By Travis

It has been 15 years since I started teaching and I have taught in a number of schools, spending the most time in three. Each time I move to a new school, I see an environment for greatness and it fills me with excitement. Over time, the greatness never comes. It appears that each school gets close but always falls short.

The impulse is to find an error, a single negative to explain why the school cannot reach greatness. However, there is no single issue that, if solved, could move the school to greatness. Each of the three schools has well trained educators, has strong principal leaders, and has students are eager to work. So why is greatness elusive?

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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 Mark

You've probably read about it: The Washington State Supreme court stated in an 85-page opinion that the State of Washington has not met it's constitutional obligation to fully fund its public schools. (Here's the actual majority ruling in the case, officially McCleary v. State.) 

So now what? The court intends to "keep a close eye" on the legislature. I guess I need help understanding what this means and how this serves as an example of the system at work. So, the state has until 2018 to comply. If they don't comply, then what?

The same kinds of rulings are appearing elsewhere, as pointed out in a blog I read frequently, where accomplished teachers in California talk state and national ed policy. I learned there at InterACT, through a post by David B. Cohen, about Lobato v. State of Colorado wherein the court similarly ruled that the state had failed to meet its obligation. Cohen's post is worth a read, as he distills out the critical language in the Colorado court's ruling. Like many of us, Cohen is still watching Colorado, since its state school board has now voted in favor of appealing that court ruling. 

I'm sure more certain information about "what next" will manifest soon. (Actually… who am I kidding, the waters are certain to get a whole lot muddier before they get any clearer.)

What do you know? What are your thoughts? What is the next line in our conversation about this important ruling? My first step: put those student essays down for a few minutes to pore over our State Court's opinion; I hope to find some compelling language…we'll see.

By Tamara

We talk a lot here about reform: change in education. But do those conversations lead us to action? Or more conversation? Not that more conversation is bad. More conversation is often needed to flesh out ideas.

It's New Year's Eve. That time when many of us are making resolutions. Some that will stick, some that wont. This year one of mine is start taking real action based on my education policy conversations. I don't know exactly what those actions are going to be. This is probably the year I take the leap and try some lobbying in Olympia.

What about others? Are there actions you are looking forward to taking in the new year that support your thoughts and conversations here?

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?