Why I'm Marching....

I was born and raised in Washington, DC.

In the summer the humidity settles down and the sky turns a sick, pale shade of yellow.  The swamp the city was built on seems to rise up and sit in the air just above the traffic lights.

When I was kid, before the miracle of air-conditioning, we mimicked the dogs that lay panting in the dust under the shade of a tree on the hottest afternoons.  Laying as still as possible in your bed at night while a fan pulled in the night air seemed the only way to escape the oppressive heat.  Our afternoons slowed to a crawl as we moved from shade to shade to popsicles to garden hoses to sitting by an oscillating fan reading a book.

We slowed down.

We drawled our way through the day Southern style.

In Washington, D.C., July is a beast, but August is worse.

So, why return to Washington, DC on July 30 to march from the ellipse to the White House at a time when experience dictates that one should really just be sitting very, very still?

I will be marching because I do not want to lose another thing I bring from my childhood: A public school education.

At the center of our democracy sits an institution that has lead the world in thinking about what nation building really means.  Our invention--education for all-- has been copied all over the world.  The world recognizes that a nation's worth lies in its people.  We invest in our nation by investing in our citizens, and we start with the children.

The school I went to modeled a life I wanted.  I was taught by strong, intelligent women (everyone should be taught by at least one, if not more, people who "look like me" and model the possibilities) Between the serious academic work learning was often fun with breaks for both free and structured play.  We celebrated at regular intervals throughout the year and benefitted from the museums and theaters in the nation's capitol.

The school was embedded in my working class neighborhood where I sat next to the children of refugees from Eastern Europe, escapees from World War II.  I learned about cultures I would have never known had I not been hearing and learning beside all these different voices.  Of course, I didn't know what gift I was being given at the time.  This was just the way it was.  These "different" people were my friends and so they were never really different at all.

A public school opens its arms to the "poor and huddled masses" and America has been innovative, creative, and unique because we have brought all Americans together in the common school.

My entire education--kindergarten to graduate school--occurred in a public school.  Though I had other options for my own children, I believed then--as I do now--in the importance of schooling America's children together.

All three children have been given an excellent education in Virginia's public schools, right on through the university system, and are giving back to their communities in substantive ways because of the investment made in them.  Their friends are white, gay, straight, African- American, wheelchair bound, and the children of Indians, Asians, Quakers, Sudanese--and more.

But now, the system of schooling that has produced innovation, new ideas, new ways of entertaining and communicating with others, is threatened.

After ten years of high stakes testing, the students I now teach are often what I would describe as "tolerantly polite."   Those who have not dropped out by the eleventh grade--often because they have disengaged from schooling long before--are fully aware of the importance of these tests which now cloud the classroom atmosphere as thickly as the humidity in Washington DC.

Remember Marshall McLuhan:  The medium is the message.   Well, the kids have gotten the message: the test is all that matters.  The intrinsic rewards of discovery, creativity, flow, spontaneous celebration, and feeling competent after working through something hard--not emphasized.

How this has perverted the teacher-student relationship is the real threat to our public schooling and Race to the Top--and the test makers themselves--promise to put more, not less, emphasis on testing, testing, and testing.

There are other threats: The division of our students into groups that may never interact with each other often in guise of "school choice."  The emphasis on solving a complicated problem by insisting on standardization rather than individualization. The inequity fostered and amplified by spending our resources on "outputs" rather than "inputs."  Money spent on testing is money not spent on infrastructure, including well-trained teachers as well as functioning, friendly places to come together.  Our promise to our children must include access to safe, engaging places to learn--for everyone.

I will be marching for all these reasons and more.

But I will also be marching for three very important, pressing reasons:

• Granddaughter Ainsley starts kindergarten in 2013.
• Grandson Aiden begins in 2014.
• Grandson Eli--due to arrive July 30--goes to school in 2016.

I surely want these very special people to love school, to love kids of all colors and ethnic stripes, and to love America the way I loved my hot, steamy childhood.

Just a note...

The fellows of the Northern Virginia Writing Project have begun their intensive work in the Summer Institute.  As a leader of the Shenandoah Valley Satellite site I am steeped in the work of practicing teachers.  It is intensive, rejuvenating, enlightening and exhausting work as we teach each other, share theory, and write for ourselves.
The four or five weeks spent by the teachers transforms their practice and stance in the classroom, not just for the following year but for much of their teaching career.  (98% of Teacher Consultants in the National Writing Project stay in the field of education their entire working lives.  That is an amazing statistic.)
Needless to say, this is consuming work and means.....fewer opportunities to blog.
:-)

School is out...

