The Monthly ROAST

Thousands Protest in CA!!

2008-04-25T06:09:00.000-07:00

The folks at Youth Noise, who we've covered recently, did a great job organizing student groups all over California last week. In protest of Gov. Schwarzenegger's decision to cut $5 Billion from CA public schools' budgets students, teachers, parents, and community members spoke out on April 18th.

They even managed to get some media coverage (imagine! The media portaying a group of non-violent youth being civically engaged and advocating for things that matter to them...it's almost as if they are thinking, breathing citizens to whom we ought to direct resources should we want to preserve democracy...hmm!)

From KTVU in San Francisco:

“I feel like the state doesn’t realize how important education is,” said sophomore Lina Lin.
Kristy Morrison, an English teacher at Galileo, has been working to help organize Friday’s protest for the last month.

“Classes are already overcrowded,” she said, “and it’s going to get worse.”

Morrison said that students need to show adults that they can be active, in a nonviolent way, and that they are serious.
“Every wonderful thing this country—women’s right to vote, civil rights—everything happened with day to day people,” she said. “No politician made this happen.”

Morrison, who is tenured, said she works nearly 80 hours weekly, but nonetheless joined the list of teachers statewide who last week received pink slips from the their school.

“It’s discouraging and insulting and a big problem,” she said, “when people with such an education like myself that work this hard are not acknowledged are the first to go when the state is in a financial crisis.”

And, from the Redlands Daily Facts:

According to senior Sarah Fiske-Phillips and her brother Jacob, a sophomore, more than 50 letters were written by students to inform Schwarzenegger about how cuts in arts and physical education will affect school experiences at Grove.

"More people need to know what's going on," Sarah said. "We've been told that the governor probably won't even read our letters. But I think it adds more pressure."

"I hope it starts a chain reaction to inspire others to write a letter."

Alright Sarah Fiske-Phillips! Raising awareness, putting pressure on elected officials and refusing to quit - these students are making all the right moves. I hope she's right, and we start to see more and more student-driven organizing in the days to come.

What Do You Bring to the Table?

2008-04-18T05:21:00.000-07:00

The Roaming Roaster has a sprained ankle, and therefore did not get to blog yesterday. However, before the tragic ankle accident, Education Action! managed to host a little community gathering one evening this week and the details are worth sharing. Be warned: I am heavily medicated.

We invited a bunch of people to our headquarters for an informal conversation. Teachers, community activists, school committee members, CBO employees, and administrators were all asked to bring some food to share as well as ideas for collaboration. All told, about fifteen people came, which was a perfect size. We had a few glasses of wine, ate some snacks, and had a long conversation about what each of us contributes to the cause of public education, and how we might use one another to strengthen our efforts. All agreed that another event of this type ought to happen, and another after that, and so on. It seems that a conversation between people working toward common goals is a precious rarity - and it shouldn't be. Here's how you can make the same thing happen in your own community:

1. Don't overdo it

If you try to plan some grand event, you'll get stressed out and may abandon it. You'll be surprised how refreshing it is to just have an informal conversation with people who care about the things you do - this is far more likely to lead to real, on-the-ground action than a huge impersonal lecture hall. The goal is conversation, not national media.

2. Invite a wide range of people

Inviting only people you know is not a recipe for learning new strategies and making new partnerships. Use the network that you have to reach beyond your typical circle, and make sure to invite a few more than you'd like to have because people will cancel. This is the basis of grassroots organizing - they will tell their friends, and they will tell their friends, and they will tell their friends...

3. Feed them

It's always a good idea to put out some food. It brings people together, and you don't want to talk politics hungry. Plus it's a great way to deal with that first awkward twenty minutes. People can just stand around the brie and build community with their mouths full.

4. STRUCTURE!

You need to prevent a griping session or the dreaded awkward silence. This is the most important factor - you have to choose a discussion leader and provide talking points. This discussion leader must be firm, and able to curb conversation-dominators without sounding rude. Some people choose to pass around a ball or something, and only allow talking when a person is holding the ball. It might sound juvenile, but believe me: people need this.

5. Follow up

Email people right after the event and encourage continued conversation. Share everyone's contact information, and schedule a follow up meeting for the next month. Once your group develops a bit of synergy, you can start creating concrete goals to accomplish in between meetings.

So vacuum the family room, stick some toothpicks into a few pigs-in-a-blanket, and become a community organizer. It starts with conversation...something we have less and less of these days.

Youth Making Noise

2008-04-09T12:05:00.000-07:00

I am always encouraged by groups like this. Youth Noise, an online network of young people, is just one example of a great group of civically engaged activists fighting for the causes that are important to them. Youth Noise is

...an international youth civic engagement organization. Using a multi-media participatory web site, we provide a platform built on networked technologies that invite youth around the world to bring their unique perspectives and creative visions to solve problems they define as critical to their lives and communities. Through a collaborative online environment, youth share ideas, convert ideas into action and scale actions to build and activate movements. We have established a global network of young people built upon a foundation of trust, authenticity and relevance; young people now leverage this network and the platform we have built to actively participate in bettering their world.

And they seem to be making plenty of noise indeed. In California on April 18th over 10,000 young people at over 25 schools will organize rallies in support of public education. They are protesting the coming cuts to the 2009 California public school budget. Some schools will host open mic rallies while others will display art work while others will take to the streets. Find out how you can participate here.

Make noise they should! Since the Bush administration came into office, money has been directed steadily away from education and into the military. In fact, over the course of his administration, the bushies have INCREASED military spending by 30% while education has faced small increases or cuts, all the while being asked to comply with new mandates. The 2009 budget is no different than years' past - the military will see a 5% increase and education gets to watch the No Child Left Behind funding rise to almost what it was two years ago...yay.
Our national priorities are incredibly screwed up. With just the money we have spent in Iraq, never mind the rest of the gargantuan military budget, we could have had...

...21,510,598 full four-year scholarships to public universities...

