Well, somebody taketh away!

One of the great ironies of the Education profession: We are (sorta) entrusted with 30 or more students at a time, and yet we can't seem to be trusted with anything else!

I recently met some people (McActivPeople, to be exact) who wanted to plan a conference in my area. Great! My school would love to host it! After getting approval of both principals on the shared campus, talking to my District Office contact about how to get approval, sitting down with the McActivRepresentative (who is a wonderful person, by the way), and sketching out a plan, I got an email.

From my district office contact. I'm pretty sure it was written by her boss.

"Please give us the contact information of your McActivRepresentative. These things are usually planned through our office."

Yes, you read that correctly. Not, "Oh, great! Thanks for starting this process! How can we offer our support and make this the best conference ever, bringing rare good publicity to our district and encouraging our teachers with real professional development rather than bashing them down with the mediocre shit we usually offer?"

Not, "I'm glad that you're excited and taking initiative. Let's talk so that we can make sure we're following proper protocols."

Nope. Basically, they're saying "there's no was a measly little teacher could plan a conference worthy of our district's untarnished reputation. Now that you've made the contact, hand over your work so that we can transform it into another poorly-planned, cheaply run, narrow-minded district love fest where everyone sits around getting talked at all day and our department gets to stand up and welcome everyone and feel all important."

I have to wonder how much of this comes from the recent furlough days we agreed to if the parcel tax doesn't pass. They know we, the teachers, want to see cuts at the bloated, croneyistic district office, and they see that their jobs could be on the chopping block if they don't prove their worth. What better way than by making work for themselves?

Isn't there something better they could be doing?

Hope Springs Eternal

New Superintendent who appears to support small schools.

New Board majority who support small schools.

Minority will be termed out soon.

New Principal,

one of our own,

a founder of the school who respects

and has the support of

teachers, parents, and students.

Instead of fighting for survival,

we'll be able to concentrate on

teaching and learning.

What a novelty!

What potential for progress!

What a wonderful world!

Photo Credit Matt McGee on Flickr.com

Accountability? But it's too hard!

Ah, accountability. That catch-phrase hurled at and by teachers everywhere, that multi-tasking noun, that excellent idea so often used to insult and patronize. While "accountability" is slowly being displaced by "transparency," it still makes the rounds as one of the most misunderstood words in education.

It's a cliche worthy of a commencement speaker to define your terminology in a dramatic way, but here it is: Accountability means that you're responsible to somebody or for something, and that your actions are capable of being explained (my paraphrase of Encarta Dictionary).

At the most basic level, this isn't a problem for teachers. We hold our students accountable to the point of being ridiculous: "Why didn't you do your homework?" "Why were you late for school?" "How bad do you really have to go to the bathroom?"

The average teacher would want accountability to sound more reasonable: "What are you going to learn?" "How are you going to learn it?" "How will you know when you have learned it?" This type of classroom accountability should encourage students to learn and inquire and grow.

If you mention accountability for teachers and schools, well, you're asking for a fight. The images that come to my mind are angry union members yelling across tables, people with clipboards and high heels and silk blouses standing in my classroom as far away from the students as possible, and students' sickened expressions as they enter the classroom on testing days.

Accountability in education is too much like the first example. Instead of "Why didn't you do your homework?" it's "Why didn't your English Learners make more progress?" Teachers and schools are judged solely on a set of numbers, and attempts to evaluate in more logical ways become just as foolish.

One of the recent "innovations" was the introduction of the Classroom Walk-Through, or CWT because jargon makes us feel important. The idea is that district personnel, school administration, and other teachers will step into your classroom for 4 minutes, fill out a checklist, and move on to the next room. This should be done often, providing hundreds of classroom "snapshots" throughout the year in order to create a composite picture of what a school is really doing.

As much as I love snapshot collages, I can't pretend that they accurately represent what my students are learning. John Spencer on Television and Teaching recently compared such snapshots to a nature show in which the photographer stands back from a ritual, taking pictures and making judgements, but never gaining a true understanding of the culture by actually participating and getting to know the people. The CWT (love the lingo) may be better than a one-shot evaluation, but it still allows a wall of separation between reality and the clipboard.

