Trepidation

Hello, I am procrastinating.

A few weeks back, enterprising yet foolish criminals broke into my school.  Mostly, they made a big mess.  They also took all the MUNI passes in the office and ransacked the lost and found, but in the end no school has a huge supply of easily fenced, portable items around to steal.

I am opening the school today to get ready for tomorrow.  Some other people might come by; being the teacher who lives closest to the school I am the only one with a set of keys, a pass code and my very own SFUSD security card.  I'm kind of nervous about it, actually.

I am sure my pets want me to stay home, too.  And I could make stock from this turkey carcass...and go to school at 4:30 tomorrow morning to get homework packets made.  Bleargh.

In other news, it ends up that the parachute dress makes me look like an upside down muffin, so I got this one instead.  I don't think San Francisco really needed an AllSaints store (when I say San Francisco, I mean "my pocketbook", of course).

Budget Wonking Begins Earlier Every Year.

I had a small, uncharacteristic fit about pre-Thanksgiving Christmas-themed windows at major department stores, mostly because the because the terribly unfunny windows that Barneys puts up depress me.

Among other things, window-wise it could be so much worse.

But I do dislike the ever-earlier shopping season because it raises five year old awareness of the upcoming gift extravaganza and sugarthons and two solid months of holiday insanity is enough to turn any teacher into Mrs. Bitters.

Also coming early this year is Budget Apocalypse season.  Monday, a committee of the Board will be going over consultant contracts, presumably with special attention paid to Trish Bascom's Bring Bill Rojas Back Nostalgia Campaign.  There is also an informational session on the Edu-Jobs cash, which promises to be plenty depressing.  (Among other things, the state will probably end up using the money to backfill the education budget and we can all look forward to plenty of layoffs of teachers with the annual redesign/zoning/whatever bulk up of central office staff.)

Duty compels me to feel that I should go, but I think my mental health requires waiting until Brown's first State of the State address.

One More Day!

Oh my goodness, these children need a break like you wouldn't believe.  The teachers, too.

Sadly, it's a bit of a collision course in that almost all the teachers are at various stages of this year's Nasty Fall Cold, while the kids are all over it and are absolutely wired and excited and hey, do I know Christmas is coming?  What with all that and the weekend rain, you can be assured twenty-odd peppy, if not very motivated children and one grumpy and not very motivated adult.

So we mucked around with primary and secondary colors via Insta-Snow, painted and got out the smart body supplies: maze balance boards, scooter boards and Body Sox.  This went okay, as did being very explicit about my personal level of energy (low), Kleenex consumption needs (high) and desire to manage behaviors that everyone knows are unfriendly to others (nonexistent).

Still: ONE MORE DAY.  We are having a potluck tomorrow evening schoolwide and I have a lot of no-knead bread dough rising for that.  Since I just this weekend got roped into cooking a Thanksgiving meal I am refusing to do any shopping for it (except for possibly a fine new outfit to wear), and that shopping is supposed to magically happen whilst I munch potlucky dishes.  Yum.

The Word of the Day is "Ruching".

I wore a really nice dress to school yesterday, one of those ones that explains why one might spend a lot of money for something that looks like a misshapen sack of fine Italian wool on the hanger: because when on the human body, it becomes a magical garment that loves each and every bit of your figure and makes it look awesome.

Without prompting, an adult volunteer at my school noted that I am performing a service with my fantastic wardrobe, because I am "exposing students to good design".

This volunteer is my favorite person in the whole world, starting with that comment.  This totally justifies any afterschool trip to the thrift store I take today.

Once Bill Gates has taught a class of 31 Kindergarten students with the following demographics:

• 60% do not speak English at home
• 25% attended preschool
• 10% are homeless
• 40% have experienced family violence
• 100% live below the federal poverty line
• 60% live in a substandard federal housing project originally slated for demolition in the 50s
• 10% are in foster care
• 20% have experienced the death of a parent
• 10% have serious health problems
• 50% regularly experience food insecurity
• 10% have a documented learning disability
• 10% qualify for speech services

and gets them from where they are in August to on grade level by June, I will be willing to listen to him explain how states must raise class sizes and not pay me for the degrees and trainings that make it possible for me to do my job well.

