This Is Not News

Today, after months of speculation, Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission announced that Superintendent Arlene Ackerman would step down. Ackerman has been under fire for close to a year over a number of issues. Far from the least of those issues was a budget deficit for the upcoming school year of over $600 million. That deficit resulted in a wave of layoffs that affected some of my colleagues and has me looking over my shoulder, so I am by no means a disinterested party here. Now, in light of this deficit, the next bit of info may seem a bit shocking. In exchange for walking away from the three years remaining on her contract, Ackerman is receiving $905,000. The SRC is on the hook for about $500,000. The rest is coming from private donations, which is a whole different story.

Now you may be asking yourself why, during a budget crisis, would you pay someone almost a million dollars not to do any work. What’s scary is that this may be the most sensible decision the School Reform Commission has made on this issue. Because the SRC originally hired Ackerman with an exorbitant salary and set of perks, and because the SRC then extended her contract even after controversy started, the SRC was going to be giving Arlene Ackerman close to a million dollars or more over the next three years. The question is whether the schools would get more value for that money if they did have Ackerman’s services, or if they didn’t. Clearly, they decided that she was doing more arm than good. One can only wish they had that realization when they extended the contract, or when they signed it in the first place.

So, clearly, the SRC has neither covered itself in glory nor demonstrated great wisdom in this affair. This has some people wondering if the SRC is a good idea in the first place. The SRC replaced the old school board about a decade ago when the state came in to deliver added funding. The governor appoints three members and the mayor appoints two. So the citizens of Philadelphia have very little control over the commission, and a natural response is to want the people of the city to have more say. So there’s a small movement to replace the SRC with an elected school board.

I honestly don’t think there’s much chance of the current Pennsylvania legislature getting rid of the SRC, but if they did, I wonder if an elected school board would be the best replacement. There is a point of diminishing returns with elected offices. The more detailed the job, the harder it is for citizens to be informed enough about the job and the candidates to make an intelligent decision. In Philadelphia we have a set of positions called row offices – jobs like City Commissioner, Sheriff, and Register of Wills. I am a political junkie and it has taken me years to figure out exactly what each job does, let alone to figure out who has the best platform for the job. We elect judges, and I just skip those offices on the ballot because I do not have the legal expertise to know who is a good judge and who isn’t. Because fewer voters pay attention to these offices, party bosses tend to have more influence over who gets nominated and who wins. It’s not a pretty picture of electoral sausage-making. I don’t know if that’s the process I want to determine education policy.

On the other hand, lots of people in the community have a stake in the schools’ success. If schools can really integrate themselves with their communities, through the work of administrators, staff, and parents, it might create an informed enough electorate to make an elected board work. But there are a lot of necessary changes to our political and academic cultures between here and there.

One of my goals for this year is to move a little bit beyond my own classroom this year and get more involved in the larger education community. I’m fortunate that there’s one excellent resource for doing so right in my hometown: Educon, the annual conference held at the Science Leadership Academy. This year the event will run from January 27-29, 2012. Registration just opened, so I’ll be buying my ticket soon.

Why is EduCon valuable? I attended last year, and there were three major benefits:

It’s a great way to collect information about a lot of tools, techniques and resources that can help teachers make their classrooms a place where students can take chances and think deeply about important questions. I learned a lot about using storytelling tools, games, and document archives at last year’s con. I’m looking forward to following up on those threads and branching out into others.

It’s a good networking tool if you’re looking to use social networks to connect to the online education conversation. I didn’t really use Twitter before I attended the last EduCon, and now it helps me keep up with news, issues and techniques.

The SLA students and staff who volunteer at the conference have so much enthusiasm, and have built such a strong community, that I found that talking to them about how they learn and what they want to achieve was a major shot in the arm for my teaching enthusiasm.

So my calendar is already marked. Now I can spend the next four months making sure I have something interesting to say when I get there.

Last week Chris Lehmann wrote about a school he’d like to see:

Every morning, the first thing everyone did was read the New York Times for an hour. Now, imagine that they are using some kind of Kindle-style software so that they can annotate with ideas, questions, etc… such that at the end of the hour, the school community could see who had similar questions from the day’s paper.

And now, imagine what it would look like if the kids spent the better part of the day researching those questions and seeing where that took them, with the end of every day being a “share out” where kids shared what they learned across a variety of media.

I’ve had his post bouncing in my head ever since.

