Blogs

Getting through the pandemic winter with your family

Day & Time: Sunday, December 13th, 7:00-8:30 pm

A daunting challenge, yet it is the reality we are facing... and help is here! Join the Brookline Parents Organization and moderator Steven Ehrenberg for a conversation with three members of Brookline's Expert Advisory Panel 2–who also happen to be Brookline parents: Amanda Tarullo, Lindsay Fallon and Sanjli Gidwaney. 

Register here: 
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_iOfPM3ZsQs-x1AmVeLQAzA

Amanda, Lindsay and Sanjli - along with the other parent-members of Panel 2 - have focused on support for “the whole child experience.” Specifically, the Brookline School Committee and Superintendent have charged Panel 2 to examine and discuss the social and emotional impact of what our kids may be going through during this stressful and unsteady time of living and learning during a pandemic and make recommendations. (Click here for Panel 2 recommendations.)

Some of the questions we will explore Sunday evening include:

  • How will we manage feelings of isolation during a chilly New England winter while social distancing? 
  • How has almost a year's worth of lockdowns, quarantines, and shifting school schedules (remote and hybrid) impacted our children? 
  • How can we help our children manage the winter as they spend more time at home and on screens, and less time in school and other social situations?
  • How have all “the unknowns” affected our children’s sense of security and well-being? 
  • How can we manage constantly changing circumstances and achieve balance when home, work and school become blended?

The panelists will also suggest tips - both as experts and as fellow parents - for how to keep our children and indeed the whole family “sane” over the course of the coming months. Please join us for this important and enlightening conversation!

Lauren Bernard and Benjamin Kelley, BPO Co-Presidents

About our panelists

Amanda Tarullo is an Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Director of the Graduate Program in Developmental Science at Boston University. She directs the Brain and Early ExperiencesLab (http://www.bu.edu/cdl/bee/) researching how chronic stress, sleep, and family experiences shape children’s biological stress systems and brain development. One aim of her research is to identify protective factors that promote resilience in children who experience chronic stress, in order to enhance intervention and prevention approaches to help all children thrive.  

Lindsay Fallon is an Assistant Professor in School Psychology at University of Massachusetts Boston. She is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA-D) and licensed psychologist in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She also holds a master's degree in Special Education. Her research focuses on feasible, effective support for families and teachers to promote behavioral health and wellness for youth. She partners with several school districts in the Boston area (e.g., Brockton Public Schools, Somerville Public Schools), and is a trainer with the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports Academy funded by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Click here for Lindsay's remote home and school learning matrix.

Sanjli Gidwaney is the Director of Design for Change USA and sits on the Board of Directors for Design for Change Global. She manages a national team of designers, educators and  technologists, partners, and advises schools and organizations on how to leverage the power of design-thinking to engage young people in serving their communities. Sanjli has been a guest speaker at the National Association of Independent  Schools, Yale, Harvard, Ashoka, SXSWEdu and the United Nations International School. She is a mother, a baker and a hip hop dancer, and when she’s not working you’ll find her doing all three at the same time!

Thanks to all who attended Sunday’s conversation

We wanted to send our heartfelt thanks to everyone who tuned in to last night’s conversation. As with the rest of our community, we have been personally devastated to learn that so many Brookline educators have been pink-slipped since last week.

Our apologies to those who could not view last night’s conversation—we exceeded our zoom limit of 1,000 people and though many more were able to view the live stream, we know that some of you could not. We have just put the video of the event on youtube, you can find it here:

https://youtu.be/xOoVnscoVEM

We wanted to thank School Committee Members Suzanne Federspiel and David Pearlman and State Representative Tommy Vitolo for answering questions, as well as Brookline parent Meghna Chakrabarti for moderating the conversation. And thank you to everyone who submitted questions. With limited time we were unable to get to all of the questions, so if yours remains unanswered please, please write to the school committee.

And thanks also to everyone for their feedback about last night’s online conversation. If we don’t get back to you, our apologies in advance! We are already discussing plans for future conversations, so stay tuned for more information.

