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Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Born to be a man on a bridge over troubled waters


Ireland's Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw said: "I want to be all used up when I die.”
Tell it on every town green, every street corner, shout it from every mountaintop.
I want to be used up when I die on that bridge for equality for all,
I want to be used up when I die on that bridge for paying working people a living wage,
I want to be used up when I die on that bridge for equality and justice in our public schools,
I want to be used up when I die on that bridge for justice for all,
I want to be used up when I die on that bridge for voting rights,
I want to be used up when I die on that bridge fighting for human rights.
Born to be a man standing on a bridge,
Jesse The Walking Man Turner




If you are wondering what this walking man listened to on his walk through the snow this morning...it's Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge over troubled water"
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjNgn4r6SOA <

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

If we can't stand for children, teachers & public schools then we can't stand for anything!


If we oppose high stakes testing,
If we oppose children as data points,
If we believe that children are more than test scores,
If we oppose public schools for sale,
If we oppose the Common Core,
Then we will do everything possible to join others in Washington DC for the Save Our Schools Coalition: March For Public Education and Social Justice this July 8 at the Lincoln Memorial.
We are marching to take back our schools.
It's time to save your nickles and dimes,
It's time to plan your trip to DC,
Trust me it matters,
Jesse The Walking Man Turner
PS If we can't stand up for our children, their teachers and public schools, then we can't stand for anything!

If you want to know what this walking man is listening to on his morning walk....it's Tracy Chapman's version of the Dylan classic "The Times Are A Changing"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCZWv5U5wJ4




Tuesday, January 19, 2016

The potential of literacy should be more than proficiency levels

Everyone agrees teaching children to read is important. What we don't agree on is how we measure our success. Our policy makers and political leaders view accountability as cut off scores on standardized measures. They like quantifiable measures, neat little numbers that box literacy into perfect little boxes.
The problem with this type of accountability is it misses the point that what we read and write about has the potential to make us more empathic, more caring, more open, and better human beings.
I recognized the kind of man I wanted to be in the ninth grade when we read Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird. I saw it right there on the page in one
Atticus Finch. “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what."
What if rather than choose either A, B, C, D, or none of the above, we chase something greater than something quantifiable? What if we realized the real power of reading and writing can't be boxed into proficiency levels.
What if the goal is to read and write to build character, to value freedom and to care for our neighbors and ourselves?
Imagining something bigger than little boxes,
Dr. Jesse Patrick Turner
If you want to listen to what I was listening to on my walk this morning....it's "Teach Your Children" by Crosby Stills,
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztVaqZajq-I <

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

The National Save The Date for a call to action for public education and social jusitce

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The National Resistance Save The Date Event of 2016
Save Our Schools: Coalition for Action July 8 - July 10 2016 Washington DC the Lincoln Memorial.

Many thousands of us gathered on July of 2011 for the Save Our Schools March and Call to Action. We assembled to state our grievances about the state of public education and to share our visions for the future. In that moment, we were the canaries in the coalmine – sickened by an unresponsive political process and its dehumanizing policies. We became the impetus for change, and we took to the streets in solidarity to make it clear:

We who believe in freedom cannot rest,
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes. ~ Ella Baker

In 2011 we nurtured, supported, and committed to each other and to our children. We have not rested since. We have organized demonstrations, sit-ins, and strikes. We have resisted, written, called, tweeted, blogged, posted and re-posted, sang, spoken, and opted out of high-stakes testing all in our collective struggle for humane public schools and policies.

Coalitions are building and the movement is growing. We are parents and teachers, students and seniors, scholars and community organizers, urban and rural, immigrants and native-born, gay and straight, black, brown, and white realizing that more than ever, we have a common narrative based on democracy, the human right to education and economic and social justice that goes beyond our organizational silos, as important as those silos may be…

It is time to celebrate five years of common struggle and the growth that we have wrought. It is time to march again!!!

SOS, BATs, UOO, NPE, NCUEA, CELT, NEA BAT Caucus, and The Opt Out Florida Network are working with numerous organizations to build a broad coalition of like-minded people – from all walks of life and with diverse causes – to speak and march in solidarity July 8-10 in Washington D.C. We envision actions and festivities for children and adults, which foster awareness and to celebrate democracy by living it. It is an election year, and there can be no better time to show our government and our fellow citizens, “This is what democracy looks like!”

Details are developing each day on this massive event, so join us, support us, and sign up for email updates!

In solidarity,

The Save Our Schools: Coalition for Action Committee


Now be there, or be square!

If you like to listen to what this Walking Man is Listening on his walk today...it's Bob Marley's Stand up for your rights  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5Qda2HS7X0


The Walking Man Looking Back and Forward: The Struggle Continues


My New york City BK Nation Panel Talking Points for 01/06/16
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Dr. Jesse Patrick Turner Professor of Reading Language Arts at Central Connecticut State University. My BK Nation Talking Points for a call to action to save our public schools and the children who attend them.  (01/06/16)
On Standards, standardized assessments, and College readiness                                                         
In the nineteenth century America’s academic elites feared American students were not college-ready. Thus in 1892 The National Education Association created the “Committee of Ten” to create uniform college admission requirements based on new content standards using common entrance exams.  From the beginning the standards established America’s wealthy, powerful, and connected were never rooted in principles of democracy or morality, but on content knowledge measured through uniformed testing. These are not innovative, or unique, and have a long history of education reform failures.


