LETTERReader wants both sides of history taught in schools - The Advocate-Messenger

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Dear Editor,

I am writing to encourage all of us as citizens to support understanding and eliminating all forms of racism in our society. We saw with the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor along with so many others that this problem is still embedded in our society today. Unfortunately, some in our legislature would have us whitewash our history and prevent understanding how we got here. Proposed House Bill 18 punishes teachers for discussing race in their classrooms and House Bill 14 punishes schools for allowing discussion of race. Please flood our Legislative Hot Line (1-800-372-7181) and Rep Daniel Elliott’s office in opposition to these two bills. In contrast, House Bill 88 requires teaching Black and Native American history in middle and high schools, and House Bill 67 requires teaching of the history of racism in high school. Both of these bills deserve our full support. As the famous quote says, “Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.”

We must understand the past to be able to do better in the present.

Dan Nolet

Danville

COVID-19 pandemic worsens hiring woes at Illinois schools

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Nearly 90% of Illinois school districts statewide are struggling with an alarming teacher shortage that has reached a crisis level during the COVID-19 pandemic, officials with an organization of regional superintendents said Tuesday.

The escalating statewide teacher shortage, which officials said is expected to worsen in the coming years, was reflected in the results of a fall survey of more than 660 Illinois school districts by the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools.

With the organization’s study of the teacher shortage now in its fifth year, the most recent survey data illuminate how during the pandemic, Illinois schools are increasingly struggling to recruit qualified teachers, while also witnessing veteran educators retiring earlier than anticipated because of “tremendous stress,” said Mark Klaisner, IARSS president and executive director of a regional office known as West40, which serves school districts in West Cook County.

“At first teachers thought the pandemic was going to last six months, then a year, and now we’re knocking on the door of 24 months, so I can’t blame them,” Klaisner said.

“But I almost weep when I talk to some of the most phenomenal teachers we have, who still love the job, but who tell me they can’t afford to take the risk anymore. … It’s understandable, but it’s making this situation 10 times worse,” he said.

A critical shortage of school employees, including teachers, was evident earlier this month when dozens of suburban school buildings were temporarily shuttered following winter break in the wake of surging COVID-19-related absences.

Illinois school districts in rural, urban and suburban communities alike report the teacher shortage problem has become a crisis, with 88% of school districts confirming they have a teacher shortage, 77% saying the shortage is getting worse, and 93% saying they expect the shortage will accelerate in the coming years, according to the survey.

School districts also report more than 2,000 positions are either not filled or are assigned to someone who is not qualified — more than double the amount of unqualified workers school districts reported during the last school year, Klaisner said.

A substitute teacher shortage was reported at 96% of school districts — a hardship that forced the cancellation of more than 400 classes and required that instruction be moved online “because schools simply had no one to teach (students) in person,” according to the survey.

The survey found shortages of district administrators are less severe, but they are expected to climb due to retirements and the challenges of finding qualified candidates.

Last fall, officials at Elgin-based School District Unit 46 — one of the largest districts in the state — struggled to fill hundreds of open positions at its 57 school buildings, including dozens of teachers, 24 food service workers, 17 health services positions and 79 paraprofessionals who assist students in the classroom, Superintendent Tony Sanders said.

But while the pandemic has exacerbated hiring needs, the study’s findings revealed the “effects of COVID-19 on day-to-day school instruction goes much deeper.”

District administrators reported their teachers and staff “are burned out,” their substitute teacher pools are decimated as more educators choose to retire or not return to the classroom, and “very public battles over mask and other education mandates are taking a heavy toll.”

The survey, which ensured the confidentiality of the participating educators, included a response from one elementary school administrator from northwest Illinois who commented: “Anyone ‘on the fence’ about becoming or staying an educator is likely not going to be around.”

And while the teacher shortage is evident statewide — and across the U.S. — the state’s rural school districts reported “the most significant problems and the worst outlook ahead,” according to the survey, with the most severe shortages found in West Central and East Central Illinois, each of which has more than 90% of schools reporting shortages.

Illinois State Board of Education spokeswoman Jackie Matthews said Tuesday that officials had not yet reviewed the IARSS survey, but “look forward to continuing to work with IARSS to make policy recommendations to strengthen the teacher pipeline and supports for current teachers.”

The number of licensed educators employed in Illinois has grown year-over-year since 2018, Matthews said, and Illinois has “added more than 5,000 teachers to the profession.”

