This Is Not News

So this is the official Day One of the New Normal of schools being closed. I’m still feeling my way around and trying to develop a routine.

I’ve decided that as long as I have any say over the matter, I am not worrying about doing anything with the expectation that it will be graded. I just have no way of knowing with confidence what every one of my students has the time and opportunity to access. I don’t know how well email and other electronic communication is going to help me give feedback and guidance. I feel queasy about grades under the best circumstances, and these sure aren’t the best circumstances.

That said, for people who are at home and would like some kind of academic activity, I’ve resolved that I’m going to make one post a day on Google Classroom. I’m going to spend a lot of this time trying to figure out what’s going on in the world and also improving my understanding of my subject material. So why not share that process with the students? I’ll share at least one article that I’ve read each day and the questions it raises in my mind. I might even “workshop” some assignments and share them to let students kick the tires.

I’ve been making video lectures for my AP Government class for years. I’m still not quite done. So I think I’ll take this time to write scripts for the last batch I need to do (until they redesign the course again). I used to record the lectures as a sort of stream of consciousness with my notes, but I got tired of watching myself pause to collect my thoughts along with my other verbal filler tics. At least I’ve learned how to turn my iPad into a TelePrompter. (The Pages app has a scrolling display feature.)

If this stretches on for as long as I think it will, I might have to get more ambitious. But for now, let’s all give ourselves time to settle into something that resembles a routine.

I’ll be making my presentation on simulation activities at EduCon shortly.

Here are a few links that may be useful.

• The Google slides for the presentation.
• A Google Doc that collects resources and links.
• A Google Doc that collects the brainstorming that participants have done.

I’m currently attending EduCon at Science Leadership Academy. I’ll be hosting a conversation shortly on the importance of background knowledge to doing research.

Here’s the page for the conversation at the EduCon website.

Here’s the Google Slides presentation I’ll be using.

And here’s the Google Doc where I hope a bunch of really great educators are going to share some really great ideas.

I mentioned earlier that I am teaching a class of 12th graders the AP US Government course.

On one level, I am in my element. All the minutiae of government and politics that I have absorbed since I checked out a book about American presidents from the library in third grade can finally be put to use!

On another level, this is dangerous. I’m trying to package 30 years of reading and experience in a way that high school students who aren’t as fascinated by the government as I am will find relevant and interesting enough to absorb.

I also have mixed feelings about a class that is so expressly focused on performing well on a standardized test. It’s a standardized test that can result in my students getting college credit, which can be a huge academic and financial reward, so it certainly helps with the motivation. But it’s an external motivation.

I try to do the best I can to provide resources and assistance with the material. It’s only my first year, so now that I have taught the course once I think I can do a lot better next year and improve the materials I developed. For example, we’re doing case studies this month to stud how the government has operated in specific cases, and I’d really like to curate a set of readings and have them available on the web early on. Right now I’m doing the initial searching and photocopying a small number of the readings so that I don’t throw too much material out at once. Give me the summer and the chance to hit the ground running and I think we’ll be on to something.

Work in progress that it is, I think the course has been a success this year. I’ve heard students say that they understand what they’re hearing on the news, and talking about how voting in midterm elections is important. (I probably could have flown home under my own power that day.) Most of the credit belongs to the students, who have brought their questions to bear on some fairly dry topics at times. That is, when they don’t steer us completely off topic. But then some of those times have been some of the best conversations of the year.)

I’ve already remarked that I have not had as much time or energy for writing as I would like. In part this is because my teaching assignment changed considerably this year. After teaching 9th graders world history for my first five years as a high school teacher, I have been teaching 12th graders civics and economics, including one section of AP US Government. I also introduced a new elective class in American Studies that I originally hoped to combine recent American history with a study of current American culture but has wound up leaning a lot more toward the former.

In some ways, this has been a very enjoyable challenge. It is absolutely the case that what I am teaching now lines up much more with my prior academic training and outside readings and interest. Teaching 12th graders, many of whom have questions about college and beyond, is an exciting opportunity. (I also like teaching 9th graders who are just getting introduced to high school; it’s interesting to see the start and the conclusion of many students’ high school journey.)

It has also been a great deal of work. I haven’t been satisfied that the textbooks we have on hand are a good fit for our students’ needs or timely enough to be relevant to today’s challenges. So I have spent a lot of time gathering and editing articles from the web or writing my own. I think this has been a worthwhile investment of my time. The danger is that I have replaced a hardcover collection of material my students find impenetrable and irrelevant with a daily anthology of readings with similar issues, but I trust my knowledge of our students enough that I believe I am a doing a better job for them than a textbook writer aiming for a more generic high school audience. If I teach the same classes to my students next year, I hope I will be able to refine and improve the materials over the summer and have more time and energy to focus on helping the students use the material as a springboard to their own inquiry.

