Saturday, September 5, 2009

Arne Duncan

President Obama's Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, could not have been more clear.
"I'm not a fan of charter schools. I'm a fan of good charter schools."

To come out for or against a form of school governance regardless of results, particularly for or against a different way of governing various PUBLIC SCHOOLS, is asinine. This is the education equivalent of theologians arguing over how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. The kids don't care. The issue ought to be good schools. The goal ought to be good schools in every neighborhood. And if that isn't happening, then I for one am not defending anything about the status quo.

There is nothing innately worthwhile in a school having a charter. But neither is there anything inherently wrong with it. If a school with a charter is a better school than what is currently in place, then out of what possible concern for children would one cling desperately to what is not working? It boggles the mind.

Those who politicize the question of whether a school is or is not a charter might be smart. They might be experienced, and they might have their reasons. They might even have what they consider to be great and compelling reasons with Power Point's most elaborate special effects. But what can those reasons have to do with children or with education? What possible concern for children would insist that they should wait 'just a few more years' for things to get better? The children who were in primary school at the passage of the Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century have graduated from (or dropped out of) high school. Meanwhile, the State of Oregon is still modifying the State Standards and the State Assessments. Nearly a decade into No Child Left Behind, 30% of Oregon's 10th graders are scoring LOW or VERY LOW on the State Math Assessment! This means that they are scoring below the 8th grade cutoff score! And 40% (at least) are failing to earn a diploma (it's hard to know the precise number because the federal government is just wrapping up their work on the definition of a dropout!).

This is not a time for dogma. The President and his Secretary of State have put party politics aside and have come out in favor of good charter schools even if it means embracing a possibility that has broad support among conservatives. If this seems odd or makes people feel uncomfortable, I believe it is because we are unused to seeing the well being of kids put front and center regardless of political fallout.

We can't afford to keep planning and wishing for better schools. We can't afford for this to be a left/right issue. A new school year is already started. It will be over before you know it. At its close, will we have made a year's progress toward better schooling for all children, or will we only have generated the next School Improvement Plan?

Friday, September 4, 2009

The Power of Teachers, Pt.II

A Place:

A teacher, a pleasant, well-lit classroom filled (but not to overflowing) with students. Supplies and materials at the teacher's discretion. Whatever equipment the teacher deems necessary. There might be several of these places in one building, but there is probably a limit to how many.

A job description:

Teacher: "Help your students to develop the cognitive tools that represent their own next steps toward intellectual adulthood. These will very according to their ages and abilities. Teach them to read and write and to think well. Your students are expected to be safe and kind and to be constructive throughout the day. They should learn to appreciate the world as it is, to know their place in it, and to understand their responsibility for helping to shape its future. You must understand that these children are in your charge and oughtn't be passed off to a specialist or a special program unless you have exhausted every possible strategy for keeping them fully engaged in their classroom community. In those rare cases in which this cannot be done, ask for help. Every special program is a splice that results in a loss of signal strength." (Thanks for that one, DJ).

Each teacher reading this will have different images spring to mind, depending on the ages of their students and the complexity of their subject matter. I believe that many teachers (and all gifted teachers) would celebrate the clarity of the mission and the opportunity for fulfillment that can only be achieved in taking responsibility for something important. Most teachers don't want to be clerks or dispensers of someone else's lesson plans or programs. Most don't want either be accountants or to be a data point for some accountant in a distant office. They intend to matter.

Of course every building has its logistical challenges, its administrative needs, its legitimate interest in what is going on in each classroom. But classroom invasions and teacher distractions should be kept to a minimum.

Job Description:

Administrator: "Facilitate the work of teachers. Make a safe place for them to teach. Be ready to support them as the need arises. Work with teachers to distinguish needs from passing concerns. Provide the former and monitor the latter. Watch their backs. Honor their efforts."

The closer we can come, as a community, to trusting to these simple dynamics, the more we will realize the power of teachers. The alternative? Another news cycle about dramatic gains somewhere in the elementary or middle grades accompanied by promises that some day high school performance will perk up from its 20-year slumber.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

The Power of Teachers

"Our deepest fear is not
that we are inadequate
Our deepest fear is
that we are powerful beyond measure."

The world wants standing on its head. I'm not the first to say so.

What if teachers were 'powerful beyond measure'? Really. What if they were and didn't know it, if some didn't want to know it? What would it take to hide their potential from themselves? How would we go about hiding it from them? Who would have to collaborate in how elaborate a subterfuge in order to prevent the unmeasured power of the teacher from manifesting? How would one go about it?

I might begin with an 'ounce of prevention' by making teacher education programs the curricular equivalent of frontal lobotomies in hopes of scaring off the wildest of the talent. It's not perfect, as evidenced by the talent that still emerges from the catacombs, but it's a start.

Next I might work to drive the most talented of the survivors out of the field by ensuring that they teach only the prescribed content by means of only the prescribed methods using only the prescribed materials. I would review their lesson plans weekly and calculate the number of square inches on their bulletin boards that are dedicated to student work. I'd count the number of students who met the benchmark at each grade level and suggest to the teachers that any deficiencies were most likely his or her fault. And these days, I'd add a requirement that they blog no fewer than three days a week in order to keep parents informed regarding the daily happenings in class.