This year marks the 37th end-of-school ritual that I have personally participated in.  That includes 17 ends to my own years of formal education.  (It does not include the twelve years where I experienced the end of school as a stay-at-home mom.)
There is nothing like this ending in the "real" world.  Most adults' work never ends.  It only has occasional hiccups where there is some respite from the continual grind.
But not in school.  Eventually, long after the weather has gotten to the point where we'd rather be outside than in, all the grown-ups get together and call it quits.  "We're done.  Take a break. Go home and loaf all day if that's what you want to do because we've taught you all we can bear to tolerate."
The frustrating part for one with a considerable amount of schooling under their belt is that all the teachers are summarily dismissed as well.
Most of us will return to buildings in the fall where others have made decisions that we must then carry out--whether the new plans seem to be a good idea or not.
As for the summer months, some of us will loaf along with our students.  Others will take part-time jobs to supplement our salaries (if you can find one these days).  Some will continue to learn and prepare for the coming year.  All these choices are optional.
Each summer since 2005 I have worked with classroom teachers in the NWP Summer Institute.  It is a rich sharing of practice, theory, writing, discussion, and planning for the coming year that extends through the entire month of July.  For me, it has always been the model for the kind of enriching cross-curricular, cross-grade-level work that should be a part of every teacher's teaching life.
It is, however, optional.
It is also a huge commitment of time that many adults cannot afford to indulge in since they cannot give up paying positions in summer school, coaching, or construction. Nor can they afford to pay for the additional research and study by securing child care for their own children through the long summer months.  After all, teachers have to plan to put their own children through college or lay up savings for retirement too.
Still, the SI is the kind of work that all teachers should be able to do as a part of their professional practice because it provides the time for the deep reflection that results in identifying which practices go the furthest in realizing student growth.  Believe me, during the rush-to-testing schedule of the school year, there is little time for reflection and nearly zero time for collaboration.  But there are long weeks in a calendar year that could be used to enrich teaching and learning for all of us.
When we stop dismissing teachers from school, as if they are the oldest kids in the building, and compensate them accordingly, then we will go a long way to honoring the complexity of the work classroom teachers need to master in order to help more students experience success in our classrooms.  Teachers need to be part of the decision-making process that shapes school culture.  Their time and compensation should reflect the knowledge gained after years of delivering content to children.
After all, 37 dismissals ought to count for something.

Klein's Failed American Schools

How I wish I were Joel Klein.  Then perhaps I would get 30 inches in The Atlantic.  Alas, just a classroom teacher.

Like others of his ilk, Klein comes from a business world and sees the situation only through that lens.  Money into education should equal success.  If there hasn't been success then it must be because those recalcitrant teachers have been undermining reform on every front.  If only they would give up their tenure, then we could make progress. 

But success through expenditures depends on where you spend your money.  In the past decade most of the money poured into education has gone into testing.  My purchasing power has been stagnant in that entire period. (How about yours?) Professional development funds have frequently been cut.  So we get the beatings but none of the training.

I disagree with Klein wholeheartedly as he argues for Value Added Measurement of teachers.  There are few in the world of psychometrics who believes that VAM is a reliable tool for measuring student learning.  There are even more pundits who feel that VAM will undermine the good that schools can achieve when teachers collaborate.  VAM ensures that teachers will not share, least their VAM score drop below or behind one of their peers.

The ones who will pay for that reform will be the children.  Klein says in his own article, without apparent irony, that they had to add testing in every grade 3-8 in both English and Math so they could keep track of the teachers.  I wonder how much this costs.  I wonder why the kids are falling farther and farther behind.  Surely it must be the teachers and not his test-heavy system.

He references A Nation at Risk.  Here is what A Nation at Risk recommended in 1983 (I'm old enough to remember).

• More time in school (still no different from 1983)
• 11-month contract with higher pay for teachers (ignored)
• Better training for teachers (if anything, this has been cut over the years.  It's easier than ever to become a teacher.The NBPTS is the only reform I'm aware of that came out of this report.)  Accept the best and brightest into the profession.  (Ed schools are cash cows for universities. They pull in money for PD programs but the quality of undergrad programs is hit or miss. The strongest students are often counseled out of teaching.)
• Incentives for outstanding young people to enter the profession (grants, loans--today's young teacher starts with a mountain of debt--and then gets the pleasure of paying out of pocket for further training.)
• Develop career ladders to keep teachers in the profession

Klein, like many others, have ignored every one of those recommendations and are now blaming the teachers.  The new plan--to measure teacher performance and then pay on ability--is a smoke screen.  The real objective for Klein and other business people is to dismantle the last and largest union in the nation: the NEA (even bigger when the AFT is added in).