Until then, perhaps he should focus more on solving underfunding rather than adapting to it.  For instance, a good capital gains tax would make a big difference.  Indeed, were Microsoft more willing to pay taxes owed rather than incorporate in offshore tax havens, we could take a goodly bite out of the problem.

What his argument boils down to is the deprofessionalism of teaching.  He is proposing a job that no one can do well for more than a couple of years - and even with just a couple of years, the emotional and physical strain of the work would have lasting health effects.

So, Bill?  Go get a college degree, a credential and get back to me then.  For now, I'm going to assume that you resent the fact I'm better educated than you and did not have to steal C prompt from the California shareware anarchists to make a living.

So Goldman Sachs is getting into the charter school business.  Specifically, they're putting together a fund for charter ventures - for buildings, expansions, etc.

Given how much good Goldman Sachs has done for the nation, I'm sure that we can expect this to be a real aid, particularly to low-income students being failed by their terrible, terrible public schools and their rotten, rotten teachers whose pensions are just the last straw and will bankrupt us although not as badly as investment advice from Goldman Sachs et al. bankrupted their pension funds!


Back in the days of My Favorite Corporate Scandal, Jeff Skilling of Enron was huffy and puffy about people claiming he'd said CEOs only have a responsibility to shareholders, so that if they are selling a product they know to be dangerous to consumers, they must make their decisions about the product with reference only to the shareholders.  He maintains he didn't say that.

These days, Lloyd Blankfein goes before government committees, reporters and congregations to claim that the shareholders'* interest being first, last and only is God's work.

I do not think this is a positive development.

And if the shareholders' interests are the only ones worth considering, this fund's charity is questionable at best.

In other news, we sang "Fat Turkey" today.



*in the case of Goldman, of course, "shareholders" means "partners".  The actual outside shareholders should feel a warm, fuzzy feeling about GS partners making money for GS partners.

I'd Rather Be Broke.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

In return for the cash, the district was required to replace the school's principal and come up with a plan to turn test scores around. Former Starr King Elementary School Principal Christopher Rosenberg took the job.'

His plan was simple: Keep a laser-like focus on literacy. That's it.

That means no extra art, no additional science and no feel-good programs that can complicate the core mission.

That is the most short-sighted, depressing view of education that I have read recently.  If this truly describes what Muir is up to, then it's in thrall to the anti-child, anti-research forces.  All studies suggest, and strongly, that the best way to teach reading - particularly to poor students and students of color, like those at Muir - is to teach reading broadly.  Kids need reading across the content areas.  Kids need multiple, relevant access points to reading.  Kids need art and music.

And as a society, we need scientists, mathematicians and artists.  We need kids who enjoy reading and read broadly, with a critical eye.

The core mission is education, not test scores.  As described, this is an approach that will bring higher test scores.  It won't bring success.  I know that I can teach kids to read AND have plenty of time for painting.  There are pedagogical issues associated with this (mostly around management, for time issues, and around lesson planning, for layering one's content objectives), but it's possible and it works.  It just demands that you put your time and energy into teaching and learning, not cutting out the "extras".

...class sizes as small as ten students sounds really good, though.

Annual Failure

Invariably, I have these really excellent big plans for Veteran's Day.  The general schedule is usually something like this:

• Wake up early, but not too early
• Eat healthy breakfast, read news
• Clean house
• Run eight or twelve errands
• Fabulous workout time!
• Find funnel neck bird print dress on sale for fifty cents in my size
• Do one of those cook-for-the-month-then-freeze deals
• Spend time with loved ones, pets
• Watch "Vertigo"
• Early bedtime

Of course, these strange midweek holidays never amount to much.  The beginning of the year is the hardest for Kindergarten, I think: the kids are at their youngest, the weather's unkind and the teacher has forty seven thousand procedures to prioritize and teach while completing days of one on one assessment.  (On the other hand, when other grades have testing stress and senioritis and whatnot, we'll be sewing and painting and reading books and going hiking, so it evens out.)  That means come mid-November, I'm tired. Hence, Veteran's Day ends up looking more like this:

