By Tom

Well, now that National School Choice Week is behind us, maybe we can use this week to discuss a related topic; one that hasn’t come up yet on this blog: teacher choice. It’s one thing to choose a school, but once there, most parents have relatively little say in regards to who actually teaches their child.

It’s as if you and your honey spent an hour deciding on a Valentine’s Day restaurant. Then, when you get there, it’s “Welcome to Beth’s Café. You’ll have the patty melt. We hope you’ll enjoy it.”

Let me just say from the get-go that I’m ambiguous on this topic. I’m ambiguous because I'm both a parent and a teacher.

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By Tom

I’m pretty sure my house needs a new roof. It’s not leaking right now, but it looks like it might. There’s moss here and there, and the shingles look old and limp, like they’re about ready to give up.

But the trouble with getting a new roof is that there’s nothing “new” or “flashy” to show off. You just have a roof that’s new. No one stands out in their front yard, admiring their new roof, like they would with a new patio. People don’t comment on it.

But if we don’t replace our roof in a timely manner, we stand to compromise our entire house. No matter how much we’d like to put in a new patio out front, we need to stay focused on taking care of the roof. Being a grownup means setting priorities.

Washington State, like every other state, is flat broke. Not only that, the State Supreme Court recently ruled that the Washington Legislature is shamefully underfunding its schools, ordered them to take care of the problem.

That‘s what you might call a “priority.”

The Legislature needs to focus right now on just one thing: fully funding education. Period. Nothing should be allowed to distract their attention or divert their funds.

Two bills were introduced this month that do nothing to fully fund education and do everything to distract lawmakers from doing what the court just ordered them to do.

These bills would introduce charter schools to Washington State. Personally, I’m rather intrigued by charter schools. Where I was once dead-set against them, after visiting several successful charters in New York City, I’ve come to appreciate what they do with the populations they serve, and I think they may be useful in certain areas here.

But not now.

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By Tom

After enjoying Mark’s take on the recent Washington State Supreme Court’s McCleary decision, you now get to endure mine. Sometimes two views on the same topic is a good thing. Sometimes it’s not.

First the good: The decision itself was a win, however sloppy. The State Supreme Court ruled that the State Legislature has to follow the State Constitution and make ample provisions for public education, which according to the constitution, is its “paramount duty.” The suit was filed five years ago on behalf of four students, Carter and Kelsey McCleary and Robbie and Haley Venema. (Carter and Robbie are still in school; their sisters have since graduated.) (There was a kid named Steve Venema in my 8th grade PE class. I wonder if they're related.) The two families were joined in the suit by a large coalition of educational organizations, including over a dozen school districts and the Washington Education Association. The plaintive in the suit was the State of Washington. The case was actually decided last year, but the state appealed it to the Supreme Court, which made the 7-2 decision last Thursday. The two dissenters included Chief Justice Barbara Madsen, who, with no apparent sense of irony, thought it best to let the Legislature take care of the problem.

And the Bad: Six years. That’s how long the Court gave the Legislature to solve the problem. Six whole years. In six years, all the McCleary and Venema kids will be out of school and pursuing their careers. In six years every legislator and judge in Washington will either be replaced or reelected. In six years, every kid in my class will be in high school, replaced by kids who are currently learning to talk and use the toilet. In six years, the computer sitting in your lap will have been replaced at least once. In six years, you will have had to repaint your house. And in six years, the New Husky Stadium will be five years old, which means that it will have been used about thirty times, by football players that represent a student body from all over the country, whose out-of-state tuition will be used to send Washington students to community college. The Court gave the State six years to do what I can say in six words: Increase revenue to pay for education.

And now the Ugly: This, the Seattle Times’ take on the decision. I’m not sure why, but in the last few years, the relationship between Washington’s teachers (especially their union) and the leading daily newspaper has gone from chilly to cold to disrespectful to downright hostile. This is a new low for the Times; where they apparently blame the education funding crisis on collective bargaining, teacher strikes and our cushy healthcare plans. Ouch.

Will this decision make any difference? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly not anytime soon, unless 2018 is your idea of soon.

