An Honest Conversation

As a member of my union's representative council, I have sat through many a meeting where the subject of budget cuts, their negative effects, and how to alleviate as many of these negative effects as possible, are discussed. One of the jobs of the teacher's union is to negotiate with the district in order to decide how these cuts can be made with the least possible damage to the students, school programs, teachers, and overall sustainability of the schools in the district.

In order to save positions, our district has offered a retirement incentive to encourage retirees, thereby saving positions of newer teachers while still reducing staff. They have changed the calendar in order to match with other districts thereby stream-lining the bus schedule, and saving money. Our classified staff has been gutted (classified staff covers such jobs as maintenance, tech support, attendance, office secretary, campus security, etc.). Teachers are negotiating a negative change in health coverage. Everyone has given up days of pay. Elective classes have been eliminated. Class size reduction has been eliminated. The school year will be shortened by five days.

Through all of this, the conversation never moves away from the question of how to make parents aware of what is going on so that they will begin to protest the budget cuts. After all, this is not the problem of my district, it's the problem of every district across the state of California. And yet, by and large, parents seem to remain complacent. However, teachers and administrators are continuing to entertain the naive belief that by shortening the school year by five days, or closing the school for a day here and there, parents will be moved to action. But I remain unconvinced.

Who cares if the school year is five days shorter? The school year is too long anyway. When I was a kid, we started school in September, now we start in mid-August. Summer seems to get shorter and shorter. School starts too early in the morning. The day in, and day out grind is exhausting for students and parents alike. Five days off? Closing the school for a Friday here and there? Good riddance! That's one less day I have to set my alarm for six, drag my kids out of bed, divvy up bathroom time, grill them over homework assignments, pack lunches, and make that panicked run to school in the morning, trying to avoid the dreaded and punishable tardy. Sorry, I may be a teacher, but I'm a parent too, and quite frankly, a five day shorter school year sounds great to me. In fact, let's make it ten. What the hell.

Sadly, what I continue to witness is the desire teachers and administrators have to let parents know of their plight, in constant conflict with their desire to continue to give the impression that their school is a fantastic, positive, creative, uncompromised place of learning. In other words, just because we are broke, doesn't mean that we aren't still a GREAT SCHOOL! Until schools can start having honest conversations with their parents regarding the real impacts of budget cuts on the quality of their child's education, parents will continue to be widely complacent in taking action because they aren't in the classroom, and they have no real way of knowing how things are changing.

Instead of entertaining the naive belief that parents are going to care about a shorter school year, schools should stop trying to pretend they are something they are not, and go for brutal honesty. Administrators are always talking about the importance of involving parents and the community in schools, well, here's our chance. Weekly notices should be posted publicly and sent home to all parents notifying them of each and every change, and speaking honestly about what these changes really mean for the health of the school. Here are some possible examples:

Dear Care Givers and Community Members:
Due to budget cuts, we have eliminated the majority of the campus security at your local high school. We are sorry for this inconvenience, however, we have no funds. Because of this, students will be exposed to an increased level of drug trafficking and drug use on campus. We know that much of the drugs being consumed on campus will be consumed in one of our many bathrooms, however, without campus security, we have no way of regularly patrolling these areas. Please do not be surprised if your student sees someone snorting, smoking, or selling illegal substances while at school. We will do our best to continue to provide a safe environment for all students, with a continued dedication to cut down on campus violence and bullying. However, we can only do so much, so there will be no gurantees.
Sincerely,
Your School

Dear Care Givers and Community Members:
Dues to budget cuts, we have been forced to lay off more teachers, and increase class size once again. We feel it is only fair for you to know that your student will be in a Freshman English class this year with at least 35 students. Your student may or may not have a desk, but we promise them floor space. Because many students struggle with Freshman English, and class sizes are so impacted, more students will be failing and falling behind. We apologize for this, but there really isn't anything we can do. Teachers will be modifying their curriculum in order to accommodate the increased student load, and will be focusing instead on classroom management. You can expect your students to have less writing assignments as the teachers will not have time to read papers if assigned. Sorry.
Sincerely,
Your School

Dear Care Givers and Community Members:
Due to budget cuts we have been forced to eliminated and/or severely gut the majority of our creative programs this year. Most students will be unable to get into the elective of their choice. The art program is being cut back. Wood shop is being eliminated completely. Jewelry and textiles fell by the wayside years ago. The music program will be gravely reduced. We apologize for these losses but we can't afford to hire the teachers needed to run the programs. May we suggest you look into creative programs elsewhere. Private music and art lessons, while expensive, should meet your student's needs. Good luck!
Sincerely,
Your School

Until schools start communicating honestly with parents, and stop pretending that they are giving the students everything they deserve, parents will continue to get up every morning -- bleary eyed, packing lunches, mediating bathroom scuffles between siblings, and praying for summer. The sooner the better.

Sub Plan

After missing a week and a half of school due to an unexpected case of pneumonia, (it would have been two and half weeks if Spring Break hadn't cushioned the experience), I have been forced to come face to face with a truth I have long been avoiding due to my usual good health. I don't have a solid emergency sub plan in place, and though the old fall back "show a movie" works for a few days, when unexpectedly absent for a week and a half, "show a movie" doesn't cut it. I know that there are teachers out there who have their entire semester, maybe ever their entire year, mapped out in advance. I, however, am not one of those teachers. I like to go with the flow of my inspiration and imagination, and I never know what I might decide to read, explore, or assign until a week, or sometimes a weekend in advance.

Partially this is due to my student population. At continuation high, students come and go. Classroom makeup is constantly changing. I have combined grade levels, 10th-12th in every class, and for every student that breezes in and then breezes back out again, there are those that feel at home and don't leave until they graduate (sometimes as 5th year seniors). This means that I may have the same students three years in a row, and though they may seem as though they aren't paying attention, pull out a story we read two years ago and they are deeply offended, as if I am clearly not doing my job.