As a teenager, I would have killed to attend a school like this. (Well, maybe maimed.) And if you could figure out all of the logistics and get all of the technology together to make it work, I think this could be a tremendous magnet or select-admission school. I wouldn’t make the admission criteria grades or test scores or even an essay. I’d want to interview the prospective students to see who has the curiosity and self-direction to thrive in a school like this. I’d maybe even want to see each prospective student pick up a copy of the day’s paper and map out a list of questions for further review.

Why am I thinking so much about who I’d let into a school like this, and therefore who I would leave out? Because I can’t help but think about the students for whom this wouldn’t be a helpful structure, and I can’t help but think about the reasons why. Partially, this is because I have looked for ways to incorporate news coverage of current events into my teaching, including newspaper articles and NPR broadcasts. I haven’t always had as much success as I would like.

One conclusion I’ve reached is that our news media assumes a great deal of background knowledge. Look at the first two paragraphs of the New York Times’ news story about Standard and Poor’s decision to downgrade the U.S. government’s credit rating:

Standard & Poor’s removed the United States government from its list of risk-free borrowers for the first time on Friday night, a downgrade that is freighted with symbolic significance but carries few clear financial implications.

The company, one of three major agencies that offer advice to investors in debt securities, said it was cutting its rating of long-term federal debt to AA+, one notch below the top grade of AAA. It described the decision as a judgment about the nation’s leaders, writing that “the gulf between the political parties” had reduced its confidence in the government’s ability to manage its finances.

OK. For starters, you have the writing style. “Freighted with symbolic significance” is not the kind of phrase I see high school students tossing around. It’s good to challenge kids, but the language is presenting a barrier to the concepts rather than carrying them to the reader. Get beyond that, and we get to the question of why this is a big deal that this company is changing this rating. It must be because the company “offers advice to investors in debt securities.” Well, what are debt securities? Who invests in them? Why do they care about this company’s advice? And what does this have to do with the United States government? Maybe it’s the phrase long-term federal debt. So what is the difference between long term and short term federal debt? And what’s that gulf in the political parties that the article is talking about?

Now, these are the questions you’d want to see a student ask. And then you’d want the student to think about where he or she could go to find answers to those questions. But if the student doesn’t enter the project with curiosity, or with a belief that this information in the newspaper is relevant, the student is more likely to give up. If the student doesn’t have a sense of how to go about answering those questions, the curiosity is not likely to lead to the kind of substantial inquiry that leads to deeper learning.

Now, as I’ve been writing this, it occurred to me that Chris’ proposal doesn’t say the students have to focus on the new section. Maybe a student starts reading about the debt downgrade, gets bored, and finds something in the sports section or the arts section that they do have some background knowledge about. Getting a student to dig deeper into a story about baseball statistics might help provide some of the media-reading skills I’m talking about. Maybe an analysis of the NFL lockout leads a student to think about antitrust law, or a performer’s contract dispute inspires a discussion about contract rights and the respective roles of labor and capital. This could be a good start, but sooner or later each student would have to be willing to dive into the front pages if this type of school is really going to help students become strong citizens.

When I think about a school like this, I think about the school system that it would be a part of. What would an elementary school that prepared its students to thrive in a school like this look like? What kind of college would its graduates seek out? Right this very minute, there are eighth graders across Philadelphia and the nation who would benefit by being able to look forward to a school like this. But I also wonder what we can do to build a system where that would be true of many more.

Natalie Munroe is a teacher in the Philadelphia suburbs. She also has a blog. Last year, it was discovered that she had posted disparaging comments about her students on her blog. She was suspended and then went on maternity leave. Now she’s getting ready to come back to work, and let’s just say that bygones aren’t bygones at this point. The principal has called Munroe unprofessional and said that any student can withdraw from her classes.

I’ve tried to steer clear of this story because I really have a limit to how much negativity concerning teaching I can handle at a given time, and there’s definitely an abundance of that right now. But the latest batch of stories caught my eye, there are some things I want to try to say to clear my mind, and if I’m not going to get all meta on my blog, what’s the point of having one?

