By Tom

When I was younger I used to work in a swimming pool. Every day a guy named Nick would emerge from the boiler room and test the water. He would hang a thermometer in the pool and give it time to become accurate. In the meantime, he'd fill a test tube with water and check the ph. Then he'd collect his things, walk back to the boiler room, enter the data into a log and take whatever actions the results dictated.

Water is simple. It reacts consistently to external forces. And our swimming pool had an efficient circulation system. Water came in through valves in the bottom and it left through drains in the gutter that lined the side of the pool. There was also upwards of 100 people in the pool at any one time, swimming and splashing around, stirring things up. It was therefore reasonable to assume that testing one area of the pool would yield a result that was fairly representative of the entire pool. If the ph in Nick's test tube was off, then there was something wrong with the water in the whole pool.

But just to be sure, Nick would double-check whenever he got a weird reading. He would go around and test other parts of the pool, because wanted to make sure there really was something amiss before dumping an extra shot of chlorine into the pool.

Nick understood testing. He knew its value as well as its limitations.

I'm not so sure we do.

I just received the the reading scores from the state test that my students took last year. They came last week. By and large, most of my students performed well. If we had a merit pay system in place in my district, I'd probably be able to take my family to Disneyland next summer. It was good news.

And as I looked over the results, I saw confirmation of what I observed all last year. The kids who read well day in and day out performed well on the test. The kids who struggled throughout the year performed poorly on the test. 

With one exception.

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For the past two years teacher leader bloggers here at Stories from School: Practice meets Policy have written hundreds of posts about how policies impact learning and teaching in their Washington State classrooms, and through thousands of comments you have continued the conversation with them. Now we are excited to introduce a new partner to expand the conversation even further!

Through the new blog Stories from School-AZ, ten accomplished teacher leaders will post about how policy impacts teaching and learning in their Arizona classrooms and schools. The bloggers come from across the state of Arizona, and teach and lead in a wide variety of interesting contexts. Check out their bios to see for yourself.

Stories from School-AZ launched with support from the fabulous leaders at the Arizona K-12 Center. We could not ask for a better partner in this important work. If you’re not familiar with the Center, a trip to their website is well worth the time.

A new school year began this week in Arizona, and Stories from School-AZ bloggers are writing about it as we speak. When Washington bloggers come back from their well-deserved vacations later this month, you’ll be able to find them right here, connecting with their Arizona counterparts on issues that impact learning and teaching in both states.

More teacher leader voices. Broader insight and analysis. This is the beginning of a powerful partnership!

It’s August already, and any day I expect the arrival of “The Letter”.  That’s the one with the school district return address and the schedule for the first days back at work.  But summer vacation isn’t quite over, and I have a last minute recommendation for your reading list:  Stones into Schools, by Greg Mortenson.  I received it as a gift from the National Education Association Foundation in July and just finished it.  I have been telling everyone about it, expecting them to recognize Mortenson as the author of the wonderful bestseller Three Cups of Tea, but I have been surprised at how many people have not heard of him yet.  So here’s my book report.

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The American Academy of Pediatrics released a new recommendation last week concerning the response to head lice in school-age children.  They want us to leave kids with head lice in the classrooms while their parents treat the condition at home. Apparently, lice don’t pose a serious enough risk to warrant missed school.

They’re right, of course. The worst thing about lice is that your head itches. That, and knowing that you have insects crawling around on your scalp. Other than that, it doesn’t get any worse. Strep throat, on the other hand, can get really bad. So can influenza, measles, chicken pox and the mumps. And unlike those afflictions, lice aren’t terribly contagious. They can be controlled with reasonable precautions.

So all in all, there’s no compelling medical reason to keep a kid home from school just because she has head lice. The cost of a missed day of school is more than the benefit of a day of quarantine. And besides, head lice cases are frequently over-diagnosed. At my school we send kids home if they have anything in their hair that even looks like lice at any stage of their life cycle.

That said, there’s no way this recommendation is going to fly. For three reasons.

First of all there’s the creep factor. Germs are one thing. All of us know we have germs, but we can’t see them, can’t feel them when they move, and most of us just aren’t that freaked about them. Lice are different. They’re actual insects, and knowing that there are insects; real, live, visible insects moving around on our heads is just too much to bear. The same goes for our kids. The American public is not ready to accept the possibility that their kids could bring lice home from school with no official intervention.

Which brings me to the second reason. Getting rid of lice is an expensive proposition, in terms of time and money. Bedding needs to be cleaned, along with coats, sweaters and hats. Special shampoo and medicine needs to be purchased and applied. Many families simply don’t have the capacity or the time to handle the situation.

Which brings me to the third reason. The Academy of Pediatrics has acknowledged that head lice have ceased to be a medical problem. They are no longer handled by the medical community. Schools, for all intents and purposes, are charged with the diagnosis of the condition as well as the prescription of the treatment. The Academy suggests that parents take over that entire role. Parents should regularly check their children’s heads, get rid of any lice they find and continue to send their kids to school in the meantime. The problem, of course, is that every parent has to actively participate. If this were Finland, Japan or some other mythical, fully-functional nation, that suggestion might be feasible. But this America. We can’t really count on one another for stuff like regular lice checks.