• Wake up way too early
• Decide to have lots of helpful caffeine
• Helpful caffeine makes going back to bed impossible
• Eat Unhealthy breakfast
• Start reading about current state budget crisis, get to the part where 98 guarantees are already down 2.2 billion for next year and turn immediately to reading about the McQueen retrospective Met Gala for calming
• Think about doing laundry
• Read books on couch with pets
• Daylong laziness leads to inability to go to bed at a decent hour

This year I ended up going to school for a few hours to do some planning and prep stuff and cooked for two days or so.  I feel sluggish and frenetic all at once - a good run after what will undoubtedly be a strange day tomorrow should make enrollment fair manageable.  This will be my third time going and every year I find it a magical horror of noise, bright lights and sudden movements: it's far too easy to get caught up in the distraction and end up needing to spend a few hours with a cold compress and/or running on a treadmill in a dark room.

Saturday, 8am

Oh boy, I am going to do Enrollment Fair again this year!

YAY!  Nothing like an early Saturday morning in a vast, crowded, echoing space.  Memo to self: stock up on doodle paper, caffeine, etc.  And bring a fat stack of our awesome new Todd Parr designed shirts.

Actually, I kind of like going to Enrollment Fair, although it is not really how my school drums up interest. It is certainly true that I have been asked questions that are borderline offensive (and sometimes well over the border), especially since I live by my school and I don't consider my neighborhood "the ghetto".  But mostly, it's interesting.

In other news, I volunteered to copy edit our BSC.  Since we're three years in, I wish that they would allow us to set up the information the way we want.  I mean, presumably all the schools have instituted programs and priorities that they believe will close the opportunity gap.  Now it would be useful, I think, to delineate those goals in a list and then note how they impact the equity/access/accountability issues.

But then, three years in and I am still waiting for the District to share its own Balanced Score Cards for various Central Office bodies and its own improvement plan for how it assists the sites on their journey, so I suppose format changing is unlikely.

Ad Hominem: Latin for "I don't want to deal with reality."

There is this attitude that we are supposed to take big dollar donations to education at face value. "It's about the children!", you see. And that's true enough, I suppose - although whenever I hear "It's about the children" I cringe, because if someone feels the need to distinguish their input into education by its child-centricity, they must assume that all other stakeholders are not all about the children.*

Any discussion about the values that these individuals and groups appear to espouse in their work is verboten.  Don't like how Deformer X makes money?  Think their industry is antithetical to free, public education?  Prepare to be accused of arguing against straw men.

What nonsense!  The ideals that underlie business interests that engage in education projects are obvious.  Indeed, they regularly state that schools should be like businesses.  They bring in business titles (CEOs, not principals, etc.).  They yammer about free markets and choice, about the power of competition.

These are corporate, capitalist business ideas.  It's what the deformers know, and what they believe needs to happen in education.  So why can't we also look at the actuality of their thought, the base of their ideas?

I think we have to.  Free markets may be wonderful things.  Alas, I'm afraid that John Arnold and his merry band of traders at Enron preferred market manipulation to real competition.  Although no one has ever linked performance bonuses to improved performance, I'm sure nice fat extra checks are quite exciting.  But I note that the performance that required multi-million dollar bonuses was so short-sighted and built on such false premises that we are in a financial crisis.  A long view suggests that these performance bonuses were not justified by objective data.

Going deeper, I think it's fair to ask if the corporate culture in which the deformers thrive is appropriate for our schools.  I'd say it's not.  PRCs and similar employee evaluation systems support the survival of the few and competition over teamwork.  I am obligated to teach all of my students and to ensure that each one masters Kindergarten standards.  I don't get to "fire" or refuse to teach the ones who "just don't get it".  My students need to learn to support each other, to work together and to be active participants.  These are key values for a cohesive, civil democratic society.  They are not the skills prized at hedge funds.

It's a cultural mismatch, and one with very clear outcomes.  We can run our schools like businesses to the detriment of communities and most kids.  A few superstar learners will come out just fine, though.  Or we can run our schools like schools and provide good outcomes for the vast majority of students.




*As I understand deformer talk, they are all about the children.  The dread unions are all about the big big cash dollars and child-destroying that due process rights bring.  The public education system as a whole is about destroying society through low standards, corruption and liberal ideals.  How it is that I am all about the money while hedge funds are all about the children seems factually invalid, but I'm sure they have some quantitative analysis to explain how I am actually becoming extremely rich while they are toiling away on pennies, all FOR THE CHILDREN.

