I don’t trust this guy. He looks like he means to make mischief of one kind or another. Photo by M. Severson

Any good parent will tell you they can’t make their children behave, but what they can do is make them want to behave. They can make them imagine the consequences of not behaving in a certain way and choose to do what is safest for their continued happiness.

Teachers will tell you teaching is not like that.

This is where teaching and parenting part ways. Teachers can develop dire outcomes to aberrant behaviors in many faceted forms and children will still choose the wrong path, no matter our resistance.

So that’s it, fine, we have no recourse, if children don’t want to learn, we can’t make them. It’s over, give up.

No, that’s why we have teachers.

What teachers can do, if fact what many teachers are really good at, is they can make children ready to learn. This is the penultimate divergence between parenting and teaching. Teachers check to see what skills children have before they try to teach them something. They evaluate student learning styles to see how the child processes new concepts and how best they internalize new ideas and teachers strive to make the learning of the material understandable and interesting so that the child is intrigued by the thought of pursuing it further.

Teachers spend most of their time preparing children so they are ready to learn, it is what they do.

Ready to learn. What an epiphany!

Our focus in education over the last few years has been directed at setting the curriculum (read test) and forcing the child to learn it or else. “Learn this or fail!” has been a hollow mantra that has resulted in increased frustration and growing despair among students and teachers alike.

Imagine if our cynosure was the child, themselves. What if we chose instead to ensure that the child had all they needed to be ready to learn before we demanded that they do it?

If you are working on your car would you get up in the morning and throw up the hood without first gathering tools, identifying the problem, making sure you had parts and perhaps even fixing yourself a cup of coffee to help ameliorate your mood at being forced to pursue the activity in the first place? No, you want to be prepared.

We owe our children at least this courtesy. Make sure they are ready to learn before we ask them to learn. Provide the stability and security of the freedom from hunger, disease, poverty or fear and then offer the enrichment of exposure to all the developmental prerequisites necessary to make the child feel confident they are prepared and yes, even eager to learn.

Throughout my career as a reluctant scholar I was not always a diligent student but I was usually well-behaved. I didn’t get into trouble very often. Well, there was that incident with Roger Glen Hayes, my best friend, where we were doing something that was prohibited. But in my defense, I had recently turned five and we were in kindergarten. The two of us simply couldn’t resist the lure of playing “man on raft chased by alligators” with the big wooden blocks just one more time. And as a result we paid dearly for our transgressions; we were both severely dealt with, consequences including corporal punishment.

But that was a very different place and an even more distant time.

Today teachers are facing classrooms loaded with young children who have grown up with computers, flat-screen high-definition TVs, phones that are packed with enticing games and handheld toys that imitate life in extreme forms. Those same teachers are charged with competing with these entertaining mediums and gaining the full attention of their students.

While both student and teacher are pursuing engaging and interesting activities, those activities are in many ways not the same for each group. They both want to experience learning but the direction of that learning is often at cross purpose.The teachers want depth and focus, the students want excitement and interest, who will succeed?

If this makes modern American public education sound like a war — welcome to the battlefield.

Students and teachers can have different agendas. When their expectations are at odds with each other this causes conflict. Additionally, our teachers are under attack from non-professionals judging their results and questioning their motives. That engenders still more confusion, self-doubt and in the end many teachers simply give up and look for easier employment elsewhere.

But those hardy few who are sticking it out are looking for answers. Child study and psychological evaluation are some methods that educators turn to to try and assess the student’s learning potentials. Often when children are evaluated for behavior issues that interrupts learning for them and sometimes even more importantly their peers’ learning, the question of medication raises it’s oft-contested head.

An article in EdWeek by Nancy Rappaport seeks to address this issue. She argues that while:

“Education reform does not come from introducing Ritalin into the cafeteria lunches of poor schools.”

She also recognizes that when there is something wrong:

“Many teachers do not get the support they need on how to work with children struggling with mental-health problems. Too often, teachers enter the classroom ill-equipped to respond to students’ challenging behaviors: their refusal to do work, defiance of teacher authority, persistent arguing, or, in the words of one principal I know, their ability to go from “zero to 100 in a split second.”1)

Personally I was never a fan of medication for behavior issues but along with many of my colleagues I have seen an alarming increase in disruptive and distracted behavior in classrooms which makes the job of teaching the rest of the class while dealing with such interruptions something approaching critical mass.

So what is the answer?