...or sent 58,770,981 children to head-start...

...or hired 7,689,734 new public school teachers.

That's Seven Million Six Hundred Eighty Nine Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Four school teachers!

(Or we could have had 7,689,733 new school teachers and doubled my salary...)

Anyway, the point is, wherever we put our resources, that's what we care about. We say we care about our kids and our future, but we don't. We care about power and money and "defending" a country increasingly filled with idiots. You go, California kids. Be as noisy as possible.

Believe to Achieve

2008-04-02T11:17:00.000-07:00

The Roaming Roaster along with the rest of Education Action! trekked out to Albany, New York, this weekend for the Annual Believe to Achieve Conference. A project of the National Urban Alliance, this conference was billed as "The Most Important Educational Experience of 2008." Since this is obviously the most important educational blog in the country, and Education Action! is the most important activist network in the country, it was pretty much mandatory that we attend.

The goal of the conference was noble: give educators the tools to close the achievement gap one classroom, or one district, at a time AND reaffirm that education is a fundamental civil right. Our goal: meet as many passionate activists as possible and get them working on educational justice in their home communities. It seemed, on paper, that OUR goal and NUA's goals were going to dovetail nicely in gorgeous downtown Albany. We piled into the EdAction Mobile at 8 p.m. Friday night, bound for Achievement.

Saturday morning, very early, we entered the Crowne Plaza's lobby. A small crowd milled about. Everyone was sort of swaying in place, waiting for what we did not know. The whole scene had an underwater quality. The concierge informed us that everyone was waiting for a shuttle to the convention center, where the conference was ACTUALLY being held. Lugging our collection of recruitment materials, promotional materials, information, and general whatnot, we waited outside amid the flotsam and jetsam. We piled in the van. It took us approximately seven feet North to the convention center. We piled out. These things always have a funny way of making us realize what our students must feel like when we create inefficient systems for them to operate within.

The convention center is the weirdest building on earth. It is HUGE. Absolutely huge. The hallways are wide enough for three Hummers and a horse drawn carriage. Everything echos. Sporadically, in random corners, modern art appears, the sort of art that makes you wonder what distinguishes "art" from "nice try buddy." We walk through this building a longer distance than we traveled in the van, arriving at last in the center where registration tables are assembled.

The registration tables look like tic tacs sitting in a swimming pool. This place is a rough venue to generate conversation and build community. But we hang on to our optimism. This is the Most Important Place To Go All Year, remember?!

Fast forward. It is lunch time. Three people have passed our table. They did not stop. Those little golf cart things carrying maintenance workers and security guards whiz by like tumbleweed. This. Place. Is. Empty. We decide to split up the table-watching duties, and two of us head to a breakout session.

My session is concerned with reframing the idea of underachievement. The primary take away: it's all in our attitude. If we expect our students to underachieve, they will do just that. We find what we're looking for, every time. So, if we look for success, if we expect it, we'll get it. This is an important message. Too often, I sit in staff meetings addressing each student according to weaknesses. This is the language we speak: failures, risks of failures, weaknesses, challenges, etc. We almost never speak in positives.

At one point, the presenter asked us to share with our neighbors some positive words we felt described urban "underachievers." I am flanked by administrators. They are very encouraged to hear that I teach the homeless/teen parent/court involved population, which they had experience doing earlier in their careers. So we start thinking about generalizations, of the positive nature, that we can make about our students, past or present. I say, "Resourceful" which makes everyone nod. They say, "Persistent." One woman is writing down all of our suggestions, as was directed by our facilitator. I say, "Passionate." They cock their heads. Really? Passionate? They don't write it down, and move right along in the conversation.

When we come back together as a group, the four most common responses are put up on the powerpoint Family Feud style. Our group had written down all four. Passionate was not up there. My neighbors are very satisfied with themselves. They got the right answers.

That pretty much sums up my review of the conference right there. We want to address the achievement gap, and we do a lot of rephrasing terminology, looking at the results of expensive research projects, and fighting a system riddled with racism and sexism and classism and greed. We want our schools to be equitable and excellent and the education they provide to be a guaranteed civil right. But, when it comes down to it, we are up against ourselves. We are up against our own expectations for our schools and our students. We are up against administrators that don't think "passionate" is a valid adjective to describe a group of students. We are up against a culture that values getting answers more than really thinking about questions.

All weekend, we spoke to about six passionate advocates for change. Since then, we've been in contact with one of them. I want to say to these people: attending a conference for a weekend isn't making change. Writing one email to an activist organization about how much you believe in the cause and then never following up on it isn't making change. Getting the same answers as everyone else in your workshop on closing the achievement gap isn't making change. It's as if the standardized testing mentality, that many of us agree is detrimental to schools, has been ingrained into the minds of these well meaning educators. Reform efforts seem to fall into the same "just skim the surface and move on" trap as test-prep obsessed curricula. There seems to be this idea that never using the word "Underachiever" again is all one needs to do to eliminate underachievement. It's a valid step, sure, but creating an educational system that provides an equal education for all races and social classes is going to take more than vocabulary.

Get out there and DO something, people!

The Art of the Matter

2008-03-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

The Roaming Roaster roamed into quite the affair last night. I had the distinct pleasure of attending a dinner party at Ambassador Swanee Hunt's house. She hosts often, and recently raised over one million dollars for arts education programs in one night. I could hear the live jazz from the courtyard, and the bar had plenty of ice. Mood: apprehensive. Attire: I'm pretty sure I was the only one wearing sneakers.

The evening was billed as a "conversation with Carol Johnson" - the new superintendent of Boston Public Schools - about arts in education. Many of the guests had been running organizations in Boston for ten or twenty years, all geared toward bringing the arts into schools and communities that are increasingly artless. They see Dr. Johnson as a ray of hope. Coupled with the Patrick administration, which someone generously described as having "a more sympathetic view" as to what "education looks like," they see this as a time when voices for creative, well-rounded education will be heard. The evening was designed to introduce Dr. Johnson to all the community organizations bringing arts into her schools, and to jump start advocacy efforts in BPS and beyond.

