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Patrick S. De Walt, M.B.A., Ph.D.

~ Communal Conversations for the Promotion of Active Critical Engagement

Patrick S. De Walt, M.B.A., Ph.D.

Tag Archives: Educational Debate

The Struggles of Teaching

29 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by Patrick S. De Walt, MBA, PhD in Educational Trenches, Live In The Discomfort, Uncategorized

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Education, Educational Debate, expression, High Stakes Testing, Inequity, K-12, pedagogy, Public Education, Reflective Practice, social critique, Streams of consciousness, student centered approaches, Teacher Education, Teacher influence, Test Anxiety, Testing

The beauty found within teaching for me is something that has little to compare with. You see the growth, determination, creative, among other things of your students as they pursue their educational goals and dreams. These things are, at least for me, the most important aspects for why I do what I do. Seeing diamonds in the rough take shape and form all that you hope and more is so rewarding. I have had the privilege of seeing 6 years olds blossom into amazing teens, college undergraduates harness their abilities in ways that I wonder if they would have dared attempt during previous opportunities, and graduate students traverse the challenges of reclaiming their sense of direction within their educational journeys. All of this matters to me as an educator. There is nothing like it for me, even when many of my contemporaries deny our students the opportunities to flourish. The field of education requires remarkable women and men to serve as educational stewards for future generations of community members. No matter the background we have to safeguard ourselves from our own tendencies to undermine our expectations for and of the potentials of future generations. When I think of all of the students who I have taught, I find pride in the fact that, whether they realize it or not, I imparted at least a little wisdom and knowledge to them. 

The educational conundrum is one that most public educators have some level of familiarity with. Whether you were an elementary teacher, as I was, or a middle school/high school teacher, seeing your students become more of they were and are has to touch your heart. Why else would you become a teacher? 

Yet with all of this hope and promise, we find our schools and schools systems failing our kids in some form or fashion. The lack of support for our public schools, in certain areas of course, allows for others, who usually aren’t educational professionals to make decisions that are often uninformed yet have dramatic effects of the lives of young learners. Standardized tests have become the archenemies of most educators who have experienced third person test anxiety—witnessing your students get scared while taking the test. 

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Beautiful Liars and Bully Beatdowns

04 Saturday May 2013

Posted by Life With A Sense Of Humor in Blog, Educational Trenches, Guest Features

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bullying, Education, Educational Debate, expression, Higher Education, Inequity, K-12, Public Education, social critique, Streams of consciousness, Teacher Education

This weekend I am supposed to be speaking on a radio show in Dubai about the phenomenon of bullying. Of course, I’m nervous. I’m always nervous when it comes to these things. Bullying has been on my mind quite a bit this week as I prepare for my appearance. Although some may feel it is a great thing that bullying has become the fad of the moment, it actually makes me quite sad. It’s kind of like when the kid that no one likes all of a sudden becomes the popular kid of the moment. Everyone knows it won’t last and when it is over, the poor kid is left in an even worse place than before. Bullying has become a buzz word. It has infiltrated pop culture. Real Housewives are claiming that they are a victim, talk shows, commercials, plots in cartoons, etc are all focused on the topic of bullying. Unfortunately, there have been several important things that are always left for the viewer to figure out. What exactly is bullying? What would be considered bullying and what is not? Oh yea, and now that I have been told not to be a bystander, stand up, be brave, etc, etc, how exactly do I do that. This movement is under the misconception that schools, parents, school counselors, and teachers are gong to pick up the slack and fill in the blanks. Sadly, this is not happening. This campaign feels dangerously similar to the D.A.R.E campaign that research has indicated failed at accomplishing its goal of keeping kids off of drugs. Campaigns such as these will cause tons of people to rush into the field of bullying prevention bombarding our schools with here-for-the-minute interventions. Research has demonstrated that after these ‘momentary’ interventions leave, most often bullying spikes. There are many of us that have been working in the world of bullying prevention for some time. Researching it, working toward a way to prevent it, reduce it, and bring awareness. It feels as if pop culture has pushed its way into the conversation, will stomp around a bit, and leave us to pick up the pieces. For those of us that consider bullying prevention to be a life-long mission, I hope that bullying does not fall victim to the ‘fad of the moment’ syndrome by quickly rising to the peak of everyone’s attention and then quickly falling into obscurity. I fear all of this hype may leave the poor child trapped in the locker room being beat up for the umpteenth time without a word to use to describe his ordeal. I hope that saying the phrase ‘I’m being bullied’ does not become synonymous with the boy who cried wolf.

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Entitlement by “race”: What Abigail Fisher didn’t tell you…

20 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by Patrick S. De Walt, MBA, PhD in Blog

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Affirmative Action, Education, Educational Debate, Higher Education, Identity, Inequity, Policy, Politics & Education, Public Education, Race, Supreme Court

Entitlement by "race": What Abigail Fisher didn't tell you….

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Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and the Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement

01 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by Patrick S. De Walt, MBA, PhD in Culture & Music

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activism, Amnesia, Art, Blackness, Class, Culture, Education, Educational Debate, Gender, Hip Hop, History, Identity, Intellectual, K-12, Movements, Multiracialism, Music, Nationality, Race, Racial identity, Sexuality, social critique, Streams of consciousness

Hello All,

I’m honored to share this with you about one of my intellectual mentors, Dr. Reiland Rabaka.  reiland-rabaka Please access the link and check out the two podcasts at the bottom of the article.

