Dear America, We'll live to tell about it!

President Obama said: "We need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion. This isn't a matter of political correctness. It's a matter of understanding what makes us strong. The world respects us not just for our arsenal; it respects us for our diversity and our openness and the way we respect every faith."

In my personal opinion, the one thing President Trump doesn't understand that President Obama understood from day one is that America must be more than just another Alpha Dog. Top dogs come and go. What makes America unique is that we became a beacon of hope for all. Like any lighthouse beacon, we should also remember that the water is full of dangerous rocks; capable of sinking this ship of hope for all. White Nationalism places us in danger of becoming another sunken ship along the shores of falling nations.

Mr. President, it is not about our arsenal; it is about our openness, our diversity.  Close America's openness, paint diversity as the enemy, and we become just another temporary top dog until the next top dog comes along.

President Trump clearly doesn't get this. It is essential we understand that his time is limited, and his thinking will pass ~ just like this thinking has always passed.

Stick to the aspiration of something more America, make those pledge words real "Liberty and Justice for All". Trust me America, this man who doesn't understand will not last, like all the haters before him, he too shall fade; and we shall live to tell about it.
Come November 3rd.  2020, I am voting out the man who doesn't understand,

Jesse The Walking Man Turner
If you like, listen to the song that inspired my morning walk today.  It's Play For Change "I lived to tell about it" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpKNDN-5m7g

Education reform policies missing the data that really matters

Dear Education Reformers, Policy Makers, and Legislators, where is the data that really matters on your high stakes testing policies? 
If you tried to approve a new medicine or intervention treatment in the medical world, you are required to gather data by talking with patients, care providers, and family. 
This data is not considered soft data, but crucial data.
No medicine can make it to market with this data. There is the data that matters, and the data that really matters!
When did you ever ask children, parents, and teachers about the testing, the reforms, the school closings, moving art, music, and play out of the curriculum for test prep in schools of color? Your education reform took aways the things that mattered, and replace them with a Darwinism education reform policy that demanded unfunded schools compete against each other for limited resources.

You claimed you were giving Black and Brown parents a choice. Your choice left most of their children in more segregated and underfunded schools. Schools with less play, art, music, nurses, counselors, and tutors. Your reforms made billions for Wall Street CEOs, billions that should have been used to fund the arts, music, and wrap-around services needed in communities of color. 
Someone has to say it, your reforms are as deeply rooted in Structural Racism as those that existed before Brown Vs The Board of Education. 

Jonathan Kozol, (2006), wrote in The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America: “There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before.” 

I am calling this failure to collect the data that really matters. I say you did not collect it because you already knew that children, parents, and teachers would have told you. Their tears, their pain, and suffering would have shut you down.
I accuse you of education malpractice,
Dr. Jesse P. Turner
Professor of Literacy, Elementary, and Early Childhood Education 

If you like to listen to the song that inspired my morning walk today its Andra Day's Stand Up For Something" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GhY7qXGx-0

Assessment should not be something done to learners

This image may be old, but it still defines my work as a teacher today.
We are living in a time when assessment, learning, and teaching in our public schools is about measuring, quantifying, weighing, sorting, speeding things up, and labeling who is worthy, and who is to blame. Learners and teachers are living in a time of great damage. Where is the hope in this assessment game of blame?  I am not seeing it.
  

Something about assessment, teaching and learning that these number crunchers, education reformers, policymakers, and data chasers have not gotten. These data-driven people who say with certainty that our data defines what you are, and where you shall go. I have even heard some of these data chasers claiming to be able to see who is college-ready or not in grades one or two. It is in this kind of thinking that the race to nowhere begins. 

The Latin origins of the very term assessment are "to sit with". Think about it, it does not say 'to do to", it requires sitting with...it signifies sitting next to, and that to me indicates that assessment is a teaching and learning journey together. Both teachers and learners working together, growing together, each one part of something more powerful than some correct answer. No one knows how far a child may go, no test defines them, should limit them. Children are more than test scores.   

Assessment should be not your gate, but the path forward, and teacher and student should walk that path together, for we are in it together. Assessment should be about blame, but about hope. They have turned assessment into a game of numbers. A game of winners and losers, and if you accept their own data than surely you can see they are losing. 

I reject this shame and blame game. I see a path to hope not in their data, but on the faces of those I teach. The data that matters to me? Living and feeling learners who only request to their teachers is to guide them, walk a little with them and help them see more in themselves.
Children are more than test scores, teachers are more than data machines, and hope lives somewhere between the journeys taken together.   

Sincerely,
Dr. Jesse P. Turner 
CCSU Literacy Center Director 

If you want to listen to the tune that inspires my morning walk today...its Natalie Merchants 1995 song "Wonder" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zpYFAzhAZY

"Ooo, I believe, fate, fate smiled 

And destiny laughed as she came to my cradle 

Know this child will be able

Laughed as my body she lifted

Know this child will be gifted

With love, with patience, and with faith

She'll make her way, she'll make her way" ~ Wonder