You Go, Young People!

I hope this is just a reminder, but Education Action! is all about the following:

...mobilizing teachers, students, and citizens into a movement of national proportions that will enable their voices to be heard in the public policy arena....to help to build a movement like the one that shook the conscience of this nation in the great upheavals of the 1960s.

Yep, that's what we're doing. The 2000s are the new 1960s. And when I think about the sixties, I think about a nation full of young rebellious people in their teens and twenties making stuff happen out there in the world. ...And the Beatles. But mostly the other stuff. Unfortunately, the young people today have a nasty reputation for being self-absorbed, apathetic, politically uninvolved, etc. This is not the case! For inspiration, check out these two groups of young people spoke up and got attention this week:

First, let's go to Calvin College. Calvin Coolidge? No, Calvin College. It's in Michigan. It's named after John Calvin, the slightly unoriginal but very influential reformer of the protestant church.

In order to gain tenure at Calvin, a professor must attend a Christian Reformed Church or an affiliate. Denise Isom, a professor of Education, attends the predominantly black Messiah Missionary Baptist Church in Grand Rapids. As her contract runs out next year, she has sought a waiver of the CRC requirement. Her application was denied in 2007, and she was encouraged by the administration to change churches. Again for 2008/09, she has been denied, and administrators have not revealed the process for reviewing waivers.

In response, students took to the quad! Creating a group called "The Eleven O'Clock Reconciliation Group," students handed out flyers and put pressure on the administration to stop what the students believe is institutional racism. The protestors also gave dramatic readings of Dr. Martin Luther King, highlighting King's opposition to racial divisions between churches.

As one student put it:

"It feels weird enough attending a college that's about 96 percent white and almost all upper class...when this [the Isom decision] came down, I knew I'd never feel right if I didn't try to change things...the rub is Calvin's efforts to remain 'distinctively Christian' come off looking like 'distinctively white.'"

Whether or not the administration will respond with action - time will tell. What has been accomplished, though, is putting the issue of diversity in the spotlight. The students have made it clear: racial discrimination is far more detrimental to the college's community than religious diversity. This is a powerful message, and the students are refusing to go unheard.

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On a lighter note, at Connecticut's Choate Rosemary Hall, land of the silver spoons, the student body found out that Karl Rove was scheduled to speak at commencement.

Students took immediate action. They used the school paper, vowing to abandon the ceremony altogether if Rove appeared. They threatened to invite Stephen Colbert to an alternative ceremony. They attended a school meeting in droves, showing a clear majority opposed the Rove invitation. They created a group on Facebook to plan other methods of protest. The students emailed their headmaster incessantly.

Finally, the administration gave in. Rove will not speak at graduation. You go, spoiled kids!

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These are only two of countless examples out there. Young people are still taking action when they feel it is necessary. The methods they use - speaking up at meetings, accessing local media, marching in the quad - are time tested and effective. I hope you find this as encouraging as I do.

Same crappy food, new name

Complex systems maven Scott Page wrote an interesting blog on the Huffington Post today. The first line is quite attractive:

No Child Left Behind looks headed for the scrap heap.

Indeed, pundits have recently become pretty certain about NCLB’s demise. According to Richard Rothstein:

NCLB is dead. It will not be reauthorized -- not this year, not ever.

Then why isn’t the anti-NCLB crowd dancing in the streets? When do we get to sing "Ding dong the wicked act is dead!" We don't. Page asserts this to be true: the federal government's involvement in education will remain at its current level. And no matter who is at the helm, this frightens many of us. The federal government is hard for us to influence, and we have little faith that the lessons of these six years under No Child Left Behind have really been learned. Learning from history doesn't seem to be a strong suit down there in Washington.

So what will happen? We don't know. Page's article envisions a new law, the "All Children Moving Ahead Act." It sounds super nice. It privileges innovation and collaboration. It allows for minimum standards to be met in a variety of ways rather than via one test. Blah blah blah. I remember when I was a teenager there was a terrible restaurant two towns over. Bad food, bad service, peeling paint, dirty bathrooms. Your basic crap fest. So when it went out of business the new owners put a new sign out front and changed the menu descriptions. Bad food, bad service, peeling paint, dirty bathrooms - they all remained.

Unlike Page, Rothstein envisions Washington releasing its grip and simply ignoring education altogether. He makes a few good suggestions for our next administration:

With the federal government proven incapable of micromanaging the nation's 100,000 schools, what education roles remain for a new administration? There are two....One is to provide information about student performance, not for accountability but to guide state policy...The other new federal role should be fiscal equalization...Narrowing huge fiscal disparities will take time. Whether the next Democratic Congress and administration -- if they are Democratic -- take the first steps will test whether the party is truly committed to leaving no child behind.

Like the All Children Moving Ahead Act, this sounds very nice. But nice things like equality don't happen without a fight. None of these things will happen if Washington is left to its own devices. So, NCLB is dead. Whether the feds are going to bury NCLB and enact a zombie version of the undead law in its place, or simply turn the other way and let the schools self destruct, won't matter if we allow ourselves to get lulled into complacency by this "NCLB is dead" talk. I, for one, will not be sitting around waiting for the next administration to change the menu and serve the same old vile stew. The law is "dead" after six long years of pounding on the door...perhaps we've got their ears? The time for a united voice, with clear demands, is now.