“The state’s historic investments in school funding have provided school districts with the resources they have needed to create more teaching positions,” Matthew said, adding that ISBE has “also focused intently on eliminating barriers to licensure, such as the basic skills test; expanding pathways to licensure for career changes and industry professionals; recruiting and retaining teachers of color; and strengthening the pipeline for current high school students to get a head start on becoming teachers.”

“We still have work to do, and we look forward to continuing to engage stakeholders and lawmakers in uplifting this incredible profession,” she said.

ISBE officials delivered a more optimistic snapshot of the state’s education workforce in October when they released the state’s report card for the 2020-21 school year, citing progress made hiring educators of color and improving average teacher salaries across the state.

Illinois school districts added 1,251 more Hispanic teachers and 184 more Black teachers to their ranks, increasing their representation from 5.6% and 5.8%, respectively, of the teacher workforce in the 2016-17 school year to 7.9% and 6% of the teacher workforce last school year, the state reported.

According to ISBE, teacher pay and teacher retention also increased, with teachers earning $70,705 on average in 2021 — 3.9% more than in 2020 — and remaining in the profession at a rate of 87.1% – a 1.4 % increase over 2020.

State Superintendent Carmen Ayala said at the time that school districts can use portions of the $7 billion in federal pandemic relief funding allocated to the state’s schools to pay parent mentors and tutors, hire additional staff and offer current teachers stipends and retention bonuses.

Officials with the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools said the survey on teacher shortages is an important tool to help education leaders and policymakers “identify cracks throughout the educator pipeline and develop a series of short-term and long-term solutions.”

They recommend legislative proposals making it easier for retired teachers to return to the classroom, more scholarships for students hoping to teach in subject areas with the largest teacher shortages, enhanced mentoring programs and licensure processes, and increased benefits, officials said.

“It’s a high-stress job that does not offer a whole lot of pay, and then you put a pandemic on top of it,” said Klaisner, with the state superintendents organization, adding: “We have to be focused on what’s best for our students, because they are getting close to two and a half years of these struggles.”

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Students are protesting covid policies — and the adults who won’t listen to them

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What’s more, student protesters applied what they learned through the protests to later activism. Jessie Taft would go on to organize striking women in New York’s laundry industry and made headlines for chaining herself to a hotel balcony as part of a 1936 protest. Saul Wellman organized striking truckers on Long Island during the Depression before joining the Lincoln Brigade to fight fascism in Spain. In the 1950s, he organized striking auto-industry workers in Detroit as chair of the Michigan State Communist Party. The YPA’s most famous alumnus, Bronx orphan Harry Eisman, was elected as head of the International Children’s Congress in Moscow while he was held in a New York reformatory. He later earned an Order of the Red Star following Red Army service at the Battle of Stalingrad.

What It Means to ‘Teach Like a Champion’ in 2022 (Opinion)

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Doug Lemov has just released Teach Like a Champion 3.0 . The book updates Teach Like a Champion, which was a sensation when it came out in 2010. Today Doug, formerly a teacher, a principal, and a charter school founder, is the co-managing director of the Teach Like a Champion organization, which helps educators master the practices described in the book. Given the extraordinary disruptions of schooling, I thought it worth checking in with Doug on what the latest version of Teach Like a Champion has to offer.

—Rick

Rick: Where did Teach Like a Champion come from?

Doug: It came from appreciation for teachers, from a strong belief that the profession is full of unacknowledged masters of a craft—“champions”—whose work contains solutions to the very real and complex challenges of a very difficult job. But also from the realization that we fail to recognize those teachers and value what they do. Meanwhile, people leave teaching because they often feel like they’re not succeeding. It’s one thing to struggle all day and feel like you are making a difference; it’s another to struggle and go home wondering if it helped at all. The profession has to do better by the people who take the job. The short videos Teach Like a Champion includes of our colleagues at their very best not only helps express how much we value them, but it helps other teachers succeed.

Rick: How has the world of education changed in the decade since Teach Like a Champion first came out?

Doug: Well, there are some good ways that it’s changed. The number of schools that offer radically better classroom learning environments—orderly, productive, happy, challenging, scholarly—has increased significantly in a lot of communities. That gives us more models to study and more evidence that exceptional classrooms are possible. And, therefore, the argument has become, “How do we make excellence the norm?” rather than, “Is excellence possible in all classrooms?” I also think science is beginning to win the day. More people recognize that access to classrooms informed by what cognitive science tells us is an equity issue. That’s a huge win. But there are also greater challenges. Obviously, there’s been a massive disruption to learning due to pandemic. But there’s also a massive disruption caused by epidemic: the proliferation of technology, especially smartphones and social media. This affects students both directly—by degrading their attentional skills, for example—and indirectly—by crowding books out of students’ lives. And I think the social changes in this country have had mixed effects. There’s a greater awareness of equity issues, and that’s important, but specious arguments get carried along on the tide of social justice as easily as substantive ones. People argue that academic achievement is somehow the domain of one group of people but not others. Or that equity involves lessening standards.

