A Teacher's Marks

Cheers! And Goodbye.

2009-07-31T23:59:00.022-07:00

I’ve poured myself a glass of wine to both celebrate and mourn this, my 551st and final column.

As you know, the Bay Area News Group will soon consolidate most of its newspapers; and, since my column has appeared in but two them, it was a foregone conclusion that I as well as other columnists/journalists would be let go.

Fortunately, I’ve matured a bit since I first started writing this column in 1991. I’ve learned that, while it’s important to grieve, it’s crucial as well to accept stoically how all things must pass, and to be grateful for what has been. (The older I get, the more Buddhist I become.)

I am very grateful for this column. It’s been cathartic for me (and Lord knows, I can get very emotional about Education), a tremendous challenge (one I never imagined I could meet), a source of pride (sometimes inordinately so, I suppose), and, above all, a chance to tell the vital story of kids, teachers and schools--one laden with mirth and pathos, grace and rage, triumph and tragedy.

So, I hope the Muses--or, perhaps, this glass of wine--will grant me some special inspiration tonight.

I cannot ride off into the sunset without one last temper tantrum about school reforms.

They won’t work.

Why? Because they’ve been designed by ignorant politicians and market-based ideologues who, in their hubris, have misdiagnosed what ails public schools.

The problem, reformers claim, is a lack of accountability and competition. So, they’d use standardized testing to root out the worst teachers, and force the others to finally do their jobs. (They’d destroy their unions along way, even though the states with the highest test scores in the nation are also the ones with the strongest unions.)

Such testing has only exacerbated an already dire situation. Educators teach to the test, narrow the curriculum, abandon the kids at the bottom and, when that doesn’t work, cheat. The best of them often just quit.

What are the real problems besetting public schools?

The education profession usually attracts only the bottom percentiles of college graduates. (Now that we’ve so scapegoated public educators, we can expect even that shameful statistic to worsen.) We send the least-qualified of them to teach in dilapidated inner-city schools where we’ve imprisoned our poor, predominately minority kids. (Our schools are now more segregated by race and especially by class than ever before in our nation’s history.) Meanwhile, schools cling to a century-old, assembly-line, age-based model of education which serves no one. And too many parents have abdicated their responsibilities, allowing a sick, TV/PS4/wii/smartphone culture to raise their kids.

Worst of all, one out of every five children in our country lives in poverty; which, besides being unconscionable, is the single most powerful impediment to them succeeding in schools.

Will testing, accountability, or competition ameliorate any of the above?

Nope.

The truth is, this country has embraced testing because it hasn’t the courage nor the will to acknowledge, much less address the real issues in education or this country. As long as we squander our grandchildren’s wealth on killing (and thus creating more) terrorists, as long as corporate CEOs send jobs oversees, foreclose on families, manipulate the government, destroy the middle class, silence the press (columnists like me)--and pay themselves obscene bonuses for doing so--there really is no hope for public education in this country. (Or, perhaps, for this country.)

The real school reformers are occupying Wall Street today, their voices crying in the wilderness that has become America. With my newfound free time, I hope to join them in Oakland or San Francisco soon.

Well, I’m glad I’ve gotten that tirade off my chest one last time!

I can’t end, though, without also expressing again how much I still love my job. It is such a privilege and pleasure to spend my days with children. I attempt to inspire them. They, without even trying, frustrate me, surprise me, and never fail to make me laugh. They are oh so beautiful gifts.

So, with my final words, I raise my glass of wine to them, to the Bay Area News Group editors who have given me this column for so many years, and to you who have read it.

Cheers! And goodbye.

Published October 24, 2011, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group)

On Love, Caesar, and Our Republic

2009-07-31T23:59:00.021-07:00

I fell in love with history at Alesia.

Long before the Ides of March, Julius Caesar nearly met his end at the hands of a long forgotten Gallic leader named Vercingetorix.

The senators of Rome had bid Caesar an enthusiastic if not very sincere goodbye, thrilled to be rid of the brazen upstart who’d become way too popular with the masses. Since the war of conquest beyond the Alps in Gaul (present-day France) had been such an utter disaster, they’d hoped Caesar would be forgotten there, fail, or die.

Oh, how the senators had underestimated him! Caesar retrained the demoralized Roman army in Gaul, then led them on a string of astounding victories, earning him a place in history as one the of world’s best generals, second only to Alexander the Great.

Even worse, Caesar sent regular dispatches back to Rome glorifying his exploits, thus endearing himself to the masses even more. (And to Latin students who’ve studied his letters ever since.)

The Senators wrung their hands in dismay and fury. It seemed nothing could stop that man now!

Enter Vercingetorix. He’d recognized how Caesar fought only small, individual tribes. If the Gauls could unite, fight as one, Caesar could be crushed.

Vercingetorix unified many disparate tribes under his leadership, amassing an army fully 140,000 strong. He sent half to block the passes in the Alps, thus preventing Roman reinforcements. With the others, he fell upon Caesar.

Ah, Vercingetorix, too, had underestimated the man. His huge army proved no match for Caesar’s 35,000 seasoned, professional troops. He fled to the heavily fortified city of Alesia.

Caesar encircled the town with an earthen rampart 11 miles in circumference, 12 feet high (A crazy, but impressive strategy). He’d starve Vercingetorix out.

Nonetheless, at least one messenger made it through the Roman lines to alert the rest of the Gallic army in the Alps.

Caesar responded by building yet another wall, this one facing outward, 13 miles around. But how could he hope to defend nearly 25 miles of concentric fortress walls? Two armies threatened, one from within, one from without. If they attacked together at the same place along the walls--as they surely would-- Caesar would have to concentrate his forces there, leaving the rest of his battlements undefended.

The dreaded attack came, and all seemed lost. A mass of Gauls breached the walls down the line, and soon the Romans would face foes on three sides. Their own defense would become their trap, spell their doom.

Then Caesar did what would make him famous: the unexpected. He split his troops, leading cavalry out from the fortifications to attack the Gallic reinforcements from behind. It was a desperate, brilliant gambit.

When the Gauls outside the walls saw Romans assailing their rear, they mistakenly assumed another Roman army had arrived. A few panicked and ran. Others, just as undisciplined, joined them. Soon most of the Gallic army fled pell-mell--ironically, just as they were about to win--leaving their hapless leader, Vercingetorix, and all of Gaul for that matter, at Caesar’s mercy.

It’s an amazing, almost unbelievable moment in history; all the more so because it was but one chapter in a long saga that included Caesar crossing the Rubicon, defeating the Senate’s army, falling first beneath Cleopatra’s devious charms, then beneath the Senators’ steely knives.

When, almost two thousand years later, our founding fathers recreated the Roman Republic, they created checks and balances as well--hoping (Perhaps futilely. Just whose job is it to declare war?) to prevent another Caesar.

Translating in high school Caesar’s rendition of that fateful siege of Alesia …well, how could I help but fall in love with history?

Today, so many years later, I lament that so few students today learn history, much less fall in love with it. (And that film-makers rarely consider it.)

History is not just a bunch of great stories, after all. It’s a stark, fascinating study of human nature--vital insurance against our republic falling, just as Rome’s once did.

Published October 10th, 2011, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group)

NCLB Waivers: More Blackmail

2009-07-31T23:59:00.020-07:00

“Dear Parents/Guardians: In Spring STAR testing, Kitayama Elementary School students made excellent gains. Overall, English/Language Arts scores in Grades 2 – 5 went up from 60% at or above state standards to 64%, and Math scores... from 66.2%...to 66.8%. Our Academic Performance Index rose from 828 to 841, well above the state’s goal of 800. However, because of increasingly stringent state and federal standards for achievement, our school has been identified as a Program Improvement (PI)…School under the federal No Child Left Behind [NCLB]…. All parents/guardians of students attending a PI school have the right to request a transfer of their child(ren) to a non-PI district school with district-paid transportation.”

So my school, Kitayama, must finally face the PI stigma. It was only a matter of time--for us, and for the 80% of the other California Title 1 schools now in PI.

You see, schools like Kitayama, with a large population of disadvantaged kids, receive federal Title 1 funding since their challenges are so great. And it is only such schools that face sanctions for not meeting NCLB benchmarks, culminating in 2014 when all students are required to be on grade level in Math and Language Arts.

Few if any schools could meet such pie-in-the-sky standards. But, in The Age of NCLB, only the schools catering to poor kids are punished.

(Can you imagine the federal government insisting that police departments everywhere completely eliminate crime by 2014; and, when they can’t, penalizing only those cities with high rates of poverty?)

The good news is that Kitayama’s community recognizes our school’s strengths. In fact, Kitayama became a prestigious California Distinguished School in 2010. (Oh, the irony!) The parents of only five of our students have chosen to transfer to a non-PI school. (Which didn’t meet the benchmarks, either, and may even have lower test scores. Oh, more irony!)

The bad news is that many other Title 1 schools may not be so fortunate. Once parents receive a similar letter to the one above, a brain-drain of the strongest kids and most educated parents may begin--the school diverting scarce education dollars to pay for their transportation--thus ensuring that next year’s test scores will be even lower. For many Title 1 schools, the PI designation will only precipitate an inevitable spiral into ruin.

Truth be told, federal PI sanctions have forced some of the worst California schools to finally confront their failure. A few, after replacing the principal and most of the staff, for example, have shown remarkable progress. But even they cannot hope to meet NCLB’s irrational standards.

We in education have long foreseen this ludicrous moment when all schools, Title 1 or not, would “fail.” However, instead of standing up as one and stating the obvious fact that the “Emperor” NCLB had no clothes, we’ve merely vied with each other not to be the first to earn the dreaded PI designation. In this respect, because of our cowardice and disunity, we’ve made the bed we now lie in.

President Obama and U.S. Superintendent of Education Arne Duncan finally acknowledged NCLB’s absurdity last Friday. But, instead of scrapping it and creating a more enlightened plan for education reform, they merely offered NCLB-PI waivers to states that agree to additional unfunded, unsupported-by-research federal mandates, including using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers. Only then will the pressure be off all but the worst Title 1 schools.

Couched as benevolent relief, the waivers are just more blackmail, of course. “Do what we want, or else the insanity will continue.”

And, if past is prologue, California and most other states will grudgingly comply, even though we know it to be wrong.

We will have to lie in that bed, too.

Unfortunately, so will all the children we’ve so cravenly betrayed yet again.

Published September 26, 2011, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group)

Letting Go in a Changing World

2009-07-31T23:59:00.018-07:00

   At the end of June, I stood outside the lovely Buddhist monastery of Upper Pisang, Nepal, beheld the village of Lower Pisang below, and sighed.
       The two young monks in traditional burgundy-red robes to my left, had they read my thoughts, might have reminded me that all suffering begins with clinging, that nothing lasts forever. You see, I mourned, if not the loss of the legendary Himalayan Annapurna Circuit, at least its swift and radical transformation.
       The Annapurna Circuit winds for 150 miles around a Nepalese mountain range of the same name. Beginning in lush, tropical lowlands, the challenging trail follows a thundering river, eventually leading up over Thorong-La Pass at 17, 769 feet (the highest I’ll ever likely hike) before plunging back down to the lowlands again. Boasting unparalleled views of quaint villages, towering waterfalls and, of course, Himalayan peaks, the Annapurna Circuit has been a favorite for international trekkers for years.
       And therein lies the problem. Trekkers like me are loving the Circuit to death. Over 70,000 of them visited last year. As a result, tourism, not agriculture, now dominates the local economy. And every village no matter how small (and small villages won’t remain so for long.) is frantically replacing traditional homes with western-style trekking lodges.
       Including Lower Pisang below. I observed how one colorful new lodge crowded the next, their first-floor shops hawking souvenirs and Chinese-made fake North Face trekking gear. I wondered what the village had once looked like; but noted as well that the profits from those lodges had rebuilt the beautiful monastery and temple here in Upper Pisang, from where the monks and I now gazed. There’s a new school in the town below.
       Nepal desperately needs the foreign capital and employment such tourism provides. But, is the money worth the terrible cost in culture?
       And in the environment? A new dirt road replacing the Annapurna Trail will soon reach all the villages on either side of Thorong-La Pass. (Although, with the constant landslides, the road may never truly be finished—or safe.). The construction provides employment for hundreds of local peasants. But, with its erosion, it permanently scars a once pristine Shangri La.
       Will the road and the development it brings help the trekking industry, or destroy it?
       I had ample reason to wonder, and to sigh.
       I glanced up from the village towards the Annapurna Peaks, which were supposed be arrayed majestically above, but remained maddeningly hidden. My few fellow trekkers and I had exchanged autumn crowds for summer monsoons—a gamble we eventually lost since, except for one, small, fleeting break in the clouds two days later, my friends and I never saw the mighty Himalayas.
       Heavy sigh again.
       Ah, Annapurna! I discovered there so much beauty, but so many gambles, dilemmas, trade-offs, and compromises as well. Life, with its inevitable onrush of change, poses few easy decisions, even fewer right answers; and, as the monks might murmur, little at all to those who would cling to what was, no matter how wonderful and simple it might have seemed.
       Such is the complicated, messy world education ought to prepare students to inhabit, and perhaps even to lead. We Americans, however, still teach our children to choose/guess between A, B, C, or D.
       Another sad sigh.
       One can see very far, indeed, from Upper Pisang, Manang Province, along Nepal’s famed Annapurna Circuit.

Published August 29, 2011, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group)

No Thaw Soon

2009-07-31T23:59:00.016-07:00

       Three weeks ago, the Georgia governor’s office capped its investigation of Atlanta’s schools with a scathing 800-page report. It described with horrific detail the school district’s “culture of cheating.” In fact, investigators discovered that teachers and principals had been changing student answers on standardized exams at 44 of the 56 schools examined. Eighty-two educators admitted to altering tests, and their testimony implicated 96 others.
        Many additional districts are facing similar scrutiny, including now the District of Columbia, Baltimore and Philadelphia.
       Atlanta’s debacle is particularly galling, however, given the amount of accolades the district had received for its meteoric rise in test scores. Philanthropies such as the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had showered the district with grants, while the superintendent, Beverly Hall, had accepted numerous awards including 2009 National Superintendent of the Year from the American Association of School Administrators.
       But it was all a sham. Worse, many children who should have received additional support failed to because of their inflated, false scores.
       The July 13th issue of Education Week highlighted some of the more sensational narratives in the Georgia Governor’s Office report, including that of a teacher who surreptitiously photographed the test storage room so that, when he later broke in, he could leave everything as it was; of a principal who wore gloves when she changed answers to keep her fingerprints off student exams; of veteran teachers altering new teachers’ tests for them until they trusted the newbies enough to accept them into their cheating fold; of teachers holding weekend “[test] changing parties” at their homes.
       It boggles the mind. It deadens the soul.
       How shaming to learn that so many of my colleagues could betray their vocation, their profession, their integrity, and especially their students!
       It is true that Superintendent Hall and her administrative minions had intimidated teachers. They’d threatened would-be whistle-blowers. And one principal had even forced a teacher with low test scores to crawl beneath a table during a faculty meeting.
       Even so, none of that excuses the heinous behavior of so many Atlanta educators, and so many others who knew of it but remained silent.
       A silver lining to this despicable affair could be that it would add fuel to the increasing debate about the merits of high stakes testing. But, honestly, it seems inexplicable that there could still be any debate at all since research, including most recently that of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) and the National Research Council, has decried such testing as, at best, ineffective at improving real student achievement.
       The trouble is, U.S. Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan has once again turned a deaf ear to such research, even though he, himself, commissioned the NCEE report. Instead, he used Atlanta to argue for more testing: “This unfortunate incident highlights the need for transparency and accountability throughout our system…. There are districts across Georgia and across the country that are facing the same expectation to perform that are making genuine progress without cheating.”
       Genuine? Yes, many schools have raised state test scores. But how? By “teaching” (drilling and killing) to a narrow fill-in-the-bubble test, eschewing all knowledge and skills not on it, such as creative and higher-ordered thinking. By focusing on students just below proficiency (cherry picking) while abandoning the kids at the bottom. By doing nothing to discourage drop outs since those kids would have brought down test scores anyway.
       Or, as some whole states have done, by simply lowering the score required for proficiency (and then shamelessly crowing about a remarkable increase of proficient students).
       There are many ways to cheat.
       The obvious, embarrassing fact is that high stakes testing—and the fear it engenders—has brought out the worst in public education, not the best. The cheating in Atlanta and elsewhere is but the tip of a massive educational malpractice iceberg.
       But, since Duncan is urging Congress to quickly reauthorize No Child Left Behind and its centerpiece, high stakes testing, there is little likelihood of a thaw any time soon.

Published August 1st, 2011, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group)

Sing Children--While You Can

2009-07-31T23:59:00.014-07:00

THE CHILDREN sang, but I seethed.

     At my grade school's final assembly of the year, the choir performed three wonderful songs, "I Believe in Music," "My America," and "Bright Happy Day," often with intricate counterpoint and harmony. Amazing!
     The loveliness of the music, expressing so eloquently the beauty of the children singing it -- American kids of myriad races, creeds and backgrounds, so full of naive joy and hope -- was enough to bring anyone with a warm heart to tears.
     Yes, tears of immense gratitude; but also tears of blind rage. You see, as those priceless children, jewels all, sang their own warm hearts out, so many adults in this nation were at that very moment conspiring against them.
     Take U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, for instance.
     At his request (Oh, the irony!), the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) had reviewed the best educational programs in the world. Its damning conclusion: Duncan's blueprint for education reform had been, at best, a monumental waste of precious time and money.
     While Duncan had been touting shortsighted quick fixes such as high-stakes standardized testing, merit pay, vouchers and charter schools -- guided in defiance of all research by a business/competition ideology -- nations such as Finland, whose schools currently rank first in the world, had implemented much more common-sensical, forward-thinking even revolutionary strategies.
     Most importantly, leading nations had recognized how an educational system can never be any better than its teachers, and so had transformed their teaching professions into one of the most competitive and prestigious. (Finland recruits its teachers from the top 10th percentile of college graduates; the United States from the bottom 30th.)      Then, Finland and others had distributed their teachers and funding equitably to all schools and communities.
     They'd eschewed once-a-year fill-in-the-bubble testing in favor of broader (including science, social studies and the arts) less frequent evaluation, focusing on in-depth knowledge and the ability to apply it creatively.
     And they'd discarded an archaic age-grouped assembly-line approach to education.
     True to form, however, Duncan merely gave lip service to the NCEE report, then called for Congress to reauthorize a revised version of No Child Left Behind.
     In other words, he chose more of the same, but with some adjustments. He thus doomed the United States to fall even more swiftly from its already precarious eminence.
     Arne Duncan betrayed the kids in that choir -- again.
     Oh, but he was hardly alone.
     Banks continued to foreclose on their parents, corporations to send their future jobs oversees and the hidden oligarchy of the nation's giga-rich to diminish their hope for a middle-class life.
     Meanwhile, Republicans nationwide, clinging so tenaciously to their no-taxes-except-for-war/lower-taxes-for-the-rich ideology, were at that moment arguing for catastrophic cuts in schools everywhere, as well as the evisceration of unions and environmental protections.
     Will my school even have a choir next year? Will more than just a few of the youthful singers be able to afford college? Or a home, for that matter? What kind of contaminated world will they inherit? Will there be any Social Security or Medicare for them when they retire? (If they can retire.)
     For the first time in this nation's history, the kids in the choir could expect to live fewer years and at a lower standard of living than their parents.
    I wish all the powerful people in this nation -- who, because of their unbridled greed, thoughtless ideology or inexcusable cowardice, were betraying the next generation of Americans -- had been required to stand by me that morning as my school's choir sang.
     But, no, like the pilots of the B-52 bombers during the Vietnam War, they didn't have to look into their victims' innocent eyes.
     Sing children, I thought. Sing of your oh-so fleeting "Bright Happy Day," and of the "My America," which long ago ceased to be anything more than a legend.
     Yes, sing -- while you still can.

Published July 4th, 2011, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group)

What Happened to Research?