Finally, solving the issues discussed last night is of utmost and urgent importance. Although we are deeply upset that so many educators received pink-slips, many of us are very hopeful and cautiously optimistic that the town can rehire most, if not all of our educators who received notices. Please know that there are many Town Meeting Members, Lauren among them, as well as other members of local government  and the community at large who are thinking creatively and working diligently on how to resolve this budget crisis in a way that quickly saves jobs at the school building level. Clearly, time is of the essence and we, Brookline parents, absolutely do NOT want to lose our talented and beloved educators.

 

Respectfully,

Lauren Bernard & Ben Kelley

Co-Presidents, Brookline Parents Organization

Great School Leadership for the 21st Century: A Colloquium in Brookline, Massachusetts

 

THE BOSTON UNIVERSITY WHEELOCK COLLEGE OF EDUCATION AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

&

THE BROOKLINE PARENTS ORGANIZATION

present:


Great School Leadership for the 21st Century:

A Colloquium in Brookline, Massachusetts

Saturday, December 7th 2019, 9:30 am – 3:45 pm

Coolidge Corner School, Brookline, MA

 

Our town, Brookline, is about to commence a most important process – searching for its next Superintendent of Schools. To support and inform this effort, Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education and Human Development (WCEHD) joins the Brookline Parents Organization (BPO) in sponsoring an exciting all-day Colloquium – Great School Leadership for the 21st Century. The day will include a variety of presentations and interactive discussions, featuring some of the most respected school leaders and teachers in the northeastern US.

 

The day begins with coffee and pastries at 9:30 am, followed by what promises to be an inspiring keynote address by Dr. Ramon Gonzalez, Obama White House Champion of Change, at 10 am. Then, attendees and participants will explore a program designed to demonstrate what great leadership means to the diverse constituencies served by the superintendent. The Colloquium will conclude with an analysis and summary of the presentations and conversations, responding to the question, “What did we learn today about great school leadership?” This summary will be presented to the superintendent search committee to inform their deliberations and will be published for the entire community.

Please RSVP at this link

Please note:  There will be engaging, fun, and professionally supervised activities for children all day. A sit-down lunch will be provided for all attendees.

Presenters and panelists include:

Dr. Ramon Gonzalez, founding principal of the award-winning MS223, Laboratory School of Finance and Technology in the South Bronx, New York City

Karen Tarasevich, 2018 Superintendent of the Year in Rhode Island

Dr. Julie Hackett, 2018 Superintendent of the Year in Massachusetts

Jon Sills, Superintendent of Schools, Bedford, MA

Dr. David Fleishman, Superintendent of Schools, Newton, MA

Dr. Piper Smith-Mumford, Former Principal, Pierce School, Brookline, MA

Dr. Henry J. Turner, Principal, Newton North High School, Newton, MA

Dan Bresman, Director, School Within a School (SWS) at Brookline High School

Tanya Paris, Kindergarten Teacher at Pierce School, Brookline, MA

Keira Flynn-Carson, English Teacher, School Within a School (SWS) at Brookline High

John Strecker, 4th Grade Teacher, Runkle School, Brookline, MA

 

Other participants include Dr. Bob Weintraub, Program Director of Pre-K-12 Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Boston University WCEHD, Mary Burchenal, former English Department Chair at Brookline High School, and Dr. Jeff Young, former Superintendent of Schools in Lexington, Newton, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

THE AGENDA:  December 7, 2019

 

9:30 am  Registration and refreshments

10:00 am  The Conversazione - The Entrepreneurial Principal:  “How Can a School Principal Create and Sustain a Culture of Innovation and Change?”  DR. RAMON GONZALEZ, Founding Principal of MS223. Laboratory School of Finance and Technology, the Bronx, NYC

11:00 am  Superintendents Panel:  Balancing Two Big Ideas:  Building a Great School System and Building a System of Great Schools” 

KAREN TARASEVICH, JON SILLS, DR. JULIE HACKETT, and DR. DAVID FLEISHMAN

(moderated by Dr. Jeff Young)

 

12:15 pm  Lunch and Recess

 

1:00 pm  Principals Panel:  Stories from Building-Level Leadership – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly?”