Rick: How is Teach Like a Champion 3.0 different from what came before?

Doug: I think the biggest single change has to be far more intentionality about mapping the overlap between cognitive and social sciences and what teachers do. That shows up in several ways. The first chapter is about the principles that comprise a strong mental model of how students learn. If you have a clear model of how learning works, then it’s easier to make optimal decisions. The second chapter is about lesson preparation, because preparation is different from planning, and it’s critical to the success of a lesson. And then there are a series of new techniques, a lot of them based on how to bring more background knowledge into the classroom and how to better build long-term memory—two key ideas from the chapter on mental models. I’ve also added a new kind of video called keystones. They are 10-minute clips—much longer than the other clips in the book—and they show the broader culture and tone of great classrooms and how teachers combine and adapt specific techniques. The idea is that a video of any one thing inherently distorts the classroom, so I thought these longer videos would help teachers see the big picture a bit better.

Rick: Some critics have suggested that the kinds of directive practices for which Teach Like a Champion is famous are problematic, arguing that they stymie students or create patriarchal learning environments. I’m curious what you make of such concerns.

Doug: I tried to write about this directly using the story of an imaginary student, Asha. She’s sitting in class and has an idea but is a bit hesitant to share it. Her idea could be wrong, or, just as bad, already obvious to everyone else. Maybe saying something earnest about DNA recombination makes you that kid—the one who raises her hand too often, who tries too hard, who breaks the social code. But somehow in this moment, the desire to voice her thought overcomes her anxiety. I ask my readers to think about what happens next: Will her classmates seem like they care about her idea? Will she read interest in their faces? Or will they be slouched in their chairs and turned away, their body language expressing their indifference? Those factors will influence the relationship she perceives between herself and school. Yes, it matters whether her teacher responds with encouragement—but probably not as much as how Asha’s peers respond. The teacher’s capacity to shape norms in Asha’s classroom matters at least as much as her ability to connect individually with Asha. To create the highest-quality learning environments for young people, teachers have to actively shape the learning environment and sometimes the social fabric of daily interaction. Yes, that requires teachers to ask students to do what may at first seem unnatural. But the benefits massively outweigh the costs.

Rick: OK, but what about those who say that Teach Like a Champion’s approach puts too much emphasis on particular student behaviors?

Doug: Tom Bennett has this beautiful line in Running the Room. He’s writing about how school should transmit the values of self-discipline, self-regulation, hard work, and patience. “Everything of value you can conceive of was acquired through these things—through sustained effort, practice, and delayed gratification.” To love young people is to give them classrooms that build these habits. You want to speak but you learn to listen first; you are tired some days but complete your tasks regardless. And in the end, those are the steppingstones of greatness. But in lieu of that, we’ve somehow accepted a Hollywood vision where success flicks on like a switch on a journey of self-discovery. I’m going to do everything I can to build schools that offer something better.

Rick: Teach Like A Champion has been translated into something like 15 languages. What’s struck you about the reception overseas?

Doug: The international work is so powerful and so humbling. I’ve been to the Middle East three times now. The first time, in Jordan, I was invited by Queen Rania’s Teacher Academy. I was doing this workshop for teachers when the queen walked in and sat down at a table while I was showing a video. She raised her hand—needless to say I called on her—and she gave this beautiful analysis of how the teacher had made the cold call feel caring and why it was so important for children in Jordan to get both: the caring and the loving accountability. But working abroad, my first thought is always to acknowledge the differences. I talk sometimes to teachers who have 60-plus kids in their classrooms and are refugees from the Syrian conflict. In some cases, there are kids who are 10 and 12 and have never been to school. … So I start by saying: I understand and respect that everything is not the same. But what surprised me was how quickly teachers said: No, no, this applies. Your kids do what our kids do. When it comes to the core dynamic of the classroom, so much of it is the same.

Rick: If you had to leave teachers with just one piece of pedagogical wisdom, what would it be?