2009-07-31T23:59:00.003-07:00

     What is the role of research in public education? Apparently, very little.
     For example, I've long "known" that the best way for children to study at home is to sit in the same room, at the same table, at the same time every night, and to focus on one topic or assignment intensely before moving on to the next. Indeed, this self-evident fact has long formed the core of my yearly letter to parents every September.
     Unfortunately, it's all wrong.
     Research, summarized in an article that appeared in the September 6th, 2010, issue of The New York Times, "Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits," debunked everything. (Just Google the title.) The numerous studies, some dating back to the 1970's, reveal that varying study location and even the topic vastly increases a student's ability to learn and remember.
     Can you see my red face? I'm not the only one, thought. Even the internet sites I found dealing with homework and study habits continue to give the same bogus advice.
     How is it that such important research has had no effect on educational dogma, that I learned of it only by accident when a non-teacher friend sent me a link to the article?
     "We have known these principles for some time," lamented Robert A. Bjork, a UCLA psychologist, "and it's intriguing that schools don't pick them up. Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken."
     Sometimes, however, vital educational research does make it out into the public. But, it is simply ignored. For example, (I apologize for kicking my favorite dead horse.) recent and comprehensive studies have documented the folly of both high stakes testing and charter schools. The Obama Administration still adopted both as national policy.
      Last September, the most rigorous study of merit pay as well proved its uselessness in raising student achievement. (Most teachers--who accepted a scandalously low salary when they entered the profession, and so are unlikely to be motivated by paltry bonuses--are already working as hard as they can. Merit pay, however, does discourage them from collaborating with each other.)
      Nonetheless, the very day after the study was published, the U.S. Department of Education distributed millions of dollars to promote merit pay programs nationally, and committed itself to dole out an additional $1.2 billion. (Yours and my tax dollars at work! Better than wasting them on war, I suppose.)
      Research clearly has no effect whatsoever on national education policy.
      As if to underscore that, President Obama signed a law last December designating teaching interns as "highly qualified."
      Of course, research highlights how the single most important factor in children's academic success--often trumping, amazingly, the socio-economic level of parents--is the quality of the teacher in the classroom. The scandal--no, the outrageous moral injustice--has been that we've sent our worst and least prepared educators, especially interns, to our neediest children in inner cities. Then we test the kids, respond with surprised indignation, and punish their schools. (This is reform? Yet another dead horse of mine.)
     The No Child Left Behind Law (spit!) briefly acknowledged this fundamental impediment to improving education for all. In a consummate act of naiveté, Congress simply mandated that all schools employ "highly qualified teachers." As if it were that easy! (We can imagine all those inner-city principals sighing in resignation, "Oh, heck, now I'm going to have to start hiring all those great teachers I've been turning away!")
      Of course, it wasn't that easy. Perhaps that's why, rather than respond to the research or address the crucial issue by redesigning how the nation recruits, trains, and distributes teachers, Congress and Obama simply redesignated interns as "highly qualified," and then washed their hands.
     What happened to research? What happened to a sincere attempt to reform our schools? What happened to honesty, courage, and justice?

Published January 31, 2011, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group)

A Tale of Two Teachers

2009-07-31T23:59:00.000-07:00

     Mr. Smith teaches in the United States, which once boasted some of the finest public schools in the world, but has since fallen behind most other industrialized nations.
     Since teachers in his country are held in such disrepute, Mr. Smith's gifted college friends usually choose other, more respected and better remunerated professions. Indeed, he, himself, came from the bottom percentiles of college graduates. He had to spend an additional year at his own expense in a school of education focused mostly on esoteric theory instead of research-based pedagogy.
     If Mr. Smith somehow emerged, nonetheless, a great educator, he probably works at a beautiful suburban school where he prepares mostly affluent Caucasian and Asian students to go to college. If, on the other hand, he's uncredentialed, ill-prepared, just plain mediocre or worse, he's likely ended up in a dilapidated urban school to teach predominately poor African-American and Latino children--who, for some reason, drop out of high school in scandalously high numbers.
     Every day, Mr. Smith faces well over 30 or even 40 students per class. Perhaps he has enough textbooks for them all, perhaps not depending on where he works.
     He needn't be innovative because he must primarily drill his students to pass standardized tests measuring a narrow band of knowledge and skills, but requiring little to no higher-ordered or critical thinking. If he has any time to spare, he rushes through an absurdly broad but embarrassingly shallow curriculum.
     He can only rarely meet with colleagues about anything other than announcements, test scores, and schedules. His is a lonely profession.
     Poor Mr. Smith has little hope of redemption. The United States government insists on market-based "reforms" such as competition, high-stakes testing, charters, and merit pay, even though the most recent and comprehensive research proves them all to be, not only ineffective, but detrimental to both student and teacher achievement. Everyone's demoralized.
     Mr. Virtanen, however, loves teaching in Finland, a nation that, although wallowing decades ago near the bottom of international academic rankings, now places first.
     In order to become an educator, he had to beat 85% of other applicants. Finish teachers, you see, are revered, their jobs coveted. Indeed, Mr. Virtanen underwent an additional three-year, rigorous graduate preparation entirely at the government's expense, during which he received a stipend as well. He and most of his colleagues hold master's degrees in both Education and their content areas.
     Once he graduated, it didn't matter where he worked because nearly all Finland's small schools (less than 300 students) boast beautiful campuses, well-equipped, small classrooms (fewer than 30 children) and, of course, highly prepared teachers.
     Apparently, the Finish government believes the nation's children are its first priority because every student enjoys free health care, free busing, free school supplies, free counseling and free, nutritious lunches.
     Mr. Virtanen rarely lectures. Instead, he assists his students as they pursue individualized weekly and long-term goals he's helped them choose, goals that often involve teaming up with other students on research for multi-faceted, fun projects, such as publishing their own newspaper.
     Thank goodness the national curriculum is minimal, allowing Mr. Virtanen tremendous leeway and creativity. It also helps that neither he nor his students face high-stakes standardized testing. Instead, for their report cards, he writes detailed narratives of their progress, accomplishments, and challenges.
     Where does Mr. Virtanen find the time? Well, he spends nearly half his school day, not teaching, but meeting with students, communicating with parents, and collaborating with colleagues. Together they form a tightly-knit community where he thrives.
     Mr. Smith and Mr. Virtanen: Only one of them lived happily ever after. And only one of their nations did, too.
     For a more detailed look at Finish schools, read my source for this column. Just Google "Linda Darling-Hammond" and "Finland."

Published December 20th, 2010, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group)

Billionaire Boys' Club

2009-07-31T08:11:00.000-07:00

"The most important men in town would come to fawn on me! They would ask me to advise them.... And it won't make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong. When you're rich, they think you really know!"
Tevye, in "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof

     I hate to look a gift hundred million dollars in the mouth. Nonetheless, I am concerned about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's lavish gift to the Newark, New Jersey's schools.
     Zuckerberg thus becomes the newest member of what Diane Ravitch identified as "The Billionaire Boys' Club." (Ravitch herself made headlines with the publication of her bombshell, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.)
     "The Gates, Walton, and Broad foundations came to exercise vast influence over American education," Ravitch reported, "because of their strategic investment in school reform.... These foundations set the policy agenda not only for school districts, but also for states and even the U.S. Department of Education."
     Indeed, as one Associated Press news analysis quipped, "The real secretary of education, the joke goes, is Bill Gates."
     What is Gates' and his compatriot billionaires' agenda? Competition, choice, deregulation and other market-based approaches. After all, they enabled the billionaires to amass their fortunes. Therefore, they can't help but raise the "fortunes" of public education as well. There's no need to ask fundamental questions--such as What are the real and difficult challenges facing public schools?--before so blithely touting such easy panaceas.
      These men are billionaires. They know.
      It matters not that none of them are educators; that none of them have worked in a segregated, dilapidated, poorly staffed inner-city school teaching immigrants struggling to learn English (Maids don't count.); that none of their pet proposals--such as charters, high stakes testing and merit pay--are supported by any comprehensive peer-reviewed research. On the contrary, emerging data indicates these policies are harming public education.
     Undeterred by such trivialities, the Billionaire Boys' Club has molded the Obama Administration's educational policy according to its ideology, not the facts, much like what The Club did during the prior Bush Administration.
     The Club has been elected by no one, appointed by no one, and remains accountable to no one. (The press remains ever so kind since editors know very well who butters their bread.) No, like Napoleon, the billionaires have placed the mantel of educational power upon themselves.
     It's really not all that surprising. If one billionaire can attempt to buy California's governorship, what's to stop a cabal of billionaires from buying America's educational system?
     Now a 26-year-old computer geek has decided that he will buy, um, I mean save Newark, New Jersey's schools. (A decision certainly not motivated by nor timed to coincide with the opening of The Social Network, a film portraying Zuckerberg in a rather unflattering light.) He'll team up with New Jersey's governor and Newark's mayor to decide what's best for the school district's 39,000 students.
     Newark suffers from nearly a 50% high-school dropout rate, so any change at all will seem an improvement. Who can blame Newark and other public school districts for accepting The Club's money, despite all its strings? We're all desperate for funds and reform.
     I fear, though, that the Billionaires' apparently benevolent strings may strangle public education to death.

Published October 13th, 2010, in The Argus (Bay Area News Group)

Nightmare of School Reform

2009-07-31T07:00:00.000-07:00

     Mark Twain once quipped, "God made the idiot for practice, and then he made the school board."
     Twain must have been anticipating Hayward Unified's Board. I thought its lunacy had reached its zenith two years ago when school trustees abruptly fired ten principals, giving no explanation--thus completely usurping the authority, experience and wisdom of the superintendent the trustees themselves had appointed.
     Although the board eventually rescinded most of the firings, the superintendent soon resigned. One of the dismissed principals fled to another district and was quickly promoted to director. Another my district snatched up, recognizing a great educator when we saw him.
     Poor Hayward!
     Unfortunately, I was wrong about that being the board's worst moment. The trustees have since descended into inane bickering, finger-pointing and name-calling (making for highly entertaining cable TV viewing), culminating September 22nd when the board's president ordered a security guard to remove another trustee from the chamber. The latter immediately returned, stating he would not leave unless he were arrested. The police didn't know what to do.
     We do. Indeed, although the governor's, senator's and several propositions' races have taken the limelight, an equally consequential decision in November may be our choice for school board trustees.
     Frankly, and sadly, Hayward's school board is only an exaggerated example of some of the shenanigans taking place in many other districts everywhere.
     The Radical Religious Right, for example, has long taken advantage of the public's usual apathy regarding school boards to both get its members elected, and to coerce boards when it can't. It's even published a step-by-step manual, Reclaim Your School: Ten Strategies to Practically and Legally Evangelize Your School (Pacific Justice Institute, 2002). Page 21 is particularly enlightening: "The Big Lie: Separation of Church and State."
     It behooves us all to pay close attention to the impending school board elections; and to remember that a candidate's name, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or religious beliefs are no guarantee that he or she will be a wise trustee or not. Let's choose carefully this November.
     Meanwhile...
     U. S. Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan's call to publish teachers' standardized test scores has born its first fruit. (Students take the tests, of course; but their individual scores ceased to matter with the launching of No Child Left Behind nine years ago. Now the tests serve only to lambaste schools and teachers.)
     Duncan wants parents to know teachers' individual test scores in order to expose and get rid of the legions of lazy, incompetent public school educators; and, perhaps especially, to promote his pets, charter schools.
     Well, The Los Angeles Times took Duncan at his word. The Times posted on its website its analysis of seven years of student standardized test data, focusing on how kids' performance had improved, and rating teachers accordingly.
     The Times rated fifth grade teacher Rigoberto Ruelas "less effective."
     Its analysis did not take into account the fact that Ruelas consistently reached out to the toughest kids in his school's gang-ridden neighborhood of South LA. He tutored them after school and on weekends, visited them often at their homes, and always encouraged them to set their sights on college. During his 14 years teaching , he'd had almost perfect attendance.
     None of that mattered. The Times determined Ruelas to be "less effective." He subsequently committed suicide.
     We can only imagine the scores of better teachers vying to take his place.
     When will this nightmare of "school reform" end? For the first time in my 28-year career, I've stopped encouraging my students to become teachers.

Published October 25, 2010, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group)

Ravitch: Wrenching Reversal

2009-07-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

Published April 26, 2010 in The Argus, Bay Area News Group

     "The evidence suggests that the path we've been on for the past ten years is not working," says Diane Ravitch. And she makes that case poignantly in her recently published book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
     Of course, Ravitch is not the first educational pundit to decry No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Charter Schools, Vouchers, High Stakes Testing, Merit Pay, and even Obama's Race to the Top.
     Why, then, when Ravitch speaks does everyone suddenly listen? Why did the publication of her book merit articles in The New York Times and on the front page of Education Week? Why was she the toast of the Bay Area two weeks ago, appearing at Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, and on KQED's Forum?
     It's not Ravitch's message that is new or the evidence she bases it upon. What's new--no, what's jaw-dropping, eye-popping, and game-changing--is that it is Ravitch who is saying it.
     Diane Ravitch used to be one of the most outspoken and respected advocates for market-based education reform. A professor at New York University, she's a preeminent educational historian. She served as Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush Administration, and later on the National Assessment Governing Board. She co-founded the conservative Koret Task Force and joined The Fordham Institute--both advocating get-tough approaches to fixing America's schools.
     But then Ravitch went through a "wrenching transformation" because she--gasp!--looked at the data. (Can she ever be forgiven?)
     "NCLB is close to a complete failure," Ravitch claims, citing, for example, the embarrassing fact that national reading scores haven't improved since 1998. She shakes her head at Milwaukee, the city with the oldest and most extensive voucher program. According to the most recent study, the city has seen no academic gains at all. Meanwhile, high-stakes testing and merit pay have "dumbed-down education" and "created a frenzy of teaching to the test" and even cheating. Merit pay "destroys the most fundamental ethic of education, which is collaboration."
     Ravitch's old allies are wringing their hands in disbelief and dismay. "She's really smart, and she has this incredible experience," laments Mark Schneider, a former commissioner of the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. "That's why this book is so depressing. It hits on so many of the big themes of the day and picks them all apart."
     So, why don't Schneider and other conservative educational "reformers" acknowledge the data Ravitch highlights in her book?
For some, it's just too easy to dismiss her because she's gone over to the Dark Side, and now supports everyone's favorite educational scapegoat, teachers' unions. (No, she can never be forgiven for that!)
     But, there Ravitch goes again, citing the evidence: Massachusetts and Finland, the state and country with the highest student achievement are nearly 100% union, while those with no or weak unions post the lowest.
     Ravitch harks back to John Adams, our nation's second president, who quipped, "Facts are stubborn things." Even so, many individuals and organizations strive to suppress them: "There is a very-well financed effort to dismantle public education," Ravitch warns.
     She is not all doom and gloom, however. To a recent convention of school superintendents she proffered an alternative vision: "Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect. They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects.... We're on the wrong track."
     The superintendents gave Ravitch a standing ovation. So should we all.

Charter Schools

2009-07-29T08:54:00.000-07:00

Those Left Behind

Arne Duncan, President Obama’s Secretary of Education, has made charter schools a cornerstone of his plan to reform public education. I wish he would explain why.

I’d particularly like Duncan to comment on an emotional outburst that occurred several years ago during a course I co-taught for new teachers at Cal. State East Bay.

I’d invited a program graduate to return and speak who had, after only three years in the trenches of Oakland’s schools, already founded his own charter school.

I’ll call him Che, because, like the Latin American revolutionary, Ernesto “Che” Guevarra, he’d evinced uncommon ability and passion, even as a student-teacher. “Urban schools are designed to fail their students,” he’d claimed. “They’re part of a conspiracy of the ruling white oligarchy to keep minorities down.”

It was no surprise when Che soon became fed up with the middle school where he first taught. It was remarkable, though, when he recruited five like-minded colleagues to help him start an alternative school just a few blocks away.

Che and his young faculty worked with a dedication that left me dumbfounded. They spent their summers educating neighborhood families about the charter school, inviting one and all to enroll, but making it clear that every parent and every child would have to adhere to a strict contract of responsibilities.

During the school year, Che and his zealous teachers labored more than twelve hours a day to ensure each child both faced rigorous challenges and received enough individualized support to meet them. Putting into practice Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, they endeavored not just to teach students academic knowledge and skill, but to transform their image of themselves and the world.
Thus, Che created an almost unimaginable oasis of hope for some of Oakland’s apparently hopeless children.

I doubted, however, that Che’s vision would be sustainable, much less replicable. For instance, could he and his staff continue to make their school the center of their lives even as they grew older, perhaps fell in love and created families and children of their own? Could any but a few other Oakland schools ever hope to follow their model?

But, what an inspiring speaker Che would be for the new teachers in my class!

Or, so I’d thought. Once Che finished his presentation, one of those teachers raised a hand to respond, his voice tremulous with fury:

“I’m really happy to hear you and your school are doing so well. But I just started teaching at your former school. What the hell are my colleagues and I supposed to do now that you’ve lured away most of our best teachers, strongest students, and involved parents? The children you left behind, my students, are no less deserving than yours. What do you have to say to them who now languish in the school your charter devastated? What do you have to say to me? Should I, too, abandon them and my school?”

After a stunned silence, Che replied only that he’d given up on Oakland’s public schools and so had attempted to save at least a few kids from them.

I wonder: Is that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s answer as well?

Where’s the Beef?

President Obama has asserted, both as candidate and now as President, that his administration would base all policy on evidence, not ideology.

With this in mind, I must reiterate the question I asked in my previous column, Why has U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made promoting more charter schools a cornerstone of the Obama Administration’s Educational policy? There is little evidence to support them.

First, some background: The Charter School Movement began in 1988. Its stated purpose was to free a few, select schools from the federal, state, and local bureaucracy hampering public education, and so enable them to pilot educational innovations that could one day spread to all schools everywhere.

Charters were obviously never intended to compete with other public schools since they enjoyed significant advantages: they tended to be smaller; they inevitably skimmed from neighboring schools the best teachers, students, and parents; they often received substantial additional outside funding; and, of course, they weren’t hobbled by federal/state/local micromanagement.

One would expect that, even if charters implemented no new strategy at all, they would still outperform public schools nearby; and that, similarly, those neighboring schools’ achievement would diminish, even though they’d done nothing differently, either.

You see, public education paid a high price for charters. For that reason, the onus was on charters, yes, to excel; but do so by testing some new educational approach that was both sustainable and replicable, one that would very soon benefit other schools. Charters were to be laboratories. They existed to serve other schools, not compete with them.

Now, more than twenty years later, there are many impressive charter schools. (I’ll feature at least one Bay Area charter in my next column.) But have charters justified their existence by transforming public education with their innovations?

The only justification for charters I’ve read has been that some of them have achieved higher than compatriot public schools. (Well, duh!)

The surprise, perhaps even the scandal is that research on overall charter school achievement has been mixed at best. In fact, the most recent, comprehensive and authoritative study by Stanford University’s Center Research of Educational Outcomes found that only 17% of charter schools outperformed their regular public school counterparts, while 37% actually lagged significantly behind. Black and Hispanic students generally faired worse in charter schools.

Not only have charter schools failed their mission, the vast majority haven’t even excelled despite all their advantages.

Nonetheless, at a moment when we ought to be rethinking the whole notion of charter schools—their purpose, their effect, their disappointing performance—Education Secretary Duncan insists that all states increase the number of them because…well, he hasn’t really explained why.

The Bush Administration made no pretext of basing its policies on evidence (No Child Left Behind being the prime example of its evidence-less education policy), following, instead, neo-conservative, often religious-right ideology.

The Obama Administration, however, has pledged to do otherwise. So, if Duncan wants more charters, we really ought to demand of him, “Where’s the beef?” Where’s the evidence?

"A School Where I Could Be Happy"

“I wanted to build a school where I as a teacher would be happy,” explained Diane Tavenner, founder of Summit Preparatory Charter High School in Redwood City, which opened its doors in September, 2003.

Tavenner had worked for a decade in regular public schools. As Assistant Principal for Curriculum and Instruction at Mountain View High, she’d increased access to advanced placement and honors programs to more—and, significantly, more diverse—students. But still she saw too many who ought to have made it to college left behind. And so she remained unhappy.

Tavenner is happy now. 96% of Summit High’s graduating class last June were accepted to at least one 4-year university. Well over half of them were the first in their families to head off to college.

How can she and her charter succeed like this where so many other public schools cannot?

Of course, Tavenner had the advantage of the clean slate a charter provided, the ability to, as she recalls, “design the school from the ground up.

“I knew that the single most important factor in a child’s success is the quality of his or her teacher. My goal was to place a high-performing teacher in every single class, every period of every day. So, most of our resources went into our faculty.

“Summit’s vision is simple: attract, develop, and retain such high performing teachers. Then, enable them to make real relationships with their students. And, of course, hold everyone to high standards.”

First, Tavenner provided all her teachers 40 days of professional development outside the classroom every year. She gave those teaching the same subject a common prep-period, fostering daily collaboration.

Then, she set those teachers up for success by providing them a block schedule of longer classes fewer times a week, a class size of no more than 25 students, and no more than 100 student contacts a day.

By comparison, a typical teacher in my district’s Logan High, with a student population exceeding 4,000, faces at least 35 students per class and as many as 180 students daily.

At Summit, close relationships between teachers and students are the norm. The school is small, with only 100 students per grade. All of them have a Personalized Learning Plan they themselves craft together with their parents and their mentor—a teacher who oversees their progress for all their four years at Summit. No teacher mentors more than 18 students, ensuring none them fall though the cracks.

Teachers stay after school to tutor and to participate in school government—with all major decisions including the budget decided by consensus. Struggling students and anyone who misses even a single assignment are required to stay after as well.

“It’s a difficult adjustment for the freshman class,” Tavenner laughs. “But the students and their parents get with the program soon enough.”

Tavenner has succeeded in creating a school where she—and everyone—can be happy, as long as they are willing to work hard together.

It’s no wonder Summit Preparatory Charter High School can accept by lottery only a quarter of those applying. Or that, given this demand, Tavenner has opened another similar charter this fall, and has four more on the drawing board.

Giving Up

To charter or not to charter? That is the question.