Much of my curriculum I glean from current events. What's going on in the world right now? What articles are in the news? What ballots are on the initiative? What natural disasters are giving us new perspectives on the world? Where are we bombing now? And these items quickly lose their pertinence. Topics that come up in class may drive our next essay assignment, and I may never use this particular topic, along with accompanying readings, again. This sort of fluidity in the classroom means a constant stream of successes and failures. The poems written from the perspective of people's dogs, for instance, fell flat. I'll never use those again, and am still recovering from the failure, (I thought they were really funny). The prison project, on the other hand, was widely well received, but now I can't do it for another two years, at least, at which point my statistical handouts will be out of date and I will have to assemble all new materials.

This is one way I keep class interesting -- by making sure the kids never know what to expect next. This also means if I am suddenly laid out on the couch and have a last minute sub showing up, I don't have anything for them to do. If the timing is right, the kids might be in the middle of a project. They know what they need to work on, so all the sub had to worry about is making sure no one smokes pot in the back room or starts a fight. But if we are between projects, I have nothing to offer the sub besides my emergency movie which, oh yah, half the kids saw last year, and if I show it again, you can bet I'm going to hear about it.

To deal with this problem I have decided to purchase a book of "never fail" language arts assignments that come on neat little ditto sheets with a line for the student's name, and easily understood instructions. Each ditto sheet has "fun" but "instructional" activities like "rewrite this four sentence story being more specific, and using lots of details", or "write a paragraph using only one syllable words", or "rewrite these sentences using hyperbole". The worksheets are simple, perhaps instructive in a vague, banal, and somewhat meaningless way, and they remind me of two things.

One, my job would be so much easier, I would sleep so much better at night, and I would have a huge weight of responsibility lifted from my shoulders if I stopped coming up with all of my own material. If I just bought a daily curriculum, copied worksheets, used the text book, and relied entirely on other people's ideas, I would be freed from the pressure of having to be endlessly creative, and having to beat myself up every time a lesson went sour, (think dog poems). I wouldn't have to worry that the story I am bringing in contains the word "cunt", because all of the stories we read in class would be conveniently pre-censored, and so tried and true, (as in, students have been reading these same stories for the last thirty years), there would be no risk involved whatsoever.

Two, maybe I am a flawed teacher in some way, because I find the text books available in all subjects, the prescribed worksheets and "creative" projects, and the "tried and true" materials to be so boring, so dull, so insipid I feel guilty participating in their dissemination. Not like everything I bring in is top notch, (think dog poems), but at least I am always striving to find things that are actually meaningful in some bigger sense of the word. Still, with this effort comes great responsibility, and I am never entirely sure if I am successful or not. Maybe I am blinded by my own agenda. Maybe my students would improve their skills at a higher rate if I stopped focusing so much on critical thinking, and spent more time doing skill building activities, boring or not.

I try to reach every one of my students -- and as chronic ditchers, school haters, drug takers, and English loathers, this is perhaps an impossible task. Still, I can tell you exactly which students, in any given quarter, I have been as yet unable to reach, and each one, in their own separate way, haunts me. For the most part, the students who I can't reach want exactly the type of materials I will be photocopying and leaving out for the sub should I ever get pneumonia again. They are annoyed by my contemporary fiction, by my persistent agenda to force them to think bigger thoughts. They just want a worksheet that has a little line for their name, a straight set of easy to understand instructions, and an assignment that involves no deep thought, that they can finish quickly and then forget about.

On my bad days, I wonder if maybe I should just give them what they want -- formulaic assignments designed to improve a very specific, easily testable skill set. On my good days, I swear, I'll quit before I'll give in. On my mediocre days, I can't decide if I'm right or if I'm wrong. But maybe that's what teaching is all about -- discovery, uncertainty, exploration, failure, and success. In the mean time, my new sub plan will be laid out, and hopefully, with any luck, it will gather dust. As well it should.

Bullying in Schools

Because I once home schooled my children, I have been forced into many a debate over the importance of public school as a necessary means of socialization. If you choose not to send your children to Kindergarten, the overwhelming belief system in our culture is that you are depriving them of something necessary as this is the arena where they will learn how to interact with others, to make friends, to socialize. Even my own students, many of whom have opted out of the mainstream public school because they find the social "scene" there intolerable, are convinced that attending school at the age of 5 was somehow integral to their social development. If you don't go to school, they say, than you will be a "social retard".

I've always found this argument mind boggling, and can only assume that my own experience in public school must have been somehow dramatically different than everyone else, otherwise, how could anyone possibly equate public school with "positive socialization"? In my experience, school was where you learned if you were a loser or not. It was where you found out you were too poor to ever be cool. It as where the "gay" kids got tortured and harassed. It was where the kid that played the flute got tossed down the hill everyday. It was where the German girl who smelled funny got taunted relentlessly every time she stepped onto the school bus and no one would let her sit down. It was where anyone who didn't fit in was taught, day in and day out, about humiliation. And it was where we all learned that negative personality traits, such as cruelty, selfishness, ego centrism, a propensity for violence, and homophobia were what made a person popular and powerful. The more vile you were, the more you were revered by your classmates. Positive socialization?!!! Are you kidding me?!!!

With the indictment of nine teenagers, following the suicide of the fifteen year old student Phoebe Prince , perhaps it is safe to say that the long accepted culture of bullying and oppressive social behaviors in our public schools is finally going to be overhauled. Maybe, now that teenagers and administrators are being held legally responsible for allowing or participating in student abuse, schools will finally become the places of "positive socialization" I have long heard about, but so rarely seen. However, I have my doubts.

Ideally, every child would be taught positive social behaviors at home. They would be taught to treat others with respect. They would be taught compassion. They would be taught to respect others regardless of sexual orientation, skin color, or religious beliefs. This way, our schools would be filled with children who, though imperfect as we all are, at least come prepared with a metaphorical tool belt for navigating the often overwhelming environment of too many kids forced to be together day after day, without enough adult supervision to keep them behaving at their personal best.

