I didn't want to tell her...

A student asked me today why my last blog post was from September. I didn’t want to tell her it was because every time I sat down to write it sounded like I was whining. But, I did. I told her because there was so much more I could not bear to tell her.

I didn’t want to tell her that I worked so hard, and felt that I have little to show for it. I didn’t want to tell her that it is because I feel like every last inch of anything I have to offer has been drained out of me, and yet I can constantly hear the school saying, “Where’s more?” I didn’t want to tell her it is because if our API score does not go up by 30 points our school is in dire jeopardy of being given away to a charter and all of the school’s employees will be fired. I didn’t want to tell her that while I love my students, I’m tired of the culture of apathy that still exists within the walls of our school. I didn’t want to tell her that I am so proud to put out award winning books and so disappointed that the administration never gave me a nod of approval (although my students did! They had a plaque engraved for me, and awarded it to me in front of 800 students!).

And so, this is my explanation for the lack of blogs. I’m in search of educational topics that will allow me to write posts that are both positive and inspiring. And so, the search is on!

Public is for All

I went to see Diane Ravitch speak on Friday evening, which added sparks to my ever burning flame in my rally against Oprah, and was also very moved by much of what she had to say.

I think one of the most telling things she said was what is great about American public schools: we serve as the world’s model for free education. We accept all students. We do not discriminate based on ability level, handicap, gender, race, or socioeconomic status. We accept all students, and we always will. Students will never have to enter a lottery and hope that, by chance, they will receive an education. Students will never have to compete with other students to receive an education. They are always welcome at their local public schools. And when other schools have given up on them, schools that they either need to pay for or apply to or gamble their way into, our doors will be open to them. We will stand ready to educate them no matter what the challenge.

And we will stand ready to educate them no matter what the directive is from the bureaucratic machines in Washington DC or our state capitals. I know that my colleagues and I around the country will do our best no matter how much money is taken from our budgets, how many students are crammed into our classrooms (ahem, 41!), no matter how many high stakes standardized tests we must administer and cater to. We will always accept the nation’s children, and no matter how steep the uphill battle, we will always do the best we can to provide the best education for their future success.

Oprah, I will not be silenced

I’ve said it from day one: Oprah Winfrey is a phony. That’s right, a phony.

Shame on you Oprah, for berating public education and supporting a system that’s no better off than public schools are. The “amazing” charter schools you chose to highlight are as good as those “special public schools” (as Bill Gates so eloquently put it), and are as few.

How dare she try to tell us to “save our time” in responding to her show if we’re “good” teachers. As though we have no right to respond to her propaganda for the Obama administration’s blind following of the upper class, right wing educational agenda. Well, I am not going to save it. I will not be silenced by you.

Charter schools are no better than our local public schools. As Dana Goldstein of The Nation put it (and Diane Ravitch reiterated tonight when I saw her speak live in person!): “Here's what you don't see: that four out of five charters that are no better, on average, than traditional neighborhood public schools (and are sometimes much worse).” What should we say to that, Ms. Winfrey?

“Well you don’t see other than special schools, uniformly good results. You’ll see the honor students, the high track students doing quite well,” Bill Gates said as some type of educational expert on Winfrey’s show. Gates is referencing public schools, but his statement can be easily applied to charter schools. The majority of charter schools in this country track students, and the moment they find students who do not make them look good, they kick them out. And where do those students end up? In the classrooms of their local public school. The majority of charter schools in this country do not serve students who have special educational needs. The majority of charter schools in this nation do not serve the ever-growing population of homeless children. The majority of charter schools that are well performing are “special schools,” as Oprah herself even admits later in her show: “…even though many of them [charter schools] don’t work, many of them do.” Those that do work were the few “highly performing charter schools” she used as the examples in her video montage. This statement seems to cancel itself out. If many of them don’t work, how can many of them work all at the same time?

We cannot even say the same about public schools. ONE out of every five charter schools is better than a public school. Twenty-percent. As stated earlier this evening at the Ravitch speaking event I attended: “If I knew my car was going to explode 20% of the time I planned to drive it, I would rather walk.”

Poop?

It was only the third day of school, and I was already dreading fourth period. “Today will be a better day,” I told myself over and over again. They were too comfy on day one. There had been no honeymoon with this bunch. But, my students had their warm-up packets, they were to come in silently and get straight to work. But, no.