Hamlet pondered whether to battle “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or to just give up. My fear is that, in pushing for more charter schools, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has given up.

Charters never really became laboratories for innovation. They simply adopted the “new ideas” all public schools would if only they had the freedom and the funds: longer school days and years, smaller schools and class sizes, careful selection of motivated, gifted teachers, strict accountability for both students and their parents, site-based management….

Charters have such freedom. However, their claims to operate with fewer state funds than most public schools are spurious. For one, charters usually receive substantial outside support. Even more significant since salaries account for more than 90% of most schools’ budgets, charters typically employ younger, far-less expensive faculty, and turn them over after only four years, thus keeping expenses artificially low.

In other words, charters attract our best new teachers but quickly burn them out.

This is reform?

True reform would address the real and enduring problems plaguing public education, such as the fact that the teaching profession generally attracts our least qualified college graduates; that the worst of them too often staff inner city schools; that schools stand more segregated by race and class than ever; that they follow the same factory model as a century ago….

Many (certainly not all) charters, such as Summit Preparatory High School which I featured in my last column, offer at least a few of our inner-city children a way out of an obviously broken and shamelessly unjust system of public schools.

Indeed, although one recent Stanford University study found that most charters, despite all their advantages, fail to outperform regular public schools, another documented how New York City charters narrow the achievement gap between urban and suburban schools by an astonishing 86%.

If a poor, single mother pleads, “I just want my kids to have a shot at a good life,” and if some charter schools offer them that shot, who am to say anything other than “Bravo”?

Let’s be honest, though: Charters embody the Harriet Tubman approach to reform: Duncan will send to our beleaguered inner-cities more charter “Moseses” to save a least a few more kids, even though those charters will increase the challenges and suffering of those left behind, as I explained in my first two columns in this series.

I would rather Duncan emulate Frederick Douglass who boldly assailed the entire immoral institution that made Tubman necessary.

However, I find none of Douglass’ outrage, courage, and vision in Duncan’s other strategy for education reform, his $4 billion “Race to the Top” stimulus (which, incidentally, is less than 1% of the Defense Department’s budget). It merely throws money at and seeks to tweak an educational system that is hopelessly flawed.

Perhaps Duncan knows this. His push for additional charters reveals a cynical, desperate, and ultimately despairing approach to school reform: Instead of “No child left behind,” he quietly whimpers, “Fewer children left behind.”

To reform or not to reform? I fear Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has given up before he’s even begun.

No Child Left Behind

2009-07-23T14:41:00.000-07:00

Nickel-Bee

The hallmark of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind mandate (NCLB, pronounced “Nickel-Bee” in educational circles) is its utter simplicity.

Gone are the tortured debates regarding Whole Language vs. Phonics instruction, heterogeneous vs. homogeneous student groupings, bilingual vs. immersion programs, a broad curriculum vs. the basics…. Nope, now all we have to do is just require that all schools enable every single student to meet the same high academic standards—or at least to demonstrate adequate yearly progress towards meeting them. We measure the schools’/student’s success or failure with fill-in-the-bubble standardized testing and—presto!—we’re done! We can then either reward or punish schools accordingly.

Why didn’t we think of this long ago? (Just call me Rush!) In fact, it’s such a good idea that I propose we implement this same straight-forward reform in every other area of society.

Let’s begin with health care. We can implement the long overdue No Patient Left Behind initiative (NPLB, “Nipple-Bee” in medical circles). You see, it has come to my attention that patient death rates at county hospitals are much higher than at, for example, the Palo Alto Medical Clinic. Shocking, isn’t it? Well, why don’t we just require that all hospitals meet the same arbitrary survival rates? Then we can sit back and watch the ensuing miracle in our nation’s health care.

Now, we can anticipate the howls of protest from those lazy doctors and nurses in our county hospitals. Yes, they’ll cite the fact that poverty, crime, gangs, and homelessness run rampant in their neighborhoods. (Aren’t these the same tired excuses educators in our inner cities constantly hide behind?) We’ll turn a deaf ear, though, and simply insist our county hospitals to shape up. If not, we’ll implement vouchers and allow inner city patients to saunter over to the Palo Alto Medical Clinic for treatment.

Next, we must turn our attention to police departments, because—and I’m not making this up!—many urban areas suffer from higher crime rates than, say, Hillsborough. Why have we allowed this travesty to continue for so long?

It’s high time we undertake the No Felon Left Behind program. (“Niffle-Bee” in crime prevention circles.) We’ll merely require our hitherto slothful inner city cops to stop dunking donuts and get to work. Indeed, we’ll measure the average yearly improvement of every single ethnic group in their jurisdiction, just like we do with schools. If a single ethnicity fails to post a decrease in crime—let’s say the incidence of shoplifting among anglos remains flat one year---we’ll publish this humiliation on the front page of the local press, and threaten the police department with a state take-over….

I jest, of course, but with only a trace or mirth, and an abundance of bile. Once we transpose No Child Left Behind to any other social issue, we see it as it truly is: ludicrous.

This fact became even more difficult to obscure with the recent 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board Supreme Court Decision. We “celebrated” the fact that separate but equal schools became unconstitutional; but then find ourselves coughing and shuffling our feet as we grudgingly admit that our schools are more separate and unequal now than ever, as a recent Argus series made manifest.

Will Nickel-Bee resolve this? Clearly not, just as Nipple-Bee and Niffle-Bee wouldn’t address the challenges and injustices endemic to our similarly segregated communities either.

No, the problems our schools face—as do our nation and our world--are complex, indeed. They defy any easy, alluring panacea, no matter how cute or comforting its acronym.

Reauthorization?

It now seems highly unlikely Congress will reauthorize No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The six-year-old federal law stipulates that, each year, an increasing percentage of students at each school become proficient in Language Arts and math until, by the year 2014, every single child is grade-level proficient in both subjects. NCLB also mandates escalating sanctions for Title 1 schools (those receiving federal funds to assist disadvantaged children) for repeatedly failing to meet those annual proficiency benchmarks.

Although nearly everybody agrees NCLB needs fixing, the devil is in the details.

Some argue correctly that, since NCLB allows each state to give its own exam and to determine what score on it constitutes proficiency, the law provides loopholes so large you could drive an entire state through them.

For example, North Carolina announced that, according to its test, 92% of its students were proficient in math. However, only 40% of them could pass the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math exam. Similarly, while Colorado declared students with a percentile ranking of only 6 on its test to be proficient, South Carolina kids needed a ranking of 71. (Maybe Colorado’s test was just much more difficult than South Carolina’s?)

California set some of the toughest standards in the nation, which might be a source of pride; except that, as a result, a disproportionate number of California schools have faced NCLB sanctions.

It’s a mess, really. The easy solution would be to require all states to administer the same exam, such as the NAEP, and to score it identically. However, NCLB already manifests an unprecedented federal meddling into what has hitherto been sacrosanct state sovereignty over education. Should Congress determine when, how and what will be taught at the neighborhood grade school?

Others argue, also correctly, that NCLB, in focusing only on Language Arts and math, and in utilizing only standardized testing to measure proficiency, is too narrow in scope. What about Social Studies, science, art, music and physical education, which are also essential for becoming a good citizen and a well-rounded, healthy person? What about essays, projects, presentations and portfolios, which more authentically measure the skills necessary for a successful life and career? NCLB has inadvertently undermined, sometimes even eliminated these other courses and activities.

Also, shouldn’t progress toward proficiency matter? Currently, an inner-city school that motivates its disadvantaged kids to advance three grade levels in one year will undergo sanctions nonetheless if too may kids still miss that year’s proficiency benchmark; while a suburban school advancing its students not at all will receive praise as long as enough of its gifted children still meet it. Which school is truly great, and which deserving of sanctions?

How about judging other factors as well, such as drop outs? One sure-fired way to raise high school test scores is to merely encourage low-scoring students to disappear—an underhanded strategy which, according to the Rice University Center for Education, largely explains former Governor, now President Bush’s so-called “Texas Miracle” in education. (California, once again on the stringent side, factors in graduation rates.)

And then there’s the not-so-minor detail that Congress has never fully funded NCLB. (A fact that will increase in importance here in California in the light of impending drastic cuts in state funds.) The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6^th Circuit, Cincinnati, ruled in January that, as a result, schools may not have to comply fully with NCLB. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings disagreed.

Spellings, the courts, Congress, governors, teachers’ unions have been arguing these and other issues ad nauseam. None of them, however, acknowledge—at least publicly—that no research at all supports NCLB’s primary premise, that high stakes standardized testing will improve student achievement. In other words, everybody’s debating the details while avoiding the dubious premise underpinning all of them.

Since there’s been no accord, NCLB will most likely continue as it is well into the next presidency. In the meantime, benchmarks for adequate yearly progress towards proficiency in Language Arts and math will rise dramatically, by about 11 percentage points a year. Since 34% of California schools have already failed to meet current benchmarks, many more schools may soon run afoul of NCLB, including urban and wealthy ones.

In other words, NCLB is going to get a lot worse, and a lot more interesting.

Program Improvement

“We are a very caring and hardworking staff,” one of my colleagues wrote in defensive frustration last week, “with a spirited student population, and we all take a lot of pride in what we do here. We deserve better than to be painted with a broad brush by NCLB (No Child Left Behind), and hence the media, as ‘under-performing.’ We are always looking for ways to improve; but having to send a letter home to our students which implies that our other two middle schools are somehow superior to ours hurts our pride and, even more importantly, sends our kids indirect message that somehow they don’t measure up…. Our staff knows better.”

Two weeks ago, my school had to draft such a letter to all parents inviting them to transfer their children to one of the other two middle schools in the district. “For the past two years,” the letter read, “Barnard-White Middle has not met the NCLB criteria adopted by the State Board of Education and so has been identified by preliminary reports as needing program improvement.”

What the letter didn’t explain, however, is that those other middle schools didn’t meet NCLB criteria either. The difference is that we are a Title I school: A substantial portion of our students are eligible for free and reduced lunches. As a result, we receive additional federal funds, but now face sanctions most schools don’t.

The letter was a bitter slap in the face to us at Barnard-White, because, frankly, we’d been quite proud of our recent, hard-won success. For example, we’d improved our Academic Performance Index (API) steadily and dramatically for six straight years. And, even though our raw score was lower than those of our two sister district middle schools, when all three schools were compared to others with similar socioeconomic student populations, Barnard-White emerged on top. In fact, last year, almost across the board, we raised the percentage of students proficient on the tests used to determine NCLB criteria, including the California Standards Test, at a rate superior to the district average.

Clearly, we, the staff and students at Barnard-White, had been doing a lot of things right. Many of them--such as creating an environment where most everyone felt safe, supported, cared-for, and happy (one of our strongest suites)--would never show up on a standardized exam. Nonetheless, according to NCLB, we were in need of “program improvement” ; and so, because we were a Title I school, our students deserved the opportunity to “escape” to purportedly more successful ones.

The irony is that we must tap Title I funds to pay for the transportation of those who elected to leave, instead of using the money to assist struggling students who remained; and that those who left generally had among the highest test scores-- a student brain-drain making it even more difficult for Barnard-White to meet NCLB standards in the future.

Most everyone in education recognizes NCLB will eventually collapse under this and many other misbegotten absurdities. For example, the benchmark for success will gradually rise until in the year 2014, every single student in the nation must be proficient in every single subject, or his/her school will be similarly labeled in need of program improvement. Obviously, most schools will eventually fail--twenty-three have so far in the Tri-Cities--even elite ones with predominately advantaged students. Then, of course, the law will change.

That is no consolation to us here at Barnard-White. We will continue to do what we’ve always done: push ourselves above and beyond, demand the highest standards while taking tender care of each other--all with our enduring Bronco pride. But now we will do so in spite of NCLB, not because of it.

Standards

2009-07-22T14:09:00.000-07:00

Ludicrous

Why have I--and so many others who have similarly spent their careers fighting for higher standards in education--struggled so adamantly against the current standards movement in California and the nation? And why are we now beginning to smile again?

We’ve dreamed of reasonable standards, measuring student achievement with authentic assessment. We’ve confronted, instead, ludicrous standards tied to high-stakes fill-in-the-bubble testing.

Ludicrous? When the elite oligarchy in Sacramento wrote the California standards, for example, convinced that every high school graduate ought to go on to a prestigious four-year university, they were afraid of leaving anything out, and so too often threw everything in but the kitchen sink. In most grades and subjects, there are simply too many standards: more than 160 in my 4th grade curriculum; more than 70 in just one high school Chemistry course. It would not only be impossible to teach them all well, but educational malpractice to attempt to do so.

Oh, some of my colleagues have “covered” the standards: “It’s the end of the first semester, so we have to be halfway through the textbook.” They rush through the standards and the text with no pause to study anything in depth, no attempt to adequately instill real comprehension, much less a love of the subject, even less the academic skills necessary to truly succeed in school and life.

Nonetheless, they pat themselves on the back each June for having gotten though everything--a job supposedly well-done, even though the students, bored out of their minds, remember little. (Not that the students complain. After all, memorizing a list of facts only to regurgitate them on the next test is much less challenging than actually learning to think.)

Yes, systematically covering standards is quite alluring. For teachers, it is so much easier than responding to students’ needs and interests, planning captivating simulations/experiments, conducting poignant classroom discussions, guiding kids through demanding research projects, teaching kids how to read a textbook, how to take notes, how to consult a broad array of sources in addition to the text before drawing any conclusions…. (The bread and butter of real teaching, its greatest challenge, providing its greatest reward.)

Covering standards, you see, is the last and best sanctuary for uninspired or lazy educators and students.

Their sanctuary’s days are numbered, however.

Recent research is finally uncovering how cursorily rushing through standards--implementing a curriculum that is a mile in breadth, but an inch in depth--inadequately prepares students for college.

A study published in the December issue of the online journal Science Education indicates “Breadth-based learning, as commonly applied in high school classrooms, does not appear to offer students any advantage when they enroll in introductory college science courses, although it may contribute to scores on standardized tests.”

More specifically, the report documents how students who had spent at least a month on one particular topic in their high school science classes earned higher grades in college science courses than students who had not.

The difference is actually so profound as to astound: The former perform, the researchers estimate, as if they’d received as much as two thirds more instruction than the latter.

Clearly, mastering big ideas trumps “unrelated bits of scientific knowledge,” the hallmark of most standardized exams.

US science standards, upon which such tests are based, typically include vastly more topics than those of other countries whose children routinely outperform ours.

Nonetheless, each time such international test comparisons appear, pundits decry them anew, typically arguing for even more rigorous US standards and testing. (Just as physicians of old prescribed yet more blood-letting whenever the first round had proven ineffective.)

With the Obama Administration, however, we may be entering into a new era, when research (and, one can always hope, common sense) will prevail over elitist ideology. Thus, even during such dire times as ours, many of my colleagues and I find reason to hope.

Sheep

Last week I wrote that the current standards movement is ludicrous. Far from improving student performance, standards have become the last, best sanctuary for uninspired or lazy educators and students. In fact, standards have hindered achievement later in college, as emerging research has revealed.

This is not news to anyone in the profession. We educators have long murmured as much among ourselves.

Publicly, however, we’ve adopted an Emperor’s-New-Clothes approach, grudgingly feigning a faith in standards we didn’t possess lest we incur the wrath of the powerful true-believers mandating them: “Of course I teach to standards,” we’ve chorused. Or, “Yes, this is a standards-based lesson.” Few dared to utter the naked truth that the standards movement was destroying education.

And so, because of our craven code of silence, the madness only escalated.

Over-zealous administrators, for example, especially those preferring a bureaucratic approach to children, demanded that teachers include numbered standards--as in “Language Arts 7.4.3”--in daily lesson plans and on class-board lists. Some even insisted that kids write the standards at the top of every assignment. (As if teaching and learning could be reduced to a numbered list of standards!)

Former New Haven Superintendent Ruth Ann Mckenna claimed a standards checklist was absolutely necessary to protect ourselves from lawsuits. If some of our students failed the high school exit exam, we could smugly claim, “We’re not to blame. After all, we covered all the standards. Here, look at our checklist.”

It was not one of public education’s finer moments.

The next (il)logical step was a standards-based report card. For example, I no longer give my students grades such as an “A” in math or a “B” in reading. No, I’m supposed to constantly evaluate each and every child on an array of more than 75 different criteria, using the indicators of 5 for “advanced,” 4 for “proficient,” 3 for “basic,” 2 for “below basic,” and 1 for “far below basic.”

It’s a report card only a desk-bound administrator could like. Any teacher who did it right, though, would have to spend as much time testing as teaching. And, oh the hapless parents! I recall more than a few humorous (After all, you have to laugh or you’ll go crazy.) moments during conferences last fall when, after failing to decipher the two-page list of numbers on the standards-based report card, some parents blinked back up at me, exasperated. “So, how’s my kid doing?” they begged.

Even most administrators eventually acknowledged--at least tacitly--that it was impossible to teach, much less evaluate every single standard. They introduced the notion of “Power Standards.” Not all standards are created equal, you see. So, although we still needed to teach every one of them (Wink! Wink!), some deserved more emphasis than others.

One might have pointed out that, if every district and school similarly identified its own particular power standards, the whole concept of standards was now defunct. However, it wouldn’t have been nice (or prudent) to mention that the emperor had no clothes.

Now there are whispers of “Gateway Standards,” crucial ones, the mastery of which would be required for passing on to the next course or grade. These would be non-negotiable standards, the ones the teachers absolutely positively had to teach, the ones students simply had to learn.

I hope such Gateway Standards come to be. Since they’d be few, simple, clear, indisputably important, reasonable for every teacher to instruct, and possible for every regular-education student to master, they’d be the kind of standards my colleagues and I could whole-heartedly embrace, without having to wink or dissemble. Gateway Standards are what we ought to have implemented in the first place.

Perhaps someday.

In the meantime, it behooves us to ask why we teachers--supposedly highly trained and uncommonly passionate professionals, the adults closest to children and the classroom--why have we been excluded from the most important decisions regarding education?

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that we’ve too often behaved like sheep, remaining silent, acquiescent, even in the face of what we knew to be wrong.

Standardized Testing

2009-07-21T14:08:00.000-07:00

A Failure

     I returned to school this August with bated breath: How did I do on the California Standards Test (CST)?
     Of course, I hadn't taken the test myself. My students had. But, in the era of Evaluate Teachers Using Standardized Test Scores Because Lazy/Incompetent Teachers Are- The Problem In Public Education, I couldn't help but take my student's scores personally-a reflection of my success or failure as a teacher.
      Well, I failed. Maybe.
     On the one hand, I noted with chagrin that, while the 4th Grade at Kitayama Elementary did pretty well last year--with 72% of our students proficient or advanced in Language Arts (12 points above the state average) and 78% proficient or advance in math (18 points above), I (my students) garnered 61% and 73% respectively---still above the state average, but below my colleagues' scores.
      I was the 4th grade's weak link last year. I guess I ought to hang my head in shame, cower in my classroom.
      On the other hand, my scores the previous year exceeded both the state's and Kitayama's 4th grade average--which was ironic since it was my first year teaching 4th grade. Go figure!
      Perhaps all can be explained by the fact that two-thirds of my students last year were Title 1 (poor, low-performing), more than in any other class.
      And yet, one of my colleagues had a preponderance of English-Language-Learners in his class, and they did fine on the CST. So, really, I have no excuse.
      U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would like to publish my CST scores so parents could choose the best teacher for their children.
      Eeeks! Would parents remember that I have a masters degree, 27 years of experience? That I was once a mentor teacher, a teacher trainer, a teacher of the year?
Probably not. Parents of the best students would see my abysmal CST scores from last year and insist the principal place their children anywhere but with me--thus ensuring that my scores would drop even more this year. What a disaster that would be!
      I can take comfort in the fact that there's a movement to use, not raw test scores to evaluate teachers, but value-added scores: By how much did my students improve?
      Well, 21 of my 33 kids improved in Language Arts, and 18 in math, some by two categories; rising, for example, from Below Basic to Proficient, and from Basic to Advanced in just one year! Only 1 of my students went down in Language Arts, and just 3 in math. Not too shabby! (How can any child's skills get worse?)
     Educators in the know, however, understand that the 3rd grade CST is much more demanding than the 2nd or 4th grade tests. So, despite their best efforts, most 3rd grade teachers see kids' scores decline, while their 4th grade counterparts enjoy the opposite.
     Do my students' improved scores mean anything at all? And, if Duncan succeeds in publishing teachers' CST scores, would anyone at all dare to teach 3rd grade? Or Title 1 students?
    I lamented my CST failure to my friend and principal, who replied with a wry smile, "You know, Dave, it's not all about you." (Damn! She knows me too well.) "There are so many factors that influence test scores, a myriad of uncontrolled variables. The best thing you can do is to let go of your ego, and to utilize the test like we used to: Investigate which sections your students found the most difficult on the exam, compare those results to other measures of their skills, then adjust your instruction accordingly.
     "And remember," my principal added, "your primary job is not to raise test scores, but to prepare children to live a great life by instilling in them essential skills and knowledge, a love of reading and learning, self confidence, critical thinking, and joy. That's what really matters."
     Tell that to Arnie Duncan.

