By Kristin

As Brian revealed in his recent post, It looks like what happened in Los Angeles will inevitably happen in New York.  Despite my frequent frustrations with ineffective teachers, administrators and unions, I have a big problem with newspapers like the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times who think it's their job to rate teachers. 

Newpapers aren't in the business of teaching students or evaluating teachers; they're really in the business of selling advertising, so while they try to inform the public, they also tend to jump on the bandwagon of a hot topic in order to get readers.  Rating teachers based on test scores is a hot topic right now, but it shouldn't be.  If the public walked to a local school or logged on to a district's website, they'd be able to find all sorts of information.  They could rate teachers on their own.  Neither test scores nor a teacher's skill are kept secret, and it's misleading for newspapers to pretend they are.

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by Brian

I have been thinking about having test scores released in my district, like they want to do in New York City.  The public would be able to see which teachers had added value to their students and which hadn't.  

Joel Klein, the chancellor of New York City’s schools says:

"If one teacher is found to be consistently high performing, don’t we want that teacher collaborating with others? And, in turn, if one teacher is found to be consistently low performing, don’t we want to help that teacher improve, or move to replace him or her?"

Well, here's the rub:

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By Tom

Now that Waiting for Superman has been thoroughly debunked as a complete load of hogwash by none other than Diane Ravitch, where do we go from here?

I think we should keep our focus on Superman. Because Superman will keep our schools safe. Superman will help our teachers do their work. Superman will run copies, watch the lunchroom and even umpire the kickball games. Moreover, Superman will go back to the real world from which he came and tell everyone what really goes on in our nation's schools.

And he'll do a much better job of it than Davis Guiggenheim.

Just who is this Man of Steel? It could be you, actually; or maybe your husband. It could be the man down the street or the guy who picks up your trash. It could be any man who has a kid, a niece, a nephew, a grandchild or a step-child in any school in our country.

What I'm talking about is Watch Dogs. Watch Dogs is a program started by the National Center for Fathering. It's simple and sustainable and it works. They put fathers and other father-figures into schools for a whole day, where they volunteer in classrooms, eat lunch in the lunchroom, play on the playground and keep an eye out for trouble. Watch Dogs was started only a few years ago, folllowing a tragic school shooting in Arkansas, by two dads who thought they could help their local school just by being there.

My son's school started Watch Dogs this year. I went to the kick-off event, which consisted of 40 or so dads eating pizza with their kids and then listening to the principal tell us what we'd be doing. It was short and simple: we'd be volunteering for a day at school, doing whatever they told us to do. Then he posted a large school calendar and I watched in awe as every one of these guys signed up for two or three days. Whole days. Vacation time. Days when they'd be working their tails off for free.

That was a month ago. My wife, who's the office manager at this school, gets to greet these guys on the way in, show them around the school, fit them into an official Watch Dogs tee-shirt, and say goodbye to them at the end of the day. The results are amazing.

Three or four days a week they get an extra pair of eyes out on the playground, which means that instead of a five minute kickball game followed by a fifteen minute argument over whether or not Edgar was out at second, the kids get a twenty-minute kickball game, and Edgar gets to be out. Three or four days a week they get an extra pair of eyes in the lunchroom, which means that kids eat their sandwiches before they eat their Twinkies and the food fights are stopped before they start. And three or four days a week they get an extra pair of hands in the classrooms, which means that the three kids who didn't understand the instruction and can't do their math get a guy to help them who already knows how to multiply fractions.

What's more, the children of these Dogs get to know that their dad took a day off of work just to wander around in their school. That's powerful.

But there's more. My wife tells me that every single Watch Dog, upon leaving at the end of the day, tells her how exhausted they are. They tell her they had no idea, no idea at all, how hard teachers work. They spend an entire day watching amazing people do complicated and exhausting work. And then where do they go? They go back to their jobs the next day, where they can relax. Where they tell their colleagues what it's really like in our public schools.

That's the kind of Superman worth waiting for.

By Tom

I don’t care for school reform. In fact, the very phrase “school reform” doesn’t really make any sense. “Reform” implies a fundamental change. But no matter what shape school reform takes, we’ll still end up with the same teachers, the same buildings, the same curriculum and most importantly, the same students. That’s not reform. It’s like remodeling a kitchen by pulling out all the cabinets and appliances and then putting them right back, but in a slightly different configuration. You haven’t remodeled anything. All you’ve done is waste an enormous amount of time and energy.

The people who scream the loudest about school reform usually have the most complicated, disruptive and expensive solutions: merit pay, charter schools and firing entire faculties of low-performing schools.

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By Mark

I was talking to a good friend of mine recently (he happens to be the dean of students at my high school) about a student we were working together to "figure out." 

Being friends as we are, the conversation meandered a bit, and we ended up talking about my oldest son's current experience as a new kindergartner. I mentioned that he already had "homework," which was essentially him reading to us (or us reading to him) which we'd then sign off on and send back to school with him. It amounted to no more than twenty minutes per day, which we folded into the minutes we'd be doing reading with him anyway. 