Immediately clear was public schools' nearly total reliance on CBOs and other outside sources for their art instruction. Or, as was the case in an example Dr. Johnson gave, science teachers who happened to play the piano bring music into the classroom on their own terms. Music and art are considered extra, and more schools (nine in Boston this year) are cutting teachers of these subjects.

While these subjects are treated as superfluous by the state, they are fundamental in the homes and schools of the very rich. What privileged child went through school without learning an instrument? Or studying classical music? Or taking dance classes? The family who can afford it would not allow a child to grow up artless, yet schools continue to cut art and music.

So...the arts are necessary for the children of the rich, but are the arts necessary to schooling? What is schooling for, anyway? Some people believe it is to get a job. One of those people, Secretary Bump, Governor Patrick's workforce maven, stood up and brought the employer's perspective to the table. Usually, I cringe when this woman talks. She represents all that I find particularly frightening about "workforce development" (read: funnel the kids in danger of being "left behind" into go nowhere jobs so they can't end up on welfare. read: tracking. read: who cares what makes you happy; get a job.) However, this evening she was far less frightening than usual, and acknowledged that employers want the soft skills that kids learn in art and music and, often, no place else. Of note was this: Bill Gates surveyed his staff at Microsoft and found that Computer Science was the SECOND most popular college major across all employees. The most common? Music.

The room made a collective "hmmm" at this point. Secretary Bump follows it with a question, "What should I tell the readiness project?"

A man across the room from me put down his Merlot and stood up to blame this artlessness on the obsession with standardized testing. I perked up and gave him a silent "bravo!" He went on to explain that schools are not publicly accountable for anything besides English and math scores. Therefore, schools funnel resources into raising those scores.

The room had an immediate response to this. Collectively, we had thousands of stories to prove the misguided nature of funneling resources so narrowly. We all knew the student who hated school, who felt disengaged, angry, unsuccessful, bored...but who found (usually by accident) that he loved the theater. And he started to get involved with the drama club. Like magic, he's coming to school early and staying late, solely for the drama club. But, while he's there, he goes to English and math. He learns to measure fabric for costumes. He learns to memorize lines. He learns to design sets. He organizes the props back stage. All of these skills TRANSFER. Why did we come to the conclusion that math skills have to come in math class? This kid aces his math test, but will tell you he hates math. He is engaged with his school, and he stops thinking about dropping out. There were so many of these stories...but federal funding doesn't get reallocated based on sweet stories. They respond to results. Fortunately, Dan from the other side of the room, had an idea.

He introduces the "Creative Challenge Index." This is a public measure just like test scores -schools are judged on the basis of how many opportunities each student has to participate in the arts or music. Schools will have to publish how many creative expression opportunities they provide right alongside test scores. Those numbers will undoubtedly prove that when kids have the opportunity to engage in art or music they ALSO do better on standardized tests. Brilliant! When can we make this idea the law of the land?

Well, it already is a law. A law in waiting. House Bill 393, recently released by the Joint Education Committee, is written and floating around.

This is exactly the sort of concrete, creative activism that we need to counteract the devastating effects of NCLB and the testing frenzy. Find out more about what you can do to help advance this Bill here.

Swanee jumps in to ask Dr. Johnson what advocacy efforts worked in Memphis. After quite a bit of pushing back and forth, Dr. Johnson offers us the following example:

Parent Groups and Advocacy Groups, but more importantly the unity of parent and advocacy groups, put enough pressure on the governor to get a clear goal accomplished: more money. They created a proposal to raise the tobacco tax and funnel the added revenue into the schools. It worked. They raised the price of a pack by 40 cents, and ended up with 50,000,000 for the schools. Fifty million. And people had to pay forty additional cents to slowly kill themselves. This was making way too much sense for a room full of the ultra-rich.

Then Dr. Johnson said: "What we need is an infrastructure. Some way to connect the different advocacy groups."

Hmm. So we have a bunch of people who want to change things for the better. We have a relatively open minded administration (term used oh so loosely). We have a room full of groups with abundant resources who don't know each other. What we need is some kind of database for all these resources and some really dedicated community organizers to bring them all into contact with one another so we can GET THIS DONE. Hmm...hmm...who could do that?

Hello! Look at us! Please please please vast readership, join our network or send us email or call us! This bill, House Bill 393, is only one example of the things people are coming up with to improve our schools. But not a one of them is going to happen without organized action.

Find out more about the Boston Public student who painted the amazing painting above here.

(Oh and you'll be happy to note that this crowd took my sneakers as creative expression, and didn't blink an eye.)

Ohhhhbama

2008-03-20T04:59:00.000-07:00

How rarely we encounter a statesman with true courage. Rarer still, an eloquent one. Hell, at this point it's nice to encounter a literate statesman.

In Philadelphia this week, Barack Obama gave us all hope that an American president does not have to be a mindless greedmonger or a spineless moron. He also begged the distracted multitude to pay attention and avoid letting sound bytes replace genuine, difficult, meaningful discourse in yet another presidential campaign.

Our favorite part over here at Education Action!, of course, was when he actually spoke the truth about American public education. (I mean we're happy when candidates even mention education, never mind tell the truth.)

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

What?! But segregation is illegal! Yeah, well, so is driving above the speed limit. Finally a candidate who uses the word SEGREGATED to describe our schools. Is that reality I smell? Foul though it is, we won't deal with it until we admit that it stinks.

Then he goes on to issue a challenge. Hey! Nobody challenges Americans! We don't have to give anything up, except the occasional son for a war. We don't have to listen to speeches that are challenging to understand. We don't have to read headlines that are more than three words long. We get a nice little bit of money back after taxes so we can buy some stuff. We don't have to cut back on using any nonrenewable resources, in fact we can drive a hummer. We don't have to really fix schools, we'll just test them repeatedly until they fix themselves. We don't have to care about other people's kids. We don't have to do much of anything... But look what happens in a classroom when you don't challenge students. They get bored. They feel disrespected. They start to hate school. They drop out. We need a challenge, and Obama issues one I like a whole lot:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news....But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids...