Schools are expected to somehow not only teach kids how to read and write, add and subtract and multiply, but how to be nice people as well. They are expected to control the behaviors of students -- students that can often number in the thousands. Looking back, I don't know what the adults in my schools could have done to make us be nicer to each other. Some of it could have been stopped. The stuff on the bus got out of hand everyday, and the bus driver never did anything. But most of it went on below the radar, and even if a teacher had intervened, what difference would that have made in the long run? Who was hated and who was not had been decided by some unspoken consensus and no adult could change that anymore than they could keep us from smoking in the bathrooms.

Our public schools are microcosms of the communities in which they reside -- very often mirroring the value systems, behaviors, and social paradigms that exist outside the school walls. While anti-bullying legislation is critical, and the fight to make our public schools safe for all children should never be given up, anyone who blindly believes that when they send their kid to school in the morning they are providing their child with a positive social experience is living in denial. My own children no longer home school, and one attends a public school. I am grateful for what his school is able to offer him, however, not for a moment do I fool myself into thinking that my son is in an environment of his peers designed to make him a kind and loving person. That's my job.

Youth Speaks Poetry Slam

Last night I attended the 14th annual Youth Speaks Grand Slam poetry competition at the Warfield Theater, in San Francisco. The event was exciting, inspiring, and, on more than one occasion, moved me to tears. I am currently trying to recover my voice which I believe I lost towards the end of the three and a half hour show, due to a righteous amount of screaming -- I always try and do my part.

The young poets who performed awed me with their talent, their courage, and their stories. Though any young adult can compete, many of those in the grand finals had participated in a Youth Speaks workshop -- free, after school, spoken word workshops that are offered at various locations across the Bay Area.

I brought with me five teenage boys, ranging in age from 13-16. I also had eight student attendees, scattered about the auditorium -- lured there by a promise of a generous dose of extra credit, should they attend and write about their experience afterward. Of the boys in my attendance, none of them are currently writers, or poets, nor would I consider them to be of an "artistic" or "poetic" temperament. One of my sons, in fact, had threatened me repeatedly before the show with some form of bodily harm should he become bored during the performance.

Luckily for the state of my forearm, no one was bored. Boredom, in fact, would have been nearly impossible. The performance pieces were mind blowing, the DJ was rocking the house, the MC, at four foot nine, was somehow epic in proportions, and I was reminded, for three and half hours straight, what education is supposed to be like.

Teaching is a dichotomous profession. On one hand, it's about the students and meeting their needs, and on the other, there are the very real policy decisions that keep the job forever political. But watching these young people perform last night, brought me back for a moment -- away from the budget cuts, the No Child Left Behind debacle, the upcoming STAR tests, and the President's loathsome Race to the Top. It brought me back from my fears and doubts in the classroom, to a place of remembrance.

Imagine if every public school had creative writing and spoken word built into their curriculum -- if instead of forcing elementary school students to craft five paragraph essays, we taught them how to tell their stories, and perhaps even more importantly, how to value each others stories. How to truly listen.

Not everyone is a writer, just as not everyone is a painter, or an illustrator, or gardener, or a cook. But until we begin to integrate the arts into our schools as thoroughly and as adamantly as we have integrated US History, English Literature, and Math, our children will lose, and we, as a culture, will continue to be negatively impacted by our collective ignorance.

Keep Your Merit Pay

According to an article in the LA Times, quality-blind layoffs harm teachers and students. The authors, Timothy Daly and Arun Ramanathan, are encouraging an end to quality-blind layoffs, and a shift to a system that favors job performance over seniority.

As teacher layoffs begin, and as a new teacher myself, it is impossible not to see that there are injustices to the quality-blind system. New teachers are fired first, no matter what, and teachers that are well known to be ineffective are allowed to keep their jobs, year after year. There is something distinctly demoralizing about this system. After all, if your talent and skills in no way effect your yearly income or your job security, than what motivation is there to continue to excel?

Teacher's unions opposed to changing the quality-blind system, point to the fear that older, more experienced teachers will be let go because they make significantly more than new teachers. Enter injustice number two. As a new teacher, I am making about thirty thousand less dollars a year than my close to retirement co-workers. That's a huge difference in pay, and yet no matter how many extra hours I put in, no matter how hard I work to make my classroom an effective place of learning, I must watch in horror as I inch my way up the pay schedule in such pitifully small increments that the idea of ever making a proper living seems but a mirage in the far off distance of my future.

Enter merit pay. Why, if hard work so often goes unnoticed and unrewarded, would any teacher oppose the chance to be rewarded for their extra work? Because merit pay will be attached to test results, that's why, and merit pay attached to test results will lead to a further crippled curriculum. Many teachers point to the unfairness of merit pay for those who work with at-risk youth, at continuation schools, with special needs kids, or in low income neighborhoods. However, we need to shift our attention away from this arguement. Obama and Arne Duncan merely reply that merit pay will be based on improved scores, not on overall scores. So, you could be working at a low performing school, but as long as your students continually test better, you will be in line for merit pay right there with the teachers working in wealthy communities, where test scores are always higher.

This response is full of flaws, but pointing them out seems a waste of time because from the student's perspective, who gets merit pay and who doesn't hardly matters. What matters is that schools, desperate for high test scores, will continue to provide students with the type of learning that works better than Ambien. So, while we argue about quality-blind layoffs, and merit pay, and step and column pay scales, our children are being force fed meaningless content at such an extravagant rate that we are more at risk of becoming imagination deprived automatons than ever before.

There are no easy answers to how to make all kids learn, and how to ensure all schools are safe and productive places of learning. How to layoff teachers fairly, how to swallow huge budget cuts without impacting students, and how to remedy an unfair pay schedule are monumental challenges with many answers, few of them perfect. However, solving every problem by assigning a standardized test, designed to make testing companies billions and provide students with nothing, is not the answer.