I would limit each teacher's career to a narrow range of age levels by requiring separate endorsements for teaching 8-year-olds as opposed to 11-year-olds. (I would already have taught them some really bad pop psychology as a justification for making meaningless distinctions.) I would impose stringent requirements for renewing licenses. I would be sure that it took the patience of Job to earn the right to teach both science and English at the high school level.

I would create arbitrary age groupings that include students whose ages range across 365 days and I would declare that group to be a 'grade'. I would ignore the fact that the oldest third of any given 'grade' is closer in age to the youngest third of the 'grade' ahead of them than it is to the youngest third of students in its own 'grade'. I would talk about grade and grade level standards and benchmarks and would insist that these represent something real and 'objective'.

Why the obvious ruse? What purpose is served by this conspicuous fraud? If I can create habits of mind that cause the surrender of common sense and the lowering of intellectual expectations, then I can render intellect ineffective and replace the virtue of critical thinking with the habit of enthusiastic compliance.

Moving to those whose specialty is to work with older students, I would pass a law that required special training to teach math to 13-year-olds...training that in no way would authorize one to teach social studies to 13-year-olds. This would serve the dual purpose of convincing both teachers and their students that 13-year-olds' math instruction is a highly technical specialty and that it's OK for a 30-year-old teacher not to have mastered more than one narrow piece of what we expect every thirteen-year-old to study. This has the added benefit of limiting the achievement of 13-year-olds, who tend to falter under this arrangement, creating the need for a technology of 'teaming' by means of which math specialists, social studies specialists, language arts specialists and science specialists can get together to help students to integrate the very subjects that they themselves have helped to splinter.

If all of this seems too absurd to be true, then I am making my point. Those with the lowest tolerance for absurdity (because I don't have the imagination to have made any of this up!) will be sorely tempted to depart. We are effectively pushing good minds out of education (often within the first three to five years, giving rise to the need for a 'mentorship program'!) and threatening to dull the vision of those that remain.

The teachers who both possess the wild talent and the will to endure the structural realities of contemporary public education are doubly remarkable. You and I are fortunate to know many of them. But every curricular reform, every new mandate, every revision of licensure requirements, threatens to further marginalize them. We should do something.

What if teachers are powerful 'beyond measure'? What if we wanted to face that 'deepest fear'? What might we do differently?

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

'To Will One Thing', Part B

An inventory of the distractions from 'willing one thing' in education constitutes almost an encyclopedia of contemporary educational practice.

No Child Left Behind, the federal government's 'song that never ends', is a disaster. It has produced so little that its staunchest defenders are reduced to claiming that its value lies in the fact that it forced us to notice that some kids weren't learning. Anyone who needed federal assistance in order to detect an achievement gap should never have been involved in education in the first place. Those who insist that the law 'shined a light' on a previously undetected problem are admitting to unimaginable incompetence.

At the state level, singing back-up to NCLB and the dollars that it brings, we have the Oregon Department of Education and the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission. They are responsible for compliance...regardless of the consequences. Can a person enforce compliance while fostering real reform? Only if reform consists in being ever more compliant. The paperwork is a distraction.

In the private sector we have OEA, COSA, OSBA, The Chalkboard Project...all fine organizations in their own rights and all firm in their commitments to children, but all acting as conservative bullwarks (yes, the OEA is a powerful conservative force) defending the status quo against all comers and sponsoring or endorsing dozens of distractions from the central work of educating students. All advocate 'improvement' and endorse programs and professional development strategies, so long as improvement doesn't negatively impact their memberships or benefactors. And they don't hesitate to advocate statewide initiatives that play out very differently depending on the size, location and circumstances of each district. They tend to be advocates of a 'one size fits all' philosophy. They thrive on homogeneity.

The Publishing and Professional Development industries are in the unique circumstance of having to sell 'revolutionary' new products, year after year, while ensuring that nothing changes (let alone 'revolves') in such a way as to impact their profit margins. Reading First, Response to Intervention, Professional Learning Communities, Advancement Via Individual Determination, Pre-AP, Strategic Planning, Servant Leadership, the Ninety-Seven Secret Habits of Barely Solvent Businesses...(O.K., I made that last one up). What I'm not making up is that new, revolutionary products and strategies are unveiled each year and they promise to produce better, more research-based results than did last year's product which we bought and have now discarded. The same publisher that has energetically marketed a reading program for decades will announce, with a straight face, that its new program is 'completely revised'! Really? Is that because reading changed? Do I get money back on the old, apparently useless program? No. Oh, and don't forget to budget for us to train your teachers in the intricacies of implementation.

