Conducting the Inner Light

I have been missing, I know. Just, simply, too busy. Like most of the teachers in my school (and probably all around DCPS) I feel as if I can barely keep my nose above the rising flood of meetings and meetings and meetings. I saw this clip on the School of Fail Blog and simply had to repost it. It is a 5 minute or so episode from the show The Young Turks. Cenk  Uygur gives a great run-down, in 5 minutes, of the pros of the Finland system and the fallacy of the arguments about why Finland’s system would not work in the U.S. I hope to be back when break hits and I can do a more detailed post on just about everything that has been going through my head. Anyway, enjoy for now.

Finland You’re Doing it Right

It is hard not to feel affected by the death of  Steve Jobs  this week. After all, we were all so affected by his life.  Of the many articles The New York Times ran on Job’s death, the one called Steve Jobs’ Patents was the most eye-opening. You come away with the breadth of the man’s creativity and ingenuity.  From the desktop, to the variety of media devices, from adapters to Apple TV, to the iPad and beyond, he seemed to have no limits to his vision. And all of this from a college drop-out.

The other day, I read to my students Jobs’ commencement speech given at Stanford University in 2005 . The speech is incredible on a number of levels: it is a truly inspirational speech told in a concise, simple language that makes it easy to follow.  It is an ideal speech for school-age children and speaks to a number of things that they need to hear: working hard, believing in yourself and learning how the things you do now will matter later in life, even when you can’t always make that connection. Here is what he says about taking a course on calligraphy – not exactly the subject choice of great business icons:

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Not the most auspicious beginning for the man who became the major innovator of the last 50 years.  A college dropout, taking courses in calligraphy and other courses that he simply had an interest in, as opposed to those classes that he “needed” according to the university, Jobs’ life path looked more like that of the ne’er-do-well child who wanders the globe seeking his life’s calling than one of the visionary who revolutionized technology in the 20th and 21st centuries.

No one could have guaranteed that Jobs would have the success that he did, least of all Jobs.  He admits himself that he took chances, that he went with his gut. A lot of people do this and end up with nothing. Following one’s instincts lead as many people to jail, or to stints on reality TV, as it does to entrepreneurial success.  But, along with his gut instincts, Jobs had so much else – he had supportive parents, who were there for him (after all, he had to use someone’s garage to build the first Macintosh, right?), who demonstrated faith in him and who instilled in him those intangible qualities that contribute so much to anyone’s success -  faith, heart, fortitude, perseverance.

Jobs certainly needed all of these things during his career.  A millionaire by 30 and jobless. My students were shocked to learn how he lost control of his own company and how he found himself, in his own words, devastated. An excellent lesson in getting back up when you are knocked down, of not letting bad events determine the outcome of the rest of your life (or in my charges’ case, the rest of the school year). For a bit there he lost a little faith in himself and he lost a little heart, but he still had fortitude and he had the perseverance to move forward – instead of fading away and becoming a trivia question. He bounced back, adding to his resumé the creation of the first digitally-animated film and the renaissance of Apple.

You can’t find the intangibles in the Common Core Standards. There is no list of skill sets or sub-skill sets that can help a teacher foster these qualities in their students. These qualities are qualities that need to be coached, coaxed, nurtured and reinforced continuously throughout the year. You hope that your students are listening to you, that what you are teaching them  is sinking in and may one day take hold, but you don’t really know when your work in this area will come to fruition.

What I hope my students learned from listening to Steve Jobs’ speech, and to the story of his life, is that life has no certainties for us. It holds possibilities which are not always what we want them to be nor think they should be. No one chooses to lose their job, or the company that they started in their parents’ garage. No one can plan for disappointment or failure. What you want, however, is to have the ability to bounce back from both disappointment and failure, to have the fortitude, the perseverance, the faith and the heart to get yourself up off the floor and get back in the game, to not quit.  If there is one thing that teachers do that is more important than anything else, it is teaching children to finish what they start and not quit. There is no test to measure this quality; there is no way to evaluate the effectiveness of this lesson. It takes years to see the final result. It often takes a lifetime.

“What if our children and young people learn to read and write but don’t like to and don’t?” he said. “What if they don’t read the newspapers and magazines, or can’t find beauty in a poem or love story? What if they don’t go as adults to artistic events, don’t listen to a broad range of music, aren’t optimistic about the world and their place in it, don’t notice the trees and the sunset, are indifferent to older citizens, don’t participate in politics or community life?”