To put these materials together I use a laptop that my school provides for me. It’s several years old at this point and it’s starting to show the strain of trying to keep up with the times. Loading web pages and editing Word documents takes a lot longer than it does on my desktop PC. I mutter in frustration at this sometimes, but I have to think about how lucky I am. Were I teaching back in the days when I was in high school, I would not have nearly as many resources open to me from almost any location with only a few minutes’ wait.

Doesn’t stop me from staring with envy at the new laptops when I walk into an Apple Store, but it does help give some perspective.

Yesterday I read two articles covering complaints about the revised Advanced Placement U.S. History exam. The National Association of Scholars and the Republican National Committee both attacked the revisions for promoting a negative vision of United States history, such as an emphasis on the racial hierarchy established in colonial times.

Last night and well into this morning, I was constantly refreshing Twitter to see what was happening in Ferguson, MO. If you’re not up to speed on the events, there’s a very good primer on Vox. Since Michael Brown was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer, residents have been gathering to protest, and the Ferguson and St. Louis County police have been very aggressive in their tactics – using tear gas, arresting reporters, and bringing out a lot of guns and armor.

There are a lot of lessons we need to learn from what’s going on in Ferguson, but one of them is that although we should not do so exclusively, we need to emphasize the negative aspects of America’s history, because they are influencing our present and so many people in positions of power do not see this. I have read the AP framework, and it does not ignore the idea that America’s leaders helped create a government that helped move justice and a government of rights forward. But neither does it ignore that they built that nation on territory occupied by other people, or that there has been an ongoing struggle to extend that nation’s protections and privileges to all its people. We need both sides of the story, and we need to understand that for all the positive legacy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the negative legacy of slavery, racism, inequality, and exclusion also lives on today. Injustice compounds and festers, even after its most obvious signs have been swept away. It creates situations where many people feel ostracized and under threat from the very society that they live in. Then others, who are more comfortable with the status quo, are unable to see where that pain comes from because they believed the problems were all (or mostly) solved in the past and so everyone should just be able to carry on now without having to respond to what went on before.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on the case for reparations earlier this year tried to bring that point home, and a lot of people tried to push it away. Ongoing discussions across social media and activist networks about privilege demonstrate a lack of understanding and empathy. Statistics about the unequal treatment that our criminal justice system gives to Caucasians and minorities pile up until we are numb. And then we see the powder keg explode in a town like Ferguson, where a mostly-white police force is alienated from the largely-black community that it is supposed to serve.

I’ve made no secret of my fondness for John Dewey, and one of his ideas that sticks with me is that education is the process through which society decides what part of itself to pass on to the next generation. Implicit in that is the idea that there are some parts that we do not want to pass on, that the generation to come will build a better society than the one we have today. That means we need to be able to challenge our students’ assumptions and preconceived notions, while we help them develop the skills to critically examine the messages that society sends.

For students who come from a position of privilege (as a lot of AP students are), that is tricky. We will often be challenging things they have learned from their families and their communities. Students may feel like we are trying to make them feel guilty, or accusing them of being biased or cruel themselves because of the biased and cruel actions of others. The idea of a social responsibility may seem at odds with the ethic of individual responsibility that we often want them to assume. This kind of teaching requires us to be challenging and supportive simultaneously, which means we need to create a good rapport and safe environment with our students, and help them establish it with each other.

Students from disempowered groups may not need a history class to help them understand inequality in America, but they need support too. If the classroom can be a supportive and pluralistic environment, then that helps create a model that the students can work to recreate in society. The history of injustice must be married with the stories of resistance to that injustice, and the story of imperfect progress should be brought forward to the present day so that students have a reason to believe not only that present injustice is unacceptable but that something can be done about it. And then we need to help empower students to demand that change. Many of our students are already learning how to harness social media to empower citizens, but that needs to expand to understanding our electoral system, identifying who has political influence, seeing how they use it, and so on.

Together, these students can become the citizenry that demands accountability from their elected officials, that exercises power with empathy and wisdom, and that brings more justice to an ever more perfect union. And as they do, I hope that they will teach us how to do so as well.

(This post was revised several hours after initial posting to add some links and clarifying details.)

