Gifted kids, Pygmalion Effect and Learned Helplessness

Pygmalion Effect: http://psych.wisc.edu/braun/281/Intelligence/LabellingEffects.htm

Every parent wants his/her kids to stand out.  That is natural and understandable. Regrettably, some parents have more influence than others.

ALL kids have genius when we teachers are able (allowed?) to recognize that. Every good coach, teacher, and parent learns early on that kids will perform at a much higher level if someone in authority believes in them. 

Public school teachers and administrators too often prefer those kids who start school already writing, reading, and computing because the schools don't have to work very hard to look successful. 

Advanced math kids who have developed academic self-confidence at an early age should be accessing community college classes by age 15--they are not the kids who attend school for the Friday night games and the Prom, anyway.  

THEREIN lies the real damage we can do to children--when we use our high schools to teach good kids all the phony ways that people can "succeed" and then expect them to study physics and Latin to show up well on the AP tests.

It is well past time to change the model of "1 teacher: 35 kids" for a whole year. Teams of teachers should alternate their classes and share the role of education provider for pools of kids. Outside resources should be sought and welcomed (and generally are, when the schools are doing their jobs).

It is also well past the time when district officials are able to choose people to be school administrators because they like them--people who were once librarians in the administration office or who won a state championship with a kid recruited from out-of-state.  Public school officials should take some form of Hippocratic oath to first do no harm. Because "Learned Helplessness" is the opposite of the Pygmalion Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

The Value of High School (Why kids don’t go…and don’t graduate)

A certain percentage of kids attach real value to their HS diploma. Of those, some view "education" existentially, as a means to rise--to acquire and accomplish, while some are behaviorally driven by the immediate, short-term consequences (their parents reward good school performance and punish failure). High school kids who graduate basically lie on a continuum somewhere between those points.

It is instructive that our national dialogue seems to focus on how to increase graduation rates instead of how to make the experience more meaningful to the kids.

American high schools, like many of the teenagers they ostensibly serve, try to do too many things at once. Like teenagers, when stretched thin and overwhelmed, schools choose to focus on what they do well.  Schools depend on good PR to pass bond votes. The kids who make the schools look good have value. 

The others, alas...

Who wants to teach the others? Who is good at it--the teachers who shop at Nordstrom and park European sports cars in the public school parking lot?  The teachers who have a 2 handicap at the club? No, they are teaching the status classes full of affluent juniors and seniors, or the AP classes full of the children of influential parents, or coaching the big budget sports programs, where their jobs transcend those of everyday classroom teachers. If a kid has some academic or athletic talent, he/she is able enter a domain where they are nurtured by this system...and high school has value for them, also.

More and more, we have to bribe kids with social opportunities, a thin veil covering the unspoken tragedy that the school experience is otherwise not particularly meaningful or useful to most of them. 

Because, for most of them, it isn't.

From K to 12, we assign to them the inexperienced teachers, the tired teachers, the old buildings, and the broken equipment. They sit on their hands during assemblies and watch the "popular" kids make speeches and receive trophies when they would really like to be in the shop, working on CAD,  or at their ESL class, where their teacher understands them, or in the computer lab, editing skateboard video.

Schools are inequitable by design. That will not change--it is part of the culture. Until we scrap the whole medieval concept of putting a "master" at the front of the room for a year to force all the kids to learn what the master knows, we are going to fail to reach a lot of kids who would really like to be successful citizens, but don't recognize high school as a means to that end. 

Because, for most of them, it isn't.

Schools are insular hierarchies that beg for transparency and accountability.  Instead, they have secrecy policies and lawyers who are paid with education money to protect bureaucrats--most of whom will be paid  by the taxpayers to shop at Nordstrom and play 18 holes for the rest of their lives, for work they didn't have to do very well.

Too many citizens are paying for artificial turf and state-of-the-art theaters that serve to educate a fraction of the school population while disenfranchising wide swaths.

Beaverton School District superintendent says cuts could reach $40 million

January 17, 2012 by Wendy Owen, The Oregonian 

Beaverton School District will pay $75,000 to settle discrimination claim by gay student teacher by Dominique Fong, The Oregonian February 11, 2011  

Beaverton School District superintendent says cuts could reach $40 million  January 17, 2012 

Beaverton School District is facing big layoffs because it delayed cutting staff April 20, 2012 

Beaverton School District to spend up to $850,000 to replace failing artificial turf fields

By Wendy Owen, The Oregonian April 06, 2012 

Beaverton School Board OKs Teacher Layoffs, Program Cuts June 05, 2012 

Beaverton School District will hire a new administrator as it lays off teachers June 22, 2012 

Beaverton School District computer quirk causes teachers, awaiting layoff news, some panic July 11, 2012 

Beaverton School District laying off 204 licensed staff and moving 365 others to new schools or subjects July 26, 2012 

To Oregon Gov't Ethics Commission: The OEA is to education what Scientology is to religion

Feb 2, 2016

Representatives of Oregon Government Ethics  Commission:

The Oregon Education Association is a Super PAC funded by oblivious teachers.  Its leaders defraud members with impunity. I AM ONLY ONE EXAMPLE.

When I was contracted to work as a teacher for the Beaverton Schools, I signed a contract and paid a union tor represent me in safeguarding my interests. Unknown to me, my union representative, Tom Husted, sat on the board of the district fundraiser, Janet Hogue, who shared an office with the BSD HR department. My elected local union representative in the Beaverton schools, Hanna Vaandering, would one day become the state president, a couple of years after helping OEA lawyers conceal the reasons behind my illegal termination.