With a teacher’s rhetorical urgency, he added, “Should any of this worry us?”

Vito Perrone, Sr. died last month of congestive heart failure in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  His heart and his belief in what education should be, however, is something that will always remain with us, in the writings of Jonathan Kozol and Deborah Meier, among others.  Vito Perrone, Sr. was what the reform movement should have been. He was always for the children, without all the bombast and self-congratulatory chest thumping that accompanies so many who make that claim today. Read his obituary in the New York Times. His fight is our fight and one we should all keep alive.

Textbooks:If you are concerned about DCPS, one really big concern is:  Where are the Textbooks?

– Nothing has been spent on textbooks for 5 years now.  That’s 2007 through 2011.

– Usually the textbook replenishment/adoption budget is between $40 to $50 million per year.  So that’s $200 to $250 million over the last 5 years that has been “re-purposed”.  I doubt seriously that it’s “in the bank” somewhere.  For confirmation, just ask Mary Levy.

– The very expensive outside expert, Mr. Moody, has said multiple times that teachers are to just take the standards and the DC-CAS questions and teach to the test.  Make up your own material.

– Indeed, the ONLY priority over the last 5 years has been “What does teaching look like?” (TLF) and “How are you measured against what teaching looks like? (IMPACT).– There has been NO thought given to WHAT TO TEACH (textbooks). Or HOW TO TEACH IT (subject specific professional development).

– As an example of this effort, just look at howthe DC Educational Fund has spent their charitable donations:  $68 million on IMPACT and teacher evaluation and $8 million on curriculum related activities.

– The Common Core standards have been out and around for over 4 years!  There is a lot of good curriculum related material available keyed to the CC standards.  What has DCPS purchased?  How has DCPS supported their teachers?  There is a rumor that DCPS initially planned to internally develop their own CC materials but that now they have hired outside consultants to do this for them.  If there is a plan, what is the timeline for deliverables?  What is it costing?  Is it a good investment?  Or is DCPS too proud to adopt some one else’s validated and proven textbooks and materials?

– Where did the $200+ million go over the last 5 years?  What is the budget for textbooks and supporting materials for FY2011-2012 and for next year?

– Where is the promised subject specific professional development that is supposed to be part of IMPACT, RttT and the WTU contract?  Where is the curricular materials to go with that PD?

– Are there competent people working on this issue?  What is their accountability?

– Why don’t our parents and other stakeholders seem to care about this central teaching and learning issue?  Am I whistling in the wind?  Is this really a non-issue?

…Just Wondering…

I was reminded of this amazing speech by John Kuhn, the Superintendent of The Perrin-Whitt School District in Texas that was given this summer at the SOS March & National Call To Action on July 30th. Reading the transcript of the speech, I am even more astounded. Mr. Kuhn gave the speech with passion and evident indignation at the policies of the Obama/Duncan administration. Reading the speech now, two months later, I am struck by the quiet sensibility that Kuhn’s speech possesses.  This passage, especially, I find moving:

I will not race to the top. I will stop like the Good Samaritan and lift hurting children out of the dirt. Let me lose your race, because I’m not in this for the accolades. I’m not in it for the money. I’m in it because it’s right. I am in it because the children of Perrin, Texas need somebody like me in their lives.

So, here is the text of the speech. If you would like to view the video of Kuhn giving the speech just click here.

Today we had an earthquake.  My building shook as if a convoy of trucks were driving through the halls. Our principal and school staff handled it well, as did our students, evacuating the building with all the coolness of a routine fire drill.  So begins our new year, an unexpected shakeup that sends us all onto the playground. DCPS, from what I understand, has no procedures for earthquakes in place, which is understandable given that earthquakes are quite rare on this coast.  But given other events that have occurred here – the anthrax scare last year, for one – I guess we are ready for just about anything.