We need to REFUSE to accept showmanship and spectacle as our government or our justice system. We need to be stronger than the fear mongering nightly news. We need to read beneath platitudes. We need to do something really hard - actually have a difficult conversation, over and over, until we solve a problem. And the first, most essential problem Senator Obama thinks deserves our efforts? Education. Because it is fundamental.

(You should really read the whole thing, if you haven't yet. Or watch it.)

Top O' the Mornin

2008-03-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

I read the Education section of the New York Times first thing every morning. It is a depressing habit. Between EdWeek, a host of teacher blogs, and the Boston Globe, I end up with a well-rounded diet of horrible. This teacher got fired, that superintendent is incompetent, this testing frenzy is ruining the lives of children everywhere, this that this that.

Lo and behold, this morning featured a fantastic and uplifting piece about Irish step dancing in the Bronx. It seems a young Irish lass moved to the Bronx to teach music. A long way from her River Liffey, Ms. Duggan has inspired a troupe of young girls to love (like obsessively love) Irish step dancing. The troupe is dubbed "the pride of the school." She even raised enough money to take 32 students to Ireland, where they performed on Irish television.

We're going to file that, here at Education Action!, under freaking awesome.

This positive story about appreciating one another's culture, the bonding between student and teacher, and kids feeling engaged with their school, feels tragic to me on account of its rarity. I can remember being mid-grad school and feeling like I wanted to run from the education world as rapidly as possible. It was the most depressing field in the world, near as I could tell. It was going to be nothing but an uphill battle, to no avail, forever. I spoke with a fellow student who was feeling similarly. We left the library early and watched Mr. Holland's Opus in my living room, and balled our little teacher eyeballs out. How could we ever, in a million years, choose any other profession? It took one sappy ass Richard Dreyfuss film to put us back on track.

Education is, in my fair employer's words, a beautiful profession. Of all the jobs out there, it is the most challenging, the most essential, but also the most rewarding. We stay in it because when a bunch of elementary school girls, who didn't even know where Ireland was a year ago, fall in love with learning Michael Flatley style, it makes an entire year of uphill climbing worth it, a thousand times worth it. Now they just have to read Ulysses and I'll be happy...

This is exactly the kind of stuff that makes me afraid...

2008-03-13T11:45:00.000-07:00

Actually, I'm afraid of many things. Shark attacks. Driving. What all this diet soda is really doing to my digestion system. But nothing makes me more terrified than firing teachers for refusing to comply with oaths.

In California last month a math teacher lost her job for amending an oath all state employees must sign. The Oath of Allegiance, to be exact. (There is a terminator joke here somewhere, but I don't have the strength to find it.) Each state employee must sign a piece of paper that affirms his or her promise to, among other things, "Defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies."

She inserted the word "non-violently" before "defend" and was fired.

Let's put this in perspective. This woman is a veteran math teacher. She teaches remedial math to struggling students, has for over a decade. She is a student at a university, studying to get a higher credential for her trade. Her life's work is making accessible the number one most hated subject on earth. She eliminates learning barriers for students having a difficult time in college. She is, in short, a freaking saint.

But, she is also a Quaker. She doesn't believe in violence. My god what a monster! The state of California is in danger!

Where are our priorities? We have students mashed into classrooms at twice the capacity. We have students taking classes in trailers two hundred yards away from the actual school building. We have students sustaining injuries when decrepit buildings fall apart literally over their heads. In Boston, we have over a thousand students leaving every year without graduating. We have students so hopeless and so angry that they meet the pervasive violence in their lives with an inured shrug. Urban school teachers leave the profession at increasingly alarming rates.

We do NOT have the luxury, California, of making sure every damn teacher signs your oath to the letter. In fact, California, the very idea of making a state employee sign an oath is kinda scary. This exact sort of myopic boneheaded idiocy plagues the entire country. If we continue to run a broken educational system, we will have a nation that cannot even read the constitution, never mind understand and defend the principals of democracy. So while teachers are fired for refusing to sign a piece of paper, a generation is being pushed through school and will face the world unprepared. Yet, the powers that be focus on the oath and not the schools. Perhaps they want an undereducated populace to control and exploit...

Oh, and California, if you're really looking to go after someone who is disparaging our constitution, pay a visit to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Your Phone's Ringing Dude

2008-03-06T04:16:00.000-08:00

Your cell phone; it's ringing. It's the one that you got for getting good grades. I would love to stop writing about NYC public schools, but Joel Klein keeps doing stupid things about which I feel compelled to blog. His latest and greatest: buying students off. At a price of around two million dollars, high achieving NYC middleschoolers will receive cellular phones as a reward.

Hello? Are you there, Intrinsic Motivation? It's me, Margaret.

Does anyone else get a creepy feeling about this? Maybe I'm getting old. I mean, when I read twenty books and did twenty book reports one year in elementary school, I got to go see the Red Sox at Fenway as a reward. (It was cold and they lost.) Rewards for academic performance are not new. But that example is a reward for doing something extra, above and beyond what was required. And we got to choose the prize, by a vote. In NYC they are rewarding students for plain old school. They are giving them something they believe the students might want. They are trying to make "success in school cool again."

The problem is bigger than two million dollars' worth of prepaid cell phones. The problem is the way we treat school as a society. The problem is a complete disregard for our kids. The problem is that we continually try to fix severed limbs with band aids. This is not going to work and it's a waste of two million dollars. What we need are schools in which students have agency and feel invested, feel their voices are heard and of value. If students feel challenged and in charge of their own learning they won't need to be bought off. We can't BRIBE them into "success" and expect it to mean something. There are a few schools out there that get it. Apparently, New York didn't get the memo.