Another article by Caralee Adams suggests one solution may lie in “character education”. Character education involves training for teachers and students that  focuses on appropriate social interaction for everyone in the school. At its heart the concept seeks to instruct and develop responsible personal conduct in school environments. Recent data from some schools suggests that embedding character education as part of an overall school culture may significantly decrease misbehavior and help support key values such as “respect and ownership”. It may also help decrease incidents of ‘bullying behavior’. 2)

Some might say that schools are not charged with raising children, merely educating them. Most teachers would probably agree but find themselves looking for parental strategies as much as instructional. Spending time teaching character education takes valuable minutes away from core objectives.

Though there have been other detractors of the concept of “character education”, Adams states:

“A 2011 meta-analysis of school-based social and emotional learning programs published in “Child Development” found significant improvements in academic achievement, behavior, and attitudes compared with control groups.”

One new factor that may seemingly be driving this idea of character education and other solutions to classroom management issues, is the adoption by many states of the Common Core standards. Inherent in the CCS are critical thinking and synthesis, skills that demand focus and attention to learning.

However, even if the idea of ‘character education’ offers some serious hope for solutions to mis-behavior it is my belief that there is still a glaring problem. That problem is with all the financial cuts that have occurred to education, our schools are now significantly lacking in necessary support personnel who can identify and help treat the most radical behaviors. Counselors, social workers, even psychologists and indeed, teachers have been decreased to the extent that those who are left in schools are virtually unable to take on one more mandate; which is what adding a new set of lessons that focus on additional skills would amount to; no matter how valuable they may be.

Imagine sending one out of every five firefighters home and then asking the ones who remain to continue to do their job just as they have and take on the new task of counseling the populace in fire safety standards. By diverting resources from the service we would invariably be less protected from future hazards.

Fires are already burning and they are in our schools, threatening great swaths of valuable resources, our children and subsequently our own futures. There is no panacea beyond attention to the needs of children to allow them to become effective learners. You can’t be expected to learn if you are hungry, sick, angry or tired. And you can’t be expected to learn if you are consumed by actions that are beyond your control.

We must clear the way to allow teachers to teach and students to learn but even more, we must encourage that teaching and learning.

Once again I am left saying, while proposed ideas such as ‘character education’ are all well in an idyllic world and possibly helpful in practice, unless we commit ourselves as a nation to fully support our children, their families, their schools and their education, we are talking about yet another unfunded mandate.

1) http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/02/27/22rappaport.h32.html

2) http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/02/27/22character.h32.html

Erik W. Robelen, co-author of the blog “Curriculum Matters”, writes about a coming trend in education. (1) Many states are trying to do away with social promotion. Social promotion is the practice of sending a child to the next grade because they have been in class another year, without focusing if they are ready. As an educator I am as much in favor of getting rid of social promotion as the legislators appear to be. But I believe they are going about it entirely the wrong way. As usual with these types of solutions, it is much too simplistic.

The intent of most of the legislation is to put in place a “third grade limit” to social promotion. You can be promoted in kindergarten, and in first grade and in second grade even if your reading scores are not up to par but when you hit third grade your free ride is over — time to grow up and read.

This suggest a dangerous precedent to educators: a wall in third grade that will lead to clogging of classes at that grade and less success instead of more.

Educators know that all children do not read at the same age. They will tell you some who come into kindergarten have deciphered the great mystery and are already reading. My first daughter was one of those (2 ). Others don’t get it until first grade is well into the year, like my second daughter. Then there are those that are not ‘in the know’ until much later — like me.

What is important about this is that the person who best knows when that child will read is their teacher. They are the one working with that child on a daily basis, the ones seeing what progress is made, however incremental. Legislators are right to be concerned about the issue of children being able to read by a certain point in their school careers but they also have to be willing to work with the experts in the field to equitably do away with social promotion.

As a teacher I have retained children in grade. I have to admit that I am not a real strong proponent of how it should be employed. I tend to err on the side of time and encouragement. But I can look back on those children that I have retained in grade and say that I am two for three. Two out of every three that I retained were successful the next year. As a former baseball player I think that’s a pretty good batting average.

If I may be so bold as to tell legislators what I think their legislation in re education and retention in grade should look like, I would propose this: empower teachers by removing age as a criteria for placement and promotion.

Rather than setting a grade level as being the ‘end’ so to speak, I would facilitate the end to social promotion by taking away the expectation.

