With great fanfare, Linda Darling-Hammond has been named as president of the California State Board of education. Given the history of the California State Board of Education, I feel she will be comfortable there. Darling-Hammond is a good example of the fact that the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.
Kill the Messenger, written by a conservative who passionately defends the
implementation of external, high-stakes standardized testing, lists Radical Opponents
of testing: Gerald Bracey, Howard Gardner, Walt Haney, Alfie Kohn, Jonathan Kozol,
George Madaus, Deborah Meier, Monty Neill, Susan Ohanian, Peter Sacks, Lorrie Shepherd.
When Education Week asked
people to comment on NCLB, Darling-Hammond's
answer and mine offered telling contrasts. Typical of her lifetime work, her
answer is to pour money into more thoughtful teacher development and
high-quality assessments. Typical of me, my answers asks the reader to be outraged and to weep
over the student pain.
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/01/05/15nclb_perspectives.h31.html
For eons, Linda Darling-Hammond has held leadership positions
in framing education deform as a money problem--not more money for the poor but
more money for school and teacher redesign, more money for "good"
testing. And she happens to have headed countless operations involved in this
redesign.
“Darling-Hammond has given us a practical roadmap to success
based on research and best practice.”
_Randi Weingarten, American
Federation of Teachers
“Finally, a book that captures what educators have been saying.
Linda Darling-Hammond skillfully portrays the complexity of reforming an
education system. This book is a must-read for those interested in building a
world-class education system!”
_Dennis Van Roekel, President, National Education Association (NEA)
Currently, Darling-Hammond is the president and CEO of The
Learning Policy Institute at Stanford. In 2016, she co-authored a paper “Pathways to New
Accountability Through the Every Student Succeeds
Act”: Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, states have an
opportunity to broaden their definitions of student success to include
students’ SEL—the foundation for academic and life success.
In 2017, she
co-authored “ Encouraging Social and emotional
Learning in the Context of New Accountability.”
The push for these social/emotional
learning benchmarks is on. Here are recent Tweets:
LindaDarling-Hammond_ @LDH_ed Feb 8, 2019
More
We now know a lot from
neuroscience and education research about how to help children learn and develop, raising
achievement and creating safer schools.
Check out
https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/educating-whole-child-report
LindaDarling-Hammond_ @LDH_ed Jan 15, 2019
More
Social and emotional learning is the
pathway to academic achievement, perseverance, resilience,
and a strong society. Check out #NATIONATHOPE COMMISSION@ASPENSEAD for how we can create supportive policies and
practices.
Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional,
& Academic Development: Commission co-chair: Linda Darling-Hammond;
co-chair: Gov John Engler, outed president Michigan State
http://nationathope.org/wp-content/uploads/partner-commitments-020519.pdf
*National 4-H “seeks to catalyze
activities that harness big data for synthesizing new knowledge, to make
tailored and accurate data driven predictions.”
*Higher Achievement is “working with American Institutes of Research to produce online training in
social and emotional learning for staff and volunteers.” (Board chair is with
McKinsey)
*Generation
Citizen, whose board chair is with
McKinsey, formerly with Teach for America, is working to “institutionalize stronger civics,
specifically social and emotional-aligned Action Civics.”
*Chicago Public
Schools promise to "integrate social and emotional learning, civics,
and history_in all the district’s middle and high schools by the 2020-21 school
year.”
* Alliance for Excellent Education “will continue to translate, communicate, and broker science of adolescent learning research.”
*Playworks “is releasing today Games
for Social Emotional Learning, a free guide designed to reinforce the social
and emotional learning kids need to thrive.”
*National Board of
Professional Teaching Standardsis
partnering with Learning Heroes to pilot social, emotional, and academic
communications resources—leveraging the expertise of more than 122,000 National
Board certified teachers. You can buy mugs and T-shirts at their store.
*Character.org (has been identifying schools of character for 20 years. Texas has 15, Vermont
none) One of their advisors is Dr. Susan Sclafani. That's enough for me
*Boys & Girls
Clubs “is creating playbooks on embedding social
and emotional learning across all aspects of the Club day, from arrival, to
assemblies, to meals, and in more than 20 diverse programs that are being
refreshed to explicitly develop these skills.”
*CASEL Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning
(They offer step-by-step guidance for academic, social, & emotional
learning. Darling-Hammond on Board of Directors) https://casel.org/funders/
*New Teacher Center “to deepen student-teacher relationships
through empathic teaching content and student data review within the coaching
and professional learning community context. When we focus on
Teachers, students succeed.” Funders
10,000,000+ : Balmer Group, Gates Foundation, Hewlett
Foundation; $2,000,000--$9,999,999: Zuckerberg, etc.
*ASCD“will continue to advocate for changing
the definition of educational success from a narrow focus on academic
achievement to a more comprehensive approach that supports the whole child so
that each student is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.”