But hey; a win's a win!

By Tom

There are about seventeen hours from the time I say goodbye to my students until the time I say hello to them the next day. Of those seventeen hours, I like to spend about eight in bed. That leaves nine. It takes me about an hour a day to commute; dinner and breakfast combined take another hour, and I spend one more hour shaving, showering and performing other “miscellaneous hygienic tasks.”

That leaves me with six hours of free time. But not really; since one of those hours has to be spent at school, according to my contract, and another hour has to be spent at home, doing chores and staying on top of my kids’ homework.

So I really only have four hours of discretionary time each day. Four out of 24.

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By Tom

The Seattle Times came out with a story today about the “Alarming” achievement gap between African American students and the children of African immigrants. Apparently the Seattle School district studied their data and found that African American students perform significantly worse than their African classmates, even when you control for factors such as income and single-parent families.

I’m glad the Times ran this article. It’s hard – not to mention awkward – to generalize when you’re talking about something as emotionally charged as race, but when something like this comes along, you sort of have to. That is, after all, the whole point of analyzing data.

Most teachers have noticed this phenomenon for years. I certainly have. Our school has a large proportion of both populations, and most African immigrants are among the most motivated students in the school. Their parents push them hard and are very supportive of everything we do in school. In talking with these parents, I’ve always gotten the sense that educational opportunity was one of the main reasons for their being here, and they have no intention of watching their children squander that opportunity. I get the feeling, from working with many of these families, that they genuinely trust the teachers, the schools and the entire educational system.

As we know all too well, African American families don’t exactly share that same trust of our educational system. Nor should they; our educational system hasn’t exactly spent the past two hundred years earning that trust. There's no question but that this lack of trust interferes with their children's success in school. It's unfortunate, it's sad, but it's true.

What this data shows is that success in school has nothing to do with race. It might have something to do with poverty, but it has everything to do with the relationships between our schools and our families.

What I want to know is this: where do we go from here? How do we build productive relationships with all of our families so that every child succeeds? 

By Tom

In case you missed it, there was a wonderful article in the Seattle Times about Asa Mercer Middle School, named after the guy in the picture. Asa Mercer – the school, not the guy – went from being the poster child of woeful, inner-city education to one of the best schools in the Seattle School District. In only six years.

So how did Asa Mercer accomplish this turnaround?

A strong administrator, dedicated teachers focused on a common vision, good curriculum, a belief that every student can achieve and really hard work.

This is exactly what I found in the schools I visited last month in New York City. And although Mercer is a regular public school, they've found the same answer to the same problems as the charter schools I've visited. Not surprisingly, the principal at Mercer was a former teacher at a NYC charter school.

What this shows is that there's no secret to successful schools. Nor is there a shortcut.

It also shows what happens when we learn from what works – no matter where it's working – and apply it to other schools. 

Our students deserve no less.

By Tom

In my first of this three-part series I discussed the need to do something better in our most impoverished neighborhood schools. In the second post I described what I saw in several high-performing New York City charter schools. In this post I’m going to tackle the question of whether Washington State should allow charter schools.

This question has come up before. In fact, Washington has voted down charter schools three times so far, following high-profile campaigns which basically pitted pro-charter groups against the Washington Education Association, our state’s largest teachers’ union.

The union’s opposition to charter schools, as I understand it, boils down to this: charter schools take jobs from union members, they compete unfairly with traditional public schools, and they undermine those schools by “skimming off” the more motivated students from those schools.

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By Tom

Emerging from the subway tunnel in Harlem, I had two questions in my mind:

1. Were charter schools really as good as the hype, and if so, why?

2. Could they work in Washington?

I’ll address the first question in this post. I’ll discuss the next a little later this week.

Some background: I was invited earlier this month by the League of Education Voters to join a fact-finding tour of several charter schools in Harlem and The Bronx. Our goal was to learn about successful charter schools in order to inform the conversation about whether or not to allow them in Washington State.

After our breakfast at the New York City Charter School Center, a resource that helps start and sustain charter schools in New York City, we were toured Harlem Success Academy and Kappa International High School (not actually a charter school; more of a high-expectation “choice school”) On the following day we saw KIPP Charter School and Green Dot charter school.