Bad call, Joel Klein.

(...Yeah, I made that pun. Couldn't be avoided, really.)

What About Anti-Elitism?

2008-02-26T04:47:00.000-08:00

Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Mica Pollock, is the editor of a new book on race in the classroom. Every Day Anti Racism: Getting Real About Race in the Classroom sounds like a boon to all educators - I mean, what classroom couldn't benefit from some balls-to-the-wall for real talk time about race? Further, what faculty meeting? The answer of course is zero - no matter how diverse or homogenous, how well performing or under performing, how rich or how poor your classroom, there is no place in America that couldn't stand a good dose of conversation about race.

But, how best to go about it?

This book, which author Tim Wise advises reading before attempting to teach another day, purports to contain some helpful hints. I will read it, eventually. I'm in the middle of Dune right now, and then I was going to pick up the new Michael Chabon novel, and then I'll get to it. I went to Harvard, so I must already have the answers, right?

No! No no no! The contributors to this book include (but are not limited to) a professor at Duke University, a Kennedy School economist, a Professor of Law, an Assistant Professor at Harvard...blah blah blah. Very very smart people. Likely wonderful writers to boot. I am sure many of them have conducted extensive research into classrooms in urban public schools. But when, I ask you, WHEN is the last time they taught in one of them? Because when I was at that castle of brick and ivy, none of my professors had set foot in a public school classroom in many, many years. I wonder how many of them attended public school as children...

I hope I'm wrong, and that all these economists and law professors have spent sixteen years each teaching in LA Unified. And, I'm sure Mica Pollock, who is a super nice, super smart lady who gives a huge shit about public education and has done her fair share of teaching, would have liked to put the microphone in public schools and not the Harvard Club. There is a prerequisite for publishing in academia, and I am so frickin' tired of it: you must paste over-credentialed names all over the cover. This is problematic because in order to GET over-credentialed one must abandon the schools most in need of help. [Not to mention the fact that it comes from Harvard...a place that has a notoriously tough time retaining and giving tenure to professors of color.]

I want to hear from teachers, like me, who admit on a daily basis that we have just about ZERO clue if what we are doing is right, but we're doing it. I want that stuff right alongside the PhD economists and the professors of 18th Century Scatology or whatnot. So, for the five or six of you out there who read this blog and who also teach or parent or go to school - I would like to hear your stories about race in the classroom or race in the faculty meeting or race in the hallway. Maybe this is a result of my own prejudice about lands of brick and ivy, but I just don't see them as bastions of "getting real." Real is: you are running on two hours sleep, overtired from a long night of waiting tables, which you do so that you can afford to live in the city where you teach, and you've got tests to grade, papers to read, it rained a lot so the hallways are flooding again so your class is moved suddenly to the computer lab and everyone is jumping around looking at myspace, putting headphones on, shouting, laughing, arguing, and one of your students says, at the top of her lungs, "Fuck that, nigga, she's some ghetto ass Puerto Rican hood rat bitch I'm gonna fuck her shit up" right next to you and you've got to address that statement in all its racially charged glory...what do you do?

Tell me, Professor, over some brie and a lovely Chardonnay, what do you do right there?

MCAS...putting the ass in assessment

2008-02-14T04:47:00.000-08:00

This was going to be a recap of the wonderful MCAS Reform Day at the State House yesterday. Between two and three hundred youth, teachers, parents, and activists showed up to ask for a more rational system of evaluation in our public schools. The kids were amazing. They created posters, postcards, plans of action, and delineated clearly the issues they felt MCAS unnecessarily brought to their schools. One group even created a book filled with young people's voices from all over the Boston area, outlining their academic struggles and what they thought their schools could do better. I for one am energized and relieved that our standardization factories haven't squished out every bit of the hopeful, creative juice that makes our kids so great.

Then, I read the Scot Lehigh's Op-Ed in the Globe. I know you shouldn't blog angry...but:

Here, "reform" and "reforming" are artful and elusive terms. What they really mean is, weaken or water down. If the group, which counts the teachers unions as "significant contributors," according to director Marilyn Segal, has its way, high school students would no longer have to pass the MCAS to graduate....

What MCAS reform means, actually, is the opposite of watering it down. It means strengthening assessment to include all learning styles. It means creating a range of graduation requirements, rather than just one. Broadening the scope of an assessment is not weakening it; it is allowing that not every child demonstrates his learning in the same way. Reform also means taking the frenzy out of the test. High stakes environments are simply not conducive to learning. High stakes environments are great for performance, but we seem to want kids to perform well without creating a situation in which they can LEARN.

Mr. Lehigh also claims that the MCAS is not related to the dropout crisis:

Further, when the Department of Education surveyed superintendents several years ago about why students were leaving school, the MCAS exams weren't one of the major reasons cited.

Okay, deep breaths. There are two problems with this.

One: They asked the Superintendents?! They wanted to know why STUDENTS were dropping out so they asked...the Superintendents? That's like saying, "Hey, I want to know why 65% of women are unhappy in their marriage. Let's survey the...um...fathers-in-law. They'll know."

Two: If they HAD bothered to ask students why they left school, the majority of kids probably wouldn't have said the MCAS either. What they would have said was that they were bored or their teachers didn't care. Again, this goes back to what a test-obsessed system does to the culture of a school. If teachers are straightjacketed into a drill and kill curriculum and working under the constant threat of state takeover if those test scores don't go up, their demeanor might be less than caring. They might feel like quitting every single day. And if the curriculum is constant preparation for a test, well the boredom thing makes a lot of sense. So perhaps they didn't cite MCAS as the reason, but this is just a case of patients complaining about symptoms without naming the disease.

And then this guy:

"Someone should tell some of these people that the debate is over," says Senator Robert Antonioni, Senate chairman of the Legislature's Joint Committee on Education.