DR. PIPER SMITH-MUMFORD, DR. HENRY J. TURNER, DAN BRESMAN, and RAMON GONZALEZ

(moderated by Dr. Bob Weintraub)

2:00 pm  Teacher and Parent Panel:  “What do teachers and parents need from school and district leaders?”

MARY BURCHENAL, TANYA PARIS, JOHN STRECKER, KEIRA FLYNN-CARSON, DR. ADRIAN MIMS, DOROTHY CHARLES, LAUREN BERNARD, and PRIYA TAHILIANI

(moderated by Carey Goldberg)

3:15 pm  Summary: “What did we learn today about great school leadership?”

Please RSVP at this link

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Support Brookline’s Kindergarten Teachers!

Dear parent, family member, caregiver, and supporter of children in Brookline Public Schools -

Thank you. More than 475 people have signed the petition in support of Brookline kindergarten teachers and keeping play in our classrooms. We received signatures from well outside of Brookline, too. Other districts are watching to see if and how we lead.

More than 100 of you left thoughtful and moving comments reflective of the depth of care and concern the community feels about this issue.

To whit:

"We hire wonderful teachers. LET THEM TEACH!"

"Play is a critical part of inclusion for children with special needs. In the words of Fred Rogers, 'Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.'"

"We chose Brookline's public schools for the creativity and innovation that Brookline teachers bring to their craft. We trust that they know how to engage and excite our youngest learners as they embark on the lifelong journey of education. We did not choose to live here for standardization and excessive data collection. These are not Brookline values."

We have not yet heard if Superintendent Andrew Bott or members of the School Committee have responded or reached out to the kindergarten teachers following their public presentation on June 6.

So, what now? We will be presenting the petition, signatures, and comments at the next School Committee meeting on Wednesday, June 19. The meeting begins at 6pm at Brookline Town Hall, 333 Washington Street.

Your voice matters. Your presence matters. Sadly, I fear that even the most hefty petitions can be ignored, but individuals in a room are not so easily dismissed. Therefore, if you felt strongly enough to sign and comment, we encourage you come to the meeting. We encourage you to speak during the public comment period. Make your concerns, stories, and requests heard. We understand (and sympathize) that attending evening meetings can be very challenging, but if even a fraction of those who signed come to this meeting, we could fill the room in support of our littlest learners. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Meghna Chakrabarti and Benjamin Kelley

Bringing Joy Back into the Classroom: A Community Dialogue about Brookline Schools

Join parents, educators, students, and members of the community at large to share your experiences, concerns and vision for public education in Brookline.

Wednesday November 28th
6:30-8:30 PM
Hunneman Hall, Brookline Main Library
361 Washington Street

 

  • How can our classrooms be places of joy for all learners?

  • How can we as a community support teachers and build these kinds of classrooms?

  • What are the factors limiting the creation of  these classrooms?

  • With a new round of contract negotiations coming up between Brookline educators and the School Committee, what role can those negotiations play in bringing joy back into the classroom?

    Please come to share your ideas!

MCAS: Making Children Anxious and Sad

THE TESTING CHARADE
Pretending to Make Schools Better
By Daniel Koretz
288 pp. University of Chicago Press. $25.
Available at Brookline Booksmith

by Mike Offner
January 2018

Test scores are a primary focus of the administration of the Public Schools of Brookline, and the costs are substantial: teachers feel pressured to “teach to the test” rather than to teach in the manner they feel is best for our children; Brookline students feel considerable stress and anxiety about the tests; the testing itself uses large amounts of time that could be otherwise focused on teaching and learning; and children who are part of groups labeled as “underperforming” can experience feelings of helplessness, marginalization, and low self-esteem.