When I contacted Vaandering for help in her role as president of the Beaverton EducationAssociation, she brought me an illegal contract that was designed to get my signature on an updated settlement agreement to shelter the lawyers who had colluded to withhold my settlement check for over a year after the federal court had been told my case was resolved. They were attempting to coerce me to sign stipulations for the state licensing board, who had circumvented my due process rights with the help of my OEA lawyer, Tom Doyle, then of Bennett-Hartman.

I lost my career because I resisted pressure from Doyle for years to sign stipulations to undocumented, unproven charges that were designed by the TSPC to influence a federal lawsuit and to protect lawyers and administrators who were deceiving the taxpayers, the media, and state and federal courts about their unlawful termination of my employment contract.  My OEA-appointed lawyer, Doyle, while serving as the OEA’s employee, had filed a breach-of-trust  million-dollar "freedom of speech" lawsuit in Judge Robert E. Jones Sixth District Court without consulting me (I read about it in The Oregonian) before I ever got to my "just cause" hearing with the administrators who fired me, effectively using the federal lawsuit to silence and manipulate me while allowing Beaverton's lawyers defame me with blatantly false sexual harassment charges for which no one has ever been held accountable.

My mother was dying and I had been stabbed in the back by people for whom I had worked 70-hour weeks for seven years.  It took me a while, but a few months after I was fired, I began asking the OEA legal coordinator, Mark Toledo, for oversight of my legal representation.  This was YEARS before I received a pittance of the "million dollars" Doyle had sued for--and YEARS before the TSPC director , Vickie Chamberlain, suspended my license illegally, using unprecedented extralegal "accept-certain-facts-as-true"findings.. To shelter the Hungerford lawyers and her cronies in Beaverton School District administration, Chamberlain disregarded the recommendation of the only objective judge to hear my story and suspended my license, using charges she never had to prove. She was able to TRAMPLE my due process, thanks to the my membership in the OEA and the fact that I was teaching under the auspices of an Oregon teaching license..

To summarize, I was being paid unfairly. My teaching equipment has been taken from my classroom secretly and hidden by people who were supposed to be helping me teach. I was pressured by unaccountable, unsupervised building administrators at the state's largest public school to give students undeserved grades. My school district administrators had unethical relationships with the "teachers" union, the people who were paid to represent my interests and the validity of my employment contract.  My school district administrators also had unethical relationships with the woman who oversees teacher licensing in Oregon. So, two weeks after I had voiced concerns to a new superintendent (Colonna), I was.fired in mid-year by sneak attack and falsely charged with sexual harassment--to augment vindictive charges of insubordination. My union rep had been aware of my impending termination and had not contacted me. I was locked out of my work and my employers told the children and parents whom I had served well that I had been sexually appropriate, that I had stolen equipment, and that I had sabotaged grades. I was harassed for almost four years by lawyers being paid education money...after asking to resign. This is all part of the public record FDAB testimony) but that story was covered up in the media, who were lied to about the reason for the departures for the administrators I have mentioned.

The Beaverton superintendent who signed my illega termination paper, Jerry Colonna, is now on the Oregon State Board of Education. The local union president who sold me out to unethical lawyers, Hanna Vaandering, is now the Oregon Education Association president. The Westview assistant principal who lied under oath about my refusal to submit work after I was locked out of my building, Mike Chamberlain, was given a principal’s job the following year and is now in the Beaverton District administration building, The assistant principal who solicited the false sexual harassment charges from the school librarian, Gail Vangorder, “retired” that summer at age 51 after testifying against me.  She was brought back to principal the following October when the actual principal, Malcolm Dennis (already on a district oversight program for incompetence), was caught coming to work drunk and given a secrecy agreement, then a pay off and a job in another state in exchange for his silence. Vangorder lasted six months and “retired” again, next surfacing for short stints in the education departments of two local colleges. The director of Beaverton's HR department, Linda Borquist (who was allowed by my union lawyer to lie under oath about my three years of work with her son Jeff) was forced to resign when a copy of her FDAB testimony was given to members of the Beaverton school board who had been lied to about the reasons behind my termination. A year after I was fired for blatantly contrived sexual harassment charges, the BSD board submitted a sexual harassment policy to the Oregon Department of Education that would have made my termination impossible.

I had asked to quit months before, after being cheated out of 20K in fair pay. No one associated with the Beaverton Schools has EVER been held accountable for misconduct. I lost my teaching career because I was a member of a union that defrauds its members with support from the state government and because I had purchased a license to teach from that same government, not as a result of anything I did improperly as a teacher in the Beaverton School District. 

I am very interested in clearing my name with the state of Oregon. Also, if the Governor is serious about ethical accountability, I would like to help assign responsibility to those former and current “public servants” who actually misbehaved and to those contract lawyers who have been paid education money to cover up that misconduct.

All the talk about graduation rates and attendance and “high stakes” tests are smokescreens.  Schools will improve when the bullies are removed from administrations and the lawyers who earn public money to shelter them are exposed.

The “teachers union” is a kabuki dance. The Oregon Education Association is to education what Scientology is to religion.  I would like to work with the OGEC to clear my name and my record and to prevent others from the damage done to me by unaccountable government employees..

Sincerely,

Don Bellairs, Oregon citizen who actually taught kids for his education money