Friday, February 26, 2010

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.

Friday, February 19, 2010

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.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

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?

Saturday, February 6, 2010

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.