I feel like DCPS could use a shakeup right now.  The cheating scandal seems to have been swept under the rug, or is at least being kept on a very low burn.  More exposure would not do Kaya Henderson and Company any good as it would expose the complete farce that cheating made of IMPACT for last year.  After all, scores for Value-added teachers are based on comparison of like schools as well as schools across the District (this arcane aspect of the scoring has me fairly confused, quite frankly, and I would appreciate an explanation I can understand). I’m sure teachers whose scores were compared with schools such as Noyes feel a little more than cheated. It matters greatly that there was cheating on the CAS, and it is a joke to hand out bonuses and Highly Effective status to teachers under such a cloud. Perhaps DCPS should use an asterisk for this year. We can be like Major League Baseball.

The only people who seem to be interested in investigating the scandal are reporters. Thank God there are still some around who actually think their job is to investigate and report the news and not to act as shills for education corporations (such as Kaplan Testing Services, formerly The Washington Post). The New York Times had a very good article the other day about Michelle Rhee’s continual avoidance of USA Today reporters (Eager for Spotlight, but Not If It is on a Testing Scandal). As the reporter, Michael Winerip, pointed out, Rhee has been willingly interviewed by almost everybody except Field and Stream and Soldier of Fortune (although, given the fact that she thinks she is on a crusade, I fully expect to see her interviewed there as well, sandwiched between ads for World War I Trench Knives and AK47′s).  The Washington Post‘s Mike Debonis (one of the few reporters besides Valerie Strauss who seems willing to openly criticize Rhee) considers the highly critical Times article to be “The end of Michelle Rhee’s media honeymoon.”  This is an end that is way past due.

Meanwhile, District teachers have to continue to operate with a system that claims IMPACT as a nationally recognized evaluation tool, despite the fact that this very evaluation tool is still being crafted and built by its creators.  They are building the plane while in flight, adjusting and changing rules as they go, shrugging off their own mistakes while making teachers pay the price.  That the gross inequity of this has been allowed to go unchallenged, especially by our union, is the biggest farce in DCPS right now.

And that brings me to our union.  What exactly is happening with the Washington Teachers Union?  It seems as if they are walking hand-in-hand with Kaya Henderson and Vince Gray. I expected more fight from Nathan, to be quite frank, a little more than what I am seeing. About the only fight I am seeing is between Nathan and Candi Peterson and I think I am not alone in asking: what is up with that?  Just how does Nathan think it looks when he engages in what seems, at least from the outside, as the same petty kind of snit-fight that his predecessor did with him.  Once again, we have the vice president of our union suing the president of our union and calling for the AFT to step in and mediate.  Do we really need this right now? It simply makes the case for our detractors when our union behaves in this manner.

Our union should be demanding intelligent changes to IMPACT – to make IMPACT more of a practical tool for helping teachers in their practice, instead of the punitive tool for ridding the system of teachers that it currently serves.  Our union should be demanding a full-scale investigation into the cheating scandal, a scandal that affects every teacher in our system in so many different ways.  Our union should be offering strong alternatives to the tired ideas of reform that were proven ineffective long before Michelle Rhee stepped through our doors. Instead, our union is involved in another bickering mess.

I don’t know what Nathan’s fight with Candi is about. I do not know who is right or wrong. I only know that right now we, as members, are not being served, nor can we be served, to the best of our elected representatives’ ability, if they are suing one another and involving themselves in gossip and innuendo.  After the inept leadership of George Parker, we needed much more than this.  Our union needs to change. Perhaps it is time for our members to take matters in hand the way it was done in Chicago when the teachers there created CORE – the Caucus for the Rank and File Educator.  For God’s sake, we need someone to shake things up.

Update:  This morning I saw that the Daily Kos has a piece on Michelle Rhee’s silence:  Michelle Rhee still refuses to answer questions about the cheating scandal.  It seems after trying, unsuccessfully, to get an interview with Rhee, USA today reporter Marisol Bello was told to submit questions that she wanted Rhee to answer. Bello submitted 21 and Rhee answered 11, not a single one about the cheating scandal.  Similarly, The Root has an interview with Michelle Rhee, Michelle Rhee Would Do It Again (personally, I don’t think I want her doing that to me again, however…) in which Rhee again avoids any discussion of the scandal.  On the idea of investing in teachers, and developing teachers, who may be deemed ineffective Rhee says: “Would you allow your children to be in that person’s classroom while we try to professionally develop them?”  I found this interesting considering that Rhee and her team, for the most part (there were a few exceptions), were inexperienced at running a school system and were professionally developing themselves daily at the expense of parents, teachers and students. Once again, what is ok for Michelle is not ok for everyone else.