We are currently in the process of establishing nationwide standards for each grade level. This is long overdue. A child in second grade in Mississippi should be learning the same basic skills as a second grader in Arizona so that if one moves from one state to the other, the transition is less troublesome.

By removing age as a criteria, a child would move from grade to grade by completing the standards for that grade, not by having a birthday. The teacher would have to focus on teaching children on an individual basis more by maintaining portfolios. Testing would be reduced to progress monitoring on an individual basis, not stigmatizing whole classes. That would mean that states would have to fund education so that teachers had a reasonable number of children to work with to allow for the increased follow-along. Support would also have to be offered to assist those struggling by offering them tutoring and small group instruction. I would also look at the way classes are established more closely and encourage multi-grade class designations. Classes like Primary K-1 or Intermediate 4-5 might make more sense. This would also call for smaller class sizes to be enacted.

Certain caveats would need to exist. As a developmental educator I would retain the idea of being five years old as a minimum for entry though I would allow testing of four-and-a-half year olds. I would mandate preschool on at least a part-time basis and by this I do not mean, mini-academies, I refer to PRE-schools that focus on large motor development and socialization through play. These are areas that all primary educators recognize are sadly lacking in many of our current students.

I would also continue the long-standing practice of no double retention in schools. That is to say I would not want to see a thirteen year old in fifth grade. If a child has been retained in one grade in elementary school, they should not be retained again in that school. Inability to complete grade level objectives more than one year in six would suggest that educators and support professionals need to offer more specialized assistance to a student, not simply make them do it over again. Finally, I would ask that parents and legislators realize this is not about failure — it is about success. Our goal should not be to punish the student for struggling to learn but to celebrate their progress toward learning more. This can only be accomplished through adequate funding and a renewed dedication to the idea that educational professionals not only understand what they are doing but are the best ones to frame how they do it.

(1) http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/03/28/26retention_ep.h31.html

(2) http://tucsoncitizen.com/tired-tucson-teacher/2011/10/09/i-dont-teach-reading/

I like my house; I’d better like it, I have lived here over thirty years. But if I were to change just one thing I would have insulated it. My house has no insulation. It is built of brick, plywood and all the other necessary items but I have found through the years that not one scrap of the original building materials were specific to insulating the walls or the roof.

Now I know in Arizona we only have the four seasons: early summer, summer, late summer, and what we laughingly call winter. Still, some mornings it gets a bit chilly. Yesterday my daughter, the almost doctor came in and said, “It’s warmer outside than in here.” Well of course it is, that is where our heat is going, with no insulation, we’re warming the outdoors. She bought my wife a space heater for Xmas. When we turn it on, it knocks out all the lights. (Some day I will write about my house’s electrical system.)

By now you’re asking yourself, “Where is he going with this?” Thanks for asking.

My editor, Mark Evans, forwarded me an article this week. Normally I glance at these, say “Thanks” and go ahead and write about what I am interested in. Fortunately I took a good look at this one and saw that it mirrored much of what I have been screaming about lo these many years.

The article from First Things First, is – “National Expert: Raising Reading Test Scores Starts Where Language Begins – In the Crib”. 1 The expert, Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek said it includes six principles.
“They are:
·         Children learn what they hear most – frequency matters.
·         Children learn words for things and events that interest them.
·         Interactive and responsive environments build language learning.
·         Children learn best in meaningful contexts.
·         Children need to hear diverse examples of words and language structures.
·         Vocabulary and grammar develop together.                                                                                                                                                                                                What those principles boil down to is that children need to be talked to often, in meaningful ways and by adults in their lives.” 2

I have no argument with any of these, in fact I laud the effort to focus on early childhood education. However, I must offer a caveat. Some parents might think that any voice speaking to children is acceptable. I heartily disagree. What children hear and from whom they hear it, is just as critical as the volume of discussion in formulating their appropriate development.

Allowing a child to hear adult conversations or be subjected to adult concerns is unnecessary and possibly damaging. We seem to think that more is better in terms of what our children know and again I demur that content is as important as frequency. There are things a child does not need to know; things that are confusing and too complicated for their still developing minds.

This does not mean that I am endorsing acceleration of reading or writing skills. I do not advocate escalation of skills that children show no aptitude for. As Hirsh-Pasek says in her second point above, they must have interest in what they learn. It does not say that their parents must be interested in them learning it. As an educator I sometimes hold curriculum demands in check in favor of encouraging success. This is simply good practice.