Published September 12th, 2010, in The Argus (Bay Area News Group)

Stubborn

“How is it that our high school students can earn more credits, get higher GPSs, but yet not perform any better?” mused a dumbfounded David Gordon, Sacramento County Superintendent and member of the Board for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). (Reported in The Argus Friday, February 23^rd.)

The NAEP, often termed the “Nation’s Report Card” because it is the only test given to a sampling of students from every state, revealed that just one-fourth of high school seniors tested in 2005 ranked competent in math, and barely one-third read at grade level. This was a substantial decline since 1990—despite rising individual state test scores, despite more students spending longer hours at school, despite the kids taking tougher classes with higher grades than ever.

How is this possible?

Well, not only is it possible, it was predicted by Stanford University’s Linda Darling-Hammond. Her research—studiously ignored by President Bush and the Department of Education—has repeatedly demonstrated that, prior to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), every single state that adopted high stakes testing as a means of education reform experienced a decline in actual student achievement as measured on the NAEP. So, given that the President and Congress mandated the same sort of testing as national policy, it really is no surprise that we now see the same depressing result throughout the country.

Why? Because, for one, teachers (those who don’t quit in disgust) narrow their instruction to focus almost exclusively on state standardized test items. They reluctantly but increasingly eschew higher-ordered thinking since it can’t be readily measured on the fill-in-the-bubble exams. They cut projects, discussion, cooperative activities, simulations, field trips, music, art…and, instead, drill basic skills ad nauseam. “Kids will tell you in America,” lamented Darvin Winick, Chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, “that they are bored and that they see no connection between what they are learning and what they need in their future.”

Ah, but you see, it’s no longer about what kids need! With high stakes testing, education gets turned on its head as individual student success ceases to be the goal, and children themselves become a means to a new end: increasing a school’s published ranking. For example, educators now often neglect students at the bottom. (Thank goodness they don’t have to accurately count drop-outs, since those students would have lowered test scores, anyway!) No, teachers, practicing a sort of educational triage, devote scarce resources instead to the kids in the lower-middle who, with minimal effort, can be made proficient, and so raise a school’s ranking.

Also, with the NCLB one-size-fits-all, everyone-is-going-to-a-prestigious-college approach (in spite of the fact that less than thirty percent of Americans ever earn any college degree), schools force more and more students into tougher and tougher college-prep classes—whether or not the kids are prepared intellectually or academically for such a rigorous curriculum. Here in California, for example, we’ve decided that all students must take Algebra in 8^th grade. Since teachers cannot fail large numbers of students without incurring administrators’ and parents’ wrath, they have to lower the bar and pass hapless, struggling kids along.

All in the name of higher standards, of course!

There is another way. Linda Darling-Hammond’s research also highlighted the one reform leading to impressive gains on the NAEP: Investing in teacher recruitment, training, and support. Apparently, there is simply no substitute for getting better teachers into classrooms. (Duh!)

Nonetheless, in a response eerily similar to Bush’s troop-surge strategy for the Iraq quagmire, many lawmakers suggest the best solution for the current low NAEP test scores is even more, harder exams. “Standards are not high enough on state tests,” argues Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez.

We Americans are nothing if not stubborn. And stupid, insisting we can solve any and all problems, no matter what the cause or complexity, with merely a bigger hammer. And then, after smashing our fingers yet again, we blink with bewildered surprise.

It would be funny if it weren’t so sad, if the stakes weren’t so high.

Rest Easy

I just wanted to reassure everyone that, during these tense weeks of testing in schools (SAT 9), everything is OK.

For instance, obedient to State Department of Education requirements, I have removed the large map in the back of my classroom, and covered up with sheets anything else on the walls that might give my students some sort of advantage on the exam. Every one of my colleagues and I sat through a video admonishing us against adding or deleting a single word from the instructions we’ll read our students. Also, we’ve signed affidavits pledging we will not copy or even discuss any part of the test. Just in case, though, administrators keep it under lock and key until just moments before testing begins each day; and they collect it and all peripheral materials again immediately afterwards. I’ll turn in every scrap of scratch paper my students use as well, so it can be sent off to SAT 9 Headquarters for analysis and evaluation.

Even Heaven can’t help the teacher or school less scrupulous with these meticulous precautions. In fact, one, small misstep could result in the invalidation of the entire district’s scores.

I know all this will come as a relief to you. Given the tremendous disparities between and among California’s schools, you might worry that some students could have an unfair advantage over others during testing.

Indeed, last May the ACLU sued the State Department of Education for providing so many children--who just happen to be predominately poor and minority--an awful education. The ACLU cited inner-city schools, for example, where dead rats slowly decompose in the corners of gymnasiums; and where those rats’ living brethren brazenly wander the halls during school hours; where bathrooms, if they work at all (Don’t even ask about the water fountains.), reek of urine and worse; where technology is non-existent, and teachers lack even a single class-set of textbooks.

Of course, those teachers represent the most pathetic and glaring form of educational injustice. Recent research has revealed teachers to be the single most important factor in determining a student’s success or failure. In fact, teacher quality is more important than even class size and a child’s socioeconomic status.

Nonetheless, California’s best teachers only rarely staff those dilapidated, inner-city schools. No, a disproportionate number of teachers there possess only emergency credentials. Worse, at some schools the annual teacher-turnover rate exceeds sixty percent--with, of course, dire implications for the education of their students.

It is understandable, then, with the obvious disinterest the State of California has displayed in acknowledging, much less addressing the outrageous disparities in the learning environments of its children, you might worry the same could be true with their testing environments. As I noted above, however, education officials are apparently obsessed with ensuring all students are tested the same.

This is crucial, you know, since accurate SAT 9 test results will reveal how--surprise, surprise--at too many inner-city schools, children learn virtually nothing. Thus, it’ll be easier than ever to ridicule such children, belittle their teachers, despair in public education, and argue for vouchers.

So, never fear: The Department of Education is doing everything in its power to make sure that, at least during testing, all schools are equal. We can all rest easy. I know I will.

Kids No Longer Matter

My students will slog their way through standardized, fill-in-the-bubble tests this week: the new CAT 6 (replacing the SAT 9) and the increasingly important California Standards Test (CST). The former, a norm-referenced exam, evaluates students relative to their peers statewide. No matter how well kids do or how much they improve, nearly half must earn a derided score of “below average.” The latter exam measures, instead, student mastery of fixed state content standards. Are the kids learning what they’re supposed to?

At least, that’s what we say these exams determine. Their real purpose is to evaluate schools, not kids.

This became obvious to me three years ago. We at my school scrutinized the previous year’s test scores, highlighted those areas where our school had performed poorly, and then zeroed in on the few that had the highest number of questions on the exams. We hoped, by improving student achievement in those targeted areas, we’d reap an easy but dramatic increase in the school’s overall API (Academic Performance Index), which The Argus publishes with much fanfare. Pretty clever, huh?

In an era of “High Stakes Testing,” an awful lot rides on that API score—everything from crowing rights and monetary rewards for both schools and teachers, to public humiliation and state-takeovers. (We choose to ignore the close correlation between a school’s API and the socio-economics of its students.) Although my school’s average score has risen over the last three years, one of its racial sub-group’s score has not (white kids one year). So, despite our success, our reputation and independence are still on the line.

Notice that, amid all this hoopla, we don’t focus our efforts on a particular skill or knowledge because it is intrinsically important. Nor do we ask what an individual student lacks in order to improve or be successful in life. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that the same year my colleagues and I focused so intently on our API, we never reviewed our students’ personal test scores so we could discuss them during parent teacher conferences, or plan individualized instruction. No, only the API mattered—then, and now. That score has become the purpose or “end” of the exams. Students have become merely a means of achieving it.

Consider the frightening implications. The Argus covered last fall the embarrassing number of local kids who are out-of-shape, even obese. Who cares, since neither the CAT 6 nor the CST measures such triviality? Similarly, The Argus reported on April 24^th how local high school graduation rates fail to reveal the real number of dropouts. How convenient, since those kids would only have brought down schools’ API anyway!

You see, kids no longer matter.

Nor does good teaching, it would seem. This year, for instance, 8^th graders will take the CST History exam for the first time. The trouble is, it will measure their mastery of all the absurdly broad history standards, not just the ones teachers have covered so far this year. Thus, 8^th grade history teachers face a dilemma: They can frantically rush through the remaining standards before the exam, or teach at least a few of them well during the six weeks remaining afterwards. In other words, teachers must choose between appearing to help children, or actually doing so.

As high-stakes standardized testing becomes the centerpiece of education here in California, educators will face this dilemma more and more.

Test Scores, Perception, and Reality

I'd like to offer a few words of encouragement to the Fremont parents who failed to get their children into the prestigious Mission attendance area schools; and to the educators who doggedly staff the supposedly inferior ones elsewhere: As the famous automobile commercial states, “Perception is not always reality.”

At first glance, recently published standardized test scores seem to confirm the pervading perception. The average performance of Mission area students on the SAT 9 exam not only far exceeded those of kids elsewhere in the district, but shamed schools throughout the Tri-Cities, and even most of California.

Wow! No wonder so many people waited hours in line in a futile attempt to get their kids enrolled in Mission schools. No wonder the wealthy have invested more than a half-million dollars a piece in homes near them.

Nonetheless, had these parents considered things more carefully, they could have saved both their time and their money.

You see, while standardized tests might measure an extremely narrow band of an individual student's basic skills, they in no way indicate the quality of a particular school. On the contrary, they usually reveal only the school's admission standards: which kids it welcomes through its front door.

Private schools, for example, enjoy artificially high test averages since, by means of an entrance exam and exorbitant tuition, they screen out most students with low scores.

The same has become the case for Mission where for decades the City Council permitted the construction of exclusively affluent housing. As a result, Mission's schools have become essentially elitist, for the rich and well-educated. It's an embarrassment which, more than anything else, accounts for Mission's impressive test results.

Tell me, does anyone honestly believe that, if we suddenly switched the faculties at Mission San Jose and Irvington High Schools, the schools' respective tests scores would be likewise reversed? Would you believe me if, when my school's scores jump dramatically over the next few years, I claimed the improvement had nothing to do with the expensive new track homes going up in the neighborhood? Please, shoot me if I do.

No, to use standardized tests to judge any school, we'd have to look, not at raw scores, but at their average improvement over several years. What does each school accomplish with its particular students, no matter what skills they possess when they first arrive?

Measuring student improvement would level the playing field among schools. If we did, I suspect we'd discover that most kids in apparently second-rate schools are actually receiving a fine education, that their test scores, while still low in absolute terms, are improving dramatically over time, perhaps at an even faster rate than those in more venerated schools crowing about their “remarkable” achievement.

I pray that, one day soon, test scores will be interpreted in such a way as to give such dedicated teachers and their beloved students due recognition.

In the meantime, I urge everyone to remember that “still waters run deep.” The best education may be found outside Mission, where humble schools quietly work their daily miracles.

Vouchers

2009-07-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

Bloodletting

The Voucher Initiative might best be likened to an old medical practice, bloodletting. Long ago doctors believed many physical maladies--everything from head-aches to fevers--were caused by too much blood in the body; and so the logical remedy was to drain out the excess. Everyone from kings to peasants willingly bared an arm so doctors could slice open a vein.

The beauty of bloodletting was that it seemed an easy remedy for numerous ailments. Nonetheless, today we smile at that primitive practice. (And grimace!) We understand that those well-meaning doctors of old had mis-diagnosed their patients. Indeed, diseases are too diverse and complex to ever allow for a such a simple, generic cure. Thus, instead of healing, the doctors often made their patients even worse.

I believe the same is true for the proponents of the Voucher Initiative. They claim the trouble with American education is that it's sheltered from market forces. Schools don't have to compete for their students' patronage, and so needn't strive for excellence. But, if we give parents a choice--and some tax dollars along with it--then teachers and administrators will finally get off their duffs and really get to work. (Actually, Vouchers would give the choice to schools, not parents.)

The Voucher Initiative sounds so nice and easy! Unfortunately, it is a simplistic solution founded on a misdiagnosis of public schools' apparent poor performance. The real problems are far more complicated. And their solutions are ever more elusive.

For example, most teachers aren't lazy. They're under-prepared, under-paid, under-respected, and, in general, overwhelmed. That's why it's becoming increasingly difficult to lure our best college graduates into a classroom. (Read my column next week!) The Voucher Initiative--itself a thinly veiled slap at educators--certainly doesn't make the teaching profession any more appealing.

An even greater problem is the fact that so many kids--especially those in inner cities--are unprepared to learn. Living quite literally in a war zone, they come to class tired, hungry, scared, unmotivated, abused, addicted, pregnant, unable to speak English, and armed to the teeth. How could any school succeed under such circumstances?

Meanwhile, public schools in affluent, safe communities such as Palo Alto and Hillsborough distinguish themselves as some of the finest in the world. The Voucher Initiative posits that forcing inner-city schools to compete with them--and with exclusive, private schools, as well--is the solution. Sure. Just like bloodletting is the cure for migraines!

Even if all our communities were thriving, we'd still face the problem of funding. Our local schools have already slashed their programs to the bone. Classrooms have never been so crowded, or campuses so rundown. And we'd need to build a new classroom every day in California just to keep up with all the immigrant children. Tell me: How will Vouchers, which will pilfer 2.6 billion from public education, help?

On December 14, 1799, George Washington woke up with a severe sore throat. Martha summoned several doctors who, during the course of the day, bled the ex-president four times. Finally, Washington begged to be left to die in peace. He did, just before midnight.

In trying to save Washington, his doctors bled him to death. Tomorrow, when you go to the polls, please don't let the Voucher Initiative do the same to our public schools.

A Tale of Two Schools

Once upon a time there were two schools, each on a different side of the tracks.

The first school, Ravenstree High, was on the wrong side. It ministered to poor, minority students. Many of them came from troubled, single-parent families that had never seen a high school diploma. The kids were only too familiar, though, with gangs and drugs. As a result, Ravenstree's dropout rate was high, its test scores low. Ravenstree wasn't well respected in the community.

It was a shame. The teachers who taught at Ravenstree were among the most dedicated. Many of them had turned down a higher-paying position at more prestigious schools because they wanted to work with disadvantaged kids. They put in long hours calling parents repeatedly, tutoring kids patiently, and planning innovative lessons. Their work paid off. When the Ravenstree's test scores were compared with other wrong-side-of-the-track schools, they were among the highest.

But few in the community ever made that comparison. And so they ridiculed Ravenstree and its teachers.

Meanwhile, the sun was shinning at Palo Blanco High, on the other side of the tracks. It had recently been singled out as the best in the state, since it had the highest percentage of kids passing advanced placement tests. Parents--most of them white--took time off from their jobs at the university to attend a special ceremony in the school's monstrous, new theater. The parents saved their loudest applause, though, for the teachers, who had somehow managed to help these Stanford/Berkeley-bound kids do well.

The newspapers, of course, covered the gala event. They ran it on their front pages, right next to an article about teen-age pregnancies at Ravenstree.

One day, some local politicians became exasperated. “Why can't Ravenstree do as well as Palo Blanco?” they fumed. “The problem is that Ravenstree isn't like a business. It doesn't have to do compete with other schools in order to win its students' patronage. Let's give those kids a choice. Then Ravenstree will shape up, or go out of business!”

The community, eager for a quick, painless solution, embraced the idea of School Vouchers, or Choice.

The following year, about two hundred kids from Ravenstree took their vouchers to Palo Blanco. (Others might have done the same, but they couldn't afford the cost of daily cross-town transportation.)

Of the two hundred, Palo Blanco accepted only thirty. (Coincidentally, they turned out to be either the brightest students or the fastest athletes.) Still, despite the numerous applicants, Palo Blanco made no plans to build more classrooms. The addition of so many kids from Ravenstree might “upset the warm, homogeneous atmosphere of the place,” explained Palo Blanco's smiling principal.

Meanwhile, Ravenstree's principal wasn't smiling. She began the year with thirty fewer student-leaders, and a lot less state funding. Most of her students had really never had a choice, and now they were left with even less.

Only one of the schools lived happily ever after.

High School Exit Exam

2009-07-19T14:08:00.000-07:00

Good Questions

The trouble with good questions is that they beget so many others.

Take, for example, an April 23^rd Argus article about a Stanford University study of the California high school exit exam. The study documented how graduation for some minority groups has declined by 20% since the exam’s full implementation in 2006, while student achievement has stagnated. “The exit exam isn’t working as intended,” lamented Sean Reardon, one of the study’s lead authors.

“I continue to believe,” rebutted State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jack O’Connell, “that the exit exam plays an important role in our work to ensure that a high school diploma has meaning.”

Reardon’s and O’Connell’s disagreement begs two important but embarrassing questions (embarrassing because of the evident lack of consensus regarding their answers still two years after all high school students began taking the exam):

First, what is the exam’s purpose? Is it to force kids to study harder and learn more? Or is it to document that, after 12 years of schooling, they have accomplished more than seat time, that they’ve mastered requisite knowledge and skills?

The answer is likely both, but the Stanford study reveals that the exam has failed on at least the former goal.

The latter one, of course, begs the second, more contentious question: What sort of knowledge and skills should a high school senior posses in order to graduate?

Elitist answers have held sway recently, calling for all high school graduates to be prepared for prestigious four-year universities (even though, currently, only about a quarter of the U.S population ever earns a college degree). Hence, schools have eliminated trade, art and music classes in favor of Algebra and Physics for all, beginning even in 8^th grade.

The only consensus has been, not what a high school diploma ought to mean, but how important earning one is. “If you drop out of high school,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, “you’re basically condemned to social failure. There are no good jobs out there if you don’t have a high school diploma….”

Which gives rise to yet another important, but disconcerting question: Why do so many kids—approximately 30% nationally—drop out? And, the corollary question: Why are such a disproportionate number of them urban, poor, and minority?

Hispanic teens, for example, drop out at a rate four times that of their Caucasian peers. Meanwhile, in cities like Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis, fewer than 35% of teens graduate.

Whatever is the matter with American kids and their schools?

The simplistic, default answer has been a lack of standards, and this has led to most of our recent failed attempts at reform such as No Child Left Behind, High Stakes Testing, Vouchers, and exit exams.

None of them, however, acknowledge, much less attempt to ameliorate other, more complex and more damning explanations for this nation’s education woes, which might include, for instance, the fact that our schools are more segregated by race and class now than ever before.

Or that the education profession attracts the bottom percentiles of our college graduates, convinces as many as half of them to quit within 5 years, and usually sends the least qualified of them to work with our neediest students.

Or that our factory-model of instruction has changed little since the end of the 19^th century.

Or that our ever-increasing consumerism favors television over reading, text-messages over writing, instant gratification over a caring for others or the future.

Unfortunately, these other answers lend themselves to no easy panaceas. No, they would involve a huge commitment of effort and resources to address. They’d require, in fact, a reordering of our national priorities

You see, sincerely asking about the challenges facing our schools must eventually lead to other terribly profound questions. Is our society healthy and just? (If it were, we’d make children, all of them, our primary concern.) What is the greatest threat to our survival as a people and a nation? (Perhaps it isn’t Al-Queda.)

The trouble with questions is you never know where their answers might lead. This may explain why we are so often afraid to ask them.

Widgets

I have an investment opportunity for everyone: I’m launching the Ellison Superior Widget Corporation. Throughout California I’m going to construct factories that will manufacture the finest widgets in the world.

I have envisioned a rather unique business plan, though. I’m not going to spend much on the factories. Most will be dark, dank, dreary, decaying. Also, many of the widgets arriving for final assembly will be defective or even broken. Furthermore, I’ll hire the least qualified workers (The majority will quit after only a few years.), and concentrate the most inept of them in the worst of my factories.

Never fear, however: I’m going to test each of the widgets as they pass along the assembly line; and then publish the embarrassing results in the newspapers, thus shaming the factories and their workers into improving their performance. Then, just to be sure, I’ll have another test at the end of the line, and throw out all the widgets that don’t meet my “high standards.”

Brilliant, right?

No? That’s odd, because that is precisely the way we’ve run California’s public schools. We’ve consistently underfunded them, rising only recently to just barely above the national average (without factoring in the outrageous cost of living here). As a result, the ACLU recently won a lawsuit, citing that “Thousands of California's school children are forced to study in overcrowded, unsafe, poorly ventilated buildings with terrible slum conditions.” Indeed, we have the second highest student-teacher ratio in the nation. This despite the fact that we have one of the highest rates of child poverty (19%), and highest percentages of non-English speaking students, (nearly 25%).

Then, as with the rest of the nation, we’ve usually staffed our schools with the least qualified college graduates, those scoring near the bottom of every single index, such as GPA, SAT and GRE scores, etc. Most--usually the better ones--leave the profession within five years. And we’ve sent the worst of rest to our inner-city, struggling schools.

But, because we’re so clever, we’ve given our kids standardized tests every year, publishing the “shocking” results in the newspapers, and punishing the lowest performing schools. This year we’ll also require high school seniors to take an exit exam, and punish as well any who fail by denying them a diploma. Brilliant, right?