Although the initial news reception of the Save Our Schools March has been slow there were a few bright spots recently, thanks to Matt Damon.  After being introduced by his mom, teacher and Stanford Education Professor Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Damon gave the final speech at the rally.  What I wish had been up on the Jumbotron screen after his speech, however, was his interview with the journalist from ReasonTV that occurred in the tent behind the stage.  ReasonTV is where the Drew Carey Project creates videos on medical marijuana, school choice, private highway ownership and other grand ideas of the Libertarian cause the comedian and game show host supports.  In a way it was one celebrity against another. Drew Carey lost.  What would be good to watch is the entire ReasonTV clip of the march that aired on YouTube. The reporter asks very leading questions along the lines of  ”Do you think it’s good for the students or bad for the students that teachers are guaranteed their jobs for life?” and seems to be expecting some kind of answer to either back up her/ReasonTV’s views or to make the interviewee seem like  the stereotypical, wanting -the-status-quo kind of person who “opposes” school reform image that reformers attack so often.  What she gets instead are very strong, well-made arguments from teachers, parents and Matt Damon that very coherently demonstrate why we were all there on the ellipse that day.  Here is the actual transcript of her interview with Damon:

ReasonTV:  In acting there isn’t job security, right? There’s an incentive to work hard and be a better actor because you want to have a job so why is isn’t it like that for teachers?

Damon:  You think job insecurity is what makes me work hard?

ReasonTV: Well, you have an incentive to work harder but if there’s job security…

Damon (partially overriding her question): I want to be an actor, it’s not an incentive, that’s the thing. You see you take this MBA style thinking, right, that’s the problem with Ed Policy right now is this intrinsically paternalistic view of problems that are much more complex than that.  It’s like saying a teacher is going to get lazy when they have tenure. A teacher wants to teach. I mean, why else would you take a shitty salary and really long hours and… and do that job… unless you really love to do it?

At this point ReasonTV inserts a completely gratuitous cut of the crying scene from Good Will Hunting. I think this was to somehow try to diminish the strength of Damon’s statement but it simply seems as if ReasonTV were embarrassed for their reporter. The interview continues with the cameraman getting involved.

Cameraman: Aren’t 10% bad though. Ten percent of the teachers are bad.

Nancy Carlsson Paige (Damon’s mom): Where did you get that number?

Cameraman: I don’t know. Ten percent of people in any profession should maybe think of something else.

Damon: Well, ok, but maybe you’re a shitty cameraman, I don’t know.

This interview received notice on Anderson Cooper’s 360 and on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell - O’Donnell’s Rewrite was especially pointed and intelligent in its response to the attack on teachers, I would recommend anyone to listen to it and pass along his comments.  I printed out the transcription of the interview because while I think viewing the clip is important, reading what they say, seeing the words in front of your eyes, is quite illuminating as well.  Look at the view or our intrepid reporter, or at least the view she is purporting to advocate by her question: she seems to believe that achievement occurs only because of incentives. That without incentives we would tend to be lazy and unproductive – regardless of whether we are teachers, actors, cab drivers, the President of the United States or reporters.  There is a view out there that if teachers were simply paid well and given tenure they would stop working.

Jonathan Chaitt on his New Republic blog (in which he called Damon’s defense of teachers “bad”) said if he were guaranteed a fixed salary that was tied to his tenure he would work less hard. Well Jonathan, that is you, it is not me nor many of the people I know. I have always worked hard at what I do, regardless of what that job was or the pay, because I have a thing called a work ethic.  People who possess a strong work ethic work hard regardless of the reward, when they are finished their work they don’t say “where’s my money?” instead they feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction at what they have done. That is not to say that I don’t want to be paid for my work as a teacher, of course I do, but I didn’t go into teaching to become rich. It was never with that expectation. And unlike many of the jobs I have had in the past, no matter how bad a day I have, I do not find myself saying these words “they don’t pay me enough to put up with this”, words I have heard uttered at almost every other job I have ever held.

