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.