STAR testing begins in a couple of weeks. Because I love my school, I have to encourage my students to do well. What I would like to tell them is, revolt! All of you! Organize and revolt! This test is optional, it means nothing to you, but it has the potential to destroy your school. In fact, if Meg Whitman becomes governor of California and gets her way, your school will be given an "F" or a "D" if we're lucky, because you guys don't score well enough on the STAR. Everyone, right now, stand up and walk out. If every student in California refused to test, then the government would be unable to judge you, and your schools in this way.

But I'm a new teacher. I'm not tenured yet. I'm at the bottom of the pay scale. I can't afford to incite a revolution. So, next week, I'll probably go over some literary terms, I'll beg my students to test well, and we'll bribe them with snacks and a BBQ if only they will try. Then my students, who I love and respect, will be given a test that is so hard, they will be lucky if they know half of the answers. If they do try, most of them will leave the experience feeling the way they always do in school. Stupid. Next year, they will get a paper in the mail confirming their suspicions. Thanks standardized test companies, and inane legislation. Thanks for nothing.

You can keep your stupid merit pay. Just leave my students alone.

The Effigy

The hanging of an effigy of President Obama in a classroom at Central Falls, (the school that is garnering national attention due to the decision to fire all of its teachers), is making news. While few would object that there are more classroom friendly methods for discussing the issue at hand -- the effigy has succeeded in bringing the issue of "holding teachers accountable" back into the public eye, and I am reminded once again that education and equity are not synonymous in this country, as much as we would like to pretend otherwise.

The fact that our "failing" schools are consistently in areas with a high rate of poverty, should come as no surprise. Why student income level, native language, and the overall safety of the communities in which they live are also not figured into the equation when evaluating teacher performance has been made clear by Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education. He seems to believe that when teachers are faced with a caseload of students who live in dangerous neighborhoods, who are poor, who are neglected, who are underfed, who are non-English speaking, they should be able to overcome these obstacles in the classroom and continue preparing students for college readiness. No problem.

As usual, I feel powerless when faced with nonsensical policy making, and so I have decided to investigate the issue of good teachers from the ground up, beginning where it really counts -- with the students themselves. What makes an effective teacher? What defines a "good" teacher from a "bad"? I know what those passing down the orders think -- a successful teachers follow directions, buys into the directives handed down from up-high, and produces students who test well. But what do the students themselves believe?

So far I have interviewed two students, both boys, one in 8th grade, and one in 10th. I asked each of them to tell me what made a teacher a "good" teacher. Honestly, I thought they would struggle a little bit with this. That maybe they just accepted teachers as they come, and wouldn't know, exactly, what made one good and another not so good. I was wrong. They both gave the matter some deep thought, and then provided me with their top three qualifications.

The 8th grade interviewee listed, in order of importance, the following three criteria: funny and entertaining, knows their subject, likes what they do. I questioned him on his second qualification. He elaborated, explaining that in his experience, some teachers don't seem to know much about their subject matter. These teachers, he said, always teach exclusively from the text book, and never seem to know the answers to your questions.

The 10th grade interviewee had very similar responses. He too was able to come up with three essential qualifications: creative, interesting and engaging, funny. So, both boys felt being funny was paramount. Of course, not everyone is funny, but I can't help but think how frequently I rely on laughter to get my students through a lesson successfully.

I asked the 10th grader if he ever felt as though a teacher was teaching him successfully, even though they did not display the above characteristics, and he adamantly shook his head. According to him, without creativity, engagement, and humor they were not good teachers, period.

I wonder if we could do away with our complex means for teacher assessment and replace it with a simple check list. Do you love what you teach? Do you know how to make your subject matter interesting? Can you teach and think creatively? Do you have a sense of humor? Access to teacher credential programs could be based on this simple criteria.

I plan to interview many more students on their top qualifications for what makes a teacher "good", and will continue to report on my findings. I think that the superintendent of Central Falls High, and President Obama too (why not), would do well to question the students at Central Falls in the same way. All too often, the students themselves are not given a voice. Those kids know who can teach and who can't. Has anyone bothered asking them?

A Matter of Integrity

"Standards are important." I can't tell you how many times a week I hear these words. We have to have Standards, otherwise what will anyone be learning? How can we guarantee that all children learn, if all teachers are not teaching the same thing, at the same time, all across the country? This seems to be the general consensus, one re-emphasized by Obama's ratification of a new set of National Standards.

I have a son who is fortunate enough to attend a college prep private school. He is taking an African Studies class. His teacher has them read a wide variety of books, both fiction and non, and tells them stories so memorable, that the students remember them for years afterward. He does not have a text book for either his African Studies class or his integrated Humanities class. African Studies is not part of the State Standards, and yet, what my son is learning about this fascinating country is far more important than anything I see listed on the State Standards. He is learning to be interested in the world around him. Can that be a State Standard? Foster interest in the world?

No. It can not. State Standards look more like this:
All 11th grade students must be able to enhance meaning by employing rhetorical devices, including the extended use of parallelism, repetition, and analogy; the incorporation of visual aids (e.g., graphs, tables, pictures); and the issuance of a call for action.

What? What does that even mean? Why does it even matter? I'll tell you why. Because on the STAR test, there are questions like this:
The frank tone and objective viewpoint of this passage make it especially characteristic of which American literary period?
A the Revolutionary period
B the Realistic period
C the Naturalistic period
D the Contemporary period

And like this:
Paragraph 3 of the passage could best be classified as an
A epitaph.
B elegy.
C anecdote.
D allegory.

And like this:
Which statement best describes how the author uses rhetorical technique in this sentence?
A Understatement is used to introduce the topic with a sarcastic tone.
B Figurative language is used to intensify the impact of the statement.
C Word repetition is used to emphasize the importance of the subject of the document.
D Allusion is used to address the topic of the document on a historical level.

Teachers are fairly divided on the Standards front. There are those who have never even looked at them before, who believe that as long as they are true to the essence of their subject matter, their students will learn what they need to learn, and there won't be a problem. And then there are those who follow the Standards religiously, driving their curriculum forward with the force of a bulldozer in their attempt to cover everything that has been mandated by the State as critical information for their 2nd graders, or 8th graders, or 12th graders to know.