Although I’ve never been a big fan of charter schools, I was determined to keep an open mind and see for myself what these places were all about. I had even done my homework: I read Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System as well as Steven Brill’s Class Warfare. (He loves charter schools; she doesn’t.)

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By Tom

Eighty-eight percent. That's the proportion of freshmen at a large, urban university who had to take remedial courses in math or English before they could start on their regular college-level classes.

In other words, 88% of these college students were not “college ready.”

I learned about this state of affairs at a recent NCATE accreditation visit. I can’t name the specific school (or else NCATE would fire me from a job for which I’m not even paid) but it doesn’t really matter. This is typical in colleges that serve urban, high-needs populations. Their students routinely come from high school with something less than a high school education.

We can take some comfort in the fact that these students probably aren’t the best of the bunch. This was, after all, a second-tier state school. The best high school students in the area presumably went to private colleges or more prestigious public universities. And you’ll also be pleased to know that two years ago, ninety-four percent of the freshmen needed remedial classes. Progress! On the other hand, these are the students who are going to college. Reread that last sentence and think about it for a minute.

No matter where you stand on education reform, you can’t pretend this isn’t a problem. And you have to ask yourself two questions.

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By Tom

I just finished a week of parent-teacher conferences. And although it can be physically exhausting, it’s always one of my favorite times of the year. They always come at a time when I’m just starting to think about my class as a group of different individuals, and when I’m curious about how they got to be the way they are. As always, this year’s conferences were enlightening. It may surprise you to learn that I’m actually a pretty good listener, which is what I spend most of the conference doing. I’ll ask a few questions and go through a few pieces of student work, but mostly I listen to what parents tell me about their children. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, “You can hear a lot by just listening.”

Specifically:

-A lot of families are really struggling right now. You already knew that, and so did I, but after talking with some of them, it’s become far more real. People are unemployed, underemployed and badly-employed. I talked with a guy from Microsoft who’s been out of work for months; a former dentist from the Ukraine, who’s working at an entry-level, low-skill job; and several parents who work nights at the only jobs they can find. Most of us in education look at the current budget crises in Olympia and quickly decide that the answer is more taxes. But most of us in education don’t live nearly as close to the edge as some of the families we work with. Higher taxes might improve their children’s education, but they might also push them over that edge.

-I work with a lot of recent immigrants. Over half of my students were either born overseas or have parents that were. Many of these families come from places where child-rearing is a multi-generational endeavor. Adjusting to the American way of raising kids doesn’t always work out very well.

-Somewhat related to that, it was clear that at least one-third of my students are essentially ruling their households. Their parents seem to have lost control. For some of these families, it's partly because their children speak better English than anyone else in the house. For others, it's simply weak parenting. Either way, these are eight-year-olds, for crying out loud, and I can only imagine what the future holds. I actually had one man, with no sense of irony, ask me to tell his daughter to read on the weekends. I was about to ask him the same thing. I’m clinging to the belief that this is just a small-sample aberration; that there isn’t really a parenting crisis in this country. Please let me cling to that belief.

-My personal relationship with parent conferences has evolved. When I first started teaching, I was about ten years younger than any of the parents. I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t know what I was talking about. And they knew it. Then for awhile I was about the same age as the parents. I also began to know what I was talking about. Conferences became a lot more enjoyable. Now I’m about 20 years older than most of the parents. I’m roughly their parents’ age. Consequently, they treat me like a person from the previous generation. I’m still getting used to that.

-More than anything else, math confuses parents. Especially the fact that we seem to lack a consistent approach to teaching it. When third-grade math problems confuse grown-ups, something’s amiss. I’m at the point where I would agree to any math curriculum, even the worst math curriculum, as long as we stick with that curriculum for eat least thirty years. Honestly.

-One of my students, the oldest of five kids, hasn’t seen her dad since he went to Iraq nine months ago. He’s coming home in three weeks; the day before Veteran’s Day.

 Just thinking about that makes me smile and cry at the same time.