Doug: Low tech, high text. Phones away, books out. Attention is the driver of learning. You wire or rewire your brain through how you use it. The ability to sustain your focus, to key in to the signal and ignore the noise is built by habit. Every time phones are out, you are practicing fracturing your or your students’ attention, making half-attention the normal state. Read and read and read. In hard copy only. Write and write and write. Pencil to paper.

Rick: And, for school or system leaders, what one thing can they do that would matter most for the quality of teaching?

Doug: Curriculum has been the most overlooked factor in the struggle for higher achievement. High-quality, knowledge-rich curriculum is key. It has to be carefully designed and include rich but adaptable daily lesson plans. And it has to understand what the cognitive science tells us: Facts and higher-order thinking are not opposites. You can only think deeply about that which you know a great deal about. Knowledge is deeply important and too often scorned by educators.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Revising America’s Racist Past

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SOUTH DAKOTA: Questions on Political Interference

Unlike Washington state, Montana, Oregon, and others, where laws require students to be taught about Native American history and culture, South Dakota has not emphasized the troubling and complex history of the Oceti Sakowin in its social studies expectations.

(The name translates to the People of the Seven Council Fires, and refers to the speakers of Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota who live on land that spans the Dakotas, Nebraska, Montana, and into Minnesota and Canada.)

In the mid-2000s, the state updated some teacher-preparation requirements and issued a voluntary set of lesson plans on the Oceti Sakowin. But although roughly 1 in 10 South Dakotans is Native American, the voluntary teaching guidelines aren’t in widespread use.

At one level, it’s easy to see why: Native American history is hard history. Learning about the unique culture and resiliency of the Oceti Sakowin requires grappling with some of the darkest moments in South Dakota and U.S. history—notably the Wounded Knee massacre, in which around 300 men, women, and children were killed by American soldiers.

Still, when the state education department opened up applications in May to sit on the panel to revise the history standards, Sherry Johnson, the tribal education director for the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate—a federally recognized Oceti Sakowin treaty tribe—saw an opportunity to bring the state in line with North Dakota, which just a month earlier had passed legislation requiring new curriculum on Native American history.

The state’s history standards, by definition, must be taught. And embedding the Oceti Sakowin content in the standards would pressure both state and district officials to develop new tools, curriculum, and resources to teach them, Johnson reasoned.

Writing state standards is not a whole lot of fun. It’s not paid; it’s meticulous; it requires lots of time sitting around in badly lit conference rooms.

But, in a process that several writers described as productive, cordial, and well-managed, the team completed a draft whose standout feature was that knowledge about the Oceti Sakowin were included at every grade level. For the first time, students would be required to understand the concept of tribal sovereignty and these sovereign nations’ unique relationship to the state and the U.S. government.

After agreeing on a draft, the teams submitted it to the state expecting only minor wording changes. Instead, with little advanced warning, the state education department released a revised draft that differed dramatically.

It is not illegal for state education officials to alter standards during the revision process, but the changes in South Dakota fundamentally altered the focus of the draft.

The new version removed at least 18 references to the Oceti Sakowin, leaving just one in the draft; the remaining standards refer more generically to Native Americans. Also excised were most of the draft’s “inquiry standards”—overarching skills designed to help students evaluate and critique historical sources, stay current of public issues, and use civic channels to solve problems.

Added throughout were curious new elements that had not been there before: a lengthy preface extolling the Constitution and new references describing the nation as a republic and emphasizing the importance of individual rights.

A Modified Draft South Dakota officials significantly modified the social studies standards draft created by an educator workgroup, mainly by removing new content about the state’s Native American population. But other additions and deletions are telling, too. The officials largely removed a set of inquiry principles and added new language that reflects conservative priorities about patriotism and republican forms of government. Also, some standards now direct students to “evaluate” a topic, rather than “analyze” or “critique” it. …

Examples of modifications and deletions between the working group’s final draft vs. the department’s revised draft.

5th grade standards:

Describe the influence impact of other countries had on indigenous Native Americans in North and South America through exploration and conflict, and colonization .”

of other countries on North America through exploration and conflict, .” “Identify the basic structure of the government by studying the United States Constitution," and explaining why the United States was established as a Republic.

High school standards:

“Analyze and evaluate how global economic, political, technological, and social trends have influenced South Dakota history, including Oceti Sakowin Oyate and other peoples who have settled in the state .”

.” “ Students will critique Evaluate the advancements and limitations of founding documents and other primary sources and assess how these documents impacted future domestic policies and changes in American society.”