*Yale
Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence “is building an online suite of staff development modules, classroom
resources, and performance-based tools to measure social and emotional skills.” Partners include Born This Way Foundation Led by Lady Gaga and her mother, Facebook, TED, and lots of others.
*Rennie Center Funders include Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, IBM, Massachusetts Department of
Education “remains committed to providing independent research to help
education leaders understand and support the needs of the whole child and is
convening networks of educators aimed at enhancing social and emotional
learning and integrated student supports.” In 2012 you could have read their
report on Massachusett’s $250 million Race to the Top plan. Or a 2010 report
focusing on “providing students with a broader set of skills that will enable
them to thrive in an increasingly diverse, rapidly evolving and
globally-connected world, known as 21st century skills.” And so on.
*NEA (The
National Education Association will implement the Commission’s recommendations
through existing frameworks of professional learning for educators, a continuum
of actions to leverage educator voice
within the Every Student Succeeds Act, partnerships, Community Schools, and
Restorative Justice initiatives.)
What a combo.
Take a
look at the multitudinous list of WestEd clients—ranging from Amplify Ed,
Pearson Online and Blended Learning, and Pacific Gas & Electric to Exxon,
Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and
Educational Testing Service. And lots more.
WestEd
Assessment Literacy Workshops: Promoting Understanding of Assessment and the
Effective Use of Summative Test Results Among K-12 Educators “are informed by
research from the National Research Council (1999,2001, 2003), Linda Darling-Hammond (2010, 2012,
2013), and the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences
(2009)”
Project RAND was formed in 1945 when Commanding General of the Army
Air Force H. H. “Hap” Arnold articulated a need to connect military planning
with research and development decisions—long-range planning of future weapons.
Now they have policy experts in a variety of fields, ranging from Education and
Literacy to National Security and Terrorism. Notable participants include
Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, Scooter Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld,
and Linda Darling-Hammond.
Here are Rand Reports
by Darling-Hammond
https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/d/darling-hammond_linda.html
And so on and so on. All this flurry
of activity to avoid the reality that if poor people had more money, their kids
would have a better chance to be “healthy,
safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.”
The greatest imperative for teachers is to learn to say
“No.” In a profession of people pleasers, I did it when a new hotshot
administrator ordered teachers to list the behavioral objective for every
planned action in the classroom. I insisted that it made more sense to
offer a summary of what we’d done each day. This summary proved to be useful to
me. I was also the only teacher in my district who said “NO!” to an in-service
in what was called positive attitudes toward learning, which amounted to scripts
for saying nice things. It took students all of two days to recognize the ritualized “I like the way you…” verbiage for the drivel it was, and they mocked teachers
who used it. To the teacher who said, “I like the way Lucy has opened her
book,” a kid would respond, “I like the way the teacher holds the chalk.” And
so on.
Researchers have teachers on a constant
reeducation treadmill. You’re never good enough. As one prominent group
financed by the Gates Foundation puts it, “When we focus on teachers, students
succeed.”
Nonsense.
This is particularly nonsensical
when the reeducation is paid for by Gates. In his book, Aspen participant Anand Giridharadas notes that “many of our conversations at the Aspen Instutute
about democracy in the ‘good society’ occurred in the Koch Building, named
after a family that had done so much to undermine democracy and the efforts of
ordinary people to ‘change the world.’” Likewise, the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation has spread its money around in grants to teacher trainers, doing
much to undermine public education and the efforts of ordinary teachers to do
their work.
Giridharadas gets at the core of the
teacher dilemma when he notes that the Aspen Institute “brought together people
from powerful institutions like Facebook, the hedge fund Bridgewater
Associates, and PepsiCo. Instead of asking them to make their firms less
monopolistic, greedy, or harmful to children, it urged them to create side
hustles, “to change the world.”
Starting with the 1996 National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a
blue-ribbon panel report, What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s
Future (sponsored by the Rockefeller
Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation), Darling-Hammond has positioned teacher
change as the driving force in successful schools, and it’s past time to ask if these are side hustles for rich corporations. The specific
ways teachers are called on to revamp themselves have altered
from sponsor to sponsor, but ever and ever, the core problem of student poverty
has been largely ignored. No one points out that each new iteration for
changing the way school work is paid for by corporate elites. Giridharadas’ book has a great chapter title: “Arsonists
Make the Best Firefighters.” Teachers
may come to realize that no matter how much they follow earnest directives for
change, a large percentage of public school kids are still poor: ill-housed and
ill-fed in the homes of desperate parents. What would happen to student achievement
if every family in the country received a living wage? What if teachers were
retrained to teach this?
Maybe teachers need to reeducate
themselves about the dynamics of our political and economic system so they can
set about educating their students to the real changes needed in this country.
Maybe we should start by asking the signers of the Aspen Commission on Social,
Emotional, & Academic Development to make their firms less monopolistic,
less greedy, less harmful to children. And maybe we should start teaching our
students the truth about the country they live in