Enjoy…

PSDW~

Hip Hops Amnesia

http://newbooksinpopmusic.com/2013/02/19/reiland-rabaka-hip-hops-amnesia-from-blues-and-the-black-womens-club-movement-to-rap-and-the-hip-hop-movement-lexington-books-2012/

 

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01 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by Patrick S. De Walt, MBA, PhD in Educational Trenches

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charter schools, Education, Educational Debate, Inequity, K-12, Politics & Education, Public Education, School Funding

For those in the trenches, I encourage you to take a look at this and other posts from Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig at http://www.cloakinginequity.com.
PSDW~

Cloaking Inequity

Politicians and others often frame a narrative that charters are on par or better than traditional public schools. I have discussed how charters stack up traditional public schools extensively in posts here on CI on charters. Are there charters that are islands of excellence? Of course, there are some and I discussed this in my invited testimony last week at the Texas Senate. But we must hold charters accountable to data— not just achievement data— because it is becoming clearer and clearer that many charters have high attrition.

Although, the Texas Education Agency doesn’t calculate and disseminate attrition rates, you can basically do it yourself here.  Table 5 is where the information lies.

Below is a table for the central Texas area that an anonymous reader produced and emailed me, not holding graduates against schools, but otherwise looking at attrition rates.

A Mathematica KIPP study that came out recently…

View original post 353 more words

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Moving Beyond the Polarized Debate – Bridging Differences – Education Week

27 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by Patrick S. De Walt, MBA, PhD in Educational Trenches

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Education, Educational Debate, Inequity, K-12, Law(s), Policy, Politics & Education, Poverty, Public Education, School Funding, Teacher Education

This contribution is by Dr. Pedro Noguera. As you read this entry courtesy of Education Week, please think about its message and the implications it has to you as a student who wishes to become a teacher, pre-service teacher, and/or veteran teacher. All of us who are in the educational trenches are seeking better solutions for enhancing the educational opportunities of future generations of learners. As you read this post, think about what side of the debate you are on. I look forward to reading your thoughts.

PSD~

Moving Beyond the Polarized Debate

Dear Deborah,

While the debate over the direction of education policy continues at national and local levels and the new administration begins to consider what, if any, new initiatives it might take to promote school reform, we know there are educators across the country who are thinking about what schools can do right now to meet the needs of the students they serve. I think it is important for us to weigh in on these matters for the sake of the educators who are on the front lines of school reform and their students.

This is clearly an area where your leadership in developing new ways of thinking about how schools might be organized and about how teaching and learning might be carried out has been so helpful to so many. The schools you have been instrumental in creating and leading—Central Park East in New York City and Mission Hill in Boston—have served as models of possibility for educators who have sought to create learning environments that are thoughtful, creative, and most importantly, humane. Education activist Sam Chaltain is using the experiences of Mission Hill to create a series of videos that will be aired nationally to encourage educators and the public in general to think about how we might educate children differently. This kind of work is essential because we can’t wait until we put the right policies in place or until our society becomes more just and equitable to figure out how to create schools that can succeed in educating all kinds of children.

Certainly, policy and politics matter. As we have seen and discussed, policy is shaping how assessment (i.e. high-stakes testing) is used, and increasingly, assessment is determining what children learn, how they learn it, and how schools and teachers are judged. Moreover, as we’ve pointed out before, the fact that education policy largely ignores the effects of poverty and inequality and the way they influence on child development and the performance of schools is yet another reminder that educators are working under major constraints.

These constraints—the political, the economic, and the social—are real and should never be discounted or minimized; otherwise, we end up sounding hopelessly naïve about possibilities for change. Yet, naming them is not good enough.

A big part of what is wrong with the current debate about reform is that it is dominated by what I think of as naïve optimists and radical pessimists. The naïve optimists are the ones promoting simplistic solutions like: “fire bad teachers,” “lengthen the school day,” “close failing schools,” or radically expand the number of charter schools without any real public accountability. What these so-called reformers have in common is that they seize upon a single idea or set of ideas to promote change and then assume that if we just follow this narrow prescription schools will improve. The record shows that they never do, especially not in the communities that suffer from the greatest economic and social challenges.

The radical pessimists largely offer critiques of policy. They remind us that the obstacles to school change on a mass scale lie in the structure of our society, in, for example, the way wealth is distributed, poverty is concentrated, and race continues to operate as a means to deny access to opportunity. They force us to acknowledge that hard-working teachers and visionary principals are insufficient if these are the only forces we rely upon to overcome the obstacles.

The problem with the radical pessimists is they typically have very little to offer in the way of advice to the hard-working teacher who seeks to use education to inspire and impart tangible skills to students. They are even less helpful to the school leaders who seek to transform struggling schools into safe and caring environments where children can be intellectually challenged and supported in their development.

This is one of the reasons why the radical pessimists are losing the reform debate and why the naïve optimists are winning. Ideas matter and if we can’t offer practical suggestions about what can be done to improve schools right now we make ourselves marginal to the debate over reform. Of course it helps to have private foundations and hedge fund managers behind you, and the so-called reformers are generally well financed, even when there is little evidence to support their change agenda. Clearly, the naïve optimists really aren’t that naïve. Some are quite clear that their goal is to dismantle teachers’ unions and privatize public education. If they win, you and I both know our entire society will be at risk.

That is why we need to weigh in on this debate. Not merely from the standpoint of making the case that new policies are needed, but also from the standpoint of practice. Let’s use some of our exchanges to assist the educators who are looking for help and guidance right now, as well as the parents and community organizers who know we can’t wait for the right policies to be enacted to create the schools our children deserve.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Pedro

Moving Beyond the Polarized Debate – Bridging Differences – Education Week.

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dewalt@patricksdewaltmbaphd.com

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