Given these costs, what are the benefits? Does all of this testing accomplish something worthwhile? Does it help Brookline students learn, achieve, or grow?

Harvard professor Daniel Koretz’s latest work, The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better makes a compelling case that the culture and policy of testing not only offers few if any benefits, but in fact does considerable damage to public school students and the greater public school communities. Koretz has studied testing for more than 30 years, has published five books and dozens of articles, and has a CV that is 25 pages long. He writes:

Pressure to raise scores on achievement tests dominates American education today. It shapes what is taught and how it is taught. It influences the problems students are given in math class (often questions from earlier tests), the materials they are given to read, the essays and other work they are required to produce, and often the manner in which educators are rewarded, punished, and even fired. In many cases it determines which students are promoted or graduate. This is the result of decades of “education reforms” that progressively expand the amount of externally imposed testing and ratcheted up the pressure to raise test scores.

In Brookline, our children take the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests in Grades Three through Eight, and then again in Grade Ten. Third Grade teachers, knowing that their students will take the MCAS for the first time, know that they will inevitably be judged, at least in part, by their students’ MCAS scores.

And although students do not take the MCAS in Second Grade, the Second Grade teachers feel pressure to have their students well trained in test-oriented questions so that these teachers do not “let down” their colleagues who teach Third Grade. And so it goes, all the way down to kindergarten, where teachers cannot escape the pressure to send their students along to each successive grade well prepared for the MCAS, so as not to create undue stress or negati ve attention f or any of their colleagues.

Brookline is hardly unique in suffering from the many negative aspects of the test-driven culture of public education. According to Professor Koretz:

Test-based accountability has led teachers to waste time on all manner of undesirable test preparation -- for example, teaching children tricks to answer multiple-choice questions or ways to game the rules used to score tests. Testing and test preparation have displaced a sizable share of actual instruction, in a school year that is already short by international standards.

One might wonder, “Does what Professor Koretz writes about really apply to Brookline? Aren’t we progressive and sophisticated enough to not fall victim to the test-prep pressure that Professor Koretz describes?”

A starting point to answer those questions is the memo that is sent to Brookline principals and teachers at the start of each year, telling them how classroom time should be allocated. This annual memo from the Brookline Office of the Superintendent starts as follows:

Each year we send out the time allocations document centrally to all teachers. Each year, the time allocation document induces anxiety in many teachers as they find that the time allocations are not realistic and cannot be met within our school day.

Given that this statement is directly from our superintendent’s office, Brookline parents might ask, “If the time allocations memo causes so much anxiety and is not realistic, why hasn’t the superintendent’s office changed it?”

The evidence of the emphasis that Brookline puts on MCAS preparation is apparent in the time allocations memo itself. The MCAS for grades Three through Eight tests two areas, which it defines as “English Language Arts” and “Mathematics.” And sure enough, in the Brookline time allocations memo, teachers in Grades K through Five are told to spend a total of about 60% of instructional time on areas defined, literally, as “English Language Arts” and “Mathematics.” The remainder of time is divided among: Social Studies, Science, Art, Music, Physical Education, and World Language. In other words, our classrooms’ time allocations are approximately as follows:

But what’s wrong with tests?

“What’s wrong with tests?” a Brookline parent might ask. “Don’t we want to know how well our children are learning?”

Professor Koretz offers three categories of pernicious corruption of teaching that test-focused education culture creates: (1) reallocation between subjects; (2) reallocation within a subject; and (3) coaching.

The reallocation between subjects is illustrated above in the pie chart showing Brookline’s Time Allocation Guidelines. The case of Brookline is consistent with what Koretz has observed generally: “To start, what would you expect to happen if you put great pressure on teachers to raise their scores on tests of a few subjects but ignored everything else? This is not rocket science: you would expect them to cut back on things that don’t count and shift resources to the tested subjects.... We’ve known for decades that they often cut back on subjects like social studies, art, and music.”

And many Brookline parents might share Professor Koretz’s concern that “[s]tudents who don’t learn social studies and science, for example, are poorly equipped to be informed citizens and will be less competent in many lines of work.”