• I never read the original blog, so I can only see the quotes of Munro’s writing out of context. But the only context that would make some of these quotes not insulting, unprofessional, and otherwise way out of bounds would be if the phrase “You should never say” appeared before them.
• Munroe says that blog was meant for close friends, and that she didn’t use her full name. Well, if you only want to send messages to personal friends – get an email list. Don’t create a blog that the whole Internet can see. And don’t put your picture on it. And leave off your last initial. How long is it going to take people to realize that on the Internet, very little goes away forever?
• Related to the last point: Do not underestimate students and what they can/will do to find out more about you. Every year I have new students search for me on Google. They find my Facebook profile, this website, tons of stuff I’ve posted on message boards over the years, and photos of me. A few of them even remember my birthday. You can hide, or you can open up an opportunity for kids to connect to you. But if you’re gonna hide, you better do it well.
• It is very interesting that Munroe still has a job when it’s pretty clear her boss doesn’t want her there. The principal is quoted as saying that the only reason Munroe still ha job is because she has “employee rights.” I have no idea what the contract in her district says, but I admit I am surprised that there is no notion that creating a hostile and difficult educational environment is not something that can get you fired. On the other hand, a First Amendment lawsuit would be almost inevitable. I would like to see those cases filed in order to get some precedent here, but I guess I can understand why the district doesn’t want to be on the hook as a guinea pig.
• The result of that, though, is that some people are going to use this as fodder in the “Why can’t we fire bad teachers?” debate, and that makes me sad. I teach in a district that tried to fire a teacher for motivating her students to speak out about conditions at their school, a teacher whose alleged offenses were far less injurious to her students than Munroe’s. Union and contract provisions helped save her job, but they didn’t stop the district from trying. Those protections are not a Get Out of Jail Free card. If administrators find that a teacher is not doing the job, they should take the time and gather the evidence to make the case under the due process accorded in the contract. Otherwise, it’s too easy to imagine someone getting fired at a whim.
• Munroe’s comments in the article I linked to do not help her cause in my eyes. It’s not the principal’s job or the district’s job to defuse the situation. It’s hers, by apologizing, discussing what she’s learned, and telling her students and colleagues how she will do better. But she doesn’t seem to realize that’s what she should do, and so I don’t really expect things to get much better for her. Nor do I have any sympathy.

I’m going to do a more extended reflection of my experiences at EduCon over the next few days – I’m letting the weekend stew a little bit, plus I want to gather some of the links and resources I found out about into something that might be vaguely useful. But one thing that I know EduCon did is give me the motivation to confront the gap between the teacher I am right now and the teacher I want to be. And I am never going to make as much progress as I want on that front until I come to terms with the three-way battle between me, myself, and the textbook I’ve been assigned to teach.

I feel like I need to apologize for the possibility that I might, at some point in this post, say something positive about a textbook. I feel like I spend much of my day banging my head against the thing, and it’s a 1300 page world history text, so you can just imagine how much fun that is. Reading and answering questions out of a textbook is so disconnected from building something that addresses a real challenge in your own life that the ghost of John Dewey should start warning me that I’m about to get a visit from the Spirit of Education Past. I’ve spent a lot of my time as a high school teacher looking for ways to help my students put some personality into the events of history, and there’s not a lot of personality in a textbook.

So why do I also spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to help my students get more out of this thing?
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Last night Chris Lehmann posted about the way that many figures in the education world view teachers more as adversaries than vital resources in the effort to educate our kids. I’ve been mulling over Chris’s post in my head since then, and while I am far from an expert I think there are a number of reasons for this viewpoint. That means there are a lot of things teachers (and others) have to do in order to correct the problem, but maybe a rough To Do list isn’t a bad place to start.

• Familiarity: I’ve noticed that writers in various creative endeavors often say that they get the brunt of criticism from people when something isn’t quite right. There’s a perception that writers have the easy job, that if they screw up it’s more egregious than if a director or an artist or what have you screws up. And they say that part of this is that even if the average person has never framed a shot or played a note, just about everyone has put words to paper. (Maybe not well, but that’s another story.) So there’s no mystery associated with the task. That mystery is a line of defense for other creators – we may know that we don’t like a song or a scene, but we don’t have a sense that we know why it’s wrong or a sense that we can do better. So we might not be as critical. What does this have to do with teachers? Well, we’ve all been students and many of us have been parents. We’ve been part of the classroom process and so we don’t feel like there’s any mystery – even if we’re not familiar with the behind the scenes work (prep, grading, lesson planning) that makes the classroom environment work. So we’re less forgiving of what we see as mistakes. Plus, since we’ve all been in classrooms, the odds are pretty good that we’ve had bad teachers at some point. I’d say I’ve had some bad teachers at every level since elementary school. I’ve had average teachers and excellent teachers too, but just like people will remember the one double play the second baseman screws up instead of the ten he turned successfully, those memories of bad teachers can become magnified and create an unease that teachers don’t know what they’re doing.
• Bad Word of Mouth: When I say that everyone knows a bad a teacher, I’m going to include teachers in that statement. I have had friends, family friends, acquaintances and associates who work in schools. Almost every one of them has had stories about teachers who aren’t up to the job. In fact, in the urban education course I took this past semester for my Master’s, I was assigned a book written by a former teacher at an urban school who warned prospective teachers not to let the bitterness and bad attitudes of experienced teachers get to them. Now, maybe that’s due to differences in styles, maybe it’s due to personal rivalries. But when people hear from people “on the insideâ€? that there are bad teachers who don’t get called to account, that’s going to create a negative image of teachers and the organizations and officials that advocate teachers’ interests.