Standing in the back of the room, watching my animals trickle in (that’s what I call them, not to their faces of course, but in conversation with colleagues), I felt a strange smell start to tickle my nose. Vomit? No, not quite. Really rotten cheese? No. “It smells like SHIT in here!” Ah, yes, the unmistakable smell of shit. And there went my chance at a perfect day.

Immediately, I went into action mode. Inside I was frantic. How would I control the chaos that was taking place before my eyes? Outside, I was calm, collected, and in control. “Brenda, come here. We don’t speak like that in this room.” “Kevin, outside.” “Jorge, take out your warm up packet.” “Destiny, warm up packet.”

“Miss?”

“Yes?”

Oscar, nodding to the student next to him, whispered, “Can he go to the bathroom?”

And there it was: the overwhelming smell of poop wafting off the body of 15 year old Francisco.

“Yes.”

Once poor little poopy Francisco was out the door, the animals settled into their cage and got down to work. It was silent. I took role, and planned my speech. Hopefully I could get it out before the little poopster returned. No, that would make life too easy. He returned, still lightly smelling of poop. What was I supposed to do? I was not equipped to handle this situation. Drunk students? I can handle that. High students? I can handle that too. Pregnant girls? On it. Students on probation? Been there, done that. But poop? Isn’t that for elementary school teachers to figure out?

Poopy McPooperstein returned, and there was a light giggle in the back of the room. I delivered the death stare and it ceased. When it was clear that we were done with our warm up, I gave the speech. You know, the speech about transitioning from a child to an adult, how we all mature, and when there is a situation, adults learn how to move on, silently, and carry on with our work.

We worked our way through the agenda, into my relatively interactive activity about connotation (which helped me make up my mind that this class no longer needed interactive anything). There were many wisecracks and interruptions, and on each occasion we stopped until there was a deafening and uncomfortable silence. “Just make it until the final bell rings,” I told myself over and over again. We were finally under control when…

Yes, there’s more.

Outside my window, at the bus stop, there was a loud fight, the type of fight with a light shove and some of our language’s most colorful expletives. “Just don’t let any stray bullets come through my window,” was the only thought to go through my mind, until Jorge leapt out of his seat and started to bee-line towards the window. “Jorge, sit down!” I said in a voice that was as close to yelling as one can get without yelling. And then his body did the strangest thing. It was as though he was in The Matrix. His body wanted to continue to the window, but his mind was telling him to sit down. Two other bodies shot up, and I quickly got them to sit down. “But that’s my homey,” he protested. Good lord. People still say homey?! “They are uneducated fools, and we are here getting our educations so we don’t end up looking and sounding like the imbeciles outside, so sit down.” And of course, this is four minutes before the bell, and I just want to let these animals out of the cage to run loose on the world, but I can’t release them when the bell rings.

We make it through the end of our activity, after the bell rings, and they are dismissed. And I am left, still held captive in the cage.

Sound Byte

My eleventh graders and I have been reading JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye together. The other day they were working on figuring out what Holden’s values were. In order to do this, they had to identify things he called “phony” (which he does A LOT) and figure out what specifically he meant when he said “phony.” Then, they had to figure out the opposite of that which is phony, which would help them to arrive at what he valued.

As this is an important piece of analysis, I decided to review the answers with the class. Upon realizing that one of his uses of “phony” means “two faced,” I asked for the opposite of two faced. “ONE FACED,” one of my students yelled out.

.

.

.

Yes. One faced.

McDonaldization of Education

Oh, McDonald’s. I won’t eat there. It’s the exact same crappy food with the exact same crappy service every time. Nothing is ever different or exciting. But I will give them this: they are dependable. I do, however, drink Starbucks. A lovely coffee shop where each drink is made the same way every time, unless you ask for a change. Much like Burger King, you can have it your way. So much of our world has become McDonalized (to borrow from Ritzer). And it has moved from food to gyms to…you guessed it, education.

With the onset of No Child Left Behind, specific pieces of education were McDonalized: curriculum. Some districts adopted reading programs that were scientifically proven to teach all children to read. Some districts decided that every teacher at the same grade level would teach the same page of the same book at the same time. That way, when an administrator walked into the room, they would know exactly what the teacher was supposed to be teaching. Schools were no longer places that were serving the specific needs of the community in the way the educator found the best way possible; they were spaces that were privy to the demands of the government who said all children will learn, and they will all learn in this way.

