Keynote speaker shares strategy for urban teaching
Volume 12, Issue 7 - April 2008
By Mike Myslinski
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| Urban Issues keynote speaker Linda Darling-Hammond addresses the crowd. |
The more than 400 teachers from larger cities who took part in the successful CTA Urban Issues Conference in March were praised for doing “incredible, heroic work” against great odds by keynote speaker Linda Darling-Hammond, a nationally recognized Stanford University education expert. She also praised CTA for its leading role in fighting for the teaching profession.
“This is the most important group in California, as far as I’m concerned,” she told the audience of urban educators in her empowering speech. “The teachers who lead our urban school systems are the folks who will determine the future of this state and the future of the nation.”
The author of 13 books and countless journal articles on education policy, Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford, co-directs the university’s School Redesign Network. She was named in 2006 as one of the nation’s ten most influential people affecting educational policy over the last decade by Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, a program of Education Week.
Between offering her strategies for teaching in diverse urban environments, Darling-Hammond praised the work of CTA in advocating at the local, state and national levels for better teaching laws, conditions, salaries and school funding.
She said that CTA’s successful mobilization last fall to stop the reauthorization of the flawed federal No Child Left Behind Act — partly because of an unfair new NCLB plan to tie salaries to student test scores — “may have saved this nation from a reauthorization” that would have made a bad law worse.
“Unions are being blamed for almost every ill in public education,” she told the conference. “People do not understand the role that unions play in both securing safeguards for the system as a whole and making it possible to recruit people into this profession at any kind of reasonable wage.”
The CTA conference offered many workshops with rich resources for urban educators. Topics included special education, building learning communities in our schools to empower educators, and school funding equality, as well as sessions on women and power, working with children living in poverty, and how to keep schools safe. Two seminars covered the CTA-sponsored Quality Education Investment Act, which will bring nearly $3 billion in extra resources to 488 lower-performing schools over seven years.
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| Attendees enjoy the conference. |
But it was Darling-Hammond’s speech that touched the applauding crowd with its insights and call to arms against enemies of public education who seek to attack teachers unions and to “de-professionalize” teaching itself.
She blasted the ideas of critics who say that teacher pay should be low because anyone can teach, and that learning would improve if principals had more power to fire teachers without due process, or if more superintendents without any classroom experience were put in charge of more school districts.
A former urban teacher in Philadelphia and New Jersey, Darling-Hammond noted that what works in urban classrooms is taking the time to make connections with students based on their cultural and family backgrounds, and knowing what kind of education they already have. She also noted the importance of making it possible for students to “own the knowledge that they are constructing.”
She stressed that teachers need to be more directly involved at local bargaining tables and in Sacramento in helping to redesign public schools and teaching methods.
Rote learning and canned curriculum do not work, said Darling-Hammond. Students need to be judged on their ability to assess, think critically, and do research, not on how well they take multiple-choice tests.
She cited one astonishing study that found that in the short period between 1999 and 2003, more new knowledge was produced in the world than was produced in the entire time before then. Students need to be taught how to comprehend the Internet and the information explosion — not easy challenges for educators.
“We are preparing them for work that hasn’t been invented yet.”
America needs to invest more in its teachers to compete globally, as other countries do, said Darling-Hammond. In Singapore, for example, the state pays teacher candidates to attend schools of education, and starting teachers earn more than doctors. California should renew grants and loans so more people will consider teaching. California also needs to strengthen its mentoring system for new teachers, provide smaller classes and offer quality teacher training instead of “drive-by workshops and spray-and-pray professional development.”
In his speech at the Santa Clara conference, CTA President David A. Sanchez discussed the state budget crisis and acknowledged the “special pressures and challenges” that urban school district educators face every day. He praised the planning committee for pulling off a meaningful conference.
“The workshops being offered are timely, innovative and full of useful ideas that you can take back to your classrooms.”
Among those CTA members working hard to make the conference a success were Dennis Kelly, president of the6,000-member United Educators of San Francisco, chair of the conference planning committee, and Janice Allen, president of the1,800-member San Jose Teachers Association, who also worked on the committee.
“Schools in urban centers face challenges before the challenges hit the rest of the schools in the state,” Kelly said. “We hope we have prepared urban teachers to deal with these challenges during this conference.”
Allen noted that the conference workshops addressed “many critical issues affecting public education in California.” She said the governor’s proposed public education cuts would only make things harder for urban school districts.
Darling-Hammond drove home the message about the importance of CTA’s fight against the budget cuts.
“Money does make a difference. Kids who have reasonable class sizes, well-paid teachers, a wealth of materials, computers, music, art, gym, PE — they learn more.”