I remember being in grad school and frequently being frustrated in classes where the professor didn’t say a lot. This was especially true in political science courses, where I was trying to catch up with a lot of literature on democracy and political institutions that was really interesting, but a bit out of my background. (I took a couple of poli sci classes as an undergrad, but decided not to major in it for a variety of reasons.) I figured that the prof had spent a lot more time studying and thinking about the literature and the subject than I had, or than my classmates had, and in that two or three seminar window, I wanted to use that resource to streamline my own knowledge-building as much as possible. I had done the reading, I had my own thoughts and criticisms, and if someone else had either made them or refuted them, that would be very helpful. I had questions about how the research in the reading had been followed-up upon, and the prof was far more likely to know of the rest of the literature than I was. Now, it’s possible that I was, and am, too likely to defer to experts and credentials. But in my mind, that expert with that credential was the reason I was paying money to take that class and not just getting a reading list on my own and finding a discussion group on the Internet.

I think about this a lot these days because now that I am a teacher, I have to make a conscious effort not to simply be the kind of teacher that I liked most when I was a student. Don’t get me wrong, I take a lot of my inspiration from my own teachers and try to steal as many tricks from the good ones as I can. But not every student is looking for an explainer, or a source of lousy puns, or whatever I was looking for from my teachers. And they deserve the best I can give them, too. They might deserve it, and need it, even more than the students who are more on my wavelength. (And I may be going out onto a very thin branch with this whole “deserving” theme, because I don’t want to suggest that some students are less deserving of a good education, but bear with me for a minute.)

The thing is, I kind of hit a certain genetic/environment jackpot, in that the things I was good at and interested in as a kid are the things that society was going to force me to do anyway. And the things that I was less skilled at and less interested in were things that society let me pursue or abandon as I saw fit. I like reading, I like memorizing stuff, I like writing, and so on. So the fact that I had to do this for seven hours a day didn’t bug me too much, and overall society has rewarded me for this. If, on the other hand, I had been forced to spend seven hours a day exercising and learning how to play various sports, I might have been a little crankier and inclined to slack off. When I literally batted .000 during a season playing baseball for the local Y, I just stopped playing, spent more time reading, and that was that. Students who don’t like school or have less developed “school skills” don’t have the option of leaving the history team to spend more time on their basketball homework. It’s important for me to keep a strong sense of empathy, look for ways to make the history team work a little better, and be the teacher that they need, not the teacher that my current vision of my 14-yer-old self wanted.

I am writing this piece on the day that the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers’ contract with the School District of Philadelphia expires. Since the last time I wrote about the terms of the contract, PFT president Jerry Jordan has held a press conference stating that the union (of which I am a member) was unwilling to accept wage cuts but would be willing to change the terms under which the district provides health insurance to its employees. I will probably talk about those specifics in a later post, but I think the more pressing issue can be found in Mayor Nutter’s response to Jordan. He said that he was disappointed that the union was not saying anything about staffing flexibility and other work rules. In concert with the School Reform Commission’s actions to suspend parts of the Public School Code that affect seniority rules, it is clear that this is a major focus of the negotiation/standoff. So I’d like to discuss that in a little more detail.

But before we do that, I want to put the most important part of this discussion right up front. I believe that it is important to ensure that experienced aides, counselors, secretaries, and teachers remain in the district. I know that there are lots of anecdotes about people who have been on the job too long, who seem to have lost their enthusiasm or not kept up with technology and other changes. Those are valid concerns and they are part of the reason why there is a process for continuing to evaluate people. But overall, research supports the idea that experienced teachers and school staff help students. It takes time to build relationships with students. It takes time to find your voice in the classroom. It takes time to develop lessons, see where they work, and reiterate to fix where they don’t. If teaching becomes a high-turnover profession where teachers move on to other fields after two to five years, our children will be faced with a system that is constantly restarting from scratch. The seniority rules I’m talking about here are designed, in part, to avoid that situation.

When we talk about seniority rules and PFT members, it’s important to remember that not only are there different types of seniority, but there are different ways that seniority is used. There is usually a two-step process involved in getting an assignment in the School District of Philadelphia. The first step is to be hired by the district. This can be done by the central administration. Once this happens, you are “in the system,” and eligible to be assigned to a specific school. But at this point you do not have an assignment yet. This seniority, which reflects how long you have been employed by the district, is called “system seniority.”

Once you get assigned to a particular school, you begin accruing seniority in that school. This type of seniority is referred to as “building seniority.” There are actually technicalities that can result in you carrying your building seniority from one assignment to another, but I’m going to put them to the side.