Chaitt echoes the cameraman that there are “bad” teachers out there. Yes, there are. There are bad teachers, bad policemen and women, bad doctors, bad politicians (kind of a redundancy, that one) bad bookies and bad chimney sweeps.  There always will be a percentage of poorly performing workers in ANY field.  The truth of the matter, though, is that all this talk of quality is a diversion, it is a subterfuge, misdirection. The reformers want to paint the Save Our Schools March and its participants as “defenders of the status quo” fighting to keep things as they are. They do not listen, nor do they want to listen, to what was said. Linda Darling Hammond said it in the first speech and it was echoed later by several others, including Diane Ravitch and Jonathan Kozol.  It is not a question of teacher quality, it is a question of poverty. Chaitt, ReasonTV, Michelle Rhee, the Tea Party and other conservatives do not want to hear this because that means equitable funding and they do not want equitable funding. Here is what Darling Hammond said:

And while many politicians talk of international test score comparisons, they rarely talk about what high-performing countries like Finland, Singapore, and Canada actually do: They ensure that all children have housing, health care, and food security. They fund their schools equitably. They invest in the highest-quality preparation, mentoring and professional development for teachers and school leaders, completely at government expense. They organize their curriculum around problem-solving and critical thinking skills. And they test students rarely (in Finland, not at all) – and almost never with multiple-choice tests.

Many of the top-performing nations rely increasingly on assessments that include research projects, scientific investigation, and other intellectually challenging work – developed and scored by teachers – just as progressive educators here have been urging for years.

There is a rabid fight on the reformer’s side to discredit everything the SOS march stands for.  Arne Duncan and his DOE are using every ally they have in order to paint Diane Ravitch (especially) and others as robotic slaves to unions and the so-called “status quo”.  Mike Klonsky has done a great job of chronicling  all this on his blog.  But the fact remains that those who have money tied to the reform effort are going to use every penny to try and have their way. And while their money goes deep, it is not without end. And it is always good to remind oneself of the number of times in this country when those with money were not able to buy the results they wanted thanks in large part to the strong efforts of others and to the inherent intelligence of the public once they have the facts set before them in a straightforward and honest way.

The speeches of the SOS rally on July 30th are now available on YouTube. News organizations are beginning to report more and more on the arguments made at the rally. Not just that teachers are marching and that we are in opposition to reform but actually asking what it is we want and reporting, intelligently, the ideas and thoughts that we have. I think that anyone who actually reads or listens to what was said can quickly understand that, not only do we oppose the policies of the Obama/Bush Departments of Education, but that we have real and substantial ideas for what should be done.  These ideas have been put forth in such publications as Rethinking Schools and Education Week; they have been promoted by many teachers who have outstanding credentials – just look at this list  from the Save our Schools website or listen to these teachers in Sam Chaltain’s piece on CNN.  But instead of debating our ideas, of debating the statistics, the advocates for reform attack us with the same statements and accusations – lazy teachers, union drones, only wanting to maintain the status quo, yadayadaya, on and on. Their tactic has been to attack the teacher and, ultimately, this is where they fail. The teacher is not the enemy of education. We are the teachers, the sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, friends and neighbors, all that make up the teaching force of this country.  Matt Damon saw his mom getting trashed and he stepped forward and said “hey, wait a minute.”  Anyone who knows anything about schools knows that you should never say anything about another person’s mom unless you want a fight.

Yesterday was the Save Our Schools March in Washington, D.C.  I brought along my daughter and son for their first experience in democratic protest.  I was happy to see that they were impressed and enjoyed witnessing so many people brought together to voice their concerns.  I was impressed as well. While the turnout, according to some sources, was smaller than expected but more than those deriding this march claimed would show up, I still wish more had been there.  They missed an amazing day.

The heat was awful, the sun felt like it was literally toasting my skin and yet I stood through two hours of speakers, performers, advocates, singers and others without hardly realizing it.  I won’t do a play-by-play and I can’t give you the names of every speaker and singer there as I didn’t take notes – I wanted to be immersed in the event, not standing off to the side observing.  If you were there and would like to add to the commentary please do so, I appreciate the views of others who were there.  So, along with some pictures I took, here are my overall impressions.

There is Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford Professor of Education, who should have been chosen by Mr. Obama to be Secretary of Education, carefully explaining, with data to back up her statements, what high achieving nations do that we don’t in order to have their students perform well. For example, almost none of these nations use standardized tests as part of their regular curriculum. In Finland they don’t test at all.  Eat that bee, Michelle Rhee.