Inequality matters, and we can't test our way out of inequality   Let us include standards obsession with our history of school inequity. In 1896 four years after America’s love for standards found itself further supported by Plessey v Ferguson. Establishing segregation as the law of the land for nearly 6 decades. In 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education ended jurisprudence segregation. For the first time in public education history the wealthy, the powerful and the connected status quo found their policies threatened. Hiding behind their trusted mantra of “standards and exam uniformity” gave cover to “de facto” segregation and inequality in our nation’s public schools. With the passage of the “Every Student Succeeds Act” in 2015, America continues down that same old 100 years of failed education reforms.



Assessment and education: First Do No Harm, Second Sit Beside Learner Assessments, and Third All learners Must benefit from Education Reform Experiments.

Our assessment framework is broken. The current assessment framework does not need to be fixed we need a completely new human assessment framework. There are many interesting factors about America’s love affair with standards and uniform assessments. This love affair is of course rooted in the power of assessment, evaluation, test selection, and data-driven instruction. The most compelling part of the narrative lost is a perspective on the data that really count; namely the health, and well-being of children. In medicine, doctors and researchers insist on primum non nocere, (first do no harm).  However, in educational assessment, such ethical requirements seem lost in pressures to meet standards and make Annual Yearly Progress, (AYP).       

If we impose a testing requirement for high school graduation that ensures a student fails, where is the benefit? State Exit Assessments like the New York Regents illustrate the data that count how many students met the standard. The data that really matters needs to be recovered in misdirected attention to standards). What about the students who passed their entire high school classroom-based assessments? What about all the students who succeed in gathering all the high school course requirements? Many empirical studies have shown strong correlations between test scores and factors such as family income, parents' education, single-parent families, and school enrollment.  Simply put, children who have two educated parents who are economically secure are much more likely to do better on the tests than children who do not have the same assets.  Why give an assessment that disfavors the children of poor single-parent homes?


The Latin root of the word assess, assidere, means to sit beside.  Educators who are closest to the child, and who sit beside the child on a daily basis, derive the most informative data.  It is essential that these very same educators make the decisions about test selection and evaluation reporting.  It is the teacher who can read the social, emotional, physical, cultural, linguistic, and cognitive characteristics of the learner. Human subject ethics for research requires strict adherence to “Beneficence” Research should have a positive impact on all participants in any trial.  In 2023, teachers are the ones with crucial professional knowledge and are closest to children in school. What do policymakers, legislators, and administrators do? They ignore the voices of teachers, just like they ignore the voices of children. They bow to CEOs, podcasters, and anyone ready to profit off our children. We not only have Reading Wars, Math Wars, and a never-ending war on the professional knowledge of teachers.  Until the center of public education places creativity, joy, inquiry, and love as the center of education, I expect this war on our children, teachers, and local schools to go on.                             

My conclusion is framed by perceived pressures from NCLB/ESSA’s focus on meeting standards that are not based on the ethical principles of research. Is assessment and evaluation meant to be cold, heartless, and disconnected from primary stakeholders or is it supposed to contain a wellness or instructional component? Is there no court of appeals for children, parents, teachers, and local schools in this new era of accountability? Is the focus of educational reform the disenfranchisement of those closest to our children? We need to study why we are following a top-down assessment model that ignores the patients (students), doctors (teachers), parents, and family. News headlines inform the general public that the United States is in danger of falling behind on international assessments. Policy-makers tell us that the United States test scores reveal we are falling behind in international educational comparisons.  The 2010 Brown Center Report on American Education, How Well Are American Students Learning, debunked two myths of international assessments; 1) that the US ever led the world on tests of achievement, and 2) that Finland leads the world in education. According to the Brown report Finland scores near the top on the PISA assessment, but not on other international assessments. Historically the US has led internationally in Nobel Prizes in every Nobel category. The US is near the top in number of patents granted. When policymakers say we are falling behind they are looking at test scores obtained by measuring individual performance to a contrived standard. Contrived Standards and standardized assessments ignore the collection of information based on individual progress, growth, and achievement.   Assessment and evaluation rooted exclusively in formal standardized summative measures is too narrow and has nothing to do with actual indicators of economic success or competitiveness.