Her third principle is my favorite. Children learn what they do. Give them a chance to do what kids do, not what adults want them to do. Let them explore, learn, get dirty in child-centered activities. Hopefully you had the opportunity to be a child, now give your offspring that same opportunity. Talk to them, talk to them often but talk to them as an adult speaks to a child. Give them the benefit of your experience and script their lives. And finally, listen to what they say. Answer their questions, as a teacher answers a student.

We need to carefully insulate our children. They deserve to be nurtured. We need to ensure that they hear those things they need to know but also that they are not subjected to language and intent that is endemic to adult conversation and concerns alone. Let children be children. As a career educator and a parent I know that lessons are best learned by experience; repetitively, simply and by slowly increasing complexity.

Our children deserve the chance to develop as children before they are forced to consider the world as adults.

1 http://www.azftf.gov/Why/LearningLibrary/Documents/                                                                                          Language_for_Reading_KathyHirshPasek.pdf

2 http://www.azftf.gov/

Driven into the front fascia of my house are two, 16 penny nails. They are nailed in about one inch into the wood and stick out about three inches. They are spaced at the width of my ladder. Back in the days when I used to work on the cooler, or vainly try to patch my leaky roof, I would put my ladder here and the nails would ensure that it wouldn’t fall down while I was up there.

There are also two nail holes on the fascia in the back of my house where the roof is lower. But I stopped using that spot to access the roof back in the summer of 1982.

I can still see the moment in my mind. I was reciting certain arcane incantations that should not be heard by children over the faltering ruin that was my cooler, vainly trying to bring it back to some semblance of life yet again when I heard a sweet little voice that I knew only too well say, “Hi daddy.”

Almost against my will I swiveled my head ala Linda Blair in the Exorcist and saw my daughter Sarah peaking up over the edge of the roof smiling at me. I would have said something but my heart was right beside my tonsils so I smiled back and as nonchalantly as I could I made my way to the ladder and suggested that my (almost) two-year old daughter should climb back down first and Daddy (the dope!) would climb down too and play with her.

Have you ever yelled as a parent? Of course you have. Have you ever yelled in a whisper? Yes, again, you have. Yelling as softly as I could to my wife inside the house I was rewarded by her voice immediately saying, “Sarah! Get down from there!” when she was already about halfway down. “She’s on her way down.” I admitted while stretching over the roof keeping a hand behind her as far as I could reach. She got to the ground finally with her Mom’s help, I didn’t go headfirst over the side and in the end everyone was fine.

The sad thing is, you know what I was thinking in the back of my mind, the whole time? “Wow, she climbed that ladder all by herself, that’s amazing for a two year old!” That’s right in the midst of a life threatening situation I was puffing up like a proud poppa! But I never accessed the roof from the back yard again. As a parent I know where to draw the line — one life threatening experience per child.

Two year olds should not learn to climb ladders; certainly not 8 foot ladders. They do no have the skills or knowledge necessary to understand the ramifications of being that far off the ground, let alone the coordination and facility. They are not ready for it. And yet they can learn it, my daughter is proof of that.

As a developmental educator I recognize the fact that a three year old can be taught to read. That is, they can be taught to recognize the symbols and patterns we call reading. But is it important to them? Do they have the skills to use that knowledge properly? Can they make a cogent argument that Frog and Toad represent an unequal symbiotic relationship? Should we teach a three year old to read?

Something I have noticed is that some of the kids in my current class are good readers but their writing stinks. It’s not just that the content is lacking, they actually can’t form the letters properly. What is my solution? Have them write on the chalkboard more. I know that in order to control the skill of being able to hold a writing instrument and form recognizable letters on paper, one must have several prerequisites in place. The hand must have the proper grip and the strength and sustainability of making the fine movements. The wrist must be flexible and stable. The elbow must be able to hold a position at a radical angle from the body and the shoulder must be stable and strong.

In other words, in order to be a good writer, you need a strong shoulder. It’s why I bought my girls a big truck for each of their first birthdays. They pushed that truck around and got strong, stable shoulders. Strong shoulders helped out later in Bobby Sox too.

But the physicallity is only the mechanics of the process. If you want the writing to have depth and pith you must understand the meaning of reading so that you can respond in kind.

It gets really complicated. That’s why reading is so magical. It is not just recognition of the symbols and their language linked phonetics, it is the morphology and the connotation. it is not just understanding the meaning of what someone has written but how to respond to it.