I have found that those who believe in the Standards movement are quick to bandy about terms that echo their support, and those who do not believe in the Standards movement, pretty much keep their mouths shut on the matter. You can only spot them because of the way in which they gaze longingly at the door while their colleagues and administrators wax poetic on the Holy Grail of the Standards driven curriculum.

Now that teacher performance is at risk of being intricately tied to test results, however, one has to wonder if this divide will exist for much longer. When faced with the chance of a lesser pay check, will I too buckle under the pressure to teach information that I believe to be superfluous? Not a chance. That's because I have my own set of standards. I'll give you an example:
Standard 1.1
Integrity.

Take to the Streets

Before becoming a school teacher, I was not a fan of the public school K-12 system. I did not enjoy this system as a child, and my disillusionment only worsened as I grew older, culminating with my leaving the 10th grade and attending junior college full time instead. I adored junior college, loved my classes, tried my hardest, got good grades, and completed an Associates degree by 18. As far as I could tell, high school was just some terrible lie that adults told adolescents in order to make them suffer unnecessarily. I felt I missed nothing by opting out of high school, and the classes I would have been forced to take throughout my high school career, appeared to be unnecessary to my success in college.

With the curious passion of youth, I became convinced that most of what I had learned in school, prior to junior college, had been meaningless, and in fact, I felt as though what I had learned had been specifically designed to harm my innate, creative intelligence. In my early twenties, I would argue with my school teacher friend about the importance of sending your kids to public school. I refused to send my own children, and believed that he was sacrificing his to the greater good by sending them to a public school simply because he felt it was his duty to do so. Many public school enthusiasts believe that people who homeschool, or send their children to private or charter schools, are partially responsible for the slow death of our public schools. Not only because often these children would be a benefit, intellectually, to the schools, but because each child represents a dollar amount that will now be funneled away from the local public school system. Falling enrollment means tougher times for the schools.

Now that I teach in the system, however, I understand where my friend was coming from. Imagine if all of the people who send their children to private and charter schools -- spending upwards of thirty-thousand dollars per year, or at the very least taking money out of the system -- were to send their child to public school instead, and donate that same sum of money to the public school? Imagine if every family donated some amount of money -- whatever they could afford -- to fill back in the yawning gaps in funding? Imagine if all of that money were used directly to fund the schools -- improving the campus, providing supplies, adding sections, and building up the currently emaciated and/or nonexistent enrichment programs.

In Cupertino, CA, one group of parents is pushing for exactly this. Finally, the cuts to our public schools have grown severe enough that the parents are starting to take action. These parents are attempting to raise 3 million dollars, in order to retain 115 of their teachers who will otherwise be laid off. By their calculations, if every one of the 10,000 families in the Cupertino School District were to donate $375, they could save their schools for at least one year -- thereby buying time for the district to figure out a plan B.

According to Sam Dillon in The New York Times, Diane Ravitch -- education scholar and major intellectual muscle behind No Child Left Behind, and our transition into a standards based, test driven educational system -- has changed her mind. She now sees that these policies were misguided and that we would have been better off following the examples of other nations where students study an array of subjects and disciplines and the curriculum is not, I imagine, driven by the questions on a multiple choice test.

How unfortunate that she seems to have come to this conclusion just as the last bit of meat has been shaved from the bone. It seems we have come to a precipice in education, and that we have been driven to this point by a combination of lack of funding and poor policy making decisions. Until President Obama starts sending his own children to a public school, perhaps it would be prudent not follow so blindly the next set of directives that are already beginning to trickle down the system of command.

The Act of Giving Human Traits to Non-Living Objects

I'm still mulling over this issue of how the government can evaluate teacher performance from afar because, like it or not, this is the direction we are moving. My student assessments are based on a panacea of techniques that I am constantly developing and improvising depending on my students and the varying levels of their needs. Sometimes my assessment is based on an particular academic task: i.e. one of my students just turned in a paper that uses all complete sentences, when previously she had been unable to do so. Sometimes my assessment will be based on something much simpler, i.e. I was able to get a non-writer, non-responder, to write three sentences in his notebook, and smile twice.

Just as I never stop assessing my students I also never stop assessing my own techniques -- content, delivery, successes versus failures. Self-assessment is part of my job, and believe me, I wish there was some simple formula to make this process easier, and not so convoluted. However, I do not feel that the government has, as of yet, devised an effective method for evaluating student learning, and it concerns me that this same ineffective method may, very soon, be used to evaluate teacher performance as well.

Lets take a dramatic, and hypothetical, case in point -- one certain to make English teachers everywhere cringe in dread. Let's say the entire year goes by and I'm so busy packing in the important stuff, that I forget to teach the students in my English class the literary terms that will undoubtedly be on their standardized exams. At test time, assuming they are even bothering to try, they will quite possibly miss certain questions because of this. Based on their test scores, it may appear as though I am not teaching my students successfully. Both my students and I will be graded as "Basic", or even worse, the dreaded, "Below Basic."

This is one of the things that keeps me up at night. What is more important? That my students learn to question, to be curious human beings? Or that they temporarily memorize the meaning of the word: Personification.

The school howls with grief while the children inside, stare longingly out the windows. The windows whisper, "Don't know what personification means? Look it up."

Someone Who Cares

Recently a teacher friend of mine made an interesting point. All of this talk about "bad teachers", she said, about getting rid of the "bad teachers", as if this will solve the problem and enable all of our students to learn. In every profession, she pointed out, there are people who aren't very good at their jobs. We have bad contractors, bad police officers, bad taxi drivers, bad doctors -- but the nation doesn't get all worked up about those. But a few bad teachers, and it's suddenly a national crisis. Shoot, we even have bad Presidents. You'll never have all "good teachers" any more than you'll have all good parents, all good students, or all good anything else.