So this idea by the American Academy of Pediatrics, as well-intentioned and logical as it may be, simply won’t work. It’s a lousy idea.

Although my father was a successful city manager for over twenty-five years, he was not perfect. At one point, the city needed to replace several police cruisers. Looking to save some cash, he decided to buy and convert some used Checker Cabs from a large city on the east coast. When his police force heard about the idea, they were alarmed. Not only did they not want to be seen driving around in used taxis, they were convinced that the cars were top-heavy and would tip over. A stubborn man, my father proceeded with the purchase, ignoring the very people charged with implementing his ill-conceived plan. Sure enough, within two months, each of the cars had rolled over in the line of duty. No one was hurt, thank God, but my father learned an important lesson: when you develop a new program or idea, you need to involve the people who will actually be implementing it. Otherwise it’s doomed.

People, including cops, don’t like change unless they’re involved with the process; especially when the change comes from someone who doesn’t have a first-hand understanding of its implications.

My father learned that the hard way.

I was reminded of this story after spending a week working with a bunch of teachers in the Washington DC area. Compared to what I’m used to in the Seattle area, these teachers are demoralized, disenfranchised and de-professionalized. And these were National Board candidates, who tend to be among the most optimistic, the most enfranchised and the most professional. Teacher after teacher told about ill-conceived policy after ill-conceived policy coming from the top down, with one administrator after another telling them how they should handle the very real problems facing the region. And not once were they ever consulted.

Washington State, by and large, places much more value on teacher leadership and teacher involvement. Teachers sit on committees, make important decisions and are much more in charge of their own professional development. We don’t always agree with the outcome, but we at least feel we’ve been a part of the process. Consequently, we’re more supportive of our educational policy and less inclined to participate in “passive sabotage.”

Much will be made of Washington State’s failure to make the list of finalists in round two of the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top sweepstakes. In drafting the legislative package that preceded our application, state leaders decided to choose consensus over bold reforms. They decided to adopt reforms that most school districts, as well as the WEA, would support, instead of a package that included such things as charter schools and test-score merit pay.

Good for them. They listened to the people who have to actually implement their policies. Teachers and school-level administrators know about charter schools. They know how they can quickly become unsustainable burn-out factories that fail to deliver on their promise to show non-charter schools new and promising pedagogy. They know what happens to the overall mission of a school when an unreasonable amount of emphasis is placed on standardized test scores. That is, test scores for test scores’ sake, not as an indication of real student learning.

So we lost out on some much-needed money. That happens. I honestly believe that we’re better off making due with a little less cash than having the money to spend on policies that those of us in the field don’t really support.

Sour grapes? Maybe. Tippy police cars? Definitely.

There are many dirty little secrets we teachers would prefer not to discuss. Maybe it’s that stack of papers which never got graded so you just gave everyone points. Maybe it’s the mastery with which you pretend to know a former student’s name when you run into them ten years later in a Wal-Mart with their own kids. 

One of mine which I’ve had to admit to myself lately: I don’t really care all that much about state or national standards. As all the education sites and blogs erupted with commentary about the recent declaration that the national core standards are better than most states’ standards, I tried as much as I could to get fired up, but I couldn’t do it.

Sure, these lists of standards are useful for framing my scope and sequence each year. I go through each unit to cross check that I’m covering what the law tells me to. When these standards get revised by some committee in some board room, do I have to re-write my whole curriculum? Surprisingly, their continuous wordsmithing doesn’t change much on my end.  

Perhaps since I teach language arts (which tends to lean toward skills standards rather than content standards) I’m in a different world. I don’t mean this question to be facetious or to imply my disagreement with them in principle, but: why do we pay so much attention to these encapsulated nuggets of teacherspeak called standards? Will a change in wording in Olympia or D.C. mean I will teach differently and suddenly be better at my job? Will telling bad teachers to pay more attention to standards make their students learn more or better? Or is it all public relations? If we just phrase these statements the right way, will all the ills of public education be resolved?

What is the big deal with standards? Why do we expend so much energy on them, care so much about them, and hang our hopes upon them? I want to hear your side.

There's a motto that I like to think by: "Doubt what you know." It's a comfortable, if somewhat ambiguous way to go through life. Take sports, for example. I knew the Mariners were going to be competitive this year. but I also doubted it. 

When it comes to school reform, I know certain things. I know that merit pay doesn't work and that total restructuring - firing an entire staff and selectively rehiring some of them - doesn't work.

But then came Annapolis High School. In a recent story for NPR, Claudio Sanchez (the coolest voice on the radio) reported on AHS's graduating seniors. When they were freshmen, the school was a train wreck. They had a huge achievement gap, with black male ninth graders failing at a rate of 72%, and they made Maryland's list of worst schools.

Along came a charismatic principal and $3 million dollars of school district money.

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