For example, I was hired by the district in March of 2009 for a start date of September 1. But at that time I did not have a specific assignment. I was allowed to interview with individual principals through the site-selection process (more on that later) and, if none of those principals hired me, I would pick from available vacancies closer to the school year. I spent three days at one high school before classes started, and then got hired by the principal at Parkway Center City on the Friday before classes started. So my system seniority and my building seniority are mostly, but not entirely, in sync. If I chose to leave Parkway Center City to teach at another school, my building seniority would reset to zero while my system seniority continued to accrue.

So how are these types of seniority used in staffing? Let’s start with system seniority. When the district decides that it has to cut its overall staff levels, as it did in 2011 and again this year, it puts all the employees in different categories (social studies teachers, math teachers, counselors, etc.) into lists based on their system seniority. So there might be a list of social studies teachers, and I would be ranked below a teacher hired in 2006 but above a teacher hired in 2011. Let’s say there are 500 social studies teachers and the district decides they only need 450 because of schools closing. The 50 teachers at the bottom of the list – the 50 with the least seniority – would be laid off. Then, as time passed, as social studies vacancies opened up in the district, the district would start calling those 50 people back to fill them. The laid-off teacher with the most system seniority would be called back first, then the laid-off teacher with the next most system seniority, and so on. Until they get called back, these laid off teachers have no salary and get no benefits. They are unemployed.

Now let’s talk about building seniority. Let’s say that a particular school has to lose a teacher because the enrollment is down. So instead of five social studies teachers, the school will only have four. The teacher who has been at that school for the shortest time will lose his or her position at the school, but will still be employed. So that teacher will still get a salary and benefits. He or she will need a new assignment. This teacher is considered a “forced transfer” and goes through the same process as a new hire – able to participate in the site selection process, or choosing from the available vacancies. For the teachers who decide to choose from the list of available vacancies, the order in which they choose is based on system seniority. So a force-transferred teacher who has been in the district for five years chooses before one who has been in the district for four.

It’s the use of system seniority to pick assignments that gets a lot of attention when politicians and administrators start talking about flexibility. Why should Teacher A get a certain slot just because he’s been working in the district for six years, instead of Teacher B who’s only been here for four? Over time that system has been altered, with the introduction of the site-selection process. If a position is to be filled through the site-selection process, a school’s principal and a committee of teachers interviews candidates that have already been cleared by the district and chooses one for the job. Some schools fill all of their positions this way; others fill a certain percentage. This is the system that was in place when I was hired, and it makes sense to me for filling vacancies. More veteran teachers might disagree with me, but overall the union has worked to implement this system.

So the PFT has already shown some flexibility on how vacancies at specific schools are filled. Why do people like Mayor Nutter keep talking about flexibility? Why did Superintendent Hite ask the SRC to suspend part of the school code? Because they’re gong after the way that seniority is used to determine who gets laid off and who gets called back when the district makes overall cuts. They want to be able to keep a teacher who has only been in the district for three years and lay off one who has been there for ten. They want to be able to call back a counselor who has only been in the district for five years instead of one who has been there for twenty.

Why is this such a big deal? Well, as a union member, I support the idea that if I invest a certain amount of time in a job, it’s good that I earn some job security as a result. I think that this has benefits for me as a teacher and for the students I work with. Eliminating seniority protections with regard to layoffs allows administrators to make an end run around the due process required to terminate an employee. I believe that many principals would not do this, but it only takes one two bad actors to abuse the system. And even administrators in good faith can let their own beliefs and personal relationships color a process, which is why contractual due process is so important. If I believe that a student has earned a failing grade in one of my classes, I have to follow a process to document and justify that belief. I believe that similar caution is warranted when someone’s job is at stake.

Beyond the actions of individual administrators, by suspending seniority rules the district is creating a situation in which it can replace more experienced, more expensive employees with less experienced, cheaper ones. That might help the bottom line for a while, but it is not going to help schools in poorer areas that already struggle to provide students with experiences, qualified teachers. We are already seeing some charter schools and organizations such as Teach for America adopt the idea that teaching is not a profession that someone makes a career from, but a stepping stone to some future endeavor. The link goes to a recent New York Times article on the topic that ends with a quote from a 24-year-old teacher who says,

I feel like our generation is always moving onto the next thing,” he said, “and always moving onto something bigger and better.

I want to move on to something bigger and better too. I want my skill as a teacher to get bigger. I want my classroom to be a better place for my students to learn and grow. I believe that the seniority rules help make that possible, and that’s why I’m willing to fight to protect them.