Buy in Bulk, Part Two: Teacher Esoterica

While Teacher Hoarding Disease often blurs my thinking, there are some things that are worth having in quantity.  Some of these are obvious: copy paper, folders, pencils.  The utility of some materials in bulk, however, was not immediately apparent.  It was only after a few years in the classroom that I committed to keeping a stock of certain tools.  I strongly recommend maintaining a large supply of the following:

1. Hole Punches: The teacher who has only one will be overwhelmed by students waving their newly-decorated nametag necklaces, demanding they be hung.  The teacher who has seven can set her class lose on them while cutting ribbon for hanging.  They also come in useful for flash card rings, papel picados, introductory sewing and lacing projects, developing hand strength, confetti and all kinds of nifty things.
2. Flour Sifters: I have three of these.  Used together, my class shaves minutes off baking prep time with these.  They also make for good grip training.
3. Stickers:  Stickers are cheap.  Kids love them.  Why hold back?  I assure you: if you are worried that children who get a sticker one time will expect them every time, this is not the case.  Indeed, you can even tell them that.  However, I should note that my class goes through more stickers for math and art than we do for rewards, since sticker-fidgeting and sticker horse-trading drive me nuts.  (I prefer to give out books and to draw on kids' hands with dry-erase markers.  I can turn out a ghost, happy face, heart, star, bat, cat, spider or similar doodle as quickly as I can put a sticker on a hand to be transferred to the forehead/ear/shirt/friend's hand/friend's back/oops out of sticky on the floor for me to pick up later.)
4. Craft or telephone wire: Useful for art projects, tying bundles and fidgets.  A spool of ethernet cable at SCRAP is cheap and it's only a couple of hours with an X-acto to unearth lots and lots of colorful wire.

What else is worth stockpiling?

Buy In Bulk, Part One

Teacher Hoarding Disease is a real and dread condition.  It starts slow: an impressive sale on multifix cubes, a box of golf pencils, a couple of extra homework packets.  Over time it takes over, until one is left with a closet so overloaded with broken crayons, irregular paper samples and lightly chewed teddy bear counters.  Cursed are those who open the closet, for they shall be buried alive.

As I've said before, Teacher Hoarding Disease is an acquired syndrome, and an understandable one at that.  School funding often oscillates wildly from year to year.  In California, education budgets may be more predictable these days, but this is because the pendulum swings only from "Catastrophic" to "Evacuate to Fallout Shelter".  When you don't know what will be available or can predict that nothing will be, the difference between laying in for winter and compulsive hoarding blurs.

Teachers generally are resourceful: scavengers nonpareil with the flexibility of impromptu theater actors.  This disposition potentiates the disease's severity: you may never have the opportunity to buy one thousand watch gears for fifty cents again, after all, and they will be nifty collage materials.  Teacher turnover also complicates the course of the illness: retiring and laid-off teachers always have plenty of lovely, well-made and effective teaching resources that you will never use but cannot bear to throw away.  Some of this deitrus molders in dark cupboards, stealing valuable storage space and every year becoming less useful.

I have been in my current classroom for four years and I still haven't fully excavated what the teachers who came before me left behind.  Every winter break, I put at least ten hours into clearing out textbooks retired in the early 1990s, mostly empty bottles of separated tempera paint and the like.

This year I'm fighting the system.  My particular weaknesses:

*Teaching Manuals, Blackline Master Collections and Education Books
I've found a few incredibly useful guides, which has encouraged me to collect anything that might possibly be of interest.  The Explosive Child changed how I thought about classroom management to lasting and excellent effect: perhaps this research study from the seventies will have a similar impact on my mathematics instruction!  The reality that I may very well have more books than I will ever peruse for homework worksheets, sub plans and pedagogical outlook rarely occurs to me in the moment.  Also, my limited organization skills often lead to misplaced blackline masters, so sometimes I snag an extra copy at an excellent price so that I'm ready for when I lose the first one.