I see this evidenced at the elementary school level where teachers of grades K-3 used a specific reading program. And let me tell you, when those students are finished, they sure sound like they can read. They are expert decoders, as we like to say in the education community. They can decode letters to make them sound like words. But stop a child who seems to read like an expert and ask him/her what they just read and forget it. All is lost. They don’t know. While the program teaches them to decode and read words, it does not teach them comprehension nor critical thinking. In this program, students never read an entire book or story from beginning to end, only pieces of the story that stand out. The beautiful picture painted by the narrative never comes to life. All those hours wasted by the author; hours spent on character on plot development gone to waste.

This beautiful idea of streamlining education also brought about many new jobs. Jobs which were deemed as “incredibly important.” Jobs that took money away from teaching positions and moved it towards more administrative positions. It is now the job of someone at the district level to create new curriculum, curriculum that works for all students (as they have scientifically proven by piloting it in a limited number of schools). All teacher receive these huge gray binders, and for each day one opens the binder, there is the lesson and any necessary materials, all laid out. Sounds nice, right? Less work for me? Wrong. The one year I did use the notebook, I was miserable. Each day I woke up, my excitement had waned. I did not want to go into work for another dreaded day with the imagination killing binder. And my students looked like they wanted to take a nap. So, I did the best I could; I altered the lessons and brought in my own material, just as I would have had I been able to use the standards to guide my curriculum. Only, this time, I was just sprucing up someone else’s boring curriculum, which turned out more difficult than starting from scratch.

And the best part was, we were all gathered to give feedback on the lessons. And what happened the following year? Had the lessons changed? No. The same gray binders made their way to the same grade level teachers to teach all over again. We weren’t going to waste someone else’s effort just because it didn’t work for our students! No! In the name of No Child Left Behind we were going to teach the pre-made curriculum!

I do agree with one small piece of No Child Left Behind: all children can learn. But I will say this, not all children can learn based on something that has been McDonalized. The McDonaldization of education must stop. It is killing the imaginative and inventive spirit of our nation. My students are becoming close minded yes-sayers who simply do as they are told and do not think first. And due to these “scientifically proven” programs, I am finding that they are becoming less and less skilled along the way.

Good bye, McDonalidization. You are no longer welcome in my classroom.

An open letter to Arnie Duncan

February 6, 2010

Dear Secretary Duncan,

I was very much looking forward to listening to your interview on NPR this morning. And it seemed that the only music to my ears was the phrase “necessary changes to NCLB.” I was very excited when the interviewer asked about the major changes necessary, and so let down to hear the general response of “more charter schools” and “merit pay.” And again, so interested in hearing the response to “What does merit pay look like?” and so disappointed to hear the avoidance of a clear answer.

As a public school teacher, it is very hard to support what I hear about the changes recommended for education in our country. It seems as though even the Department of Education has a hard time with understanding what most people fail to understand: schools are not insulated from society. Schools are a mirror and reflection of our society, its values and its power structures. When students walk in to my classroom, I know that the teacher before me attempted to teach California’s ridiculously complicated standards, and that due to the socioeconomic status of my students, these standards have been difficult to grasp from day one. I know that they are not coming into my room on grade level, but according to the little bit I have heard about the plans for merit pay, they are magically supposed to leave my room in June at grade level. I work incredibly hard with my students; I accommodate varying learning modalities that are all forced to learn in the same room together. I use varying strategies to help my students to access and learn our standards. I push literacy and critical thinking skills. But I can not, no matter how hard I try, overcome the overarching, problematic issues of my students’ society that follow them from the sidewalk into my classroom. And I truly still question how I will be paid for my merit when the only way I have heard is through “evaluations” and “scores.” What if my administrator has a grudge against me? What if my scores are low in general, but my students have progressed three grade levels from September to May? How will I be compensated for all of that hard work? How will I be protected from the vengeful administrator?

I took it personally that it was assumed that standards are “dumbed down” and that they are not challenging enough to support our students who are headed to four year universities. Students who are placed in remedial classes upon entering college are simply a reflection of the drop in true literacy outside of the classroom. They are a product of a generation that does not read, are not interested in the world beyond the one they can hold in their hand, do not engage outside of “popular culture.” They are placed in remedial classes not because the schools have failed them, but because the school is not a powerful enough tool to overcome the faults of our socioeconomic inequities. I can not control that somewhere along the line the parents of my students were told not to speak to their children in Spanish, but in English. And so, did my students learn how to speak beautiful Spanish? No. Were my students exposed to weak, broken English? Yes. I can not control that books are a luxury to the students in my community and so they have little exposure to reading for pleasure. I can not control that for many of my students, there is no parental figure at home to motivate my students to do their homework. Why are they not home? Because they are too busy working more than one job to make sure that there is food on the table and that the bills are paid.