So, what about teacher accountability? Don't all business sectors use some sort of performance pay? Not really, according to Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute. In an excerpt from his book Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right, Rothstein explains that "private sector pay is almost never based primarily on quantitative performance measures." Based on his conclusions, our foolish method of grading schools based on Math and Reading scores is detrimental to real education, because everyone always focuses primarily on the areas of their profession that are evaluated. We all know what happens when we focus on Math and Reading: we say goodbye to Science, Social Studies, Music, Art, Electives, Sports, and anything else that enables a well-rounded education.

When we look at common teaching practices, this focus shouldn't be a surprise. When I start a project with my students, I give them background information, instructions, examples...and a rubric that shows exactly what will be graded and how many points are available in each category. My students know to use that rubric as a checklist and to focus on those categories.

True evaluation requires a change in mindset. Accountability means that we are responsible for our work, but for whom are we working? To whom are we responsible? Who are the stakeholders in our school? We have many:

• The Federal, State, and Local governments direct money toward our programs. They're controlling partners...who really have all of the control.
• The community pays taxes that provide that money. They should have more control, because they elect many of the government officials. They also have an inherent interest because the community's future depends on raising up their children to be future leaders.
• The parents of our students, regardless of their taxpayer status, because, well, they're the parents of our students.
• Our students. These kids are required by law to sit their behinds in our classrooms for almost 6 hours a day, and then go home and do homework. They don't get paid, and they often don't have a voice in the decision-making.

In order to truly evaluate a school, we have to base our assessments on the goals of every stakeholder group, which means that our rubrics must include students' goals as well as federal mandates. Reasonable accountability requires resources: time, money, and an incredible amount of effort that I've already outlined in another post. Such resources are in short supply, but any type of evaluation that doesn't focus on the goals of all stakeholders is as ridiculous as a teacher focusing on bathroom usage instead of academic progress.

Doing Someone Else's Job

This post could also be called "How Much I Dislike My Curriculum" or "Why I Really Should Teach Social Studies."

Some people hate textbooks. Some people rely too heavily on textbooks.

I don't fall into either of those categories, which seems to make planning more difficult.

If I hated textbooks in general, then creating my own hodge-podge curriculum would be the unquestionably normal thing to do. If I relied heavily on the district-chosen curriculum, I wouldn't really have to plan anything, because I could just put little post-its on the resources I wanted to use and start photocopying away.

Oh, no, either of those would be too straightfoward. Instead, being somewhere in the middle, I'm scouring the district curriculum (which is really neither worthwhile nor appropriate for our demographics) for useful items and ideas, searching the web and my endless teacher-type books for the rest, and trying to sequence it and make it all fit together so that my kids will learn what they need without wasting time.

Right now, I'm working on the grammar component. It doesn't help that the district-chosen grammar book is a great waste of trees and ink!

For example, the state standard says, "Use subordination, coordination, apposition, and other devices to indicate clearly the relationship between ideas" (ELA Content Standards page 53). So, I break out the little handbooks, look up the handy index, and what do I find? Half a page of complicated explanation, basically saying that subordination is creating a subordinate clause out of the less important idea.

Thanks for that.

My kids already understand subordinate clauses, but they couldn't begin to comprehend your wordy, incoherent ramblings! Okay, so where do kids practice this device? Oh, what, they don't? This non-explanation is everything you're giving me? Jolly! That means that I get to use my (unpaid) summer planning sessions to create practice opportunities for them. Don't forget, that's just one of many standards.

That's okay, I don't mind volunteering 8 weeks every year to create curriculum, even though you've already paid the textbook company for these worthless space-wasters we call handbooks.

So what's in the rest of the book? Five hundred pages of mostly useless exercises, trivial grammar rules, and unreadable explanations. I'll end up using 3 or 4 of the 19 chapters. As for the rest...well, I now understand why most of this 8-year-old book looks so new!

Now, I'm not reinventing the wheel here. If this job were already done (as it is in the most-fabulous TCi Social Studies program), I'd happily take a Kathy Reichs book down to the pool without feeling any guilt.