This got me thinking about those Rhode Island teachers again, or any teachers, for that matter, who work at "failing" schools. I guess I'm still thinking about it because I haven't come up with a good answer to the teacher assessment issue. I mean, lets face it, if half the time I can't tell if I'm meeting my student's needs, how is anybody else going to be able to figure it out?

I did come up with a missing point in the argument of Melinda Gates in her Washington Post article, "Education Reform One Classroom at a Time". She claims that all children can succeed in large numbers, no matter what their economic status. She uses her schools, and their high success rates as proof. It occurred to me, however, that Gates did not take into consideration a critical component. The students at her school are there because they have someone at home who wants very badly for their child to succeed, and who isn't afraid to think of alternative routes to make that happen. Someone who is paying attention. Someone who washes and puts out their child's uniform every morning. Someone who decided to seek out the best school possible for their child, who went to the trouble to fill out an application, and who made the commitment to make sure their child makes it to school every day -- week after week, year after year.

Maybe the Gates Foundation schools do have a better curriculum. I'm sure, with all of that extra money, they probably do. Maybe they do have better teachers. Again, with such powerful resources at their disposal, I'm sure they can hand pick all of their instructors. But what she doesn't mention is perhaps the most critical component of all. These students have someone at home who cares about education. If only every child were so lucky, my job would be a lot easier.

Teacher Assessment

Today, a news headline in my inbox reads: Rhode Island District Superintendent To Fire Entire Staff At Underperformed High School. According to the article, this high school is the lowest performing in the State, and their test results have continued to drop too many years in a row. The teachers have refused to adopt the changes mandated by government program improvement, and so the Superintendent must choose the only other option given by No Child Left Behind legislation, and fire them all.

Next I read an article by Melinda French Gates, published in the Washington Post. Gates seems to believe that even schools that carry the weight of the At Risk student population can produce consistently high test results, as well as high school graduates who plan to attend college. What students need, she writes, are good teachers. The teachers hold the key to student success -- and if the teachers are good enough, then the students will succeed across all social and economic barriers.

Now, I am not one to romanticize the public school teacher. I went to public school, and I remember with bitter clarity what it was like for me there. Socially dysfunctional and boring. So boring. Boring beyond boring. I have never been so bored in my life, boring. I stopped counting the holes in asbestos ceiling panels the last day I spent in high school, boring. So don't expect me to carry on about the invaluable nature of the holy K-12 "teacher". On the other hand, for many of my students, a good teacher is the best chance they have -- because when they aren't at school, no one else is in their life is paying them any positive attention.

Gates readily admits that assessing teacher performance is complex, and that assessing teacher performance based one standardized test results alone, is not enough. After all, by the time students reach my classroom, they have already been taught for the previous 11-13 years, by other teachers. Yet suddenly I am responsible for their achievements, as well as their failings. And what if my students do not do well on the Standardized Test? What if they still stink at writing when they leave my room -- sorry, but if the multitude of teachers who came before me couldn't do it, what makes you think it can be done?

On the other hand, what if they learning something in my class that cannot be measured via multiple choice? What if they read and enjoyed their first story? What if they learned to be more tolerant? What if they, for the fist time ever, like English -- when previously it was a subject they found most loathsome? How do you measure that?

So maybe those teachers in Rhode Island really are terrible at their jobs. Maybe they are boring, so boring that the smartest kids refuse to go to school because they've already counted all the holes in the ceiling and there are none left to count. Maybe they are mean teachers, who unjustly punish their students, refuse them creative expression, and belittle them in front of their peers (we've all had those). On the other hand, what if the students are learning something? Something we haven't yet figured out how to measure?

I don't know the school, I don't know the community, and I don't know the teachers -- but I imagine, even if I did, this would not be an easy question to answer.

Mr. Klein Speaks

Recently, I spoke with an educator who is employed at a high school under "government improvement" -- this is what happens to a school when their student scores fail to improve on the yearly STAR assessment exams. I've talked with teachers who work at these "failing" schools and actually drive door to door during testing time, rounding up kids and dragging them in so that the school can meet the mandatory quota for student participation. And once the kids get there, well, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out exactly how hard they try.

This educator likened the environment at her "failing" school to George Orwell's, 1984. Which caused me to ponder, how can any intellectual environment truly thrive in any sort of creative, inspiring way, if the setting is such that teachers are afraid to speak their minds and express their opinions? And so, on the eve of the decision made by the Santa Rosa City School Board, (home to some 30 schools), to eliminate 7.6 librarian jobs, cut funding for campus police, increase class size, shorten the school year by 3 days, and cancel all spring sports, (track, swimming, softball, baseball), I have decided to begin giving voice to as many teachers as I can find who are willing to speak.

Please enjoy what will be the first of many short teacher interviews.

Bob Klein teaches English, among other things, at a continuation high school in California.

Q. How long have you worked in the public school system and what subjects and grade levels do you teach?

I’ve worked in the public school system since the mid-80s. I began my career at Casa Grande High School in Petaluma, with a population that has ranged, through the years, from about 1500-1800 students. For thirteen years, I taught introductory Spanish to mostly freshman. I also taught Human Interaction for about six years, exclusively to freshman. That class was a lot of fun, providing information and living skills to help teenagers make right choices in their personal lives. This class informed and shaped my own perspective of what it means to educate youngsters.

For the past nine years, I’ve been teaching English at San Antonio High School, also in Petaluma. This is a continuation school where kids find it a little easier to succeed without the pressure of homework and strict academic standards required by most colleges. It’s a great place to work, but when I transferred there, I miscalculated how the difference in the level of behavior and attitude would affect my approach and my curriculum. It took me a good couple of months to re-orient myself to a different type of student, and classroom. These are students whose needs are primarily dictated by a combination of low motivation, drug dependency, little family support, anti-social behavior, and any combination of these and many other factors that create the need for alternative sites.

Q. What effect do you feel No Child Left Behind legislation has had on the schools where you have worked? Have these changes been subtle? Profound? Inconsequential?