And the idea of charter schools simply breaks my heart. Charter schools do look amazing on paper. They have wonderful test scores. They have beautiful graduation rates. They send all of their weak students back into the public school pipeline for us to deal with. To make it seem as though those of us teaching in public schools are not effective teachers. That those of us in public schools do not have the same teaching skills as those in charter schools. That charter schools are the answer. The answer is understanding that the problems in our schools reflect the problems of our society; that the children who are successful generally come from families of stronger socioeconomic backgrounds. Yes, we have students that break through the glass ceiling and defy existing power hierarchies, but they are few and far between, and oftentimes are breaking through on only a temporary, superficial level.

Schools will not improve until we accept that they are mirrors of our society. Schools will not improve because someone says “merit pay” and “charter.” Schools will not improve when the money follows the child. Schools will only improve when we address the overarching social issues that impact the students (and faculty) attending our schools. Schools will only improve when the values of our society are adjusted. Schools will only improve when my students know that their unhealthy cafeteria lunch will not be the only meal they eat that day. Schools will only improve when we as a society acknowledge that the society impacts the school and that the school impacts the society.

I hope that upon your restructuring of No Child Left Behind and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that the society at large is taken into consideration, and that schools are no longer isolated from that which is happening in our country at large.

Thank you for taking the time to read my concerns. I hope soon to hear the actual plan for merit pay and for a way to improve our public school system that does not lean on charter schools.

I'm Booked

One of my students approached me a few days before our three day weekend with a business card. “Can you call my boss?” he asked me. I stared at him for a beat with my “whaaa?” face. “She won’t officially hire me until I’m passing your class.”

“Fantastic!” I thought to myself. This kid has under a 50% and he wants me to call his boss? My student received a 30% on a research report he barely wrote back in November and still has yet to rewrite it. Perfect timing for this request! “How’s this weekend?”

“I’m booked,” he replied. BOOKED?! Child, you are FIFTEEN YEARS OLD! What kind of fifteen year old is booked?!

I took a deep breath.

I fought for words.

“Well, when do you want to start working?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Then get me that essay as soon as possible.”

Regardless of my less than stellar comeback, I couldn’t believe it. He was “booked”?! This is what education is coming to. Children who are failing their classes even when being given the chance to make up their work, with no point deductions for lateness and failure the first time around, are too busy to focus on school. They have made other plans. School is not any type of priority and in three days he can find absolutely no time to rewrite or add to his report, even when a job was on the line. Amazing.

What values are we teaching our future when school and education come last?

And then I ask myself…

What lessons do we need to take away from our students when school becomes so unimportant that it is placed last?

Mind of Minutia

I know it has been a long time since my last post. I have found myself in a state of disillusionment with my job, my goals, and my purpose. Perhaps that is when I should have turned to writing first, but it seems that I was so utterly confused that my thoughts seemed to be making me speechless. Below is one of the many thoughts I was finally able to turn into words.

I met today with one of my students at the public library. She could only meet for one hour, though, because she had practice. Because of an earlier field trip, I was able to drive her to practice. As I was heading back towards school she told me, “No, we’re at the park.” I realized at that point that she was not headed to an athletic practice, but to practice for Powder Puff, the annual football game of senior girls versus junior girls. And I found myself utterly disappointed.

Our students seem to be growing more and more concerned with things that do not matter in the long run. Sure she was showing dedication to her class and the event, but when the event ends, what will she have gained? With an athletics team the student works towards an ultimate goal, small goals, and learns valuable lessons in failure, teamwork, leadership, success and humility. A team can work towards a season filled with success and championships, or just improvement. But with a one time event? What is the ultimate goal? What are the students working towards? What long term lessons are they learning? Are they building character? The list of questions that stem from my confusion goes on and on.

It is as though our students have no clue what long term goals are, what builds character, leadership and responsibility. The time and energy focused are less and less on academics, clubs, athletics and school organizations, but on somewhat trivial pieces of high school social activities. Our students are filling their minds with minutia. They have a hard time completing simple addition problems in their head, but can tell you all the benefits of having a PS3 gaming system over the Wii. They are not aware of their incomplete and run-on sentences, but know the relationship ups and downs of the latest Hollywood couple. And this knowledge is not even useful in building healthy relationships or positive social skills. If anything, it seems to be making our students more apathetic, anti-social and shallow. How do we, as educators, use the constraints of state standards to pull our students back in and show them the joy in being a deeper human being?