Leonard Cohen probably didn't have the education community in mind when he wrote:

'I bite my lip
I buy what I'm told,
From the latest hits
To the wisdom of old'

Merit pay, an end to teacher tenure, mandatory mentoring programs, an end to social promotions, the standards movement, the list seems never to end. We educators chase every fad that comes along and take deep offense at anyone who suggests that the new emperor is no better dressed than was the fabled one. We are so gullible that when the glitter gets thick beyond all credibility, we can be sold a 'back to basics' movement that simply dusts off the programs (but adds new price stickers) that were discarded a decade or two ago in order to make way for what was then a 'new, innovative, scientific' approach. We need to stop.

Is this all of the distractions? No. Just a first attempt at describing how easily we are distracted. Can we eliminate the distractions one and a time and find the heart of the educational enterprise in what is left at the end of the process? I suspect not. I imagine that we are going to have to locate our educational identity first, as the only defense against the next new, scientifically based, federally endorsed, state mandated shiny waste of time and money that comes along.

More to follow. Or precede. I don't really understand how blogs work.

'Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing'

At least, that's what the Great Dane said. I suspect that he was on to something. Something relevant to schools.

The great complexity of operating even a small school is not due to organizational logistics so much as it is due to multiple and conflicting values and expectations among its constituents. Depending on who you ask, you might hear that the purpose of schooling is: socialization, job training, baby sitting, the cultivation of each child's unique potential, college prep, therapy, the integration of newcomers to American society, the elimination of poverty, the maintenance of America's competitive edge in the world, national security, making the world green or making parents happy. Not one of these competing purposes is without a constituency, and it is often a matter of which constituency has the most influence locally, within the state or at the federal level determining the size and shape of schools. And no matter what a school does, some of these priorities are going to be given short shrift because no single institution can fulfill all of these hopes.

Schools and districts have a fundamental choice to make. They can operate at the whim of 'current educational research', the professional organizations, the parent organizations, the business round-tables or the state legislature and dedicate their energies to keeping up with the latest fads and shifting priorities on all fronts. This is a more common strategy than one might wish. The result is the educational malaise that we are experiencing on a very broad scale and with very few exceptions.

The alternative path, and what gives rise to the exceptions, is that schools can commit themselves to a vision that cuts across time and trends and profit margins and can instead go about the work of preparing young people to understand the world as it is and shape and cultivate the world as it will be. Sounds simple, and it is. But simple ought never be confused with easy.

So what? Just a truism, really. If you commit to one thing, you are likely to do better at it. All that is required is that you eliminate the distractions. Simple. But in education, the distractions can be extremely difficult to sift away from the heart of the matter. What sorts of distractions are these, that they come disguised as matters of educational urgency?

Part B to Come

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Irked?

Some of Corbett's neighbors are, according to the Oregonian, irked. Irked at Corbett School District. Irked about Corbett Charter School. I suspect that it is only a few people and that the Oregonian is making more of it than it really warrants. How could they be irked?

First of all, Corbett School District did nothing but to agree to sponsor a charter school, an action that has been taken by both of Corbett's neighbors to the West. There are some 80 charter schools in Oregon, and they all are sponsored by either school districts or the state. Corbett's 'irked' neighbors each sponsor multiple charters, making any suggestion that they might have been surprised by the charter law's provisions or scandalized by its consequences somewhat puzzling.

Corbett Charter School was developed and proposed by the Corbett Charter School Association, a private non-profit corporation. And yes, the founders (I am one of them) stand guilty of sharing multiple degrees, certificates, endorsement and decades of experience in the operation of public schools, including Corbett School. We are not mavericks. We know public schools. From the inside. We believe that we have a right, as private citizens, to bring our experience and education to the table in the form of a charter proposal. The Corbett Charter School Association, and not Corbett School District, is the appropriate object of ire.

And on the subject of ire, what's so special about the case of Corbett Charter School? I believe (know, if you want to press the issue) that students have crossed several district boundaries to attend the various charter schools in East County and that the local districts have never made a move to prevent this from occurring. I know that Corbett students have attended charter schools outside of the district and have been allowed to enroll in spite of their Corbett residency. Not once did a neighboring district ask Corbett's permission, and I would have been surprised if they had. That's not what the 10-year-old law says! So how is it that Corbett students leaving to attend schools in neighboring districts didn't raise any red flags, but anyone crossing the Sandy River from west to east set off sensors? Something about geese and ganders comes to mind here, but I'm sure that it must be beside the point.

Charter Schools are controversial. They are a political issue. The guardians of what I take to be a less-than-ideal status quo oppose any charters other than the ones that they, themselves, operate. And isn't that just how politics sometimes works?

My goals for Corbett Charter School are not political. I want more children to have the opportunities that my daughter, a transfer student who crossed the Sandy River every day for nine years, enjoyed at Corbett School. And I wish that offering those opportunities to more children was neither irksome nor political. But ire is something that a person can learn to live with.

My wife was on the phone with my daughter today. Lara is just settling into Willamette University. I asked Sheri see whether Lara had any words of wisdom for the new members of the Corbett Academic Decathlon team. Lara is a lovely girl, and she has a gentle side that sometimes eludes the casual observer. Her advice is a good example of just how elusive her gentle side can be.

"Suck it up and read." That was it. She takes care of her business and expects the same of others. No frills. No politics. To the job.

So say we all.