Thank you, captain eloquent. And I apologize. Were we questioning the wisdom of determining everything a student has learned in his entire academic career by one measure? Did we dare to suggest that there might be a better way? You do not have the power to declare this debate over, Senator.

And, then our fair Governor Patrick had this to say to Mr. Lehigh at the Globe:

"I came to the MCAS by talking to parents of poor kids who told me that before the MCAS, their kids were just promoted on without even being able to read . . . I start, because I personally stink at standardized tests, highly skeptical of standardized tests, but I got there by talking to these parents, I mean, all over the place, talking to these parents. So it would take a lot - it would take a whole lot - for me to reconsider that position."

First of all, kids are still being promoted without being able to read. This one gets me particularly upset because I work in a school for kids who have been forced out of the Boston Public School system. In our school, at present, we have two teenagers with second grade reading levels and one girl who cannot read at all. All three of these students left high school in the tenth grade. Hmmm. It looks like the MCAS didn't prevent these kids from being promoted without reading ability, but it just waited until tenth grade to force them out.

Second of all, the governor doesn't really want to make the call on MCAS. His readiness project is conveniently set up to decide all of that stuff for him. So our job now is to convince the various committees of the readiness project that MCAS reform is a priority, is necessary, and is the best thing to do for our kids. For more information on how to do that, please visit Citizens for Public Schools, and revel in their awesomeness.

The Marginalization of Life-Long Learning

2008-02-08T05:45:00.000-08:00

By Stepan Mekhitarian

Stepan Mekhitarian is a mathematics instructor at an urban charter school in Los Angeles. He received his Ed.M from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and his BA in Business-Economics from UCLA. Prior to teaching, Stepan worked in the public accounting sector for two Big 5 firms.

Ever since the introduction of No Child Left Behind, educators have criticized high-stakes tests’ negative effects on public education. They have mentioned the tests’ inaccuracy in reporting true student progress and NCLB’s failure to provide educators with the support and resources necessary to improve results. However, high stakes tests’ greatest drawback is their proclivity to reduce students’ all-important desire to become life-long learners. By forcing educators to effectively teach to a test, students miss out on projects, experiments, and other enrichment activities that often inspire students to pursue a particular field and devote themselves to it.

As a high school math teacher, I constantly find myself torn between whether to move on to the next topic covered by the California Standards Test in May or to spend time elaborating on a lesson with an engaging project or experiment. I know the project will pique the students’ interest and will probably drive home the concepts taught in a way a textbook lesson never could, but the sad reality is that a project will use up valuable time without teaching students a new topic that will be on the test. I try to justify the project from a testing standpoint by reminding myself that the project will help students understand the topic better which will ultimately result in a higher test score. However, I cannot escape the fact that I simply do not have enough time to conduct a project or experiment that is truly worthwhile and meaningful.

This is a troubling reality, because it is projects and experiments that can often be the most inspirational learning experiences for students. I vividly remember physics experiments, mock courtroom sessions, chemistry projects, and museum trips from my high school days; the content of the lesson on page 240 in my science textbook is a little hazier in my memory. It is precisely these experiences that can have a profound effect on the educational interests and goals of a student. Such a crucial element of education must surely be preserved.

So where does that leave us? Should we eliminate high-stakes testing in favor of devoting more time in the classroom to activities that encourage a passion for learning? We cannot deny the importance of accountability and standardized tests’ role in providing it. A common measuring tool not only drives accountability, it also provides a system through which educators can compare results, analyze best practices, and inform their instruction. The solution to this problem is not the elimination of standardized testing but rather a rethink of the educator’s role. The current system of accountability is designed to closely monitor educators in a way few other professionals are scrutinized. This is in no small part due to the thousands of classrooms where minimal learning has taken place over the last several decades. Teachers are finally having to report to a governing body outside of the classroom. The stranglehold currently in place on what is taught will only loosen when the teaching profession becomes more professional, forcing ineffective instructors out of the classroom and making teaching an attractive career proposition for the brightest minds coming out of college. Only then will the emphasis on standardized testing lessen and shift to helping educators invoke passion in young hearts through projects and experiments.

bridging another divide

2008-02-06T05:27:00.000-08:00

For those of us steeped in the battle for K-12 education, it is all too easy to get myopic and ignore an important spot on the educational landscape: Alternative Education. Sometimes called "Adult Education," Alternative tends to end up the blanket term for all the education that happens off the traditional track. Not surprisingly, it lacks political influence and benefits our country's most disenfranchised learners. Also not surprisingly, it is extraordinarily divested from "traditional" education.

Alternative Education is growing. As No Child Left Behind infiltrates public schools and turns them into test factories devoid of joy and creativity, the drop out rate increases.

The reasons students leave high school are some of the most misunderstood elements of the alternative educational experience. As a teacher in an alternative school, the two things I hear most often are, "I was bored," and, "My teachers didn't care."

If your classroom is packed full of 35 students, one teacher, and all the test prep you can stand, why would you stay?! What if you were interested in music or art? What if you needed extra help from your teacher? What if you hated taking tests?

Shocking news: dropout rates are soaring. In my fair city, Boston, about half of the students that enter the Boston Public Schools in ninth grade won't graduate four years later. That amounts to about 1500 kids leaving the "regular" system each year. That's potentially 1500 new "alternative" students, per year, in one city. Most estimates put the current total of 16-21 year olds without a high school diploma or GED at around 10,000. That does not even take into account all of the other candidates for alternative education who are older, younger, or new to the country. Yet, in Massachusetts, for every dollar spent on education seven cents are allocated to alternative education programs. Talk about being left behind.

(You can read a great report about Boston's dropout crisis, and the programs designed to address it here.)

If we are to generate real concern for a broken system, the whole enchilada has to unite and advocate for itself. It doesn't make sense for Alternative Education to advocate for its needs while K-12 Education tries to address its own problems. They are the same problems, at different points along a dysfunctional time line. Besides, neither camp is doing a great job getting attention. After Super Tuesday's exit polls, the word "education" was on no one's lips. It was not a top five issue in ANY state. We need all the help we can get. So....imagine the political noise teachers, parents, and students from all K-12 districts in the country could make. Now imagine throwing in the voices of local community based organizations, non-profits, local colleges, libraries, and churches.