Advisory as Evidence

When the latest mound of paperwork was foisted upon me as being useful and relevant, I spoke up. I questioned why we had to complete stacks of complicated forms (in triplicate, of course), how they would be used, and what they thought they would accomplish, especially since I've never filled these out before and they'd be going into student files. After receiving a simplistic answer ("the district wants us to..."), I then asked when the principal was going to come and cover my class so that I could complete this paperwork. The response: "Do it during Advisory."

Yes, our school has jumped on the Advisory bandwagon, but we're one of the few places I've seen that actually run a semi-effective program.

Let's go back a few years into my past, before I jumped on Route 66 and found the Promised Land.

Early in the morning, students would arrive in my classroom for Advisory. Some of these students were vaguely known to me, while others weren't enrolled in any of my other classes. After a short stint of intercom-listening for announcements and the pledge, I would be left with 12 minutes. Twelve very empty minutes. The plan was that I'd help the students keep track of their homework, teach study skills, and take them through a character-development curriculum.

In 12 minutes.

After I made it clear that this process wasn't working for me, the school counselors helpfully photocopied an entire ream of...additional character-development curriculm. I'm still not sure why they thought killing more trees would help me use this 12 minutes effectively. Ensuing conversations uncovered the reality that these 12 minutes were really a catch-basin time, giving those chronically-tardy kids a chance to get to class on time.

12 wasted minutes a day. 60 minutes a week. 36 hours throughout the year. All this, for kids who wouldn't get up early enough to come to school. How long do you think it took them to realize that they could sleep in an extra 12 minutes?

Meanwhile, the few students who did arrive on time had established long before my arrival that "Advisory" was a synonym for "Social Hour/Naptime." It was lots of fun trying to convince them to do homework, breaking up fights, and pretending to teach about character. I eventually learned that it was just as effective to sit and grade while the kids fooled around, as long as I kept an ear open for conflict.

36 wasted hours, over the two years I was there. Yes, that's 72 hours - 3 full days - of headache-inducing, teeth-grinding frustration.

Now let's flash forward to the present.

We have an Advisory program that actually works both because of the time we invest and the culture of the school. We spend an entire hour every day, and two on rainy days when we don't have P.E., with our home cohorts. Instead of a hodge-podge of kids I may or may not know, I have a group of students who are mine for 2 other classes, and who have been in my Language Arts class for a year and a half. These are "my" kids. I'm the first contact for their parents, I'm the one who facilitates their Learner-Led conferences, and I'm the one who collects and monitors their homework for all of their classes. In this 5 hours per week (180 hours a year, for those of you who are keeping track), I teach real study skills, check every bit of their homework, and lead them through Social Justice projects.

Because of this Advisory class, our kids are able to fulfill our high expectations. They're mastering the standards and applying them to their lives. They're learning how to organize themselves, how to ask for help (which is an art!), and how to change the world.

Which is why I both laughed and cried when the principal said, "Just do it during Advisory." She truly thinks that Advisory is just another study hall? She really believes that I'm sitting around doing paperwork while the kids work silently? She honestly wants me to divide my attention between my students and these all-too-complicated NCR forms?

This is just more evidence that she doesn't understand the vision and mission of our school. We've been struggling with this all year. The first week back, I asked her, "why did you want to work in a small school? What about the model appealed to you?" Her answer? "Well, the size!" As if her job would be easier because the number of students is smaller. As if the only difference between our revolutionary model and the traditional school was the size of the building.

Our school isn't perfect, but we are one of the best opportunities in the area for our students. Our teachers and staff work hard, and our students accomplish more than many people could imagine. But how are we going to continue to innovate and research and collaborate and improve? We've already had so much busy work thrust upon us that we can barely breathe, and sometimes we're surprised when we go back and look at the founding documents of our own school. We're travelling a vastly different road, and it's not the best path.

How are we going to go anywhere if our "leader" doesn't even know who we are? How is it possible that now, just over halfway through the year, she has such a mistaken impression of one of our core programs? Is there any hope?