*Children's Books
The day I turned sixteen, I applied to work at a children's bookstore (and thankfully was hired and therefore able to turn in my fast food uniform for good).  Since then, I have always had some kind of involvement with childrens' books, so I know lots of titles very well and want to share them with my students.  My family is overrun by mad readers and my household boasts not one but two Amazon Prime accounts.  Therefore, my book hoarding is condoned and reinforced.  And again, I've made some wonderful finds, like four of the Church Mouse books, which are seriously out of print and available at your local online retailer for a couple hundred bucks.

*Craft Supplies
If I come across the materials for some excellent project, I often find myself wondering if these materials will be available for next year's class.  This typically ends with me buying adequate amounts for the next three or four years.  I use the materials for three years, at which point I begin to worry that I will never see them again.  At this point, I may elect not to do the project in the future, so that there is still a large supply of materials.

This year, I am weeding my teacher manuals by giving second copies to my Resident.  When I go to the the Children's Book Project, I take only the most exciting finds for the classroom library.  My class has already worked its way through several spools of yarn, paper towel rolls and crayon bits.

Know Your Deformers: John Arnold

For a number of reasons too boring to recount here, I am an Enronista (if you will).  I have read each and every mass market book on Enron, including the really badly written ones by former employees unassisted by coauthors or ghostwriters.  I've seen the movie and read a number of technical papers about the company.  I've even read the Powers report and some of the similar investigative findings.  I can recount in great detail various financial shenanigans, badly-thought business plans, corruptions and deadly sins that led to Enron's ultimate failure and I have strong opinions about who the most guilty are.

All these details actually come in handy these days.  A number of Enron's financial crimes are largely the same ones committed by today's financial criminals.  I'm not shocked by the inability of our government  to indict, prosecute and ultimately imprison jerk-collar criminals: as yet, there have been eighteen guilty pleas and four criminal convictions in the Enron case.  Once the Supreme Court's latest ruling lets Skilling get free on a "too stupid to understand how my business works" argument ("honest services"), Andy Fastow and his Star Wars memorabilia will be the only Enrat left serving at a Club Fed.

But I digress.

Also, some of the Enrats have decided that their merry free marketeering will be just as fantastic for all in education.  Chief among these is John Arnold, whose eponymous foundation makes big grants to organizations like Teach for America and The New Teacher Project.  He's also handed big chunks of cash to Houston ISD to develop teacher performance assessments and is one of Michelle Rhee's top secret private funders drawn together to pay for the possible new salaries under her Blame the Teachers IMPACT contract.

You see, John Arnold is a big believer in pay as an incentive.  This is why he personally took eight million dollars - $8,000,000 - as a performance and retention bonus after Enron's collapse (while it was still trying to sell itself to Dynegy, whom it did not exactly tell about these fun time payments).  This totally incentivized him to...leave what was left of Enron and its trading book in less than a year.

Well, clearly Mr. Arnold knows retention bonuses don't mean anything, which is probably part of his problem with my due-process rights.

Mr. Arnold is also a gambler.  In less than three months, he managed to go from up $200 million to down $200 million while working as an Enron trader.  This apparently gives him real insight into gambling on unproven and statistically invalid methods of assessment.

If I were held to such a standard, I'd have lost my credential by now.  I have due-process rights, not dumb-process rights.

And most critically, Mr. Arnold has attitudes antithetical to a free public education system that wants the best for all its students.  His philosophy cannot allow for a system of participatory, community-based endeavor with an end goal of success for all.  It gets in the way of winning, you see.  I base this off statements John Arnold made in evaluating the performance of other traders.  Since you might not guess this by reading the statements, let me assure you that his comments were meant positively.


"...learning how to use the Enron bat to push around the market"
"market manipulator...force markets when it's vulnerable"
"further exploit our dominance"

...so much for a free market among the Enrats.  Mr. Arnold can't even be held to his own Randian nonsense.  He doesn't want a free market; he wants a market he controls - or at least one he can game.

The issue is not criminal conduct.  The issue is whether someone who prizes such a me-first, you-never attitude, who apparently deserves a performance bonus no matter what his performance is and who gambles with incredibly high stakes is someone whose philosophy is what we want in our schools.

Personally, I think Mr. Arnold's philosophy is the short-sighted, reptilian-brain impulse that underlies a lot of our current financial and societal problems.  I want our public schools to nurture learners who are creative problem solvers who approach those around them with empathy.  I want smart students who reflect on short-term and long-term outcomes for themselves and for the world around them.