The quest for a Nation Balanced Assessment Framework begins by understanding humanity can never be defined by any standardized assessment.
It is essential to include the voices of all stakeholders; students, teachers, parents, and pupil services. What we present here is a balanced assessment framework that views assessment as a photo album of performance over time, designed to provide a clear, unobscured, picture of the whole child. Any Balanced Assessment photo album should contain numerous examples of authentic learning performance indicators. Standardized learning is not an authentic measure of a student’s ability to learn. Standardized measures have never been indicators of learning ability.  The concept of looking at the whole child is formative, humane, just, and more likely to yield information that recognizes the potential, innate talents, and gifts of each child while respecting parents, teachers, and local schools. The essential question is: When will our leaders start looking at the photo album of America’s children rather than deficit-driven competitive notions based on their fears of unpredicted futures.  It’s simple people? Where is the humanity in your standards and assessments?
References

Brown Center on Educational Policy at Brookings (2010). The 2010 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning? Available at http://www.brookings.edu/brown



Important Additional Resource/links


The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law “failed badly both in terms of its own goals and more broadly,” leading to a decade of educational stagnation. That is the central conclusion of a major new report marking NCLB’s tenth anniversary. President George W. Bush signed the program into law on January 8, 2002. > http://fairtest.org/NCLB-lost-decade-report-home

For a more intensive of my view on Balanced Assessment see: Jesse P. Turner, John D. Foshay, and Ernest Pancsofar (2013). Toward a More Balanced Assessment Framework. Edited Daniel Mulcahy. Transforming Schools: Alternative Perspectives on School Reform (chapter 6):IAP, Charlotte, NC.


For my role as an activist you can email me turnerj@ccsu.edu, or follow my blog on the web http://childrenaremorethantestscores.blogspot.com/


An after-the-event picture of our Amazing BK Nation Panel, but the real stars of this evening were our audience of mainly Black parents and teachers and some White parents as well. Tonight it was not about my child or my school, it was about the collective whole...it was about defining the we, the resistance to the status quo of 15 years of failing standards, assessments, and school choice without equity. This audience defined opting out as not merely refusing the test, but as opting out for justice.
This audience was full of BK Nation Superstars, parents, and teachers all informed, willing, and able to fight for rights. Notice in the center now Congress Member Jamaal Bowman
Love every single one of them. You can find his more teaching less testing bill at https://bowman.house.gov/_cache/files/8/9/89180377-ee4a-4906-b170-f4ee28d3602e/0D579FD78ABAA89748EA157D3F31CAB1.more-teaching-less-testing-act-bill-summary.pdf  Everyone on the panel is still in the fight for the public schools our children, teachers, and families deserve. 

If you want to listen to the song this walking man is listening to this morning on his cold, cold walk over the mountain....it's Bachman Turner Over Drive's "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99lyU5N--f8

Friday, January 1, 2016

My 2016 Walking Man Resolution of Resitance to 124 years of failed education reforms



In 2014 Dean Paton Executive Editor of YES magazine wrote an important piece about the roots of privatization taking over our public schools. Two years later it is well worth the read people. http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/the-myth-behind-public-school-failure His is a brief history of education reform since 1980.

However the roots of privatization go back over a hundred years. We can't separate commerce from wealth and power. What if there is a method to the insanity of returning to the same failing policies over and over again?
In the nineteenth century America’s academic elites feared American students were not college-ready. Thus in 1892 The National Education Association created the Committee of Ten to create uniform college admission requirements based on new content standards using common entrance exams.  From the beginning the standards established America’s wealthy, powerful and connected were never rooted in principles of democracy or morality, but on content knowledge measure through uniformed testing. 
Now let us include standards obsession with our history of school inequity. In 1896 four years after America’s love for standards found itself further supported by Plessey v Ferguson. Establishing segregation as the law of the land for nearly 6 decades. In 1954 Brown v the Board of Education ends jurisprudence segregation. For the first time in public education history the wealthy, the powerful and the connected status quo found their policies threatened. Hiding behind their trusted mantra of “standards and exam uniformity” gave cover to “de facto” segregation. Now standards and testing uniformity policies continued to make our public schools segregated and unequal places of learning.
I have come to accept that after 124 years inequity in our public schools “equity” was never the goal for America’s children. Justice for all was never the goal in America Public School System, but the path of least resistance towards maintaining a public school system that maintains the status quo.  Over a hundred years of education reform policies that amount to meaningless slogans that do nothing to lift all Americans. If you are not one of the wealthy, the powerful, the connected your right to a free public education is not rooted in the great good, your good, but the good of the status quo. Every Student Succeeds Act 2015 is just more of the same old 100 years of failed education reforms.
Sir James Matthew Barrie author of Peter Pan said: "Failure is the path of least resistance." Their method is clear it's has always been about keeping us working people down on their farms of servitude.
Our path from servitude remains the path of greater resistance.  
My Walking Man 2016 resolution is to step up my fight against inequity and injustice in our public schools.
If high stakes testing goes away?
I’ll still be marching.
If the standards go away?
I’ll still be marching.
Tell it in every town center in the land,
Tell it on city street corner,
And shout it from every mountaintop...
This Walking Man is marching until equity and justice are realities for every child in America’s public schools.
Equity and justice are my standards,
Jesse The Walking Man Turner

If you happen to be in New York City on January 6, 2016 come join this Walking Man, his fellow panelists, and BK Nation as we continue our fight for equity and justice in our public schools.

If you like to hear the song the Walking Man was listening to on his walk...Barry Finch's singing the song he wrote to honor my 2015 Walk to DC. "Come Join The Walking Man Band"
it's https://soundcloud.com/jo-lieb/the-walking-man