No. Most definitely no. The fact of the matter is that we in California have been fooling ourselves for decades. We’ve cowardly ignored the “elephants in the living room,” the “Emperor’s New Clothes”--call them what you will--the obvious, pressing, but intractable real educational issues such as underfunding, decrepit schools, parental neglect, poor teacher quality, racial and socio-economic segregation, gross inequity…. We’ve looked to testing, touting “high standards” as an easy panacea. Of course, it hasn’t worked. It never will.

I wonder, though, if--by means of a bizarre, unforeseen boomerang effect--we may inadvertently drag ourselves kicking and screaming towards true reform. You see, the chickens are finally coming home to roost, especially with the impending High School Exit Exam. Many students will fail. Most of them--surprise, surprise--will have attended awful inner-city schools. Then, their parents will sue, arguing correctly that California never really offered their children the opportunity to succeed; that testing, while documenting this fact, did nothing to ameliorate it. And, as with the ACLU, the parents will win.

Thus, those who have long shirked their own responsibility by cravenly holding only teachers and now students accountable, will discover that their ploy has come full circle around to implicate them. Very soon, all of us may be held accountable. Then we’ll finally have to acknowledge just what kind of poor investment we’ve made.

Public vs. Private Schools

2009-07-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

When De La Salle High School football coach Bob Ladouceur commented on his team's advantages over public school rival James Logan, he explained, “We are allowed to be spiritual, ethical, and develop more into the total human.”

Before I became a public school teacher, I would have blithely nodded my assent. After all, I had attended a Catholic grade school, high school, and college. Afterwards, I taught at various parochial schools for five years. And all the while I heard--and even repeated myself--the prevalent stereotypes:

Public schools were godless wastelands of bureaucracy where apathetic teachers merely punched their time-cards while shuffling students listlessly along, amid wanton violence and rampant drug-abuse, until finally a few kids defied the odds and graduated, unable to read their own diplomas.

Unlike parochial schools, of course, where teachers really cared about their students, standards and values endured, and a warm community of love thrived.

I no longer believe all that drivel. In fact, I left parochial schools because I came to believe that public schools may best exemplify Christian values.

I hearkened to Jesus' parable describing whom he called into God's kingdom: “Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in here the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.” (Lk. 14: 21) Jesus invited everyone, even--perhaps especially--society's outcasts.

That's what public schools do: accept all the poor, disadvantaged, emotionally/intellectually handicapped, and underachieving students parochial schools won't. And such kids often create a diverse, open community that is itself a powerful lesson in values and ethics.

That was one lesson few learned in the Catholic high school I abandoned. Despite the fact that over 40% of its students weren't Catholic, any idea or cultural expression which didn't toe the dogmatic line was simply unwelcome. Was that teaching spirituality?

In his own quiet way, though, I think my public school colleague Jeff Weinmann is very spiritual. A professional musician and album producer, he left it all to teach choir at my school. On his way to conduct the Fall concert last Wednesday evening, another car plowed into his. When he arrived at the theater, he discovered that the risers were missing. The microphones were too. He was having a bad day.

Nonetheless, Weinmann found his smile and joyfully led his choir--composed primarily of kids who could never set foot in a school like De La Salle--through moving renditions of “Go Tell It On The Mountain,” “Lean on Me,” and “We Can Make A Difference.”

Weinmann bursts the public school stereotype and powerfully rebuts Ladouceur's remarks.

And yet, to every stereotype there is at least a grain of truth. Because of their usually smaller size, their more homogeneous students, and their relative freedom from state bureaucracy and partisan politics, I know parochial schools can more easily set high standards and speak more openly about spirituality.

Similarly, many public schools take cultural/religious pluralism to a ludicrous extreme. In local Castro Valley High School, for instance, student leaders want to make their annual December assembly as “unoffensive” as possible, and will remove any vestige of religion. I wonder, what will be left for them to celebrate?

Even so, in comparing public and private schools neither can claim the moral high ground; nor will either always live up (or down) to its stereotype.

The Truth About Public Schools

2009-07-17T14:38:00.000-07:00

These are trying times to teach in public schools. So many in government and the media have jumped onto the bash-the-public-schools bandwagon.

Vouchers are the most recent, and the most serious attack. Implicit in their very existence is the assumption that public schools have failed, and that we educators are to blame. It's a wonder any college graduates at all enter the education profession anymore. It's a wonder so many remain in it.

However, an astounding but little-known piece of research, completed in 1991 by the Sandia National Laboratories, should give teachers heart. (Endless peer-reviews ordered by an apparently disgruntled Bush Administration delayed its dissemination.)

The Sandia researchers, who had hoped to get to the bottom of ”The Problem” with public schools, came to a startling conclusion: “To our surprise, on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”

How can this be? Everybody knows that more kids are dropping out than ever before, right?

Wrong. Sandia Labs evaluated graduation figures for the last hundred years and determined that “today's youth are obtaining high school diplomas at unprecedented rates.” About 75% of our kids graduate on time, and another ten percent later go on to obtain a G.E.D. That's the highest rate in our country's history!

Did you know that college graduation figures are even more flattering? At present, one quarter of our youth garner a college diploma--the highest rate in the world! Even more encouraging is the fact that women and minorities comprise an increasing number and percentage of them.

Ah, but everybody knows that those diplomas don't really mean much anymore. Our standards have fallen. Current S.A.T. scores make that eminently, and depressingly clear.

Wrong again. Sandia Labs found that, while it is true that average S.A.T. scores are lower, this is because elite students aren't the only ones taking the exam anymore. You see, now many, many more kids aspire to college. (Quite an achievement on teachers’ part.) Since most of them are from middle and lower classes, it is only natural that average S.A.T. scores have dropped a bit. Nonetheless, the performance of elite kids during the last 15 years has increased by nearly 40 points.

Yeah, but everybody knows that public schools are inefficient, and waste a lot of money. (It's teachers’ outlandish salaries, I guess.)

Wrong yet again. Yes, the average per-pupil expenditures have increased dramatically in recent years. But Sandia Labs took the time to look behind those figures. They uncovered that the increase was primarily due to special education classes--the ones for the troubled or learning-disabled kids most private schools refuse to admit. It costs roughly seven times more to teach them.

Once the researchers removed these federally mandated (but unfunded) special-ed. programs from their calculations, they ascertained that the cost of regular public education has remained constant during the past twenty years. In other words, educators have never before done so much with so little.

The Sandia National Laboratories concluded, “The U.S. education system is performing as well as or better than ever before.” So, no matter what “everybody knows,” educators ought to be mighty proud of themselves.

For a copy of the Sandia Report, “Perspectives on Education in America,” contact Heldref Publications, The Journal of Educational Research, 1319 Eighteenth Street, NW, Washington, DC 200036-1802.

Merit Pay

2009-07-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

Governor Schwarzenegger hopes to link my salary to my performance, implement some sort of merit pay. I guess the party is over. Now I’ll finally have to get to work.

First, I’m going to change my reading program. Thus far I haven’t focused on raising test scores, but on strengthening basic skills and nurturing enduring attitudes. I’ve worked to get my students to read more and better by requiring reading logs tied with challenges and goals, creating literary circles and other opportunities for kids to discuss literature, teaching reading strategies such as making connections and Reciprocal Teaching….

Silly me! Although backed by research, such a holistic approach may not immediately raise test scores. I’ll never convince Arnold I’m a worthy teacher that way! What’s worse, the next years’ teachers will take credit for my work! I’ll just have the kids read lots of short, arcane passages and then answer a fill-in-the-bubble questionnaire afterwards. They’ll hate it, but their test scores will rise. As long as I make it appear like they’re learning, I’ll get my money.

Also, I’m going to inform the principal that I will no longer have special education kids clustered in my class. Not only have they required more effort on my part over the years, but they’ve lowered my test scores. Yep, those needy kids made me look bad! Well, not any more.

In fact, given that so many of the students at my school are poor, why don’t I just transfer to the school on the other, wealthy side of town? I’ll work less, but seem to be more successful. What a fool I’ve been.

No matter where or whom I teach next year, I’m going to stop sharing my lesson plans and teaching strategies with any of the new teachers. After all, there’s only so much of that merit money to go around; and if those young whippersnappers outperform me, I’ll lose out. Let them learn how to teach the painstaking, hard way through trial and error, the way I did. I’m sorry, but in Governor Schwarzenegger’s brave new world of teacher accountability, it’s every teacher for himself!

Oh, but whom am I fooling? I’m forgetting I so publicly opposed the former superintendent when she closed the continuation high school (thus dooming untold numbers of kids to failure) and when she attempted to implement that disastrous reconfiguration plan (thus wasting over sixteen million construction dollars). Now, for all my efforts to defend children and my district I’ve been labeled a troublemaker.

From now on, I’m going to keep my big mouth shut, no matter what. Maybe if I just go along with everything administrators say for a few years, I can earn my way back into their good graces, their good evaluations, and some merit pay. Lord knows, I’ll deserve it after all that!

Of course, there are some bitter cynics who question the Governor’s motive. They complain that a paltry thousand dollars or so to a few, obsequious teachers will do nothing to address the fact that, according to Economic Policy Institute research, teachers earn an hourly wage 23.4%

less than other similarly qualified professionals; that, as a result, teachers generally comprise the least qualified of our college graduates. Which is not even to mention that California, despite its unusually high rates of poor and non-English speaking students, still boasts some of the largest class sizes in the nation.

To such disgruntled nay-sayers who claim Schwarzenegger is just diverting attention from those real, dire issues, I have but a few, choice words: More merit pay for me!

School Reform

2009-07-15T14:06:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Heights High

Education reform is like tax reform. We all wish to cut taxes, of course, at least in theory. As soon as our own entitlement disappears, however, our indignant protests begin.

This ubiquitous but latent disingenuousness bared its hideous head a few years ago at Heights High School, just outside Cleveland, Ohio.

Although apparently integrated (unlike most of its neighbors), Heights High was actually two distinct, segregated schools: one for college-bound European American kids clustered in upper-level courses, and another for African Americans who languished in "standard track" classes. You see, the quality of education a student received depended largely on his or her race.

A unique opportunity for reform occurred in 1988, with the inception of The Model School Project at Heights High. A generous grant empowered teachers to identify the school's deficiencies, research alternatives, redesign their school from the ground up, and then govern it afterwards.

Eventually, a specific plan emerged, with the concept of small schools within a school at its core. In order to ameliorate Heights High's immense size (over 4000 students), family-like groups of students and teachers would be created. The ``families'' would remain together during the freshman and sophomore years, and thus come to know each other well. Each family would be composed of five teachers and approximately one hundred and twenty-five students. Classes would be smaller, and each team of five teachers would enjoy a common prep, permitting it to deliver an interdisciplinary, core curriculum to all students, regardless of race.

What an innovative, exciting idea! Nonetheless, once the details of The Model School Project were announced, everyone--and I mean everyone--assailed it.

The teachers' union, for example, asserted that site-based management was a threat to both union leadership and the time-honored adversarial relationship between teachers and administration. Besides, it violated the contract.

The union opposed the school-within-a-school concept as well. It wouldn't be fair for some teachers in freshman/sophomore core classes to have fewer students than their colleagues. Meanwhile, honors course teachers were loath to leave their cush classes, full of motivated students. Also, achieving smaller class sizes would be expensive, diverting scarce funds away from teachers' salaries....

Next, a small but vocal group of affluent European American parents balked at the idea of mixing everyone together. They descended on the Board of Education, threatening to vote down an up-coming school bond, and to send their kids to private schools. The Board, displaying consummate, but all-too-typical cowardice, immediately acquiesced.

Ironically, even many African-American teachers and parents objected to the reforms. They feared that the new, more rigorous curriculum might be too difficult for their kids, who often came from troubled homes. They also labeled some new get-tough discipline policies as ``racist.''

This sad story of Heights High makes the obstacle to improving public schools uncomfortably clear: We all support the idea of reform, but only as long none of us has to compromise or risk anything for the sake of the common good.

We have met the enemy, and he is us--all of us.

Welcome to Heights High, The Crippling Politics of Restructuring America's Public Schools by Diana Tittle, The Ohio State University Press,1995, chronicles in gruesome detail the rise and fall of the Model School Project.

Those Who Can…

Mr. Jones embarrasses me. His classes are at best uninspiring. In fact, he’s almost as bored as his students. Yet, he’s either unwilling or incapable of trying anything new. And I must call him my colleague.

Mr. Jones teaches at virtually every school. He’s easy to spot: He’s the one whose car tires squeal as he races out of the parking lot every afternoon at three o'clock. Heaven forbid he should hang around to coach or tutor! Or maybe he sends numerous kids to the office each day—evidence more of his inability to manage a classroom than of the kids' poor behavior.

Or, perhaps he’s the one hogging the VCR, preferring to teach with a remote instead of a piece of chalk.

Why doesn’t Mr. Jones move on to another profession? He’s no fool. He could never find another job where performance (or lack there of) has so little to do with salary and job security. As long as he doesn’t noticeably harm kids, he’ll enjoy tenure and a periodic raise. And it’s oh so easy to be mediocre!

Even if administrators could manage to fire Mr. Jones, they wouldn't dare. Whom would they find to replace him? It's not like there are crowds of bright young college grads clamoring for his position. And those they do mange to hire tend to score near the bottom on tests such as the SAT and GRE.

Indeed, a 1985 report by the National Institute of Education revealed, "…there has been a decline in the numbers of intellectually talented people entering the teaching profession. College students who choose education as a major have lower average scores on a number of indices of ability than students who select other majors. Among students who begin an education program, those who complete the program have less ability than those who switch to other programs. Among college graduates who get teaching certificates, those who seek teaching jobs are less talented than those who do not. Most alarming of all, among people who take Jobs as teachers, those who remain in teaching after five years are less able than those who leave to enter other fields.

You see, there is some truth to that old, insidious adage: "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Why would anyone really talented choose to become a teacher when he could make so much more money, and enjoy so much more prestige doing something else?

Many people, thank God, do. Call them idealistic. Call them naive. They work tirelessly, thanklessly, heroically. They, too, can be found in every school, working right along side of the likes of Mr. Jones. Their motto is, "Those who can, teach; those who can't, go into some other, less significant line of work." They love and excel at what they do. They inspire me.

The trouble is, there aren't enough of them; and there are more than a few like Mr. Jones. And as long as that remains the case, any proposal for education reform is doomed to failure. No matter how we structure our schools, they can never be any better than the Mr. Joneses who staff them.

No Panacea

2009-07-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

In 1789, the French dreamed of creating Utopia. After storming the Bastille and eventually beheading King Louis XVI, they declared a republic of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.”

Viva la naivete! You see, in this imperfect, messy world of ours, liberty with equality is unattainable. Pure equality, for example, can be achieved only at the expense of personal freedoms, as the communists demonstrated. Similarly, unbridled liberty invariably leads to a terribly unequal distribution of wealth, as we capitalists have discovered. In other words, in politics and economics, we can't both have our cake and eat it too.

Unfortunately the same proves true for most educational issues. The controversy surrounding Basic Skills and Higher Ordered Thinking (Phonics verses Whole Language) provides an apt example. Both extremes have led us to disaster. Hopefully we've learned from our mistakes, and will now pursue a blended approach.

There are innumerable instances of such difficult dilemmas. Some people demand that their neighborhood control their local school. The problem is this engenders outrageous disparities between rich and poor schools--an injustice many state supreme courts have declared unconstitutional. California's did in 1976. Now every school in California has at least a basic minimum of funding. Unfortunately, every school is burdened with massive state bureaucracy as well. Either way we lose.

How about tracking or heterogeneous grouping? When we tried sorting kids according to ability--into reading groups like the bluebirds, the redbirds, and the crows--we ended up inadvertently dividing youngsters according to their socio-economic backgrounds. Poor students, too often kids of color, found themselves placed with the crows, a lower track from which they never escaped.

Oh, we're wiser now, and keep most kids together. Nonetheless, with one child in a class reading on a 4th grade level, and another who's ready for high school texts, it's often an overwhelming challenge indeed to meet their individual needs.

Then there's “site-based management,” a current educational buzzword which posits that each school should be left alone to make its own decisions. Locally, Fremont schools come closest to approximating this. The price? (There's always one hidden somewhere, you know!) Encouraging every school to march to the beat of a different drummer is not usually the most efficient use of resources. In addition, schools invariably become so different that parents fight to get their kids into the one perceived to be best.

New Haven, on the other hand, has made equity its watchword, regimenting it with strict, top-down centrally-controlled cadences. As a result, the district is financially sound, but (Here comes the price.) for many years the creativity and initiative at its various schools were stifled.

So, what's the answer? Should I have my kids study individually or in teams? Should I plan active projects or make a real attempt at completing the curriculum? Teach Western Civilization or embrace Multiculturalism? Foster self-esteem or enforce strict discipline? Aaagh!

Education abounds with such dilemmas, tough choices between apparently desirable but mutually exclusive goals. The best we can do is finally stop the pendulums from swinging erratically from one extreme to another, strive for some uneasy balance, and then reconcile ourselves to feeling still dissatisfied.

Perhaps, though, once we accept that there can be no Utopia, we'll stop shouting at each other, begin to compromise, and maybe even achieve that last of French ideals, Fraternity.

Teachers' Unions

2009-07-13T14:49:00.000-07:00

Bloody Awful

Some bloody thoughts on the current war against unions in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

First, teachers’ unions have unwittingly helped to bring this attack on. While they have succeeded in slowly increasing teacher compensation, and have wisely defended public education from the misguided market-based “reforms,” they’ve never championed an alternative plan to radically transform schools--leaving the impression they’re merely a self-interested impediment to change. Teachers’ unions have essentially slit their own throats.

This has made it easy for Republicans to take advantage of our economic crisis to eviscerate unions, beginning with those of public employees. After all, unions tend to support Democratic candidates and causes. In addition, they’ve been among the few remaining organizations with enough wealth and power to take on corporations.

Recall that the Supreme Court ruled recently that corporations may spend unlimited, secret fortunes on elections, thus converting The United States from a republic into a corporatocracy. Once the unions are gone, the corporations will rule virtually unopposed.

And, make no mistake: Those corporations and the small oligarchy of obscenely wealthy individuals who control them have been undermining our republic for a generation, insidiously destroying the foundation of any democracy, a strong middle class. They’ve shipped jobs overseas, forcing American workers to compete with exploited ones in developing nations. And they’ve rewritten tax laws to amass this nation’s wealth into the hands of a very few, themselves.

So, truly, middle class Americans who voted Republican and who support the current assault on unions are essentially slitting their throats, too. (Of course, the Republicans have always been masters at manipulating people into voting against their own economic interests.)

And then there are the ever-diminishing stature and morale of educators.

Teachers in the United States have long been treated with disdain (unlike in the nations that, supposedly, outperform us on standardized tests). Perhaps this is due to the fact that, until recently, most grade and middle school teachers were women. Or, maybe it’s because teachers tend to come from the bottom percentiles of our college graduates. Meanwhile, the profession has become so stressful, so laden with isolation and frustration that most educators flee within five years. (Too often, the best ones.)

In the last decade, we’ve thickened this depressing morass with high stakes standardized testing--thus, narrowing curriculum, strangling all the depth, creativity, engagement, nobility and fun that made altruist individuals want to become educators. Then, we’ve targeted the “hoards of lazy, incompetent teachers” who dare to nurture our most needy youth, publishing their dubious “value-added” score to root them out and humiliate them.

Meanwhile, although we insist on holding teachers accountable, we let everyone else off scot-free. We forgive governments for under-funding education while increasing the ranks of poor kids; and we absolve so many parents for their own irresponsibility and neglect.

Why not, since teachers make such convenient scapegoats?

We all know, deep down, that the first step to true reform would be to get outstanding teachers into every single classroom. But, rather than raise the education profession on high, making it among the most selective, well-remunerated, and, therefore, prestigious of all, we’re demeaning it as never before. As our coup de grace, we’ll destroy the profession’s and public education’s last (albeit imperfect) defense, unions.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, though: Essentially, by doing so, we’re also slitting our children’s throats.

It’s bloody awful, indeed.

A Bed Unions Have Made

In its opinion of July 6, 2010, The Argus endorsed SB1285.The Teachers’ Unions are fighting to defeat it.

If made law, SB 1285 would address the fact that, amid devastating state-wide teacher layoffs, schools with the highest number of disadvantaged students may lose the majority of their faculty, while other schools with wealthy students will dismiss but a small fraction of theirs.

“The reason for the huge disparity,” The Argus explained, “is state law that forces districts to lay off their least senior teachers first. Often low-performing schools have a higher percentage of new teachers, who are the first in line to be laid off. As a result, those schools endure the most disruption, which makes it more difficult for them to improve student performance.”

The real, underlying issue, of course, is not that disadvantaged schools face the highest number of layoffs, but that they’ve been saddled with so many inexperienced teachers in the first place.

In fact, the most unconscionable moral injustice in public education is that we’ve nearly always sent our least qualified educators to the children most desperate for a good teacher and a great education.

Consider the fact that, since teacher salaries comprise the vast majority of school budgets, and since experienced teachers receive substantially higher salaries than their novice peers, Oakand hills schools, for example, often spend thousands of dollars more per pupil than their hapless flatland counterparts, even though they’re in the same district.