When I took my education courses at Sonoma State, I experienced a renewed sense of love/hate with the many pathways into academentia. And though I would soon be an agent of the academic environment, I always kept a safe distance from some of the ideologies that characterize the “academic paradigm,” such as using terms like “academic paradigm,” and leading to such legislation as No Child Left Behind.

There is not one teacher in my sphere of colleagues who feels that there is any wisdom in No Child Left Behind. I see it as a misguided and short-sighted piece of politics. In the interest of brevity, I will point to the ultimate manifestation of this policy, which is to test our students based on curriculum standardized to meet arbitrary and unrealistic goals. And then to take the results of these tests and determine which schools are wonderful bastions of student success, and which schools suck and need government intervention to improve student success.

Success at what, and according to whom? is a favorite question, but I will remain brief on that subject.


Q. With the Obama administration, comes new attempts to reform the public school system. Top on the list is merit pay, formation of national standards, and an increased emphasis on data collection and standardized assessments. If you were the President's Secretary of Education, what would be your top suggestions to improve our struggling education system?

More alternatives! Standards, data, assessments...they work for certain kids, the ones who are driven to succeed in the academic world. For those students, schools are just dandy, and they will adapt to just about anything we throw at them. But some students aren’t getting what we’re feeding them, and can’t handle the delivery system. We can try to change the system, which is what Washington wonks and bureaucrats have attempted. Then policies such as merit pay become a desperate attempt to make us compete for the big bucks. Some teacher stuck in Lower Skunk High School where the population is 85% minority, or the average income is below the poverty line, or for whatever other reasons the young Skunks don’t rise to a specified level, Mr. John Q. Teacher at Skunk High is #@!! out of luck!

What to do? More money for programs that matter. When the first thing to be cut from a school are the music and arts programs, we have a problem. We need the arts and music, woodshop and auto tech, and movement classes, including dance and tai chi; these programs are the heart and soul of a school. Librarians get cut, as if they were expendable. Why is mathematics sacrosanct? And Ancient History? It’s interesting, and great stuff, but why not share the pain? Do kids need English class every single semester? What about the kids who hate English, and will never read a book even if their lives depended on it?

Schools That Work

As the re-haul of the tragically misguided No Child Left Behind fiasco begins -- or begins, at least, in theory -- I increasingly hear the words "Our educational system IS NOT WORKING" being bandied about by politicians and theorists across the country. This has given me pause for thought. Since first being tossed into the public school educational ring at the vulnerable age of five-years-old, I have been pondering this question in one form or another. What am I doing here? Why am I doing this? What does this all mean? I still don't know the answer, but it seems like if we are going to make bold statements like "It's not working" we had better have a pretty good idea what "working" means exactly.

Does "working" mean that all students, regardless of economic level, are doing well on multiple choice exams? Does "working" mean every single high school graduate is qualified to get into a university, regardless of whether or not they can afford it? Does "working" mean every graduating 12th grader can perform algebraic equations? Can read and understand Shakespeare? Can fill in a map of the world -- countries and capitals -- with no errors? What would our public K-12 school system look like exactly, if it was "working"?

I can already predict the academic papers, the grant funded studies, and the government mandated trainings and re-trainings -- all of which will claim to have found the answer to our educational woes. National Standards will be created, standardized tests will be re-evaluated and enforced, teachers will be put through increasingly rigorous, yet meaningless hoops in order to meet state requirements, without seeing any increase in salary -- and yet none of these things will create any fundamental change.

I can also predict that none of these re-trainings, and new standards -- which will doubtlessly come with new standards aligned text books, and new formulaic, yet supposedly "creative", curriculum -- will make our K-12 education any better. In order to create positive learning environments schools need an abundance of creative, inspiring programs -- culinary arts, music, sports, book-filled libraries, jewelry making, wood shop, photography, technology studies, environmental studies, field trips. Whenever possible, core curriculum -- math, science, English, foreign language, history, government -- should be integrated into abundant enrichment programs.

Class sizes must be small -- no class should be more than 20 students. In order to learn, students need to feel safe when they are at school,which means, again, smaller class size, smaller schools, more teachers, healthy food, gardens, plenty of supplies, well kept grounds, more counselors, and a wide variety of student support. In short, all of the things that are eliminated first due to lack of funding, are the most critical components to creating life-long learners who are passionate about educating themselves.

But maybe this isn't what we are really looking for. Maybe a K-12 school system that helps to create healthy, well-informed, well-rounded, intelligent citizens is not what "working" means. I have a sinking feeling that it is not.

Good Intentions

There are education critics out there who have what some might consider an extreme view on the intentions and damages caused by the public school system -- in both its present and past incantations. They believe that the education system is designed to break down innate creative genius, and replace it with the ability to follow directions, be subservient to authority, and learn to preform boring tasks with little to no complaint or questioning.

I try not to think this way. Instead, I choose to believe that the task of educating billions of children -- all with their different needs, different backgrounds, and different ways of learning -- is so great, and the needs to consider so vast and untamable, that even the best intentions can go awry.

How to best ensure all children receive an equal level of education when some are homeless and some live in mansions? When some speak English and some do not? When some want to learn how to build engines, and some love to read literature? How to homogenize the non-homogenizable so that everyone learns equally, equitably, and thoroughly?

Meetings are held. Arguments are had. Plans are made. Laws are implemented. Panels convene. Experts are consulted. Studies are completed. Money is given. Money is taken away. Libraries are made. Libraries are closed. Libraries open up again. New theories are produced. New buzz words are created. Teachers are re-trained. Class sizes are reduced. Class sizes are blown up again. Teachers are hired. Teachers are laid off. And on, and on.

It takes a herculean show of effort. So I feel bad sometimes, being critical. Like it's wrong of me to judge any of this when it's amazing that it happens at all, that as contentious as we humans are with each other, we manage to pull together an education system for every single child living in the United States -- and provide it to them free of charge.