There were great slogans on T-shirts and posters all over the ellipse.  An entire contingent of Wisconsin teachers were there. In fact, I think there were more teachers from other parts of the country than from D.C. – at least, when they did a call and response to see where teachers came from, that is what it sounded like. I would love to be wrong on that one, however, given the voter turnout in our last election, and the total lack of concern that seems to be happening with the current fight between our Union President and Vice-President, I somehow think I am not. What we need is solidarity, and that sorely seems to be lacking in D.C.

  Taylor Mali gave a rendition of his poem What Teachers Make, which if you have never heard before (hard to believe) then you better hit the link. It isn’t him at the march but it is not much different than the rendition he gave on the podium. I listen to Mali’s poem now and again to sort of fire myself up, especially when I am feeling discouraged about what is happening to my profession.  You could hear the ripple through the audience when he took the stage because everyone knew what was coming and there were appropriate cheers and hoots throughout his poem.

  Pedro Noguera, Professor of Education at NYU (in the background) and Jose Vilson, teacher, advocate and poet (in the foreground) were both eloquent in their speech and poem, respectively.  Vilson’s poem This Isn’t a Test was wonderful.

 For me, things really livened up when Jonathan Kozol took the stage.  It is hard not to be a fan of Kozol if you are a teacher. He speaks with compassion and understanding, with insightful knowledge and sharp edged humor about the things that teachers face every day and, especially, the plight of our educational system today.  He was as passionate and forceful as I’ve ever seen him. His voice strong and clear belying his slight frame and his age.  Kozol speaks truth to power and is often derided for it by the pundidiots on Fox News.  I wish, as I always wish after hearing him, that I had the full text of his speech. I would still like the full text of the speech he gave at the International Readers Convention in Chicago in 2005.

  It was great to see both Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch on the same stage. I follow their Bridging Differences Blog and enjoy their exchanges about education. On stage this day they both were in agreement about the false direction reformers (or deformers) are leading education towards and how we must not give up the fight to make our public education be what it should be – an opportunity for every child, regardless of income, to learn and be educated and to, hopefully, improve on their lives.

    The last two speakers to take the stage were Carlsson Paige and her quite famous son, Matt Damon.  Damon gave what Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post called a clear headed speech. It was filled with common sense that all teachers and anyone who understands what education should be about could appreciate.  I think it was this part that touched me the most and made me shout out in agreement:

I had incredible teachers. As I look at my life today, the things I value most about myself — my imagination, my love of acting, my passion for writing, my love of learning, my curiosity — all come from how I was parented and taught.

And none of these qualities that I’ve just mentioned — none of these qualities that I prize so deeply, that have brought me so much joy, that have brought me so much professional success — none of these qualities that make me who I am … can be tested.

That is the God’s honest truth, none of these qualities can be tested.  The reformers want to claim that there is a number that can be pasted on everything.  By believing this poor myth they miss so many things.  Faith has no number.

Below are more pics of the event. Enjoy! Solidarity!

Save Our Schools March

Saturday July 30th

12 pm: Diane Ravitch, Jonathan Kozol, Jose Vilson, Deborah Meier, Monty Neill, Angela Valenzuela

2 pm: The March to the White House

If you are a teacher, a relative of a teacher, a friend of a teacher, your children are taught by teachers, you pass by teachers on the street, then you should be there, standing tall for our public schools.

Hope to see you there.

I have been quiet for the last month. I guess that is part and parcel of the teacher life – too busy to do anything outside of school-work, especially in the closing weeks of the year.  Part of my silence was due to that but, I have to admit, a large part of my silence was a weariness I was feeling about education in America.  I believe in the good fight – the fight one makes on behalf of the right thing – but there are times when that fight seems futile, impossible, overwhelmingly so.  Most of the teachers I know, the ones I respect, believe in common sense.  Common sense tells us what is best for our students. Common sense tells us that 5 weeks of testing, with another 5 to 8 weeks of test preparation, is not the best thing for our students. We are talking 10 to 12 weeks of our school year built around testing – not learning, not projects, not constructive learning time, but testing.  That’s the city-wide, mandated testing. The BAS and the CAS (which I understand will change next year, although how no one is saying).  Forget about teacher administered tests (but then teacher tests don’t take up two weeks of school).  A test is nothing more than a thermometer reading. A proper test (not a fill in the bubble, one out of four choices, write a few lines, kind of test, but a proper test) will tell a teacher how well their students know the material taught, how well they are able to analyse what they have read, how well they are able to employ the strategies that were taught in the classroom. Not test-taking strategies, which are a horse of a different color altogether, but the strategies that we employ every day in our lives to help us with our work and our daily living.  Test taking strategies,such as teaching a student that only 1 out of 4 answers on the bubble sheet is correct therefore if you can eliminate the other three effectively you can narrow down your odds, say to 2 out of 3 or even 1 out of 2, are great if we are preparing them for a life at an Atlantic City. Maybe that’s what Texas Hold Em has brought us to.

