December152009
brief summaries: my school and the city.
First, the school update: You remember the hope (this is where I would link to another post if I knew how?!) about the survey and the possibility of feedback, etc. Here’s what happened after that:
1. small changes: principal feedback on meeting notes, a suggestion box in the main office, announcements emailed to the staff
2. heard from another meeting that I put my spies (kidding) in: teacher morale is low on the high school, according to members of the administration, because teachers are spending all their time BEING negative instead of DOING something positive. read: its our fault.
My grade team was actually called out as the bright spot of the high school because we’re proactive and create magical solutions (We’ve started calling ourselves the dream team. Even asked the AP for matching jerseys). Had I been there, I might have said something to the effect of: HA! We’re trying new things out and working ourselves to the bone creating solutions that are making you smile, but we’re the least happy OF EVERYONE. Some of these things ARE NOT OUR JOB AND WE’RE GOING TO BURN OUT AND LEAVE.
sorry for the all caps. I’m a little disgruntled today for a variety of reasons, one of which is wondering why school is still happening for another week aka break needs to be here now.
and here’s what you might have missed in the city:
**The governor is withholding schools aid because of the state budget shortfall:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/nyregion/14budget.html?_r=1
**new york is trying to win a lot of obama/duncan education money (called Race to the Top, or RttT), through the aforementioned teacher tenure linked to test score initiative and substantially increasing the number of charter schools:
http://gothamschools.org/2009/12/14/regents-urge-legislature-to-double-number-of-charters/
**the mayor/chancellor team is closing down 20 SCHOOLS! including some of the last large high schools in the city.
http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/145920
… to be replaced by those charters from the RttT proposal? Doesn’t that timing just work out so nicely for the new initiatives of Bloomberg and Klein! God, now if only they were good for educating all of the city’s students….
Tags: /small reforms /blame the teachers /The Reformers /Race to the Top
November232009
scandal in sacto schools »
I’m from Sacramento. Our mayor is Kevin Johnson. Kevin Johnson was an NBA player from Sacramento who returned to fix the ghetto. I’m not sure those were his exact words, but that’s basically what his message was. Michelle Rhee is the chancellor of education (well, thats what we call it in ny, forgive my error… class starts soon) in Washington D.C. and one of the most famous (and crazy?) leaders of the anti-union, testing and numbers are everything, but really I’m just doing this to end the race gap movement. They both worked at St. Hope, a charter school company in Sacramento. Apparently, while they were working there, KJ was accused of touching THREE young women inappropriately and then Rhee swooped in to cover the whole thing up !! They also grossly misused government funding. Rhee wanted to bring the St. Hope charter “Experience” to infiltrate the D.C. system.
Sounds like a great experience, no? I mean, they are getting married after all of this scandal. That should count for something about the effectiveness of their schools, right?
HA.
here’s more of a summary if we’re not reading the full report (why not?!!)
http://conductingtheinnerlight.edublogs.org/
Tags: /The Reformers /corruption!
November202009
remember when I said, “at least there aren’t any fights?”
Well….. there were two today. Before 11am. And one on Wednesday afternoon. Its been building for a little while - its not like things were exactly serene and positive here. I didn’t bother finding out what they were about.
In addition, I sort of unloaded on the AP (assistant principal) this morning about the fact that our graduating class is going to have maybe 15 students in it at the rate we are going. She seemed… surprised. Which mostly had me wanting to scream “REALLY YOU DONT KNOW THIS IS GOING ON????” but instead I said something to the effect of “how can we ring the alarm?” Heard an annoucement for 11th graders to meet in the library right after the last class of today, to which a few students replied “Sorry, I don’t have time for that.”
The NYT wrote an article today about a small school succeeding despite the odds (thats usually how its portrayed) and closing the racial achievement gap : http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/education/20sfschool.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=education. The main point they came away with is that while different strategies can and should be tried, at the end of the day it is about “believing that kids can and will learn.” The article includes another quote that claims, “We know what needs to be done; we know how to do it” and yet “educators are notoriously bad at adopting others’ good ideas.” It seems from this kind of statement like every school has been hand delivered The Solution(s) and they just don’t want to implement them. Its like we/they HATE children or something. Placing this kind of blame seems like an echo of the same individualization thats placed on teachers in the national anti-teachers union drive as well. If THEY just put in the effort, our school problems would be solved.
What would be much more interesting are examples of success beyond saving that mathematically challenged 3rd grader. Like many of the other school spotlights that are done, this article was based on an elementary school. What if they’re EIGHTEEN? Where is the handbook for high school that solves problems at that level?
Tags: /The Reformers /graduation /small schools