Try making it happen! If you work in K-12, find a local CBO that offers educational services of some kind, and strike up a conversation. Build an ally. If you work in a CBO, make a friend in a public school. Talk to each other; find the issues that you have in common; share resources.

You Go, Young People!

2008-01-30T11:36:00.000-08:00

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.

____________________

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!

_______________________

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

2008-01-23T11:28:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-17T08:59:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-01-12T14:12:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-01-12T14:01:00.000-08:00

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!

The Washington ROAST

2007-11-03T14:56:00.000-07:00

Five months after the Roaming Roaster sat at a messy kitchen table, talking about teaching over a cup of coffee, the pioneer trip has happened. We ventured into the nation's capitol to talk to a few Washington DC teachers. Here's the story...

After one of the driest three months in New England history, torrential, wind-whipped, downright biblical rain graced the Northeast just in time for our car trip. Squinting into the night, the windshield wipers played metronome for our interior thoughts. Was this a good idea? Would anyone want to talk to us? Would we learn anything? Shouldn’t I be lesson planning?

By the time we pulled into the parking lot of a particularly shabby looking Econo Lodge somewhere in New Jersey, I was too tired to think about my classroom or anyone else’s. Having visited four other hotel lobbies in search of a deal, this Econo Lodge was both our last hope and quite possibly the worst deal in the state of New Jersey. Yet, we were tired, and grumblingly accepted the abysmal state of disrepair, funky smell, and ornery concierge. Room 116, at nearly 3 in the morning, couldn’t be that bad.

At 7 am it became clear, through trial and error, that the shower in room 116 did not function. The second visit to the concierge was no more pleasant than the first. He slid the key card to room 218 across the desk without a word. Apparently the old E.L. has frequent shower problems. This seemed a perfect metaphor for public education. Everyone knows there are rooms with working showers and rooms with broken showers. And yet people are still sent to rooms with broken showers! They are only exonerated from such conditions when they leave their rooms at 7 am, march through the halls in their pajamas, and advocate for themselves.

The ROAST was to be held at a teacher’s house just outside the city. Which was fine because after dropping so much money at the Econo Lodge we couldn’t afford to be buying a bunch of people coffee. When we knocked on the door an exuberantly barking dog who, as many small dogs do, assumed its size to be much more threatening than it was. Our host teacher, Ashleigh, introduced herself while restraining the dog. This relaxed everyone considerably.

Ashleigh, a science teacher, had recruited two math/science teachers, from two different schools in the city. Given that this was our first ROAST, that it was Saturday, and that nobody had a clear understanding of our objective, three teachers was plenty satisfying. A product of a liberal arts undergraduate education and a master’s program in education, I am unaccustomed to dealing with math/science people and/or male teachers. Indeed, math and science teachers seem to be in desperately short supply across the country – just look at NYC’s recent monetary incentive program for math/science teachers. And anyone who's ever gone to a graduate school of education knows that the teaching population is overwhelmingly female. All this to say, Ashleigh's recruits represented a refreshing point of view.

Of the things I feel compelled to mention, I will start with the one I find particularly insane. There were plenty of issues I was prepared to hear about. I don’t want to say that I was hoping to hear about issues I hadn’t thought of, because that would be like wishing ill upon these schools, but I was hoping to broaden my perspective and challenge my comfortable understanding of schools that is informed by the district in which I work and very few others. I was also hoping to never write annoyingly long run on sentences, but, hey, life is weird. So anyway. I can remember one of the best differences between high school and middle school was the choice factor. In high school I finally enjoyed a modicum of empowerment in the annual decision between Bio and AP Bio or Pottery vs. Journalism or when to take all of the Math classes I needed or how to creatively avoid Mr. Hynek’s class or whatever. This decision making process played an invaluable role in my education. Not only did it increase my sense of investment in my own education, it prepared me to make similar decisions in college. It gave me a powerful sense of autonomy, and tied my adolescent search for identity to my education – the classes I took, at least in some capacity, helped define me. Education wasn’t marginal to my life; it was fundamental.

All this background to lead here: during the summer at this particular DC school, the principal creates class schedules for the entire school. The students are handed their classes in September. They have no choice, no registration period, and sometimes realize, far too late, that they do not have the right combination of courses to graduate. Why? Because there are two guidance counselors for 800 students and the guidance counselors are on 10 month contracts. So even if they could counsel 400 students each as to what classes they should choose, they wouldn’t be around during the summer to work out the logistics. These two providers of guidance being the counselors dubbed, by the principal of one DC school, “The worst in the city.” How can this go on, you ask?! Well, it’s all about priorities. It isn’t a district priority to fund new counselors, because eight DC schools just got new football fields last year – the new Superintendent was there to cut the ribbons. It isn’t a counselor priority, the counselor’s can’t do it over the summer because their 10 month contract is protected by the union. It isn’t the teachers’ priority, because the feeder school sends in a bunch of “behavior problems” and behavior management proves a more pressing topic of conversation. The students’ having a voice in their educational destinies at this school just isn’t something that warrants a huge change in the school’s policies and procedures. And no one is motivated to address it.

Moving on.

All three teachers were products of The New Teacher Project’s DC Teaching Fellows program. Like it or not, all teacher recruitment programs need to be measured against the colossal and seminal beast, Teach For America. What DC Teaching Fellows attempts to do, that TFA does not, is recruit mid-career professionals to the field, place them, and keep them in a specific underserved district. Thus, TNTP has Teacher Fellows programs in cities such as New York, New Orleans, and Oakland. Here’s a mnemonic for you who are unfamiliar with the programs: TFA = come in straight from college, stay just two years, gain a little knowledge, and promptly disappear. Teaching fellows = pick up and leave your career, you can teach and we can train you, you'll be certified after two years, and then your school better retain you. Got it?