Rather than redress this heinous crime, we’ve chosen to “reform” education with high stakes testing. Then, when the very schools we’ve so shamelessly shortchanged don’t measure up, we feign shock, even outrage, and we punish them with escalating sanctions. (Haven’t we punished them and their children enough already?)

The current plague of teacher layoffs has finally brought this disgrace into the limelight--a most disturbing silver lining.

SB1285 is but a long-overdue if imperfect remedy. First, it would require parity in teacher layoffs, resulting in districts having to fire many experienced teachers while keeping many novices—yet another dubious reform, I fear. But, which is far more important, the bill would also mandate parity in future teacher placement. At last all schools would begin to share both experienced and new teachers. This part of the bill is revolutionary.

Teachers’ unions, however, are apoplectic. You see, SB1285 threatens teacher seniority, which they hold sacrosanct.

Thus, although their names end with the word “Association,” as with the National and California Teachers’ Associations (of which I am a member), they reveal themselves to be little more than unions—concerned primarily with protecting contracts, the welfare of teachers, and the status quo.

True professional educational associations would have long ago denounced the hoarding of the best teachers in the most affluent schools, and led a fierce, relentless campaign to end the practice. They would have passionately put the interests of children first, especially those most in need.

Teach for America has brought some of this nation’s best and brightest college graduates to inner-city and poor schools, but the unions have decried that, too.

So, yes, SB1285 is a hard slap in the face to teachers’ unions.

I hope it will serve to wake them up to the fact that, in these dire times, public education requires courageous leadership and radical change.

Teachers’ unions claim they are the last defense for public education. I agree. But, if they refuse to come up with a bold plan for the most pressing educational issues, then one will be forced upon them, as with SB 1285. If they persist in condemning misguided attempts at reform without proffering real alternatives, then they will increasingly be seen as the problem, not the solution.

It will mean the end of both teachers’ unions and public education. And it will be a bed the unions, themselves, have made.

Not Large Enough

“I have never seen a strike as large as this or as successful—not only in Hayward, but across the state,” gushed Kathleen Crummey, president of the Hayward Education Association, a week ago Thursday.

Lately it seems few districts anywhere can ratify a new contract without rancorous negotiations dragging on for months, always with a strike looming, and sometimes, as with Hayward, actually occurring.

The issues if not the particulars remain the same, year after year, district to district. Teachers fight to protect their health care and to obtain a decent wage. Trustees and administrators struggle to balance a shrinking budget amid declining enrollment, while preserving student programs.

My experience has been, although both sides claim the moral high ground, neither occupies it. Teacher leadership often strips itself of its professional-association fig leaf, stooping to the worst union tactics of misleading propaganda and personal vilification. Meanwhile, administrators cunningly shuffle funds around, pleading poverty while nonetheless hiring new administrators or granting raises to existing ones.

Of course, no matter who “wins,” it’s the kids who lose.

So does public education, especially in light of two obvious but little acknowledged facts. First, the real monetary decisions affecting every single California school district take place, not locally, but in Sacramento. Ever since Proposition 13 passed in 1978, the California legislature has under-funded public schools. In fact, a comprehensive school finance study released in March revealed the state should, among other reforms, increase annual education spending by a minimum of 40%, or $17 billion.

How effective is it, then, for local educators to tear each other and their districts to ribbons every few years, clawing over meager scraps of educational funding? What is ever resolved?

Second, we are in the midst of a conspiracy to discredit public education. Its well-placed, sanctimonious perpetrators plot to enact vouchers, and so transfer billions of public dollars to private and religious institutions. Anyone who doubts should read The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools by David Berliner and Bruce Biddle (1995); or What You Should Know About the War Against America's Public Schools, by Gerald Bracey (2002).

Every time districts like Hayward wallow in yet another episode of ugly labor strife, those who plot against them wring their hands with glee, chuckling that parents and law-makers will lose faith, become increasingly exasperated, ever-more open to vouchers. Thus, educators unwittingly but oh-so-effectively do the bidding of their common enemy. It really is pathetic.

It’s high time teachers, administrators, and trustees everywhere declared a truce, took a breath, and realized there is a better way: Interest Based Bargaining. All could agree to deal with each other respectfully, honestly, and to never lose sight of the fact that their shared goal of great public schools makes them colleagues, not enemies.

With the resulting new-found trust, they could dispense with the rigid rules governing collective bargaining and, instead, place their various concerns on the table, and collaborate as best they can. They’d grudgingly accept upfront that, given the paltry budget available, most decisions will be excruciating—both harmful to children and unjust for teachers.

Then, united in their rage, they should take the battle to where it belongs, Sacramento.

If there is to be a strike, let it be a state-wide one, a day when every school in California closes, when students, parents, teachers, administrators and trustees, arm in arm, hundreds of thousands strong, descend upon the state legislature and demand adequate funding for our schools.

Kathleen Crummey called the first day of Hayward’s strike a success. I don’t believe any single-district strike can ever be anything other than a disaster. Crummy thought the strike was the largest ever. The trouble is, like most public school educators, she doesn’t think large enough.

Evolve or Die

Teachers unions are earning an increasingly bad rap, while time for them and for public education is running out. Even so, there may now exist a unique opportunity for redemption.

The December 8th Time Magazine cover, for instance, features Michelle Rhee, “the new, bold-talking chancellor running the District of Columbia Public Schools system.” She stands in a classroom grim, determined, dressed in black, wielding a broom—a prop representing her campaign to clean up DC’s schools by sweeping out bad teachers. She’s sacked 270 so far. And the headline, “How to Fix America’s Schools,” emphasizes how Rhee’s battle has national implications.

Rhee also wants to make Washington’s best teachers the highest paid in the country. In exchange, however, those teachers need to give up tenure, their hitherto sacrosanct job security.

The villains according to this and other stories dealing with both Rhee’s crusade and other school reform efforts are teachers unions. Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts minced few words in his scornful November 15th Argus piece, “The [DC] teachers union apparently exists in some alternate universe where everyone is rewarded equally regardless of the quality of their work. So it has fought Rhee with bitter tenacity, seeking to block her at every step.”

It is true that both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers have long been on the defensive, decrying most recent school reform efforts, such as No Child Left Behind, vouchers, charter schools, and merit pay—with very good reasons too many and complex to elaborate here, although I’ve explained quite of few of them in previous columns.

The trouble is, the unions have not proposed any real alternatives. For example, to foster teacher quality, the California Teachers Association (NEA’s state affiliate, of which I am a member) recommends improving teacher training, professional development, and work conditions—which are fine and important goals. Nonetheless, they alone fail to adequately address the fact that more than a few educators are incompetent, and a hugely disproportionate number of them end up “teaching” in our inner cities.

Legislators, the public, parents, and even Chancellor Rhee have every right—in fact, a responsibility—to make accurate teacher evaluation and fair compensation one of the cornerstones of education reform. Great teachers deserve to be acknowledged, rewarded, and strongly encouraged to help the children who need them most. Struggling teachers must be supported and, if they fail to improve, dismissed—without it costing in excess of $100,000 per teacher to do so.

The good news is that Barack Obama will likely end the attacks on and misguided reforms for public education. Indeed, rumors abound that he will nominate Stanford University’s Linda Darling-Hammond for Secretary of Education—a clear sign that research and not ideology will finally guide federal education policy, with a huge emphasis on both teacher quality and social justice.

Now, then, is the critical moment for teachers unions to step out from behind their barricade, to join with instead of opposing those who would reform public education; to, in fact, lead the way. Given that teacher efficacy is the single most important factor in a child’s academic success or failure, such leadership has to include a bold re-visioning of teacher recruitment, training, evaluation, compensation and tenure.

Without delay, teachers unions must design then fight for the radical change in public education that is so urgent. American’s survival as an economic power and a thriving democracy depends on it, as does the fate of the unions themselves. After all, as the Times article underscored, in Washington DC more than a third of the city’s kids have fled to charter and private schools—so far. The Darwinian writing on the wall is clear: evolve or perish.

I pray our nation’s maligned teachers unions will very soon evolve into the prestigious professional associations they were meant to be; and our public schools into similarly respected institutions where the President and everyone else will eagerly send their children.

Retention

2009-07-12T14:34:00.000-07:00

My hand darted uncharacteristically back and forth among the small dishes at the center of the table: first cookies, then pistachios, next almonds, followed by another cookie… No, I wasn’t famished. I was frustrated, facing an apparently futile dilemma. And so I ate.

Around the table sat the principal, assistant principal, counselor, school psychologist, Healthy Start Coordinator, and another teacher. Together we had to decide the fate of six (ten percent!) of my students: To retain or not to retain?. That was the question. Should these kids repeat the 7^th Grade?

All the children had—according to “multiple measures” (a current educational buzzword) of failed grades, low standardized test scores and deficient writing samples—learned very little during the past year, and were performing far below standards. And all had their own stories.

We passed two of the kids on because they had learning disabilities but still seemed recently to be showing promise. Another we dismissed because he’d already been retained once. Clearly that strategy hadn’t worked. Besides, if we held him back again he’d be able to drive himself to 8^th grade.

The other three were more problematic. Two were “flat-liners,” failing nearly every class despite their evident ability. They’d just refused to work, spurning all offers of extra help. The third was truant. He’s missed half the year because his mom kept him home to baby-sit, or because he’d simply “overslept.”

Were these kids just lazy? Perhaps, in part. However, they also evinced symptoms of clinical depression. Worse, they suffered from parental neglect, as well. (Had the latter caused the former?) My repeated phone calls/progress reports home had been greeted first with excuses, then hostility, and finally resignation. It was so much easier for parents just to give up than to follow through on a daily basis.

We educators around the table, though, didn’t have that luxury or inclination. And so we debated.

Some pointed to the research indicating that retention was almost never an effective intervention. In fact, 90% of those students repeating one grade, and 98% or those repeating two eventually drop out of high school. So, although we wanted to believe holding my students back would make them and their parents finally care, such an argument seemed spurious, illusory.

Others in the room countered that, although we educators were in the success business, we were in the standards business as well. These kids had not met any standards. And what message did it send them and their peers to continue passing them on year after year?

The debate raged. Damned if we did. Damned if we didn’t. I wasn’t the only one grabbing for a tasteless cookie.

Unspoken during our deliberations was the “elephant” on the table: these kids’ parents and their negligence. If they were held accountable for their children’s academic success or failure as we were--if, for example, they were fined for each day of their children’s truancy, or compelled to explain to a judge why their children never completed homework--then we’d never have found ourselves facing such a terrible dilemma. However, in America we ridicule schools, blame teachers, fail students—but never even mention parents or their responsibility, culpability.

The Retention Committee and I decided to retain the two flatliners. The truant kid, since he had managed to earn at least a few D’s, we promoted to 8^th grade on the condition he faithfully attend summer school.

Did we make the right decision? Did one even exist for us? Have a cookie.

School Violence

2009-07-11T14:15:00.000-07:00

“I wish he would just kill himself," Matt's dad exclaimed when I informed him of his son's expulsion. Another father responded similarly, lashing out at his tearful daughter, Anna, "Why won't you just run away?" Jimmy, whom I suspect I'll expel before June, has only one thing to say to me, ever: "I don't care."

I believe him. Why should he care, about anyone or anything, least of all himself, given that nobody significant in his life has ever cared for him? He's been tossed like a hot potato from one reluctant family member to another. He knows he's bad. He's accepted with an eerie stoicism that life, too, is awful, and likely to remain so.

These profoundly unhappy kids—and so many others in schools throughout this nation—are bright, beautiful, and, I suspect, clinically depressed. I've referred them to a therapist who counsels them periodically here on campus, both individually and in groups. They discuss anger control, even though they have many legitimate, horrific reasons to be furious. They speak of self-esteem, even though their experience has thoroughly convinced them they are worthless.

"What do you want?" desperately, repeatedly I ask them. And then, to fill their ominous silence, I plead, "Whatever it is, don't lose sight of it! Make your decisions carefully so you won't throw it away. You can be master of your fate..."

Nonetheless, with few exceptions such kids spurn my advice, sabotage any possibility for happiness. They simply loathe themselves and their lives too much. Indeed, they're quite clever about putting me in a position where I must punish them, even kick them out of school, and thus become an unwitting accomplice in their unconscious, self-destructive designs.

Ultimately many will commit suicide—slowly, with alcohol, with drugs, with unprotected sex, with gangs, with crime. Or, like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School, a few will end their lives in a violent rampage.

You see, those boys were hardly unique. They were but a sensational, gruesome tip of an untold iceberg of "outcast" children in our society, some of whom grace my office daily, most of whom either already populate our burgeoning prisons or soon will. They don't all wear black trench coats. However, so many have grown up essentially orphans, lacking one decent adult who might have spent time with them, listened to their dreams, set some sane limits, who should have told them daily in both word and deed, "I love you."

Without such nurturing—which neither a therapist nor I can magically provide now — children grow up spiritually withered, twisted, deformed.

I cannot condemn the two Colorado boys (or the kids I expel from school such as Matt, Anna, and Jimmy). The boys were monsters, yes, but they also were victims. My God, who filled their young hearts with such hatred for others and themselves? Who taught them to fire an assault rifle or make a propane bomb? Who left them alone, with enough unsupervised time to meticulously plan such an unspeakable act of nihilism and despair?

Such kids and such catastrophes do not arise spontaneously. Like Frankenstein, we create them. And it will take a lot more than shaking our heads in feigned disbelief to wash our hands of their blood, or the blood they spill.

Textbooks

2009-07-10T14:36:00.000-07:00

“History is real simple,” Rush Limbaugh claimed. “You know what history is? It’s what happened.”

Tell that to the scholars currently arguing before the California Board of Education about what 6^th grade history texts ought to include for India. As Argus Reporter Jonathan Jones covered in his front-page article last Monday, many groups have accused even recently revised texts of an “anti-Hindu,” “anti-Indian” bias. Should “Men had many more rights than women” be changed to “Men had different duties than women”? Should texts even mention the rigid caste system at all? One local activist argued, “The textbooks should highlight the positive aspects and encourage tolerance.”

Lest any of us too hastily smile with bemused condescension at such revisionism, we’d do well to recall that similar arguments have raged about virtually every topic in all our history textbooks for years.

For example, while teaching our children to “Remember the Alamo,” dare we mention that one of the Texans’ complaints with Mexican President (Dictator?) Santa Ana was he wouldn’t let the Alamo “freedom-fighters” keep their slaves?

Similarly, isn’t it odd that, in covering the Mexican American War (Abraham Lincoln derided it as a “trumped-up war.”), few United States texts honor the Children Heroes of Chapultepec? Rather than surrender to U.S. troops, the young cadets, Mexico’s last defense, wrapped themselves in Mexican flags and threw themselves off the parapet to their deaths.

No, in order to survive California’s onerous textbook adoption process, publishers must excise everything that might offend anyone--liberal or conservative. The texts emerge incomplete, poorly written, and deadly boring.

On the other hand, at least our texts now treat India. Before we taught only Western Civilization: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages and—if the teacher got that far—the Renaissance. My current 7^th grade World History curriculum includes as well Islam, Japan, China, Africa, and Mesoamerica. As a result, though, the ponderous text must give each unit but cursory coverage. There’s too much to remember. Most is too shallow to be interesting.

So teachers, at least good ones, have to make tough choices: Which topic will they just touch on? Which will they explore more thoroughly?

The very best teachers will be upfront about doing so, as one of mine was years ago: He played “52 Pick Up” with the class. Strewing a deck of cards haphazardly over the classroom floor, he explained that each card represented one historical fact, but the text couldn’t contain them all. He bid a succession of students to choose the ten most important cards for inclusion, then he ruthlessly criticized each selection: “Oh, you think only royalty or face cards matter,” he scoffed, disdainfully tossing the first ten back onto the floor. With the next, “Hmm, you’ve chosen more black cards than red, and only two diamonds. Are you prejudiced?”

Finally, he explained, “You see, no one can get it right. Each textbook author and every classroom teacher will make different decisions according to his/her own interests, beliefs, biases and passions. Your job as students is to mistrust all texts, all teachers, including me. Remember: there is no correct history; there are always other cards on the floor, parts of history told wrong or left untold. So, keep searching.”

He was a great teacher. And like most inspiring educators, he used textbooks merely as one of many sources for his course. His classroom burst with painful dilemmas, complex issues, colorful personages, patriotic heroism and shameful atrocities. More often than not he left me confused, but fascinated.

Which, frankly, reveals the futility behind textbook controversies (and most educational debates). Idiots like Limbaugh think the solution is simple: just get the right textbook or a new test--as if either could ever make a teacher great.

There is no panacea to education, save one: Recruit more of our best and brightest into all our classrooms, train and support them well, and then get the hell out of their way. They’ll challenge and inspire, no matter what the textbook says.

Computers in Education

2009-07-09T15:32:00.000-07:00

In 1987, Florida's Vero Beach High School selected Judy Jones Teacher of the Year. This was unusual since it was only her first year at the school. However, Ms. Jones had agreed to work with the most difficult, unmotivated students; and once her colleagues witnessed those kids' astounding success, they had to acknowledge her achievement with the award. It's a fascinating, important story.

Vero Beach High, as with so many public schools, suffered from a depressing drop-out problem. It had piloted several intervention programs hoping to keep a mere sixty percent of its ``at-risk'' students in school--with dismal results. Even the few who didn't drop out continued to founder in their classes. Worse, they became terrible discipline problems, often preventing others from learning. What was the point in keeping them in class?

Desperate, despairing, Vero Beach finally agreed to try a radical experiment: Computer Education. Pull the worst kids out of their regular classes, sit them in front of a monitor, and see what happened. It was a long shot, but the school and the kids didn't really have anything to lose.

Normally, teachers would have balked at the notion of a machine usurping their role. But in this case they were more than willing to be rid of their troublesome students. Who, though, would be foolish enough to oversee them and the computer program?

Enter Judy Jones. Her new colleagues greeted her warmly, and then shook their heads knowingly when she left for the computer lab. Poor thing! They gave her a few days before....

Nothing happened. It was eerie. The teachers peeked in the lab as they walked nonchalantly by during their prep periods. To their amazement, the kids were on task, engrossed in their work. In June, more than eighty-five percent were still plugging away!

There's more. Surprised at their own success, Ms. Jones' students decided to take the high school equivalency exam (G.E.D.). In a state where only about sixty percent of kids with high school diplomas could pass the challenging test, over eighty-five percent of Ms. Jones' computer-educated at-risk students did. In a matter of months they'd mastered what many students never learn at all. No wonder Ms. Jones became Teacher of the Year!

Nearby districts took notice. Soon over twenty had implemented Computer Education for their at-risk students, all with similarly wonderful results. Perhaps it was because the computer allowed students to learn at their own, individual pace. Or maybe it was its immediate feedback and emphasis on basic skills. Whatever the reason, the computer clearly succeeded where teachers had failed.

Nonetheless, most schools continue to utilize the computer only as a glorified word processor or internet browser. They encourage kids to research and write impressive projects on it. But they cringe at the thought of utilizing it as Vero Beach did to actually tutor or teach.

This is an inexcusable waste of resources. If the computer can be so wildly effective with at-risk high school students, imagine its success with eager grade-schoolers! Why wait until they're on the verge of dropping out?

Once we dare to harness the awesome power of the computer, there will be a lot more teachers as proud as Ms. Jones; and many more kids as successful as her students.

Anyone interested in learning more about Vero Beach and computers in education should read Frederick Bennett's Computers as Tutors, found on the internet: http://www.cris.com/~Faben1/

Reading

2009-07-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve climbed Mount Everest. Struggling desperately for breath and consciousness, I gazed below at a gathering storm that would nearly kill me, and would claim some of my friends. I’d spend the rest of my life wondering if my presence on that mountain had caused their deaths.

I’ve crossed the Hellespont with Alexander, the Alps with Hannibal, the Rubicon with Caesar, the Pacific with Magellan, even the Rockies with Sacagawea—both triumph and disaster awaiting most of them on the other side.

I’ve witnessed the awful battles of Cannae, Gettysburg and Stalingrad. I’ve watched transfixed while Atticus Finch futilely defended Tom Robinson, Othello tragically strangled Desdemona, Theodora boldly saved Byzantium, and Sophie made her terrible choice.

Not to namedrop, but I’ve befriended George Washington. And, let me tell you, he was hardly the saint I’d been told of. He was rash in his youth, and too often a bumbling fool as a military strategist. Nonetheless, his character and vision enabled him to lead an army of farmers to victory, and to guide many far-more brilliant men into founding a nation. This flesh-and-blood, warts-and-all Washington inspired me much more profoundly than his textbook marble statue.

Deep in the heart of windswept Mongolia, Genghis Khan showed me his sacred mountain, source of his strength. Afterwards, I rode with him as he ruthlessly created the largest empire the world has ever seen, then made of it a Camelot of open trade, religious freedom, the world’s first meritocracy where a man was judged not by his name or birth, but his character and skills. However, like all empires then and now, I watched it falter, then crumble into dust, leaving only an enduring legacy of ideas.