So my advice to you if you want your child to be a good reader, get them a large easel, with a chalkboard on one side and a painting area on the other. Make sure they have a sandbox and when they turn one year old, buy them a big truck. And finally, talk to them, verbally script everything. Don’t teach them to read — hold conversations with your baby. Teach them to know. I did all those things with my daughters and look where they ended up — on the roof!

This is something I’ve learned in 32 years in education, I can’t teach a kid to read.

It’s not that I don’t try. I facilitate reading. I encourage reading. I model reading and I applaud reading. I hope for reading to appear but at the end of the day a child will read when they are ready to read. This truth was driven home to me by my own children.

My first daughter loved books. We were good parents, we read to her regularly and our home was full of books. But as early childhood educators, my wife and I wanted her to go to a developmentally appropriate kindergarten that did not focus on academics. We had decided to enroll our children in the new magnet program school, Borton Elementary. The principal, MaryAnn McCorkle was accessible and available to discuss the wishes of two educational professionals. Our first choice was the class of our friend, Bob Wortman. We liked the idea of our daughter having a male kindergarten teacher. Unfortunately for us everyone wanted Bob at that time. Fortunately for us there was another great developmentally based classroom right next to Bob’s room. Our daughter would be in Kay Stritzel’s kindergarten.

Then disaster struck. My first daughter taught herself to read when she was only four and a half.

I was aghast, what would Kay think? What would Bob say? I apologized to Kay at the Open House and assured her I did not try to teach her to read, she just did it on her own. Kay laughed it off and said not to worry, I had never really been in control of this. My wife and I were professional educators and yet this concern about our own children overcame our professional judgement. I wondered what I had done wrong.

When my second daughter got to Kay’s room she was nowhere near as interested in reading as her older sister had been. While she loved books, her sister could read to her anytime she liked. She liked Kay’s room because it had a refrigerator. Ah, a girl after my own heart. But the fact that she was not reading as her sister had was now worrisome. I was concerned that this might be indicative of an inability on her part — just the opposite of how I felt with the first one. Again Kay came to my rescue and assured me, “She’s going to read, don’t worry, sometime next year it will click.” And sure enough it did. It was remarkable that two people who spent their professional lives as educators could not recognize the inherent difference in these two children. There was nothing wrong. Eventually I came to realize that while we could encourage reading, we could model reading, we could demonstrate reading; we couldn’t cause or stop reading; our children would read when they were ready.

Then came the epiphany albeit a gradual one. Over the years I have to come to the realization that learning reading is a mysterious skill akin to staring at one of those hidden pictures until something you hadn’t noticed becomes apparent. You have to train your eyes and your brain. As an archaeologist I became a reader of dirt. I could tell by color change or shifts in texture that there was something there, like solving a cipher. When I was on survey, once I saw the first artifact, the other ones suddenly jumped out at me, even though they had been laying there all the time.

Reading is magic. Take for example the current teaser going around where letters are switched around: fI uyo anc dera tsih, thn cn yu rd ths? Research says it makes little difference to proficient readers what order letters are put in as long as they are there or if vowels are missing, they will automatically be provided. Presto!

Wn yu R wredee to rede, U wreede.

Now speling — that’s hard!

Recently I have acquired a ‘penpal’, an engineer who has commented long and thoughtfully on what he sees as pertinent about this soliloquy I have begun. In his latest reply, ne manifesto, he says:

“I heartily believe that “one of many” objective measurements of teacher performance could be derived by measuring the “lift” for each student over the course of the year. If a kid was in the 15th percentile at the end of the 5th grade, and ends up in the 20th percentile in end of the 6th grade, then the 6th grade teacher did a better job (by this measure) that a teacher with a kid that went from the 85th percentile to the 80th. This would cancel out most of the home life/language issues. It would also mean that it may be VERY rewarding for teachers to work with the lower level students. If you have students at the bottom, there is a LOT of room for improvement. If yearly raises (or lack thereof) were tied to this measure, it would give a great incentive for some of the most energetic teachers to go this path. Maybe the percentile is not the correct number to measure, but the concept could work. I am sure there are other Teacher measures of performance, but improvement in a student’s standing seems so key to the ultimate reason for teaching.”

