December62009
inconclusive attempts at improvement
I have a potential reason to be hopeful !! At the end of a really useless professional development on Friday about discipline from the deans (have I mentioned the high school dean before? I’m not sure what she does cause she’s not really in the halls checking for anything except uniforms - more on this in a minute), we were shepherded into the computer lab to take an online survey from the administration about the current state of the school. Questions included ranking how supported we feel, how our classes are going, etc. Though initially skeptical, page two was full of open ended questions! Rejoice! Nothing makes this disgruntled, talkative and opinionated teacher more happy than being able to tell the people who can change it EXACTLY what the problems are AND even provide potential solutions (could we make it any easier?!) since they don’t seem to know it themselves. My responses included lots of words like “emergency” and “low morale” and “failing” etc. It also included the following, which is a summary of sorts of most of my problems with the school right now:
On Thursday’s community meeting, the dean talked at length with the students about the uniform policy and rattled off the ways that it would be daily monitored, that no excuses would be accepted, and the myriad of consequences that would follow for students who were not dressed appropriately. She said that she is taking a stand for what the school stands for. I stood at the front my class in some kind of shock, thinking, “Our school stands for … uniforms? That’s it?” If we’re actually about educating our kids and not just making sure they’re wearing the right t-shirt, we need MANY MANY MORE school wide priorities and policies related to students ACADEMIC achievement. A kid failing but in his uniform still isn’t going to graduate.
Thursday is also the day that I have my inquiry team meeting. The inquiry team is a group that looks at the school’s data in depth and produces sub-groupings, a focus on the bottom third of our school, and lots of pretty graphs and reports to show visitors and put in large binders. We’re supposed to use this to learn more about the kids and, based on this information, what we should do to teach them better (which, of course, means a higher standardized test score). Most of the inquiry team meetings are taken up by discussions of the middle school data. When I asked the head data specialist (our creative writing teacher - everyone’s got multiple roles here) about what the data focus was going to be for the high school, she replied, “They’re not doing any school wide focus on the high school. They’re going to leave it up to the individual teachers to decide who to focus on in their own data analysis.” She paused for a second after seeing my facial expression and continued, “It seems like they’re really just focusing on making the middle school strong so that it can feed into the high school later. They’re pretty much ignoring the current high school.”
See why its so hard to have hope here?!! !! I am generally an optimistic person though and so my new hope is this: the chorus of high school teachers writing all that is wrong in the SURVEYS (as opposed to the meeting notes where similar things have been written but seem to fall on deaf ears) will become so CLEAR and URGENT in the eyes of the administration and CHANGE WILL HAPPEN. YES WE CAN!
Tags: /small reforms /optomism /priorities
November192009
excited about college?!
Today I took my advisory group - about 12 9th grade girls - to Barnard and Columbia for the day as part of school-wide “visiting colleges day”. We took tours, talked with professors, visited dorm rooms in the Intercultural Resource Center, and spoke at length with a Columbia student. It was a really great trip for them… especially in the 9th grade. They got to hear about how great college is and all the things they can take advantage of AND what they actually need to do in the next four years to get in.
The students I actually teach are 11th graders. It’s pretty depressing for me to think about most of their prospects for college, not to mention graduating. There is a small handful of them who might make it to schools that they want to go to and be set on a solid path from there (though I definitely will still be worried about how they are handling the workload. Most of these students are struggling with having just one AP class), but too many of my kids are so far behind on even the basic requirements that they need to graduate that its hard to say what’s going to happen to them. And this is at a school whose mission is COLLEGE. Getting into and success in college. For. Every. Student.
Its not that the 9th graders I took today are inherently more intelligent than the 11th graders I have now, but I can already see the difference in knowing all this information from the start. My advisory students have a clear goal, have seen the possibilities up close, and are willing to put in the work - even with those classes and teachers they claim to hate. I wasn’t at the school yet when my 11th graders were in 9th grade, so I don’t know what they did to put the seeds of these ideas in their heads, but I can tell you is that about 80% of the students in my class dont have those goals or the focus on the work they need to do to get there. After their 9th grade year, many MANY students did not pass all of their classes. Some passed none. Yet, as a first year school, the decision was made to ignore that (I guess? I dont know what the other reasoning would be if you were recognizing the problem head on) and move them ALL along to the 10th grade. Students who failed algebra, for example, were now taking geometry. Students who failed Global 1 went right along to Global 2. When these are classes that require building skills and understanding, that seems to me to set them up for another year of failure. Additionally, the consequences didn’t click with them at all. As a 15-year-old kid, it doesn’t seem to work to just tell kids that failing is going to hurt them unless there is something to follow that threat. They should have either been held back or immediately put into credit recovery classes on top of their schedules so they could make up the credits and see why classes in high school carry a bit more weight than in middle school. Instead, they went into 10th grade and many of them failed some more.
In New York, you have to have credits to graduate. I have kids sitting in 11th grade now with 2 out of 22 credits they should have received so far. In looking at their transcripts, maybe half of our 11th graders are on track. And that’s being generous assuming some of the others who are just missing a few credits will do some kind of credit recovery. Even though we don’t offer that during the year. Right.
This is one of the issues that drives crazy about my school. In some ways, its an issue facing a lot of new, small schools because everyone has to learn these systems for the first time in a very short amount of time and develop a school program to fit them. In the course of just making sure you have teachers and day-to-day classrooms, its easy to see how decisions get made to just keep it going. Its always survival mode. But shit is going to hit the fan at some point (like maybe when we have these kids as our first 12th grade class and they all think they are graduating and then wont be able to?) and I don’t see anyone trying to stop it.
So… here’s holding out hope for the 9th grade?
And what do we do with all of the kids whose lives our school might have accidentally yet completely ruined in the meantime?
Tags: /college readiness /graduation /optomism