Abysmal Conditions for our Kids: Not Front Page News

They say that teaching is the second most private act in America. As with all quotes in the "they" canon, the original speaker is unkown, at least to me. I heard it for the first time in a class on school reform. In this context, the quote was supposed to illustrate why changing schools is such a difficult process. Teachers are isolated in the classroom; they are attached to, and extremely protective of, the work that they do, and therefore resist change. They barricade themselves in a room and close their ears to external suggestions and offers of collaboration.

This is an impression from way outside any classroom. The reality is that teachers are often isolated in their classrooms not because they are hiding from reform, but because no one else bothers to look in them. Classrooms are not black boxes, they are just ignored. This country claims to care about its children, and makes sweeping mandates to try and quick fix a broken system, but rarely takes a genuine look into a school.

Fortunately, the New York Times bothered to report on what that mysterious six hours per day is like for 3,600 students in Queens. These students are attending a school whose capacity is 1,800. They attend classes in trailers surrounded by chain linked fences. The first lunch period starts at 8:49 a.m. The conditions are nothing short of cruel. As a 16-year veteran teacher put it:

"Who decides to treat people this way? You don’t build a school for 1,800 students and stick nearly 4,000 in it. Why? Who would want to do something like that to other human beings? On purpose.”

Indeed, the situation is baffling. As a person who works in a fairly crappy school, I still find these descriptions shocking. Yet, the injustices students suffer in this school are sitting quietly in the Education section of the Times. This is not front page news; it is accepted, commonplace, ignored. Where is the outrage?!

Perhaps people are not outraged because no one, other than those who are already aware of these conditions, reads the Education section. The first step in any reform effort is getting enough people to recognize that there is a problem. The daily atrocities of inner city schooling have to be common knowledge before they are changed. What this country accepts for its children in the way of an education should be on the front page, every day, until it's fixed. This is a job for all of us who see the insides of schools every day. Write letters to your representatives. Write articles. Take pictures. Make films. Take action! However you do it, make your voice heard!

Assemblyman Weprin from New York Speaks Out!

One of No Child Left Behind’s most amazing accomplishments is its ability to ruin perfectly good words. This law has made me, an English teacher and general big fan of the English language, feel hatred for words like “achievement” and “accountability” and “qualified.” Last week, the New York City Education Chancellor, Joel Klein, arranged a media fest in Queens to reward schools that had “achieved” on the city’s new grading system. Not surprisingly, there are many critics of this grading system since it focuses primarily on (dramatic pause) standardized testing.

One critic, Assemblyman from Queens Mark Weprin, had the guts to do something about it. He got the microphone and, rather than playing the “pat ourselves on the back” game, he told it like it is. He took five minutes out of the pomp and circumstance to rail on the folly of No Child Left Behind, causing a chorus of cheers in the back of the room from teachers and parents. He accused the city of allowing its schools to turn into "Stanley Kaplan" and losing their focus on learning. I asked Weprin what prompted him to speak up, and he said, "I have two kids in public school - need I say more?" No, Mark, you needn't.

During Weprin's diatribe, Chancellor Klein grimaced and recovered the microphone as quickly as possible, thus suppressing the opinions of local politicians, parents, and teachers – I mean, what do they know about education?!

Like many misguided NCLB defenders, Klein fell victim to the testing vs. no testing fallacy. This is the one in which NCLB defenders assume that those of us opposed to it oppose testing in all forms. Klein said, “If we don’t do that [test], we aren’t educating our kids.”

In reality, of course, we know that testing is ONE OF MANY indicators of true achievement. Even one of the authors of the law, a former stalwart champion of the common man, Ted Kennedy, admits that the focus on standardized testing was remiss:

“…the law still needs major changes to bring out the best in all children…Its one-size-fits-all approach encourages "teaching to the test" and discourages innovation in the classroom. We need to encourage local decision makers to use a broader array of information, beyond test scores, to determine which schools need small adjustments and which need extensive reforms.”

-Kennedy in the Washington Post

The tides are starting to turn, but it won’t happen without a huge push. I urge you all to follow Assemblyman Weprin’s lead. If you believe something, and find a time to speak your mind but feel it would be rude, or disruptive, or scary, DO IT ANYWAY. In order to change the status quo, we need a unified, unafraid, national movement – do your part to make it happen. Speak up all the time and every time until learning, creativity, and sense are returned to our schools.

Okay okay okay!

With all of the exciting things that have been going on within Education Action! these past few months, the blog has been relegated to the back burner. Okay, really it wasn't even on the stove. The Roaming Roaster forgot just how tough it is to gather groups of teachers together for coffee - they are busy people! But plenty of stuff goes on that we think people ought to know about, so we're putting this thing back on the stove. Look forward to more stuff, more often.

Education Action! has had a great first six months - Keep up the good work out there!