Professor Koretz also writes, “Some educators have also curtailed nonacademic but important activities, such as recess. (Anyone who thinks that recess is unimportant hasn’t taught in an elementary school.)”

Indeed, it’s as though Professor Koretz were thinking specifically of Brookline, as at the start of the 2017-2018 academic year, the Brookline administration reduced Second Grade recess at Runkle by 50%, despite the extensive evidence that recess is critical to students’ academic achievement and other outcomes, as explained by Dr. Rebecca Breslow , who is a Brookline parent as well as a Sports Medicine physician at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Koretz observes further that even within a given subject, teachers feel pressure to teach only the precise content that tests measure. “Why would I teach irregular polygons?” he quotes a Boston teacher as asking, and then explains, “She didn’t mean that irregular polygons are unimportant; she meant that to the best of her recollection, irregular polygons didn’t appear on the state test for the grades she taught.”

And finally, there is the problem of “coaching.” For example, teachers can feel pressure to use the “process of elimination” (POE) approach to selecting correct answers on standardized tests. “The problem with POE,” Koretz writes, “is that some of the students who find the correct answer by eliminating incorrect ones would be unable to generate the correct answer if they weren’t given alternatives from which to select...”

Then there is the strategy of “plugging in” numbers to an equation in a test to find something that works. For example, teachers have learned to teach students that the dimensions of triangles are usually 3, 4, and, 5, or, alternatively, 5, 12, and 13, because these are the lowest sets of integers that work for the Pythagorean Theorem , a favorite topic of test-makers. So these dimensions are known as “Pythagorean Triples.”

Of course, in the real world, triangles don’t necessarily have these convenient dimensions. But the message, Koretz writes, is “Don’t bother memorizing the complicated theorem; just memorize the triples, which is easier and faster. Most of the students will get the item right, and everyone can go home happy. Well, almost everyone. Just don’t hire one of them to build your roof.”

Equity

One of the claims about education reform and its central use of testing is that it can increase “equity,” or, broadly speaking, the score gaps between disadvantaged groups and advantaged groups. Unfortunately it’s the other way around. Koretz writes that testing actually hurts disadvantaged children:

As if all of this were not depressing enough, there is yet another disturbing part of the story. Inappropriate test preparation, like score inflation, is more severe in some places than in others. Teachers of high-achieving students have less reason to indulge in bad preparation for high-stakes tests because the majority of their students will score adequately without it -- in particular, above the “proficient” cut score that counts for accountability purposes. So one would expect that test preparation would be a more severe problem in schools serving high concentrations of disadvantaged students, and it is. Once again, disadvantaged kids are getting the short end of the stick. Ironically, some aspects of the reforms that were intended to help disadvantaged students appear to have contributed to this demoralizing result.

And Professor Koretz has good company in his view that focusing on test scores is actually in equitable. For example, American University Professor Ibram Kendi, in his article “Why the Academic Achievement Gap is a Racist Idea,” writes:

These days, many people are criticizing the testing movement. Colleges are slowly diminishing the importance of standardized testing in admissions decisions. We are seeing unprecedented numbers of wealthy white parents opting their school children out of these tests.

But few testing critics are bursting its biggest bubble: the existence of the achievement gap itself. To believe in the existence of any sort of racial hierarchy is actually to believe in a racist idea. The achievement gap between the races–with Whites and Asians at the top and Blacks and Latinos at the bottom–is a racial hierarchy. And this popular racial hierarchy has been constructed by our religious faith in standardized testing ....

What if we measured literacy by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environment: how much individuals knew all those complex equations and verbal and nonverbal vocabularies of their everyday life?

What if we measured intellect by an individual’s desire to know? What if we measured intellect by how open an individual’s mind is to self-critique and new ideas?

What if our educational system focused on opening minds instead of filling minds and testing how full they are? What if we realized the best way to standardize a highly effective educational system is not by standardizing our tests but by standardizing our schools to encourage intellectual openness and difference?