I try, every day, to teach my students how to think for themselves, how to become more responsible in their lives, how to struggle against a natural inclination for disorganization and use organization to achieve more effective success, how to accept responsibility for their actions, how to think before they act, how to think through a problem and not just expect the answer to jump off the page screaming at them “HEY THERE, I’M THE ANSWER!!!!”; I teach them so many things that cannot ever be measured effectively by a test. Among the many things I try to instill in my students is a sense of the potential of their character. Does anybody think that the character traits that allowed what Sully Sullenberger did on U.S.Airways flight 1549 are something that can be measured by a test?

More than anything else I am trying to instill in them, or light the fire for, a sense of wonder about the world around them, a desire for curiosity, a thirst for knowledge, an enjoyment of the learning process and for education in general.  These are qualities that cannot be quantified or counted like beans. You cannot measure someone’s desire to learn through a test.  This idea that every student must demonstrate proficiency and that this demonstration actually speaks to the student’s accomplishment is another fallacy of this recent “reformation”. The world is filled with people who went on to success despite being terrible students in grade school and even high school. And high school yearbooks are filled with pictures of people who were most likely to be you name it and never quite achieved that promise.  I am not saying that proficiency in reading and math isn’t important, I am saying that basing a teacher’s future on tests for reading and math proficiency is looking at the smallest part of the picture. In our system, where such tests account for 55% of our evaluation, it is absurd.

The recent news about testing scandal investigations in Atlanta and D.C. speak volumes to what this testing culture is doing to our school systems.  Many will point to the fact that any teacher cheating on the tests shouldn’t be teaching to begin with. But that is really a narrow-minded view of what is happening.  Being ignored is the fact that this culture creates so much fear and intimidation from the top on down. When Chancellors and Superintendents are saying “Get me the numbers!” and creating a “no excuses” atmosphere where success is only measured by these scores, than this gets passed down to the principals and the principals are going to pass this on to the teachers.  Some will cheat on their own, some will be coerced to cheat (as some were in Atlanta and as some may have been in D.C.), some will find that their tests were altered behind their backs. Read the reports on Atlanta and it is staggering how some truly ethical people were hoodwinked or downright manipulated out of the picture so that cheating could occur.

The CAS scores arrived for DC and showed basically a stagnation in scores. Some rise in high school and middle school scores and a drop in elementary.  As one teacher pointed out on Valerie Strauss’s column, many of the gains touted by Madam Rhee, when she was Chancellor, have proven to be illusory once you factor in the schools cited for testing discrepancies and when you look at how some students were, in essence, manipulated in terms of categorization for testing purposes. Short term tricks meant to give the illusion of a far rosier picture than existed. This isn’t reforming anything, it’s playing games with the lives of our students and their families.

“There’s the matter of measuring performance. Multiple choice, machine-scored tests are an expensive joke being successfully sold to the naïve, the trusting, and the statistically challenged as a science. The tests relate to educating as memorizing a flight manual relates to flying, as marching in a parade relates to an army’s fighting ability, as exchanging marriage vows relates to a successful marriage.”   Marion Brady, Teacher, on Valerie Strauss’ Answer Sheet

To me this quote sums up the problem with the testing culture. Teachers are after bigger fish than a multiple choice test. We want our students to be thinkers, creators, problem solvers, innovators, challengers of the status quo.  The standardized tests want sheep. Tests and more tests will not change the condition of our worst schools, they will not suddenly light up the mind of our students. Believe me, our students aren’t clamoring to go to school to take tests. But what school could be for these students is a place unlike anything else in their lives. It could be the place where they get to try things they have never had the chance to try before. It should be the place where their imagination (oh how cheaply treated is the imagination in the hearts of the reformers) gets to stretch its muscles. It should be a place that they ARE clamoring to get to every day because they cannot wait to do the things the teacher has planned for them. Project based learning can create just such an atmosphere. There are examples all across the United States.  Instead, the answer we have for students who struggle to read, write and calculate numbers is to test them within an inch of their lives and then make those tests determine the fates of the very people working for their betterment.