But I try to teach my students that one of the most important skills they can nurture in themselves is the ability and willingness to question -- and so I live by example, even though it often feels safer not to. Never stop questioning your education, I tell them. Ever. I started questioning mine when I was five years old, the year I started Kindergarten, and I'm not about to stop now. I hope they won't either.

Below Average

Recently I asked some students a hypothetical question -- garnered from a great resource entitled "Nonstandardized Quests: 500+ Writing Prompts That Matter" by David E. LeCount. Great book, full of challenging, thought provoking writing prompts. The question was: "If humans hibernated two months of the year, what two months would you choose?"

Their answers were surprisingly similar and not at all like mine: "The coldest two months of the year, thank you very much."

No, weather was of little concern. They would like to sleep away two months of school -- whatever two months have the least amount of vacation time.

This response struck me as unfortunate. After all, we require that, for fourteen years of their life, all children attend school -- five days a week, seven hours per day. Shouldn't school, therefor, bring them a certain amount of joy? What does it mean when they spend the majority of their earliest years engaging in activities that they dislike? That they find exhausting? That they find mind numbingly boring? What does it mean when they are forced to engage in academic activities that often cause them to feel disinterested, inept, inadequate, frustrated, and in the case of almost every one of the students in my continuation high school classroom -- STUPID.

I asked my students to explain further and they informed me that school is a way of breaking you in, so to speak. Life sucks, you work a job you hate, you co-mingle with people you can't stand, and then you go home at the end of the day and get ready to do it all over again. It's important to go to school, my students tell me, because it gets you prepared for how crappy the rest of your life is probably going to be. But childhood should be fun, I tell them. They disagree. Why get a kids hopes up? No, stick them in Kindergarten, that way the rest of life won't be such a let down.

State Standards

The words "State Standards" will be appearing frequently in this blog. If these two words make you nauseous, I apologize in advance -- but State Standards are a reality that all public school teachers must live, breathe, and sleep with. Relationships have been known to crumble over teacher devotion to these Standards. Spend an afternoon with the right kind of teacher, and it soon becomes clear that many of them having been sleeping around -- with their book of State Standards. It's not pretty. The State Standards are insidious. We can not ignore them, no matter how much we wish we could.

This brings me to one of the most disturbing trends I see in public education -- the consistent attempt to make meaningful things that, in essence, are not. Standards are to be written on the whiteboard at all times. Standards are to relate to the lesson being taught, and students should be made aware of the standards attached to their lessons. This is in case any government spies happen to come into the classroom (I'm not kidding), and in case they question any of your students and ask them the dreaded questions, "Does your teacher teach to the Standards." Your students must answer, "Yes." If they do not, terrible, unspecified things could happen to you.

Teachers live in fear of many things -- parents, principals, pink slips, reassignments, benefit cuts -- now, they also live in fear of being busted for not taking the Standards seriously. If you don't take the Standards seriously, then your students will not do well enough on the STAR test (you know, that infamous yearly spate of testing that makes elementary students pee their pants and barf, and destroys low income schools). If your students do not do well on the STAR test, then the government spies will take over your school and destroy it further, (I'm not kidding).

Depending on how badly the administration is breathing down your neck, many teachers actually opt to give their students packets that contain the Standards in their particular subject matter, (each subject has its own elaborate set of Standards). This packet of Standards is now seen as an automatic justification for what the students are being forced to learn. This is a wonderful tool for teachers, actually. No longer must they feel guilty for lulling their students to sleep with empty, boring content! They can just point to the Standard on the board and say, "This is why you need to know this! Because California thinks it's important!"

In my experience, this explanation means a whole heck of a lot to your average American teen. I once made my students read Romeo and Juliet backwards, then I had them attempt to translate the entire book into Polish using a shared English/Polish dictionary. Whenever they questioned me, I just pointed to the Standard on the board and they settled right back into the lesson with looks of almost sage contentment on their faces.

It's kind of a relief actually -- to be freed of responsibility for deciding what to teach. Not creative? No problem! Don't care about your subject matter? Who cares?! All you need to worry about is getting your students to do well on the STAR test, and you're path is paved with...well, maybe not gold, after all, our country has weapons to build, but at least stainless steel, or maybe aluminum. Something cheep, but shiny.

Continuation High

I work at a Continuation High School. This means, for various reasons, my students do not fit into the standard public school mold -- usually for failing classes, chronic ditching, breaking school rules, dropping out then returning to school, an inability or unwillingness to do homework, or just because they don't like the pressures of "normal" school. They are here either temporarily or until they graduate -- for credit make-up, and extra support.

Classes are smaller than average -- 12-18 or so, in most cases. Sound easy? Imagine plucking the most loud mouthed, rebellious, angry, easily provoked, school loathing students from your average public school classroom, and putting them all in one class -- at the same time, on energy drinks, without a proper breakfast, or enough sleep the night before. Then try to teach them English, while the quiet ones cut daggers at you because the rampant out of control outbursts of their peers makes them crazy, and they blame you for it. Not every class is the same, of course, each comes with its own dynamics, some have synchronicity, some not so much -- but one thing is consistent throughout the day -- English class is no easy sell, no matter how you spin it. Ours is not a relationship based on a mutual love for literature, that much is for certain.

That's why I am so lucky to have State Standards. Gosh, without those, I'm not sure how we could get anything accomplished in the classroom. At the end of the day, I like to remind myself how lucky all of our children are that there exists a group of consultants out there that know exactly what our children should be learning, on any given day, from year to year, all across the great long state of California. In fact, I have been told that, if all teachers would really buckle down and attach every single one of their lessons to a State Standard then every student graduating high school would know exactly the same things! You could even give them all the same test, and no matter how unimportant and random the information on that test -- everyone would know all of the answers! From what I can gather, it's almost as if the State Standards are magic. I think that, next time there's a fight in my classroom, I am going to pull out my book of Standards and just recite from it. I've been told that this makes them settle down almost immediately. I'll let you know how it goes.