Regan commissioned the report but then did not like the recommendations.  Regan believed in small government and certainly did not want an army of civil servants in the form of career teachers. It no small coincidence that none of the above bulleted reforms were brought into play in the years since Regan-style government came into vogue.  It is no small coincidence that Klein does not mention any one of these in his "professional" assessment.

Onion Tears

The Onion has stolen my idea: announce what we wish would happen in education as a fait de compli. Of course, this is a joke because doing the right thing is rarely possible any more.
Sigh.
Read it and weep.

Mother's Day

That's mom on the right.  She taught third grade for seventeen years.  My grandmother, on the left, was a kindergarten teacher.  Ed Policy of the time meant Grammy had to stop work when she married.  Mom had to leave her first teaching job when she became pregnant with my older brother in 1950.  She only returned to the classroom after getting five children launched in school.
That was 1970 and lots had happened to women between mom's first teaching job and the next.
Some things about the world of work for women have changed a great deal since this photo was taken.  For one, most mothers work now.  Often out of necessity if not out of a desire to lead purposeful lives beyond the rearing of children.

But here are things that have not changed since I became a working mother in 1979:

• Women are still paid less than men for equal work.
• Women still find it extremely difficult to find reliable day care.
• Women and children still comprise the majority of those in poverty.
• A woman's ability to save and earn for retirement are often reduced because of time out of the workforce while rearing children.

However, women are the warp and woof of the fabric that holds our nation together, still largely responsible for raising and nurturing the generations to come.  Women comprise 90% of registered nurses and 80% of elementary and middle school teachers.  Women still bear the burden of raising the children and maintaining the household even if both partners in a marriage work.

Whether or not you feel women who work is a good idea, the fact remains that those who do not work risk facing a life of poverty in their old age.  Those who earn less in their productive years have less to rely on as they age.  And those who have given over their adult professional lives to working with children are facing the loss of pensions and earnings they anticipated as a safety net in the last years of their lives.

Love your mother. Encourage national policies that reflect your moral principles: Ensure a life of dignity and safety for women and children.

Warring on Women

I've read The Handmaid's Tale.

Maybe that's my problem--an English teacher who's thought too much about how language is manipulated in 1984 or how women were stripped of their power in the 1985 dystopian novel.  In one day of coordinated mass firings, coinciding with ATM cards that suddenly showed a zero balance, Margaret Atwood's women lost all of their freedoms.  (ATM cards did not even exist when Atwood wrote her novel.)

It can happen fast, apparently, when the leaders decide to disenfranchise a whole group.  The Iranian revolution of 1979 flipped a monarchy to a theocracy in just months.  Protests that began in August 1978 ended with the Ayatollah Khomeni in charge - and modern women forced into burkhas and out of work--by December of 1979.

The formula for disenfranchisement is simple: take away jobs and access to power through economic security, and hand all that power and access over to a ruling class.  Once the power is shifted and discrimination becomes law, as happened to the Iranian Constitution, returning to levels of equality is an uphill battle by a greatly weakened constituency.  The Ayatollah is long gone, but the laws remain.  In 1998, the parliament rejected a proposal for equal inheritance rights for women. A woman is only entitled to half that of a man.  No indication of changing back to more equal status for women.

So maybe I'm a little paranoid when I read about:

• Outlawing collective bargaining for unions serving mostly women - the teacher's unions.
• Zeroing out funding for Planned Parenthood that provides health care to women exclusively.
• Reducing funding to WIC by as much as 10% - a program that provides funding for healthy food options for women and infants.
• Cuts to literacy programs for children like RIF that have been proven to boost literacy for the poorest children.

Why are women and children being targeted for cuts?

Let's face it: poverty is primarily a woman's issue since women with children comprise the majority of the poor. National arguments are centering the blame on victims and removing the few supports that get children and their mothers through the first year's of life.  Simultaneously, the women who rear those children are facing cuts to their livelihood, placing more children at risk and ensuring a divided nation.

This is more than a woman's issue.  This is a "what kind of future can we look forward to?" if over half our population is stripped of the ability to improve their lives.

Who benefits?