Ah, it’s those ideas and the questions that gave them birth that are immortal! I’ve long pondered how to reconcile the apparently conflicting notions of life and mortality, equality and liberty, individualism and community, dogma and existentialism, republicanism and federalism, reason and faith, idealism and pragmatism…. Perhaps wisdom comes with the recognition that, in this imperfect world, we can never find a happy balance between any of them. No, we must make do with tortured compromises, best guesses, callow mistakes, a panorama not of black and white but messy grays, and ultimately the realization that life is too often a tragedy.

Literature tells the story of this noble tragedy. And it’s by reading it that I, in one still-incomplete lifetime, have seen and done so much, met all those fascinating people, and confronted so many of life’s issues, most of them far beyond my own narrow experience. Literature enables me to touch immortality: to see the world through so many other people’s eyes, both living and long-dead, watch them face excruciating moral dilemmas; and, if I haven’t yet learned from their mistakes, perhaps I can at least one day accept my own failures more graciously.

Malcolm X reminisced how literature transformed his life as well, in prison. Curled up on the floor next to the bars of his cell, reading late into the night by the garish light down the passage, “I never felt so free in my life.”

And Thomas Jefferson warned of reading’s importance in a country like ours: “Democracy depends upon a nation that reads.”

You see, reading makes one both interested and interesting. It’s one of life’s greatest pleasures, one of a citizen’s most important responsibilities.

Which is why I learned recently with such horror of America’s declining culture: One in four adults didn’t read a single book last year. And the national average dropped in the last seven years from ten books per year to just four. Meanwhile, too many teachers chasing ever more elusive test scores feed their students worksheet after worksheet, instead of story after story, novel after novel. They’re creating, at our bidding, a generation of Americans who’ll hate reading.

Some day, many centuries hence, someone somewhere will read of this, and shake her head at the tragedy—but it won’t be a noble one.

Silence of the Lambs

2009-07-08T14:38:00.000-07:00

In 1998, San Francisco Unified School District became “The Mouse that Roared.”

Governor Wilson had required all districts to implement standardized testing, even before the state had delineated its curriculum standards and what it should test. Worse, he’d demanded that all students--even those who had just arrived from abroad and spoke not a stitch of English--take the full battery of tests in English.

A cynical person might infer that Wilson, in his zeal to implement vouchers and transfer billions of public dollars to private and religious schools, was setting public schools up to fail; but that’s beside the point.

The point is, only one school district, contemplating the prospect of subjecting so many innocent immigrant kids to a full week of incomprehensible testing, called it what it was--child abuse--and refused. “We won’t do it,” San Francisco announced to an aghast Department of Education and a red-faced governor. Then, to forestall the threatened sanctions, San Francisco Unified sued the Department of Education.

Well, you can imagine how quickly The Department settled that suit out of court, and so buried what might have emerged as a dangerous precedent: educators actually standing up to defend children.

What of the more than a thousand other California districts (including Fremont, Newark and New Haven) that, although similarly recognizing the absurdity and harm of Wilson’s edict, merely shook their collective heads, rolled their collective eyes, and sighed in resignation?

Silence.

I call it “The Silence of the Lambs” because we educators have allowed ourselves to be led about by politicians with their insidious agendas as if we were lambs. Or lemmings, perhaps. We’ve plunged off various cliffs--forsaking Whole Language for Phonics, eliminating shop, art, and home economics classes, insisting all kids take Algebra in 8^th grade--with nary a “Baaaaah!”

Perhaps we’ve been cowards. However, I recall a conversation with one New Haven district office administrator about former New Haven Superintendent Ruth Ann McKenna’s plans to close and raze the continuation high school, to implement disastrous reconfiguration and redistricting, and to convert James Logan High School into an elitist college preparatory academy. Like most of his fellow administrators, he privately acknowledged the insanity of it all, but still remained mute during staff meetings. “Ruth will hang herself on this,” he explained, “but I’ll still be here.” When I inquired about all the unfortunate students Ruth would take with her, he merely shrugged his shoulders and slunk away. Meanwhile, most teachers seemed far more concerned with protecting their health care than saving their students.

You know, as with the medical profession’s Hippocratic Oath, there ought to be a Socratic Oath all educators must take: They will not allow harm to come to children.

Now we face No Child Left Behind. Even though research demonstrates that high stakes testing has consistently lead to a decline in actual student achievement (Stanford University’s Linda Darling-Hammond’s is quite conclusive), President Bush has mandated high stakes testing as national policy.

And we educators have acquiesced once again.

“Silence equals death” was true during the onset of the AIDS crisis, and it remains true now in education. Superintendents, school boards, teacher/administrator associations, and teachers themselves should, like San Francisco Unified, finally rise up and dare to speak the truth. We must courageously defend public education and, above all, the children we’ve dedicated our lives to serve.

Or, we can continue to utter a pathetic “Baaaaah!” as we herd with them to the slaughter.

Poignant Moments

2009-07-07T14:32:00.000-07:00

The Little Drummer Boy

How do you say goodbye to your best friend? Not the normal goodbye, such as when two teens might head off to different colleges, wishing each other luck. No, Deonte’s friend, Steven, was dying. There would be no college for him, nor even, perhaps, a tomorrow. This would be no ordinary good-bye.

Of course, Steven was no ordinary friend. Deonte had met him in the first grade, and remained in the same class with him for the next five years. As they both matured, so did their friendship. They played baseball, football, and basketball together. In the school band, Steven played the trumpet, Deonte the drums. The two looked forward anxiously to the day when they’d finally don their uniforms, and go on tour with the varsity band.

Over the years, Deonte learned to depend on Steven. As bright as Deonte was, he tried the patience of many a principal, teacher, and coach, including me. He relied upon Steven’s calming presence, his steady example to keep him on the straight and narrow.

Then the fickle hand of fate struck Steven with Leukemia.

Everyone clung tenaciously to hope. There was chemotherapy, and maybe even a bone-marrow transplant. Steven would pull through. He just had to. After all, he was a straight-A student, winning all sorts of academic and service awards. Everybody liked him.

But Leukemia, ever merciless, didn’t take any of that into account. It continued its unrelenting ravage until, finally, Steven left the hospital for the last time. There was nothing more the doctors could do. Steven came home to die.

It was only then that Deonte accepted the awful fact that he’d have to say good-bye to Steven, forever. But how?

That evening, the entire band assembled in front of Steven’s house. Many teachers, students and neighbors gathered as well, hugging and consoling each other, all struggling to maintain a strained smile for Steven.

He finally emerged, doped with morphine, confined to a wheel chair, sucking air through an oxygen mask. Nonetheless, his indomitable spirit had prevailed over his weakened body: he sported a broad smile, and the glittering band uniform he had always longed to wear. No wonder Deonte liked him so much!

How could Deonte play, tucked away in the back of the band with the rest of the drums? It just didn’t seem enough. He needed Steven to see him, to hear him. So, quietly, he moved to the front, and stationed himself right next to Steven. The director, D.C., gave him a nod, and lifted his baton. Then the concert began.

And Deonte played for him, ba-rum-pa-pa-pum. The brass and winds kept time, ba-rum-pa-pa-pum. He played his drum for him ba-rum-pa-pa-pum. He played his best for him ba-rum-pa-pa-pum, rum-pa-pa-pum, rum-pa-pa-pum. He and his drum.

It was an incredibly beautiful, simple, profound gesture--one befitting the birth of a King, and the death of Deonte’s best friend.

Kids Say the Darndest Things

The call from the pool came just before recess. I grabbed my walkie-talkie and headed out the door of my Vice Principal's office at Willard Middle School in Berkeley. A student had injured himself on the diving board during Physical Education Class.

Trying not to run, I hastened to the pool where I found a giant of an 8th grader sitting on the side of the pool, rocking himself back and forth, dangling one leg into the water, bellowing obscenities. One glance at his ankle and I knew it was fractured severely. "I'm here, Freddie," I soothed, putting one arm around his shoulder. With the other I held up the walkie-talkie, instructing the office to dial 911, send down Freddie's emergency form, call his parents....

Freddie. My pet name for him was "Bubba," as he usually towered over me, and hefted, I guessed, at least 200 pounds. He and his friends had hung around my office most days after school, making themselves a welcome nuisance. Nonetheless, I'd suspended the lot of them the previous week for tossing some firecrackers at an elderly volunteer tutor. Even more maddening was the fact that, afterwards, they'd remained unrepentant in my office, lying and laughing about the whole escapade. I'd added an extra day of suspension for the ugly defiance, but had wondered since if I'd been motivated most by my feeling of betrayal. After the suspension, Freddie had avoided my office, and that had been fine by me.

All that was forgotten now. I called for some towels and covered Freddie's back. I debated if I should get him to lie down, elevate that ankle, try to prevent shock. But his steady stream of loud profanity deterred me. Before I knew it, the EMTs had arrived and pulled me gently away.

"Where're my things?" gasped Freddie wildly as the EMTs wrestled his stretcher into the ambulance.

"Up in front with me, Freddie," I assured him. Then I took my place next to the driver, feeling guilty about my excitement. I'd never ridden in an ambulance before. The driver attempted to make small talk while I cast worried glances back towards Freddie.

At the hospital there was no emergency room available, so Freddie moaned on his gurney in the middle of the corridor. I grasped his hand while nurses periodically took the pulse of his ankle, ensuring the fracture hadn't cut off the blood to his foot and toes.

At one awful moment, an aide rushed by recklessly and bumped the injured ankle. Freddie's prolonged shrieks brought curious heads peeking out from doors on either side of the busy hallway. I squeezed his hand even more tightly, and aggressively mopped the sweat off his brow, hoping to distract him from the agony. "Take big breaths, Freddie. That's it. You're OK, Freddie. You're going to be OK...."

Finally his screaming subsided, and his eyes focused again. He stared for a moment at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, then turned his head and looked at me. And that's when he said it. Lying prostrate in the middle of the emergency ward, orderlies passing back and forth on either side of him, enduring excruciating pain, Freddie murmured, "Mr. Ellison, I sure am sorry about those fire crackers."

"That's alright, Freddie," I responded, stifling a laugh, marveling at this young man.

Kids say the darnedest things.

Favorite Teachers

2009-07-06T14:19:00.000-07:00

Mr. Murphy

It's strange that of all the images I cherish of Mr. Murphy, the one that remains the most vivid is of his palsied arm.

I remember the evening was dreary, probably after a late rehearsal, and I had just helped Mr. Murphy into his car so his son could drive him home. Murphy’s face was uncharacteristically fatigued, and his right arm hung lifelessly at his side. I had to lift it myself and place it nonchalantly on his lap before slamming the door.

As his car sped away, I felt my first pang of worry, the startling realization that The Great Mr. Murphy--icon, legend, god--was in fact oh so terribly mortal. He died two months later.

I could never pity Mr. Murphy, despite all his ailments. He made sure of that the first week of Freshman Speech class. He explained matter-of-factly how Polio had struck him as a young man, leaving him captive in his wheelchair, harnessed to a respirator. A few days later, in the middle of one of his lectures, he abruptly disconnected the respirator tube, stood shakily up, and limped to the podium. When he saw our eyes grow wide in astonishment, he feigned surprise. “Oh, didn't you know I could walk?” Then he grinned. The joke was on us. No, no one could pity Mr. Murphy.

Everyone respected him, though. In addition to Speech, he taught Government, and managed all the school's fund raising. But it was his genius as a drama director that made his fame.

Mr. Murphy could deftly manage a pompous choreographer, an emotional music director, an unsteady conductor, and a cast and crew of well over a hundred immature students. He instilled in us all a deep love of the theater. More importantly, he taught us discipline, synergy, and pride. A good amount of my high school education, and virtually all of my growing-up took place after school, on his stage.

It wasn't easy for him, of course. Boy, could he lose his temper! All too often he'd defy his respirator and bellow out a “Shuuuuut uuuuuuuup!” loud enough to silence even a hall-full of unruly teenagers.

Nor was I an angel. “Ellison, you're a damn ham,” Mr. Murphy would growl, trying to put me in my place. Once he called backstage during a scene change, shrieking over the headphones, “You lose character on stage again and I'll lower the curtain!” He would've, too. I idolized him, but feared him just as much.

My senior year he gave me the lead in the spring musical. Then he beckoned me to his wheelchair. “I know you'll do fine, Dave,” he encouraged me. “But don't forget: No one is indispensable. Not you. Not even me. The show will go on without us, so we can't get full of ourselves.”

I wonder if he already knew he’d soon fulfill his own prophecy.

I dedicated all my performances to Mr. Murphy--not just the ones that Spring, but all my succeeding roles as an actor and a teacher. I still can't ham it up without thinking of him.

It's not just because he died. In spite of a terrible physical fate, he worked tirelessly, joyfully, always in the service of others. And in doing so he didn't teach me merely speech or government or drama. Mr. Murphy taught me how to live.

Poe

When I was a freshman in college, and spied the specter coming down the hall, he frightened me.

Absurdly tall, with a large shock of unkempt black hair and a deeply lined, forbidding face, he swung his cane relentlessly to and fro in front of him. He seemed a bizarre morphing of an Edgar Allen Poe horror story, and an elongated, dreary E1 Greco painting.

However, his gaping, vacuous eyes, which were forever tearing, as if from some terribly somber vision they alone could behold—yes, his eyes were the most unnerving. "Poe" was an apt name for him. Pity the poor undergrad who had him for a professor!

The first day second semester, I gasped silently when Poe entered my humanities seminar and, wiping his sightless yes, introduced himself as Stephen Rogers, the instructor.

By spring break, however, I had a new name for him: "Tiresias," the blind seer, the implacable prophet. It had quickly become obvious that it was I, not he, who was blind.

Patiently, sagely, Tiresias opened my eyes to The Great Books—works by Thucydides, Homer, Dante, Descartes Kant, Shakespeare, Aquinas, Nietzsche —the "dead white men" now in such disrepute.

I still recall as if it were yesterday his haunting reading of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Wasteland"—"April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain...."

For the first time, I began to appreciate the tremendous beauty of words and the power of the ideas they conveyed, even though I could still only barely understand them.

The next fall I changed my major to the liberal arts. "The arts of symbol-making and symbol-using," Tiresias explained, "the symbols we use to describe and ultimately to create our world, and ourselves."

"Pre-Unemployment," my father lamented dryly. But Tiresias won out. You see, he awed me.

Indeed, I was afraid to speak during my first few courses with him. Who wouldn't be in the presence of a prodigy who could nonchalantly recite obscure epic poems in five languages?

But, through a persistent mix of cajoling, goading, and easy laughter, Tiresias drew me out, igniting all the passion and curiosity I hadn't even known I possessed. Eventually he couldn't shut me up, and often accused me of throwing "intellectual hand-grenades" in the midst of many class discussions.

Finally, one day it was I who insisted on reading aloud a passage from Plato's "Apology," Socrates' stoic response to the judges who'd sentenced him to die: "Death has caught me, the old man. Evil has caught you, the young. Now, I must suffer my fate, and you must suffer yours….”

"That was very fine, David," Tiresias commented after a pause.

"Thanks, Doc," I responded flippantly. And the nickname stuck. Doctor Stephen Rogers, alias "Doc," coached me through my final, tortuous 40-page senior essay on The Psalms. He engendered within my soul a fierce love of learning, a deep belief in the potential nobility of Man. And he gently nudged me in the direction of "the most honorable of all professions," teaching.

Poe, Tiresias, Doc . . . He was my nightmare, my idol, and in the end my friend. He didn't just teach. He inspired. And that is what education is all about.

“Isn’t that right, Mr. Ellison?”

Father Kirby’s photograph appeared on the final page of my high school’s newsletter. He still wore the same white lab coat, and seemed on the verge of yet another dissertation on the intricacies of subatomic particles. I quickly scanned the accompanying column for news of his latest accomplishment, only to learn he had recently passed away.

I hadn’t thought of Father Kirby once during the many years since I’d left his high school Physics class. Nonetheless, I had to sit for a long time and sadly reminisce.

I wondered if he’d remembered me. I was the short kid who sat in the first row, just by the door. I had this terrible habit of falling asleep almost every day. (That’s why Father Kirby sat me in front.) I couldn’t help it! No matter which class I had after lunch, I would always nod off for fifteen minutes or so.

Every once in a while Father Kirby would awaken me with a loud, “Isn’t that right, Mr. Ellison?”

I’d blurt out a confused, “Yes, sir!” Usually, I’d just agreed to something quite absurd, and everyone would laugh. I deserved it.

He probably thought I hated Physics. Actually, it was my favorite class. I had always been bored with math. The equations seemed to have no purpose or practical application. I merely plugged in the numbers mechanically, disinterestedly.

Father Kirby, though, taught me to use those apparently meaningless equations to precisely describe the world around me, and even to accurately predict how worlds light years away must behave. I marveled that all the galaxies paid homage to the same mathematical laws. In short, I was fascinated. (At least when I wasn’t snoring.) I wish I’d told him so.

I recalled one day when Kirby had supervision duty during lunch. He paced up and down the aisles of tables, oblivious to the din, lost in thought. I watched him make one circuit around the cafeteria, and wondered: What was it like to be a priest, without a family? Was he lonely? Didn’t he get tired of conducting the same experiments year after year? What did he do for fun? (Did he ever have fun?)

For that one, brief instant, I possessed enough maturity to see Father Kirby as a person. I suddenly realized I liked him. The moment of insight passed fleetingly, though, and I went back to throwing my Jell-O across the table.

On the last day of school, Father Kirby offered us seniors some sage advice (which we promptly forgot), and wished us all a heartfelt good-bye. Then the final bell rang. Why didn’t we stop to thank him, or at least shake his hand? Instead, with a joyous “Free at last!” we dashed out without so much as a glance in his direction. We left him in that silent classroom, to muse upon our ingratitude, alone.

Now, so many years later, I finally recognized my debt to Father Kirby. But, of course, it’s too late for a belated “Thank you.” What a shame.

I suppose it’s only normal. After all, my students are no different. I can only hope that a few of them will likewise remember me one day. Perhaps there’ll even be one who will become a teacher, and honor me, just as I will try to honor Father Kirby: She will carry on.

“Isn’t that right, Ms. Fletcher?”

For Students

2009-07-05T14:05:00.000-07:00

Smart

Dear Students,

When I first decided to become a teacher, I thought I would meet a few smart students, a few dumb ones, and a lot in between. Some kids were destined by their genes (or genius) to excel in school. Others would fail no matter what I or they themselves tried to do. Fate was terribly cruel. Or, so I believed.

Many of you, I know, share that faith in academic predestination. "He's getting an A because he's smart," you say. "I could never do so well, even if I tried." You shrug your shoulders and reconcile yourselves to your C's and D's. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but comforting in a way. It leaves a sweet after-taste of complacency.

Well, my students, I've got some discomforting news. I think we've been deceiving ourselves. During the last 20 years, I've taught thousands of kids of all ages. I have yet to meet one who couldn't succeed if he or she really tried. Oh, I've failed more than a few of them. But they weren't dumb. They were lazy, or had allowed themselves to become intellectually weak. Fate had nothing to do with it.

Intellectual ability isn't, like the color of your eyes, determined at birth. Your mind is like a muscle. If you use it a lot, it will become stronger and stronger. But, if you cease to challenge your mind--if, for example, you watch the typical three hours of television a day--soon your mind will become flabby and weak. You'll be unable to accomplish even the most simple of intellectual tasks. You aren't smart or dumb, you see. You work hard, or you do not.

There are students blessed with special abilities, of course. Some are naturally adept at jumping hurdles, while others can effortlessly solve quadratic equations. Nonetheless, all kids can compete both on the track and in the classroom if they try. In fact, I've seen "slow" kids beat an apparently faster or smarter peer time and time again. They just worked a lot harder.

I asked an Olympic trainer once which was more important in order to become an outstanding athlete, natural talent or hard work. A champion, he responded, owes ninety percent of her success to simple blood, sweat, and tears.

I'm sorry, kids. The same is true for you students.

Why do I find myself apologizing for what ought to be good news? You should be overjoyed to hear that fate has not set a limit to your potential. With consistent effort, you can accomplish almost anything you set your mind to do!

Ah, but there's the rub. If your success or failure in school is not fated, then you haven't an excuse. You must choose. You must decide whether or not to accept the responsibility and, above all, the work—years of hard work. It's no wonder that many of you might want to shy away from the challenge, or pretend it just isn't there.

Stop looking for excuses and, as the Nike commercial urges, "Just do it!" Turn off the tube. Pick up a book. Ask questions. Study every night, and take pride in your assignments. It will be difficult at first. Before you know it, though, your mind will be strong, and your success will be easy. People will say it's because you're smart. You and I will know the truth.

Real Men Don’t Fight

Dear Greg,

There was no speaking to you after your fight with Andrew yesterday. I tried to reason with you, but you were still too upset.

That's why you have to stay home for the next three days. Yes, your suspension is a punishment. But above all it's an opportunity for you to mull everything over now that you can think more calmly, more clearly. I hope this letter will help.