But intellectual difference , and multiple literacies, languages, and vocabularies, are only valued in a multi-cultural society that truly values diversity and difference. The testing movement does not value multiculturalism. The testing movement does not value the antiracist equality of difference. The testing movement values the racist hierarchy of difference, and its bastard 100-year-old child: the academic achievement gap.

And UMass Professor Ricardo Rosa has written in Voices of Urban Education that “[p]erformance assessments must be culturally responsive in order to truly serve the needs of students from all backgrounds.” Professor Rosa explains further:

If we begin, as I do, from the perspective that institutions, including schools, are designed in the image and interests of those who rule, we must be very cautious about re-creating an educational reform environment where people of color and the poor will continue to be marginalized. If performance-based assessment is considered in the same frame as current testing regimes, which is entirely possible, it becomes just another reform fad (I don’t mean to suggest that performance-based assessments is a new one) that re-inscribes the power of systems of categorization and the conferring of rewards to those who are already materially, racially, and culturally privileged. From this perspective, performance-based assessments become another repressive surveillance technique in the lives of children and adolescents.

What now?

Given the failings of standardized testing, Professor Koretz recommends that schools focus on more holistic and fundamental evaluations of classroom practices and student outcomes, and acknowledge explicitly that many critical factors in students’ achievement are completely outside of schools’ control. He recommends, for example, that communities try to evaluate how well they help their children learn how to persist at challenging tasks and how to work well in groups.

Further, he stresses the important of human judgement as opposed to computer-generated data: “...we need to accept the need for human judgment in evaluating schools. This is in some ways unfortunate, given the difficult problems inherent in relying on judgement, but there really is no practical alternative. We will need to find better ways to use judgement, not avoid it.”

Professor Koretz also recommends creating counterbalances to administrators’ incentive to focus on test scores: “If principals have an incentive to eliminate recess to squeeze out a little more time for test prep,” he writes, “someone should have an incentive to put a stop to this.”

In addition, Professor Koretz offers some compelling and fascinating descriptions of the public education systems in Finland, Holland, and Singapore. While it’s not clear how practical these examples are for the United States’ own systems, the discussion of these other nations’ approaches is thought-provoking and enlightening.

___

Anyone who wonders how much the issues in The Testing Charade apply to Brookline need only have open and candid conversations with our teachers and students. The right answer for our children seems to be that beyond meeting state requirements for offering the MCAS for Grades 3-8 and for Grade 10, the Public Schools of Brookline should not make standardized testing or test scores a focal point of policies or priorities in any manner.

In Holliston, MA, Superintendent Brad Jackson, who is also the vice president of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, told teachers that he is “taking their handcuffs off” and encouraging them to teach in the manner they believe is best for their students without regard to the MCAS. It’s a remarkable display of courage, leadership, and commitment to the well being of children. If you believe The Testing Charade, Brookline should follow.

Brookline Book Reviewer Mike Offner is a parent of children in the Public Schools of Brookline.

Cyber-attack targets personal info of students and parents in Splendora ISD

SPLENDORA, Texas - Splendora ISD says a cyber-attack has compromised information of families within the district and could potentially give rise to threatening messages made directly to parents, students and staff. The school district said it was first notified of the threat early Wednesday that is targeting confidential information such as phone numbers and addresses. On Friday, Splendora ISD stated it continued to receive the threats, saying this prominent hacking group intends to send violent and graphic messages through text and email [...] The school district believes the hackers have targeted districts throughout the country in the past, including a Montana district earlier this month.

Continue reading "Cyber-attack targets personal info of students and parents in Splendora ISD"

Why some schools are sending kids out for recess four times a day

A new program called the LiiNK Project connects play and character development and is designed to bridge academics with the social, emotional and physical well-being of children. The program started in the 2015-2016 school year with four schools in Texas that used the program and four other schools that served as controls. Although it’s too early for definitive results, the short-term ones look promising.

Read more.