The problem is, the mid-career folks weren’t biting, so DC Teaching Fellows ended up with the fresh out of college population as well. Still, from our limited sample, it seems like they are staying in teaching (if not in the cities where they trained) for longer than two years. What they aren’t doing very readily is staying within the district. In Ashleigh’s case, she may be leaving the district when her husband accepts a new job in a new state. While she would not be leaving teaching, she feels like this will amount to starting from scratch. She will leave the support network that DC Teaching Fellows provides, and will be totally isolated in a new district.

All three agreed that as new teachers in a district where they HAD the support of the Fellows was hard enough. Figuring prominently in their dialogue was the battle between new and old. The schools seem to have no middle ground in terms of veteran and new teachers. Half of the faculty is within its first three years, and the other half has been there for 15 years or more. The frustration seemed to stem from a variety of issues. First, turnover. The older teachers had seen crop after crop of new teachers start, quit, and get replaced. This cycle left them unwilling to invest the time in real mentoring, and the new teachers feel as if they are treated dismissively. Second, resources. The faculty is in competition for limited resources. If a teacher receives a box of Expo markers other teachers pounce with questions and accusations, assuming that the supplies were gleaned through some underhanded method or that favorites are being played. No one said it, but we all stopped to appreciate the complete dysfunction of a system in which teachers don’t collaborate well because they are clawing for largely unavailable classroom supplies. Third, philosophy. All three teachers could readily identify veteran teachers whose methods weren’t effective. Though I’m not a betting educator, I would put a large sum of money on the wager that the older teachers considered their methods time-tested and the methods that, over time, the new teachers would come to recognize as best practices. Regardless of which side’s methods are more effective, this divide throws a wrench into collaboration. The administration at one school actually mandated collaboration time, in the mornings, which all teachers agreed was futile. One teacher mentioned that most of his colleagues “Brought a laptop and did their own thing.”

The problem seems unbelievably complicated. And I haven’t even mentioned race yet. Everyone run and hide! Race! Yes, the divide between new and old teachers is compounded, in both schools, by a racial divide. The newer teachers are overwhelmingly white, the older teachers overwhelmingly African American. And the student population feels a divide as well, between African Americans and African immigrants. And the African immigrant students are treated differently than the African American students. And the life sciences teachers are black and the physics teachers are white. And the physics teachers are accused of getting more supplies than the life sciences teachers – but nobody wants to address potential racist undertones. It goes on and on. Not to mention, which no one did until I asked, the demographics of the student bodies in these schools. Each school had two or three white children. And we all just nodded, because segregation isn’t a word many people say anymore, but it seems to be a reality people continue to accept. The room, populated by five white people and a dog, is getting warm. Nobody likes talking about it.

I ask, “Do you have this conversation at school?”

That option was so ludicrous, so impossible, so otherworldly, that I felt silly for asking it. The divide between new and old was a taboo topic, never mind the divide between black and white, or black and African.

The solution, I propose, is not JUST a conversation - but a conversation would be a great place to start. Not a conversation in a safe room full of white liberal young people. Not a conversation full of African immigrants. Not a conversation between all veteran teachers, all black teachers, all science teachers, all ex-musician freckled accounting teachers named Sally, all anything! No one is going to get anywhere by staying comfortable. And if something is never said, its existence becomes questionable. Things that don’t exist (like, oh I don’t know, segregation) are pretty hard to fix.

While these teachers couldn’t imagine talking frankly in a staff meeting, they did suggest bringing in external mediators to act as neutral facilitators. They felt, justifiably, that an unconnected and unbiased outsider facilitating genuinely open and safe meetings (with, gasp, agendas and a stated purpose) could open up the lines of communication. So, vast and dedicated readership, get it started! Book a conference room at the Econo Lodge! Stop talking about the real and important stuff only in the safe places – if it’s something you’ve never tried, it might just be the solution.

Hello and Welcome!

2007-07-24T13:27:00.001-07:00

Hello there!

Roaming Roaster here. This being the first post, I feel explanations are in order. Said explanations, quite logically, will begin with the above photograph. Wandering in Paris last summer I was compelled to capture the facade of this establishment. "The American Dream." A bar slash entertainment club drawing in the masses via bright blinking lights and life sized figurines of those three exemplars of the American Dream: Elvis, Eric Estrada, and the Blues Brothers. Leaving the perplexing decision to include Eric Estrada in this trifecta of American pop culture aside, I was particularly struck by the commercialization of that coveted phrase, "The American Dream." What struck me initially was the fact that I was struck in the first place. Living in this country, the commercialization of anything should, at this point, have long ceased causing surprise. But some vestige of sacredness remains in the old American dream idea, for me, and that tiny trace of hope lies solely in the promise of public education. The promise that if you work hard, stay in school, and go to college, that, eventually, you will get your due. This of course presupposes that you are all working hard in schools that propel students toward bright futures at equal rates, with equal resources to do so. No matter what the battle is for – equality, liberty, democracy, some other big time social battle that ends in y – the battle’s outcome will be determined by the quality of education offered to our nation’s young people. And if the quality of education varies, so will the degree to which we achieve equality, liberty, democracy, and other y words.

America mustering up the moxie to pull together and actually make this happen seems about as likely as walking through the streets of Paris, deep in thought, and looking up to face a giant reproduction of Eric Estrada.

One thing that might increase the likelihood of this collective mustering is a united community of teachers with a strong political voice. Another thing is a general public that is aware of what actually happens inside public schools on a daily basis. This blog, and the meetings with teachers in various school districts upon which it is based, is an effort toward both those ends. I hope you will read it, and join the growing network of activists around the country working to save our public schools before public education is so abysmal and so unequal that it no longer supports a functional democracy, and the American Dream is just some cheesy bar in Paris.