In some ways, Greg, I don't blame you for going after Andrew. After what he said, why anybody would want to smash him right in the mouth and shut him up. He sure asked for it.

But what did you really accomplish? I suppose you think you defended yourself, protected your honor. You showed Andrew and everyone else that no one can mess with you.

Actually, you did quite the opposite. First of all, you made it clear that you are still such an insecure person, that a few ugly words are enough to make you lose control.

And you know who was in control? Andrew. Think about it. Why would he have sought you out and said what he did, unless he wanted to make you angry? So when you balled your fists and raised your voice, you behaved exactly the way he hoped you would. He played you like a fiddle.

Of course, a crowd of kids--or should I say a mob?--soon gathered to listen to the music. They weren't your friends, though. Friends would have stopped the fight, and saved you from this three-day suspension. No, the kids who came running were no different than a pack of wild dogs, drooling for blood. (Around a fight, everyone begins to act like an animal.) In other words, they were ravenous for some cheap entertainment, and you provided it.

Worst of all, far from putting Andrew in his place, you raised him on high. How? Well, although everybody knows Andrew is a jerk, you made it clear that what he said and thought really mattered to you. You couldn't have paid him a higher compliment.

Greg, even if you still are glad you punched Andrew, just for the emotional satisfaction of having hurt him (Not a very nice thing to find out about yourself, is it?), you can't continue to respond that way. After all, you're bound to meet scores of unpleasant people during your life. What are you going to do, punch out every idiot you come across? That would mean you'd always sink to the level of the worst fools around you. And eventually you'd end you up in jail.

So the next time somebody tries to goad you into a fight, try a new strategy: Laugh at him. Then turn your back and walk away. That will be the ultimate put-down! Thus, you'll emerge the victor without ever having thrown a punch. And you won't be suspended from school either.

It'll take a lot of self-control, though, a lot of maturity. That's why so few people are capable of doing it. Greg, real men rarely get into a fight. They've learned to solve their problems with their brains, and not their fists.

Take a Big Breath

Dear High School Students,

Why does someone have to die for you to learn how to live?

Last week, I attended Erika’s funeral. Along with her friend, Ed, she died after a terrible traffic accident. Like most of you, I didn't know Erika or Ed. But Erika's mom is my colleague and my friend, so the tragedy was more than just a headline for me.

I wish it could be for all of you, too; because if Erika and Ed's apparently senseless deaths are to have any meaning at all, it will be because you teenagers learn from them. So, for the sake of Erika, Ed, their parents and friends, take heed:

In your eagerness to enjoy all the rights and pleasures of an adult, don't forget the awesome responsibility that accompanies them. For example, with your physical maturity comes the ability to create life; and with your car keys the power to destroy it.

It might have been any of you behind the wheel of the truck that drove Erika and Ed to their deaths. So far, you've been lucky. If you are to remain so, you must recognize that an automobile isn't an exciting toy, to be loaned around for all to try. It's a weapon more deadly than any handgun. The next time you grip a steering wheel, remember you have the lives of all of us in your hands.

Also, recall that you yourself are not immortal. Psychologists say it's normal (but dangerous) for you to believe you are exempt from the consequences of your silly, thoughtless deeds. “It can't happen to me,” you say. That's exactly what Erika and Ed thought as they climbed into the back of the truck and, just that once, didn't wear seatbelts. Perhaps now you'll realize that life is for real, and shows no mercy. Often you don't get a second chance.

Erika's parents placed many tender letters of love in their daughter's coffin. The letters were such beautiful, and yet terribly sad gestures. They expressed all the praise and affection Erika's friends had never gotten around to saying while Erika was still alive. What a shame!

Fate is fickle, you know, and might have chosen one of your friends instead. Take a moment today to think of those you love, but take for granted. Imagine all the wonderful things you'd want to say to them in a letter if they were to be suddenly taken away. Then write and send that letter now. I think Erika and Ed would like that.

There's one last thing I urge you to ponder: When Erika's friends gave some short, emotional eulogies at the funeral, they said things like, “She had such a sunny smile!” and “I could always count on her!” No one mentioned stylish clothes, a slim figure, or a flashy car, even though our TV-culture claims they are so terribly important. At a grave we recall what really matters.

The trouble is that you teenagers too easily forget the lessons of death. It seems a youngster has to die each year for you to pause, and remember. (Some of you, like the two who rode to Erika's funeral in the back of a pick-up, don't get it even then!) That's why I wanted to write you about Erika and Ed. I don't want to bury any more of you.

So, take a deep breath. Celebrate life. Cherish each other. And please be careful.

The Math of Hoop Dreams

It's time for a very important math lesson. Too many foolish (Dare I say deceived?) young men fill their heads with dreams of college scholarships, and maybe even fabulous careers as professional athletes.

They better think again. According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, their chances are awfully slim. In fact, high school football players graduating this spring stand only a 6.6 percent chance--about one in fifteen--of ever making it on a college football team. And just 3.3 percent of those fortunate few--about one in thirty--will earn a scholarship. In other words, your average high school football player has only a two-tenths of one percent chance of earning a college scholarship! Which, by the way, is the same chance he has of ever making it on a professional team.

The statistics are even more daunting in basketball where, for example, only about five hundredths of one percent of graduating high school basketball players will ever play professionally. So much for hoop dreams.

As the N.C.A.A. itself understates, “Based on these figures, the odds of a high school student-athlete making a professional team are much smaller than generally believed. An individual would be well-advised to concentrate at least as much on academics, using athletics as a vehicle to get a college education rather than depending on college as a route to a professional career. Even those who do become professional athletes have an average career span of only three to four years, and then they have to return to the `real' world.”

I wonder, though, are any kids truly “well-advised” to use “athletics as a vehicle to get a college education”? Most big-name universities fail to graduate even half their so-called “student-athletes.” National champion Nebraska graduates only 53% of its players; Florida only 42%. It's a national scandal. At least, it should be.

Of course, no one similarly deceives young women with impossible dreams of athletic careers. Nonetheless, many of them continue to deceive themselves, believing that a great education isn't as important for them. After all, they can always rely on their husbands to take care of them.

Another math lesson is in order. The current divorce rate in California approaches fifty percent. And in most of those cases, it's the women who end up taking care of the children--alone. Yes, alone, because about half of the so-called “fathers” are delinquent in their alimony and child-support. (Another national scandal.) Now more than ever it is essential that young ladies earn a college degree.

It seems to me that the only kids--boys or girls--who are “well-advised” are those whom we urge to give up their pipe dreams and to hit the books hard. There's no glory in education, but it's still a youngster's best bet for a good life--no matter how you work the math.

To High School Graduates

I imagine you are experiencing a kaleidoscope of contradictory emotions: Surprise that your four years in high school have so quickly gone by, and sorrow that they must now come to an end; joy at celebrating your many achievements, and excitement--perhaps even some fear--for all the challenges and adventures waiting in your future. I hope you also feel a tremendous gratitude for your parents and teachers who, by their love, their sacrifice, made this graduation possible.

You may not want to admit it, but you are their creations. The adults in your lives have made most of the important decisions for you during the past eighteen years. Thus, they have molded and shaped you, and, for better or worse, made you who you are today.

Not any more. Now you too are adults, finally free to continue creating yourselves. Where will you go? What will you do? And, above all, who will you be? These, now, are your choices.

That is why I need to give you one, last homework assignment, perhaps the most important one you'll ever undertake. I want you to write your own epitaph.

This might seem a strange moment to speak of your inevitable deaths. But, like your fleeting high school years, your young lives too will come to an end one day. So ask yourselves: What do you want your family and friends to say of you, as they struggle to find meaning in your brief tenure on Earth? ``Here lies Amber. She....'' She what? Now, when you are at the crossroads of life, is the perfect time to consider your final destination.

I won't presume to offer any suggestions myself. But I cannot resist passing on some wisdom from three sages whose epitaphs we all might envy.

First, consider Socrates' advice: ``The unmediated life is not worth living.'' Graduation is not the end of your education. Your diploma is merely a license to learn, to continue teaching yourselves. Socrates would urge you to read widely, take long, solitary walks in the quiet evening, and ponder life's mysteries.

Next, hearken to Albert Einstein, who wrote, ``We can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only by devoting ourselves to society.''

Today, another 40,000 people will die of starvation--most of them children. During your lifetime, the population of the world will double, increasing by more than five billion people--all of them desperately poor. Meanwhile, the last of the rain forest will perish. As you compose your epitaph, please imagine that you will have put your education to good use, and somehow left the world better than you found it.

But beware. If you really try, if you truly care, you will experience anxiety, heartache, and terrible disappointment. The poet Carl Sandburg, however, would offer you one refuge from despair: ``Laughter is medicine to weary bones.'' Find joy in simple, silly things. And laugh. Often. It will keep you young, and provide both you and those around you reason to hope.

And so graduates, now that you are masters of your destiny, what sort of epitaph will you envision for yourselves? Write it now with pen and paper. Then write it every other day of your life with your words and your deeds.

I hope you write something like this: ``Here lies Amber. She thought deeply. She served selflessly. She laughed heartily. And we'll miss her.''

For Parents

2009-07-04T14:04:00.000-07:00

Parents No Best

My parents had the courage to say “No” when I was growing up. At the time I didn't understand. I pouted. I screamed. I ranted and raved. “I'll be the laughing stock at school!” But they remained firm: “No!”

I remember, for example, when my mom took me to buy shoes. It was never an exciting excursion in the Ellison family because we always got the same style, Dexter “Saddle Shoes.” (“Army-surplus clod-stompers,” I called them.) Oh, how I longed for a pair of penny-loafers! Then I would be able to strut in style! But, “No!” my mom said. The Dexters were eminently practical, their soles lasting a full year, sometimes two. And that was that. Who ever had parents as unreasonable as mine?

The hand-me-down clothes they gave me weren't any better. I can't describe my utter humiliation when my teachers would compliment them. “Why, Dave, I remember that beautiful sweater on your oldest brother, Kevin.” Aaagh!

The worst, though, were the trips to the barbershop. As quickly as the barber could switch on his electric razor (No need for scissors or a comb!) most of my hair would be gone.

“Hair-cuts are too expensive,” dad lamented. “We don't want to have to come back here next month because your hair has already grown out.”

Easy for him to say! He didn't have to endure the tauntings I did the next morning: “Peach-Fuz! Watermelon!” At times I imagined I hated my parents.

Now that I am a teacher, though, I appreciate their stubbornness. You see, every day I have to deal with kids whose parents haven't learned to say “No.” The results are alternately comical and sad, and sometimes even frightening.

Many of my boys, for example, simply must have their hair cut every few weeks or so in order to keep their “racing stripes” razor sharp. Likewise, too many of my girls fail P.E. because they refuse to dress for class. It seems that running or changing into T-shirts might mess-up their hair. I'm not kidding. And the craziest thing is that their parents allow them to continue failing, year after year!

Many parents now spend over a hundred dollars just for a pair of high-tech “pump-up” basketball shoes--often for kids who get winded just jogging to the cafeteria. I'm afraid to ask how much parents invest in the sport team jackets so many of my students wear, even on the hottest of days.

As I watch the poor kids sweating in agony--but smiling smugly in the knowledge that they are in style--I realize that my parents accomplished a lot more than simply save money with all their “No’s.” They communicated to me--subtly but emphatically--that impressing people with what I wore would not be a priority for me. Preparing myself for college would be. They later lavishly spent every dime they had saved on my college education.

My mom and dad freed me from the tyranny of style. They taught me to have the courage to be myself, and to struggle to make of myself somebody great. By denying me so much, they gave me what mattered most.

Red Ribbon Dialogues

Dear Parents,

Red Ribbon Week always makes me impatient with you. For example, this year I worked with some of your eighth-grade children on writing “Red Ribbon Conversations.” We had been learning to punctuate dialogues anyway, so it was only natural that we use the newly refined skill to practice “just saying no.”

My students were to pretend that they were at some party where there were drugs such as alcohol. They had to imagine what kind of peer pressure they would face, and how they would deal with it. I even gave them permission to, if necessary, tell some little white lies.

Some of your children were quite creative with their fibbing. “Oh, I'd love a beer,” one wrote, “but I'm taking some prescription anti-zit medication. I'll just have a soda.”

Others had the courage (easy in an essay for school!) to simply refuse outright: “For the third time, no! And if you call me a nerd again, I'm leaving!”

“Very good!” I encouraged my students, smiling and nodding my head. But inside I was seething. You see, it occurred to me that what I was really trying to protect them from was the negligence of you, their parents.

I ask you, Why should I have to prepare your young children for such adult situations and choices? Put more plainly, Why do you allow your kids to attend parties where there's alcohol? Really, it's you parents who must learn to “just say no.”

How many of you blissfully send your kids off to a party each weekend, assuming that someone else will ensure that it is safe, and alcohol-free? And then when your children get in a fight, drive drunk, become pregnant, get AIDS, you ask helplessly, “What's wrong with our schools?”

Frankly, I'm tired of it.

So, I have some Red-Ribbon homework for you, too. It's due this Friday, just in time for the weekend:

Pretend your teenager has just asked to go to a party. Write the ensuing dialogue. In it, be sure to include many more questions than simply, “What time will you be home?” You must practice strategies to determine the last names of your child's friends, the telephone number of their parents, the address and telephone number of the party, and the names (emphasis on the plural) of the chaperones.

Then, imagine the tremendous pressure you'll face from your child--remarks such as, “Oh, you're so out-of-it!” or “All the other parents are letting their kids go!”--and how you'll respond.

Lastly, make sure you include the line, “No, you may not go.” Believe me, it'll be a lot easier on paper than in real life; but that's why you need to practice.

For extra credit, list three alternative evening activities for your children, which you could both organize and chaperone.

Remember, parents: Education begins at home. And Red Ribbon Week must begin there too.

New Year’s Resolutions

Last December, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published suggestions for Kid’s New Year’s Resolutions (http://www.aap.org/advocacy/releases/jankidstips.htm). Among them were, for preschoolers, brushing their teeth twice a day; for school-aged children, engaging in some sport or physical activity at least three times a week; and for teens, watching TV or playing video games for no more than two hours a day.

The AAP had good reason to urge children to take at least one small step towards a healthy lifestyle. After all, for the first time American kids now face a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

Why? Because one in three children has a weight problem. Because most kids spend four to five hours a day watching TV. Because, quite frankly, they’ve inherited a decadent, sick culture.

The AAP wasn’t the only organization aghast. Last year the California Legislature prohibited the vending of soft drinks at school. More recently, Assemblyman Leland Yee, D-SF, proposed banning as well the sale of violent video games to minors. (You see, if left to themselves, businesses and even schools will exploit children just to make a buck.)

Nonetheless, I wonder: Are we deferring the raising/protecting of our children to the government? Or, as with the AAP resolutions, to the children themselves? Absent from this and just about every other discussion about youth is the role of parents. Shouldn’t fathers and mothers, too, have a part in nurturing their children? (Just call me radical!)

I’d like to counter-propose some Parents’ New Year’s Resolutions, four common-sensical first steps parents can take to dramatically improve their children’s lives.

Resolution 1: Monitor both the quantity and the quality of children’s television/video games. There is a direct relationship between TV time and obesity; a similar link between violent media content and aggressive behavior; and an inverse correlation between TV and academic success. Honestly, the most profound, loving, courageous act a parent can do is pull the plug on the Tube.

Resolution 2: Encourage children to read by modeling the behavior. If parents read for fun, if they read to their children, if older siblings read to younger, if families take more trips to the library than to the video store, then just about everything worthwhile improves—literacy, knowledge, imagination, critical thinking, college prospects, even the strength of our nation. As Jefferson warned, our democracy depends upon citizens who read.

Resolution 3: Insist that the family enjoy dinner together almost every evening. That means at the same time, around the same table, with the television off. Beware, though, because some strange, almost unheard-of phenomena might result: conversation, laughter, sharing, understanding, and an enduring sense of hearth, home, and love. In fact, the one and only experience almost all national merit award winners share is regular family dinners. I suspect it’s the one memory most gang members lack.

Resolution 4: Enable children to find success at school. This will include providing them a decent breakfast, enforcing a strict two-hour evening quiet time for homework, checking that homework periodically for neatness and effort; and helping them set clear, measurable, realistic goals for each day, week, and quarter. Yes, even in the Twenty-First Century, education still begins at home.

I appreciate the AAP’s attempt to motivate kids; and I applaud the Legislature’s effort to set some sane limits on their behalf. However, only parents can make the real difference for children. I pray that, this year, parents rediscover both their responsibility and their power. Then 2004 will be a wondrous year, indeed.

Goal Setting

Despite their repeated claims to the contrary, most of your children are glad to be back in school. (Certainly you're glad they're back!) With their new clothes, new books, and old friends, they can only barely disguise their enthusiasm.

As with so many previous Septembers, your children have begun the academic year with yet another resolution to be better students. This time they'll complete all their homework, and really study for their exams. Unfortunately, such resolutions are likely to suffer the same fate as so many of their predecessors. Your children will forget them as soon as the novelty of the new year wears thin, and they must face the inexorable rigors and routines of school.

It is not that your children are insincere in their desire to improve. It is simply that setting goals does not come naturally. It's an acquired skill, perhaps the most important of all. So, it must be taught and practiced. This is where you parents, your kids' first and most influential teachers, can make the difference.

This year, teach your children to choose a goal that is specific. It is not enough for them to vow to "do better." What does "better" mean? Such a vague resolution will not help them decide how or where to begin. Nor will it enable them to know if and when they have succeeded. A better goal might be, for example, to raise last year's History grade from a "C" to a "B."

Secondly, work with your children on developing a day-by-day strategy. What will they do tonight and tomorrow in order to realize their goal? The longest journey must begin with a first step, and you should help your children decide where to take it. Perhaps they need to spend an extra ten minutes each evening reviewing notes. Or, they could make a habit of asking and answering at least one question in each class. (Teachers could provide many more such suggestions at Back To School Night. Why not attend this year?)

Next, make sure your children set a deadline for their goal. For instance, they might decide to raise their History grade by the end of the first quarter. A deadline will provide the urgency necessary to keep your children plugging away. If the deadline arrives and they still have not succeeded, it is not the hour of despair. A missed deadline is merely an opportunity for your kids to re-evaluate their goal and strategies, and to re-dedicate themselves to continue striving. If at first they don't succeed....

Lastly, make sure that the goal your children choose (Notice that they must choose it, not you.) is realistic. Improving a grade from a "D" to an "A" would not be a reasonable objective. Instead of motivating kids, it would intimidate them, and quite possibly set them up for failure. Your children's first goal must be one they can readily achieve. Once they do, they themselves will quickly set a higher, more challenging one.

Before you know it, your children will have developed the habit of success. And there is nothing more motivating than success. Who knows? Perhaps your children's back-to-school enthusiasm will last until June!

Following My Heart

The jet airplane took a little over five hours to fly from Oakland to Cleveland, carrying me on my yearly pilgrimage home for Christmas.

In the ethereal world at 33,000 feet, the tranquil limbo between my harried life in California and the more sedate lives of my family in Ohio, I couldn't help but finally pause and reflect. An unrepentant vagabond, I marveled to find myself living where I live, doing what I do.

This year it occurred to me that my parents, who were waiting to greet me at the airport, must be similarly amused to see who I've become. And for the first time I realized that it was they who long ago had given me the freedom to choose my own path.

I remembered, for example, one incident which had seemed insignificant at the time, but which I finally recognized as a striking example of my parents' courageous restraint.

My mom and dad had visited me during my freshman year in college because I'd landed a big part in a Shakespearian play. After the performance, I brought them backstage to meet the director. ``Dave's made quite a splash in the theater department here,'' she commented effusively. ``We can see he's going to make a wonderful actor!''

My parents politely smiled, but I could tell they were stunned. They had assumed my acting was merely a hobby, that I'd major in something practical like business or engineering. In fact, my dad had once commented that any liberal arts degree was a total waste of time and money.

The following morning my parents took me out to breakfast before their long drive home. The conversation was uncomfortable, strained. I could tell they wanted to dissuade me from a career in the theater. They brought up the subject only once, though. ``Well,'' my father said, carefully sipping his coffee, ``I suppose you'll get a lot of big parts here, since the theater department is so small and unknown.''

Mild encouragement, a bit of caution, but nothing more. How difficult it must have been for my parents to bite their tongues!

I soon gave up the theater on my own--thank goodness. (I wonder if I would have done so had my parents demanded it.) But there were many other times in my life when my mom and dad forced themselves to remain mute while I went ahead and made apparently outrageous decisions.

After graduation, for instance, I spent two years gallivanting through Spain. Upon my return I accepted my first teaching job--in Texas of all places!--for a paltry $8,000 a year. Was I crazy?

In retrospect, I regret none of my choices. My many adventures, good and bad, prepared me well.

I consider myself fortunate indeed when I see some of my friends languishing in careers their parents chose for them; and when I witness students struggling at a sport or an instrument they hate, but their parents enjoy vicariously.

My mom and dad insisted only that I guard my integrity and get a good education. The rest they left up to me. They let me follow my heart. And that is why every Christmas, for as long as my parents live, my heart will always lead me back home, to them.