lost. "Too big to fail" meant incredible amounts of taxpayer money went to bail out and prop up the institutions that had already abused their position and our trust. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008) authorized the U.S, Treasury to spend up to $700 billion to buy up distressed assets from financial institutions that found themselves heavily leveraged in a failing market. Those funds were then redirected to inject capital directly into those institutions. Finding themselves flush with taxpayer cash one of the first things they did was pay out executive bonuses. (Los Angeles Times, July 2010)

(A couple tidbits from that L.A. Times story):

• The Obama administration's pay czar on Friday came to the same conclusion about fat Wall Street bonuses that average Americans have already reached: There's no logic behind them, except greed.
•  There's simply no justification for multimillion-dollar bonuses that are paid out to people who were irresponsible," said Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), who this year proposed legislation levying a tax on bonuses of more than $50,000 at TARP recipients. The money would be used to increase loans for small businesses.

But this criticism and attention (and outrage?) dissipated quickly. When the occasional hard question about incredible salaries and bonuses paid to top executives in the financial sector arose, the response had something to do with the necessity to pay competitively in those fields to attract talent.

A good question would be talent to do what?





"The anger at these corporate subsidies was justified because breaks like these are a symbol of a budget process designed to shift money and power to people who already have too much of it"


     Ironically, public workers during this time came under attack for their salaries, benefits and pensions. It was the only move that could be made when it had become clear that policy makers were either unable/unwilling to address, or culpable in the abuses of our economy. Someone had to fry, and public workers with the pensions that were not only an obligation-a debt to be paid,  but a source of play-money were a strategically smart target.  And this is one of the most vital things to keep in mind:

As average Americans struggle more and more financially, a very purposeful effort has been made to avoid contrasting the wages and benefits of public employees with the segment of the upper class that controls an astronomical amount of wealth, continues to see its fortunes grow, and controls policy. Instead, the powerful have used the media to make the comparison between public workers and the "average American worker" who has struggled with stagnant or declining wages on an economic playing field tilted towards the wealthy. For the wealthiest, fostering resentment and suspicion between the classes below them has been their solution  to the potential danger that those citizens might unite with an agenda of social justice and equity.

Our Present Situation

   The promise of "hope and change" that we had been sold by candidate Obama has vanished in swirl of bailouts and an assault on public workers. Suddenly the public is responsible for repairing the damage done by the irresponsible behaviors within the banking, mortgage and investment community. The loss of jobs; the loss of value in our homes; the difficulty in securing financing for the simple projects or possessions that the average American hopes for: a new car; a home equity loan or refinancing... Portraying public workers and public schools as the significant economic burden worked as a blame shift away from the true culprits while the myths of  investors and job creators went only briefly examined. Time and time again politicians called for that "shared sacrifice" in these trying economic times-but they weren't usually speaking to the top 1-2 percent. They were signaling to everyone else that they would need to tighten their belts. 

Shared sacrifice, really? 

     These calls for shared sacrifice, criticisms of public workers pay, doomsday prophecies regarding social security...all  have been echoed repeatedly by news pundits with little real connection to the majority of citizens already victimized-now being told they should accept being further disrespected. 

     And more often than not, the word "unions" is attached to the narrative as if it is at best a quaint but outdated concept-at worst a parasitic scourge and job-killer. Even gentler assessments of unions and their purpose miss the point.

"The struggle between teacher's unions and conservative think tanks to influence educational policy is clearly a key battleground in the context of school reform." (Neoliberalism in the classroom: The political economy of school reform in the United States)


      It isn't about influencing "educational policy".

      In the same way that teachers and schools are supposed to be apolitical in the way they deliver an education and support learners inside the school and the school day, politicians should refrain from assuming an understanding of the job of teaching that they have not earned. It's about professional autonomy and the difference between a mission statement for teaching that we can all agree on, and one that is either loudly ill-defined or silently shameful. 

Common Core, Bill Gates, and Market-Rot

Shared with me on Facebook just a moment ago. This illustrates my suspicion of CCLS, and reluctance to accept statements of CCLS proponents at face value-even when those proponents are also supposed to represent the best interests of teachers. From the beginning, market worship has been the inspiration behind reform-not actual practitioner input and insight. Real teachers in real schools have seen the evidence of an eroding society suffering from market-rot in the condition of the children coming to school. Their economic condition, emotional condition, and moral condition. They know instinctively that the market cares only for itself, and we all hear it revealed in tidbits like "choice" and "competition".

Not "care".

Not "fair".

Never "whatever it takes to do the right thing".

Here is what was shared with me. I agree that common standards and goals would provide a useful continuity. But from step one, true practitioners have been ignored and false idols have been propped up and protected. We need to put an end to market rot and take those who promote it to task. We need to take our schools back. 

“When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well – and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching. For the first time, there will be a large base of customers eager to buy products that can help every kid learn and every teacher get better.” ~ BILL GATES

My italics

Is this an accurate quote? Did he really say this?