Recently I watched the movie Seabiscuit with my own kids. I had not seen this movie before and was very much touched by the story.  Something that kept running through my head while I watched this movie was that if this were a story in the present day it would not take place.  It’s hard to imagine anyone giving Tom Smith, who was 57 and considered eccentric (often called Silent Tom), a job as a horse trainer or giving the jockey position to Red Pollard, a jockey whose career seemed spent (he made money between races by boxing) and who was a drinker, or going with a horse like Seabiscuit, a horse taught to lose so that other horses, judged more worthy, could have confidence in their success. The movie is all about mining the true potential in a person (or beast), about second chances, about faith and belief, about heart.  You cannot really measure these things nor can you ever realize how much damage can be sustained by our faith, belief and heart.  In our system we have thousands of students who are Seabiscuits, in a way taught to lose by the circumstances around them – whether familial or societal. Teaching them to succeed will not come through testing them 5 times a year.  What they need is belief that what they are learning, that what they are doing is truly going to make a difference in their lives.

Many of our students need to be taught how to succeed after all these years of tasting failure. That is what happened with Seabiscuit. Tom Smith, Charles Howard and Red Pollard set about teaching this thoroughbred horse (his grandfather was the great Man O’ War) how to find the potential that not only was locked inside him but had been blocked and beaten down.  We have teachers there already who can actually do the job.  Teachers who have been here all the years that others were not, when our public schools were abandoned by the moneyed of the world, when there was no TFA or NTP or DCTF or any other alphabet soup named group to help them; who were here when there were no books, no heat, no functioning water, when the classroom technology consisted of a light switch; who were here through the myriad changes foisted on them by would-be politicians striving more for their next vote than any real desire to help the children of this city.  All the teachers of this city have really been looking for is support and a little consistency from downtown, neither of which we have had much of (either from the administration or their union). Many teachers, like Red Pollard and Tom Smith, only need the right kind of support to turn things around for the students they consider their children. That support has not really transpired under reform.  Instead, teachers have been vilified and humiliated, made to adhere to a political evaluation system that marries best practices in teaching with the worst practices in corporation management.

I truly believe that we could transform our public schools with the cadre of teachers we presently have – veteran DC Teachers, TFAs, DCTFs and all.  All that is needed is a leader who understands what leadership means – I am speaking to both the union leadership and downtown. Leadership is just like teaching. Leadership is about getting people to want to do something with all their heart and soul, it is about inspiration, about hope and about faith. True leadership would bring together our teachers and parents instead of dividing them.  These are our resources and real leadership does not throw away the resources it has, whether seeming to work or not. Leadership looks for the potential and then draws that potential out and makes manifest the promise of that potential.

Seabiscuit was considered “an ill-mannered, un-trainable, no-account” thoroughbred. To look at his early record was to look at mediocrity, at best. It took several people who had no claims to real success (except Howard), but a whole lot of potential and faith and patience, to make Seabiscuit the highest earning racehorse of its time. Right now we have a lot of Seabiscuits, a lot of Red Polards and Tom Smiths, but no real Charles Howard. We do not lack in potential, we lack in the support and leadership that will bring that potential to the forefront. In the void of this leadership we are given tests.

A few years ago, when Noyes was the gem of DCPS, Michelle Rhee would ask prospective principals “Are you the next Wayne Ryan?” Ryan was the miracle performer who turned Noyes into the star school of high performers. Now the testing scandal investigation has widened, many of the Noyes teachers are “lawyering up”, as Nathan Saunders has said, and Ryan has resigned his relatively new position as assistant superintendent.  Michelle Rhee should have been looking for some Tom Smiths and Red Pollards (they are out there) and instead went with a doper of horses.  Now the question “Are you the next Wayne Ryan?” takes on a whole new meaning.