Standards deleted from the workgroup’s draft:

“Discuss the culture of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate before European interactions.”

“Use information about a historical source (including the maker, date, place of origin, intended audience, and purpose) to judge the validity of the source.”

“Introduce sovereignty as it applies to federal, state, and tribal governments.”

“Critique significant primary sources, including Oceti Sakowin Oyate Treaties, and their impacts on events of this time period.”

Read more

For Johnson, who had felt so proud of her state and its commitment to Indian education, the new draft was a betrayal.

Teachers are unlikely to teach the Oceti Sakowin content without those references, she said, and that will have detrimental effects on all students, especially Native American youth.

“You don’t validate their existence, and you don’t value the uniqueness of being Native Americans, the first Americans, and that we have a unique history. We survived an Indian Holocaust,” she said. “It’s like their history and who they are is some shameful thing that you can’t teach, and you can’t mention. And it perpetuates more racism.

“We are not in this to make children feel bad about past mistakes,” she said. “You teach history so you don’t make the same mistakes as in the past.”

There has so far been no detailed explanation from state officials for the changes. State Superintendent Tiffany Sanderson said in a radio interview that the revised draft still had far more Native American content than the prior standards. She attributed the drama to “misinformation and miscommunication.”

But state leaders were under political pressure to alter the standards—and much of that rhetoric aligns with the changes in the draft.

Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, had previously signed the 1776 Pledge —a project of a conservative political action group that asserts, among other things, that “the slander of our history and heroes in the classroom is being paired with toxic, anti-American theories that pit our children against one another on the basis of race and gender.” (The group was formed to support the thrust of former President Trump’s 1776 Commission, which issued a controversial report on civics and history education; President Biden disbanded the commission shortly after assuming office.)

Far-right news sites had published op-eds falsely labelling the National Council for the Social Studies a radical group, attacking a consultant from a firm the state selected to help guide the writing process, and claiming the standards’ focus on civic action would permit the indoctrination of students into leftist ideologies.

In late September, Noem threw out the South Dakota history draft altogether, saying that it needed “more balance”—she didn’t specify what kind—and that more work was needed for students to “learn a true and honest account of American and South Dakota history.”

Her spokesman did not return a request for Noem to elaborate on those comments. An education department spokesperson said Superintendent Sanderson wouldn’t be able to talk until after the members of the new writing committee had been named.

Noem has since introduced legislation to ban critical race theory, complementing an earlier executive order.

We are not in this to make children feel bad about past mistakes. You teach history so you don’t make the same mistakes as in the past.

Paul Harens, a retired public school teacher in the state who also sat on the writing panel, says that political context explains the sudden alterations in the draft.

“We were told to keep politics out of it, and we did. The changes they make bring politics into it. Basically, it is now the 1776 project, and again the Native Americans are ignored,” he protested. “It’s a whitewashing of history. And I do mean white.”

Another writer, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, said the incident left her both personally and professionally troubled.

“My name and school district are on these new standards that I didn’t change. My name is on this document that I didn’t support. It feels like I’m being falsely represented, my ideals,” she said. “Why don’t you trust us to teach your child?”

Even before the draft was thrown out, the bowdlerized version had prompted huge backlash. The deletions of Native American content were by far the most cited criticism in nearly 600 written comments. The state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union warned Noem that the removal of the Oceti Sakowin content could violate students’ constitutional rights by denying them access to information about their heritage.

Historian Jace DeCory, who is Lakota, is among those feeling discouraged by the situation. (Oceti Sakowin generally refer to themselves by their linguistic affiliation.)

In the early part of her 30-year career teaching in the American Indian Studies department at Black Hills State University, she said, virtually no students entering her classes had even heard of the Wounded Knee massacre.

By the 1990s and early 2000s, some students had had a few targeted lessons about the state’s Indigenous communities in high school history; that increased steadily into the late 2010s. Now, she fears that, instead of expanding, the progress will wane.

“I’m not sure what’s happening politically. I don’t know,” she said. “The only thing I know is that I believe reclaiming Native American heritage in our history and stories is vital to the future of South Dakota—and to America even.”

In the meantime, neither Johnson nor Harens expects to be reappointed to a second writing panel, given their vocal criticism. But they’ve applied to serve on it anyway.

“As verbal as I’ve been, I think I will probably not be sitting at that table,” Johnson said. But she still waits for a formal rejection—a sign that a government agency has once again reneged on a promise to do right by her people.

“I want them to officially turn me down,” she said.