These are skills that the Enron bat crushes.

I am a local.  Born here, raised here blah blah blah.  That said, I haven't rooted for the Giants since the 80s - specifically, since 1987 when they blew the NCLS lowered the love, and the 1989 World Series (a huge selection of my relatives being at Candlestick) killed it.  Plus, what with the ADHD baseball is really hard to watch except when a. on a treadmill b. at the game, heckling or c. with a lot of people, heckling.

The neighborhood is going nuts, though.  And I always approve of the Triumph of San Francisco Values.

In other news, I made 6 pounds of flour's worth of Pan de Muerto.  The idea is that it will slowly rise overnight in the fridge and the Ksters will invite some second graders over to bash on it and shape it into skulls for second rise, bake and glaze.  (I made the glaze, too.)

Halloween

Having sorted all of our Halloween candy into "chocolate" and "fruity/mockolate"(Tootsie Rolls, I'm looking at you) sacks, I am rewarding myself with a sampling.  I passed out my address to at least sixty kids, so I'm hoping to unload quite a bit of this stuff.

I don't do a Halloween party with my class, because I am a mean and terrible person.  We did manage to have our school walk-a-thon.  This is a fundraiser for a local community organization; they use the money to fund outreach programs and field trips.  So the money does come back to us (my class has already been there and will go again next month).  But as a school, we think it is important to stress community interrelationships and to work together for causes other than our own budget.  (That's important, too.  We're selling hoodies and tee-shirts for that right now, and I will try to pull off a much larger art sale this Spring.)

After the walkathon, we had a snack, did some work and baked intensely healthy seasonal treats: pumpkin muffins.  I didn't feel like dealing with flax seed, so they did have eggs but I halved the sugar and replaced the oil with greek yogurt.  After lunch and a little more work, their buddy class came over and we all made little tp-roll mummies and ate muffins.  In the end, it feels like a party day but is very low-sugar.  I am a big believer in teaching choices rather than noes (so that we have "sometimes snacks" and I allow cupcakes on birthdays but not cupcakes every day), but Friday Halloween at school followed by Sunday Halloween and Monday candy-eating is pushing "sometimes" a little too far for me.

Monday is a furlough.  I like the day off if not the pay cut; what with the vet bills and the Jeremy's sale I am not enthusiastic about my somewhat smaller paychecks.  I went in yesterday to put the library loft together, and I will be going in tomorrow to hang wall mazes and clean up for the next week.  I will be joined by many teachers on Monday, and it's all these extra hours that teachers work that make the arguments about why Board employee perks (food) ring a little hollow.  We make less.  We work plenty of twelve and fourteen hour days.  There will be no Arguello catering meal awaiting us at the end of the day.  Just a salary cut of at least $1200.  WHINE WHINE WHINE.

Words Cannot Express...

WHY is it RAINING?

Today is our school walk-a-thon.  It is a fundraiser for a neighborhood organization.

Obviously, the walking component will have to wait.  BOO!

The walking component is really great, because the overexcitement of Halloween is soothed by the walking and resultant tiredness.  Twenty one children in costumes on a rainy day does not excite, particularly since I haven't slept much this week and I'm still sick.  BOO!

Well.  We do have pumpkin muffins to make and bake, and half the class did string art while the other half did crayon shavings, so we have some art to do.  I've got a phonics sort that is Halloween-themed, too.  And we can check in on our water cycle experiment.

Or maybe it will magically stop raining, PLEASE.

I have a lot of Donors Choose boxes right now, but three of them are filled with unassembled furniture.  So  "Open the Box" would not be that exciting.  We do have a few more thank you notes to bust out, though.

I cannot remember any rainy Halloween-observed days in my youth or during my teaching career.  At least it should clear up this weekend.  I have liberally passed out my address to students at my school (since I live a couple of blocks from it) as part of our household campaign to Restore Trick or Treating to Urban Areas.

In other news.

My pet lives.  My pet is lucky to have the best vets in the whole wide world.  The survival of my pet has put a pretty big hole in my discretionary spending, but I suppose it is time to begin experimenting with the use of accessories and whatnot to make new and exciting outfits out of the clothing I already own.