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Renewing the effort to do fairly regular blogging now that a new semester has started. Truth be told, the last semester put me in a bit of a funk regarding my teaching. My evaluations and in-class observations were generally positive, but because of what I was teaching (and what I was taking) I had to give a lot of renewed thought to Dewey and how I envision education working. I think that in my efforts to structure my classes to give students maximum opportunity to prepare for tests and exams, I wound up encouraging memorization, and I didn’t do enough to encourage students to reflect and connect the material. I think a gut check like this is a good thing – I’ve been doing this for eight years now, and it’s easy to fall into habits. So I’ve been tweaking my class approach, and we’ll see where it takes me.

The next question is whether this election year will totally ruin whatever faith and interest I have in studying democracy, but that’s a rant for another time.

One of the major issues that comes up in my computers-and-education course is the idea of making electronic content accessible to people who use alternate technologies for reading/consuming information online. Intellectually this makes a lot of sense to me, but I’ve had some gut level resistance. And I think when you get down to it, the reason is that I’ve distributed course notes as PDF files for a few years now. My logic was that I didn’t want students to have to worry about how a browser would mangle the notes and make them harder to read or follow, and I do think that that’s a valid concern. But the problem is that PDFs are rotten for screen readers and other software that people with vision handicaps or other problems might use to navigate the web. So now I seriously have to think about re-formatting these online notes as XHTML pages with cascading style sheets, and at least see how they print out. Yeesh. Technology. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

Kinda wanted to have some brilliant thoughts to mark my return from blogging, but my brain’s getting ready to shut off, so we’ll have them tomorrow.

A lot of my energy today has gone toward technology problems. I want to make PDF files of several major writings from the anti-Federalist side of the constitutional ratification debate available to my students. The photocopier at work has a setting to create PDFs and e-mail them to you, which is great – but it could only handle documents that were three pages long. So now I gotta stitch ’em together.

Some of my students can’t even access the online material I’m posting using the university’s system – that’s the reason I’ve always set up course web pages on my own server, but then I always get students who look on Blackboard (the education system) rather than on the site. So I’m trying to work with the system and getting frustrated by the interfaces and lack of access.

I also had to do some work on a wiki for one of my education courses. In between arguing with the interface, I know I’m setting myself up to be a major putz, because I went through altering fonts and reorganizing material in a way that I thought made sense. I’m not sure my OCD allows for the plays-well-with-others skills required for being a wiki contributor . . .

I was all set to link to an essay in the Times of London about education tat is pretty darn close to the exact opposite of my thinking in terms of the role of the teacher. And then when I went to reread the essay and get the URL I discovered that the Times site is down for maintenance. After an hour of trying to come up with something else to write, I’m saying to heck with it, going from memory, and promising to update this post with the link later.

The basic idea was that the essayist was bemoaning the effort to make school subjects relevant to students’ lives and interests, because a teacher’s responsibility is not to the students, it is to the knowledge that the teacher passes on. The teacher presents the knowledge, finds that small group of students who are willing to accept it on the terms that the teacher offers, and leaves the rest to their fates.

I don’t even know where to begin, but I’ll start with this: if no one cares about the knowledge, then the knowledge dies. When people care about the knowledge, it multiplies. (If you doubt me, go check out how much space Wikipedia has devoted to the exploits of fictional characters.)

I’d move on to a more general point that students who see a way to use knowledge will generally do a better job of absorbing, retaining, and understanding that knowledge; indeed, for many theorists, the ability to use information is one of the defining elements of comprehension. But I’ve been blabbing about Dewey for a while here, so you probably already have that idea.

Point so far is, even if a teacher’s job is knowledge propagation, it sure seems to be that a teacher would be interested in maximizing his or her chances of success. The alternative seems to be the equivalent of throwing a bunch of seeds into uncultivated land and claiming that the farmer’s responsibility is only to those seeds who happen to find a spot where they can grow.

Beyond that, though, is that I have a completely different conception of the role of a teacher, especially at the pre-college level. Teachers are driving many of the formative experiences of the next generation of society, so it kind of behooves everyone to make those experiences constructive ones. I know there are realities to deal with and compromises to be made, but geez, can we at least get a decent read on the ideal?