As a former math teacher and a much more linear person than I am, my friend steered the conversation back to our current ninth-grader: he pointed out that my son was getting two hours a week of outside learning time because he had parents who were willing to set aside the time to read with him and do his "homework" with him. We both lamented the reality that a few kindergartners up or down the street probably didn't have parents who were able to invest the kind of time we could as a family. And then my friend asked the question I hadn't really thought all that much about:

What about the ninth graders who began school nine years ago as those kindergartners up or down the street who had no one reading with them?

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By Kristin    

Let's open this conversation up.  I have no problem with competition and a big problem with the seniority-protects-bad teachers issue.  While I disagree that we should do an across the board comparison of charter and traditional schools, I have no problem with charter schools as a well-done alternative to poorly-performing schools. 

Say Washington state allowed charter schools.  What would you want them to look like?  What would you want them to do?  If you could design a charter school, where would you put it, who would you put in it, and what would you expect from it?

Instead of just saying "No," let's maybe, here, say "If…"

By Mark

How should a school–or a single teacher for that matter–go about forging meaningful partnerships with parents? For the first time in my life, I'm on both sides of that coin: I'm a veteran teacher and now also the dad to a kindergartner. I have worked hard in the past to make connections with the parents of my students, but if I look closely at those "connections," it comes in pretty basic forms.

I teach high school and I am looking for new ways to engage parents in a meaningful way. While I'll soon be working a booth at my son's elementary school carnival, I don't see that kind of avenue for "parent involvement" in my high school. (And that's not really the kind of involvement I'm thinking of, though a fundraiser for a noble cause.)

At the secondary level, what does it really mean to "partner" with parents in a meaningful way?

By Mark

The Associated Press recently posted a story about a string of deaths at Mentor High School in Ohio. These deaths were of teenagers: three suicides and one overdose. Families of all four attribute these deaths to the devastating impact of bullying in the schools and what was coined as a "culture of mean" at Mentor High. 

Parents and critics were quick to admonish the kids who committed the bullying–and were as quick to attack the teachers and administration. Is that justified? I don't know the situation, so despite my gut reaction, I cannot say that teachers or administration did their damnedest to prevent bullying and I cannot say that they were in fact incompetent and unresponsive.

What I can say, though, is that the "culture of mean" is not just a Mentor High issue. Ironically, all you have to do is peruse the reader comments after any of the articles about Mentor High to see that the "culture of mean" doesn't need a high school hallway or cafeteria to rear its head.

What, then, is the role of a school in a case like this? The culture of mean is all but endorsed by how "freedom of speech" is exercised. One poster under an article played devil's advocate: if it is protected speech for the Westboro Baptist Church to stand at the funeral of a soldier and shout ephithets at his grieving family, then why isn't the bully's right to bully in the halls of a high school likewise protected? 

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By Kristin

Remember the Pushmepullyou in Dr. Doolittle?  It's an animal with two heads.  I was always impressed it got around as well as it did.

Unfortunately, the graduation requirements in Washington State are like a Pushmepullyou that hasn't figured out which direction it's going.  The requirements for earning a diploma are at odds with what teachers are expected to accomplish, and I think they need to change.

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By Tom

 I taught a pretty good lesson the other day, while trying to get my third graders to revise the rough drafts of their paragraphs.

I started by asking Audrey about her hair. Audrey has beautiful hair which is always combed into complicated arrangements. I asked her whether she used a mirror when she combed her hair each morning. She explained how she and her mom stand before the mirror, constantly making adjustments until it looks perfect. Like Audrey, most of my students are careful about their hair, and they could relate to our conversation.

I shifted the discussion to writing: Like hair, writing needs to be adjusted and revised until it looks perfect. I showed them what I was talking about. I projected a paragraph that they had watched me write the day before. I modeled adding details to my piece, switching words around, dividing sentences and combining ideas.

Then we put Taylor’s work up on the screen. I picked her paper because it was fairly well-written, yet presented several opportunities for revision. After we made a few changes to Taylor’s paper, I released the class to work on their own. They had seen me revise, they had practiced revising together and they were ready to work independently.

Most of them, anyway.  There were a few that I still had some concerns about, and I went to their desks first to help them clean things up.

After about ten minutes I told the class that as soon as their paragraphs were fully revised they could walk around and read other finished papers and write comments on the back to the authors.  After that we reviewed the main points about revising, put our work away and got ready for recess.

It was a good lesson. I took the class from one place to another. My students didn’t know how to revise their writing, and now they do. There was nothing particularly fancy about this lesson, nor was there anything seriously wrong with it. It was the kind of solid, meat-and-potatoes lesson that I’m expected to chunk out several times a day for the length of the school year. The kind of lesson that I love to teach.

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