I could not more heartily agree. Rather than judge progress by comparing this year’s class progress with last year’s class progress let’s judge progress by how much each student improved in a given year from where they started out. We have a form of that measure in education, it is called AYP, average yearly progress. But Mark’s suggestion is closer to what I see as truly meaningful– maintain a portfolio of each student’s work, compare the products at the beginning of the year with those at mid-year and those at the end. Beyond this what I am suggesting is a virtual IEP for each student.

Don’t give me that look, we can simplify the process. Here is what they know, here is what they need to know to move on.

I am not saying public education does not need overhaul, it does! I am saying we are going about it the wrong way. I had an epiphany the other day when I was playing with my grandson and he said to me, “OK, Ampa, you got that right, now we go to level 2.” Yes, I know, for a child still more than a month shy of his fifth birthday, he plays on the computer too much (see my first post “My greatest concern for education) but I still need him to show me things.

The idea he generated in my aging brain was ‘what if education was presented as a computer game?’ For example: Level one Identify the action word in a sentence. Level two Recognize verbs. Level three Conjugate regular verbs. You get the idea, you don’t get to move to the next level until you demonstrate that you have accomplished the previous objective. It would mean changing grade leveling in school as students would move only when they were ready, not when they were a certain age. It would also take out the competition factor between students and focus competition on internal progress — you are challenged to get better based upon where you are.

It is reminiscent of a program that I was in back in the early sixties called SRA. Students chose reading material, took comprehension tests and moved forward at their own pace as they completed various levels. It was sensible and effective. Those are two words we need to hear more of in connection with education.

Almost prophetically, Arne Duncan wrote a blog on two issues recently.(1) One was the Race To the Top and the second issue was the temptation to alter data in order to qualify for that grant money. It seemed that no sooner had that blog been published and the news from the Atlanta schools was released.(2)
When I first heard of the scandal I was dumbfounded. I told my wife, who is also an educator, that I could not believe so many people could possibly be involved in such a scheme.
It made me think. What would it take for teachers to purposely skew the results of a test? The answer was simple – money. But this is grant money that they won’t see. The money for RTT is . . . intended to support bold new plans to turn around struggling schools, revamp teacher evaluation, and implement common academic standards, among other efforts.(3)  True, it will free up other funds but is this merely greed? Certainly it is not money for them.
Why then would they cheat?
The answer is still as simple, money. It is money to replace money that was taken away, money to fund the yet unfunded mandates, money to support or upgrade technology that is hopelessly outdated, money for books, toilet paper, pencils, and a slew of other items. As teachers we have all lived through this.
I looked inward. Could I have done that? I can sit here and say, “No.” but at the same time if I thought that I could increase funding for education just by changing a few pencil marks, would I? I can only hope and believe that my professionalism would prevent it.
So why did they do it? It bothered me . . . a lot!
Thinking lead me back to a basic premise of my educational career. When I worked at a preschool many years ago, I came up with the phrase, “Winning the Race at their own Pace!” It was hackneyed and simplistic but it encapsulated a philosophy that I lived by. I believe that education is a developmental process. I believe that children learn best in a real world not a virtual one. I used to say, “Sure, you can teach a three-year-old to read but why would you want to? They have more important things to do.” I still believe that. I used to have a bumper sticker on my car — “Childhood is a Journey, Not a Race!” It was not a slogan I created, I wish I had, it came from syracuseculturalworkers.com, but I believe it.
Judging children based upon high stakes testing is fundamentally wrong. This is a core belief that has driven my career.
But it is not just that. It’s what our children are learning. They are under assault ; they are being attacked. The attack is one of knowledge. The things that kids know about their world today are very different from what I knew when I was growing up. They have so much more information to absorb than I did when I was a child.
I cannot judge whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, it simply exists, it is their reality. But it makes my job much harder. Children today enter classrooms with more varied experiences and backgrounds than ever before. The challenge for teachers is to connect with each of those children and their combined experiences and convince them that they have the information they will need. It is a daunting task.
Public education must adapt to this, or die. Teachers and educational professionals must discover effective methods to deliver necessary curriculum and make it work. There is no other choice. Obviously cheating is not going to solve that issue. In the end I can say that to cheat would defeat my basic philosophy.

Ummm, how much money was that?

1) http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2011/06/letters_from_arne_on_cheating.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS
2) http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-07-12-Atlanta-schools-testing_n.htm
3) Race to Top Winners Rejoice, Losers Parse Scores By Sean Cavanagh , Stephen Sawchuk and Sarah D. Sparks http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/08/24/02rtt.h30.html