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
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
December12009
on coming back.
I had a really wonderful Thanksgiving. After spending a full day in the kitchen, the meal was a total success (23 lb. turkey, Parmesan mashed potatoes, roasted root vegetables, garlic cauliflower, apple sausage stuffing, sauteed kale, orange and pear cranberry sauce, glazed carrots…. and a chocolate pecan pie - I did not make this - with 18 year old aged scotch brought by one of the feast eaters) and in addition to spending time with all of the people at the dinner table, I got to see a number of other LA-ers that I get sporadic moments with. The weather was mostly sunny and beautiful, though sometimes I overestimated the “I live in New York so am impervious to California weather” bit. I took an extra day so in total, it was five days off. I did absolutely nothing related to school at all after working my ass off the week before to get it all done. For a moment, it felt like summer all over again.
Yes, and then I came home. Got back to Brooklyn around 10:30 last night. Was giving a test in one class today so that was covered and pulled together the rest so I could get to bed by 12. Reality comes fast and sleep is fleeting for teachers returning from any break.
And yes, then I went to school. After leaving early and feeling very good about my positive start to the month of December and all of the problems that we could collectively solve before the New Year, someone got sick on my train and they discontinued service on the entire 2/3 line…the only train that directly goes from my house to school. Four trains and a hike later, I made it to work barely on time. How quickly optimism gives way to anxiety and depression.
The second marking period ends today, and with it is coming a list of too many students with 55 next to their names (for those who don’t know… even if a student gets a 5% in the class, its a 55). We had a grade team meeting at lunch. During these weekly meetings, all the teachers of one grade get together, diagnose problems and try to solve them. Considering the lack of feedback on the administration level when we write EVERY WEEK please let there be a school wide attendance and late policy or some action on this issue, since it is crippling the 11th grade, the English teacher and I had been hashing out a new plan of our own. There are large posterboards tracking each student visibly and color coded levels and consequences and rewards. This probably doesnt mean anything to you if you’re not in education, but suffice it to say, we’re trying anything possible as lowly classroom teachers to make some kind of change in the patterns of failure that we’re seeing.
In response to some recent calls for change, the principal actually came to our meeting today. She promised administrative support for the rewards and consequences part and was impressed with the initiative that we are taking. Which was… nice. I’m feeling fairly jaded so I treat all of these things with…. tentative appreciation.
In other areas of the school, a student in the 9th grade came back to school today who had been at an out of school suspension site for the past couple of months for hitting a teacher. The Department of Education issues these long term suspensions less and less. The deans suspect its because there’s just too many of them across the city. This child, however, has had a history of hitting teachers, so she got the time. No teacher was given a heads up that she was coming back. By third period, she had attacked and spit on another student during a class. She was back in the classroom 4th period. The school is working right now to get her classified as needing a 12:1:1 setting. This means that she needs a classroom with twelve students, one teacher and one para-professional. I don’t know this student personally. What I know is what other teachers and students (my old students from the 8th grade class I taught last year) tell me: she’s a 9th grade holdover, consistently disruptive in class, lashes out at just about everybody, and is not passing again this year.
We learn about inclusion a lot in education courses. Inclusion is the idea that you don’t have to sequester away students who have some kind of disability. The school can work with them in a whole classroom to the benefit of every student - heterogeneous groups mean that students help each other learn and in the process, they themselves learn the material better in addition to gaining critical social skills about how to problem solve and collaborate with other people. There are some great examples of this. Cooperative Team Teaching (or CTT) allows two teachers to be in the room of an inclusion classroom, helping all students learn the material. Its all supposed to be seamless and interwoven and no one knows who is who. There are other instances, though, in the case of the aforementioned student, where learning for a group of 34 (because, yes, that’s how many are in this class) becomes impossible because of one student. Whether or not inclusion for all students would be the ideal, the classroom teachers that I see do not have nearly enough of the people and other support resources necessary to make that happen. And as a result, the student is failing, the teachers are not teaching as well as they can, and even the most motivated students are frustrated that they can’t learn either.
With everything else that has been going on in the school, one teacher told the assistant principal today that if there is not a solution figured out about this student - like not putting them back into class after they spit on a student - that’s she’s leaving at the end of this semester. Its not just about the student, but, as she said, “its the last straw.”
And so… in a day that started with optimism, and maybe even a little progress, I still left feeling like maybe our school was on the brink of another disaster.
Tags: /daily grind /discipline and consequences /inclusion /small reforms