The Chronicle posted yet another of its limited utility yet temperature-raising reports on SFUSD this week. This one is particularly prettied up, I have to say.  It starts with a big number (half a million), but one that certainly includes salaries and dues and things like that.  The meat ends up being relatively small sums -  $22,000 for food (food that doesn't meet the Districts' nutrition plan for schools, which as a NPTL I must note with disappointment), blah blah blah.

Still, I do think this is indicative of two larger SFUSD problems:

1. SIZE ISSUES.
I have heard the Superintendent say "It's only a million dollars!"  That's true enough when your budget is five million dollars, but the thing is that all of those millions add up, and when you're laying off teachers in March we don't forget them.  Is $22,000 a lot of money in the Big Picture of SFUSD?  No.  Is it a lot of money?  Yes.  I am tired of getting annual pink slips and twenty cents for supplies.  Every expenditure really needs to be means-tested if you are going to go on and on about belt-tightening and sharing the pain.

Every teacher in the District took a pay cut by furlough.  District employees and Board Commissioners need to pack a meal.  (FYI: As you can see here (courtesy the SF Budget Blog), working at the District Office - even for those working for the Board - is more lucrative than teaching in SFUSD.)*

2. OPTICS.
Dear BoE, Superintendent and Similar:

When this stuff comes out - and it always comes out - you feed nasty notions about school budgeting.  "WHY FUND THOSE BLOATED ADMINISTRATIONS?" howl deformers.  "Hmmm," says the voter.    "I just read that the SFUSD Board of Education is going to a lot of conferences."

THINK ABOUT IT.

Love,

Your teaching staff.

*Which is not to say that I think these salaries are unwarranted or excessive, because I don't.  And goodness knows there are lots of SFUSD employees who aren't making this kind of money and are working at the DO.  That said, buy your own food.  In interest of demonstrating my moral righteousness, I am also against catering teacher PD days, which I may have gone on about earlier on this blog.

On Stage

Ultimately, teaching is all-day acting.  You can't even take a bathroom break when you need one, and the current image of teaching as a profession is a day-long ritual of empathy, selflessness and excellence.  One's lessons shall always be on point, and one's students always engaged.  Responses to poor behavior should be caring and take underlying motivations into account at all times.  All standards shall be mastered by all students, and all standards shall be taught in multimodal approaches that value all learners.

This is great except for the little problem that teachers aren't robots.  We get sick, we have kids, we have family dramas.  Our partners lose their jobs, our children move back home, we're not sure we can afford college for our children, we slept badly last night, we were in a fender-bender on the way to school, the bus was late...

The best you can do is build up credits with your students for the bad times, so that they know your blue mood is passing.

I am sick and my pet is in the hospital with a guarded prognosis.  I have had this pet for many years and it has been my companion in very difficult times.  What with the coughing and vague lethargy I'm not going to be the nicest lady ever tomorrow (and if the vet calls, you'd better believe that's an emergency call I'm taking).

The problem with private funding.

I have received tens of thousands of dollars in donations through Donors Choose.  Indeed, I just got two more grants filled this week.  Over the years, I've gotten

• rugs
• backpacks stocked with games and supplies, one for every child to take home at the end of the year (...twice)
• a workbench and tools
• a puppet theatre and all the goodies to go with it
• costumes
• oodles and oodles of sensory equipment (fidgets, raised-line paper, ball chairs, sit disks)
• oodles and oodles of PE equipment (ribbon wands, balance boards, scooter boards, a tunnel)
• an ipod dock and speaker system
• a mobile kitchen, including plates and silverware
• science units
• books
• math games
• reading games
• chair pockets, bookshelves and a rolling cart
• wall mazes
• extremely nifty arts and crafts supplies

In short, I've been very lucky to have had many generous private citizens and foundations support my students.  I am also an eager grant writer; for the last two years I have always had a project up on Donors Choose - except when all eight allowed have been filled and I am working on thank you projects.  And I can write a pretty good grant.  A colleague of mine says it's free money being wasted if you don't get those grants up, and I agree.

Also: I'm shameless.  Are you my friend?  Frienemy?  We went to second grade together and I have your email address?  Prepare to be solicited.

I am also asking for things that sound good.  I've had a couple of grants filled by the same foundation because I write grants for a specific area in which they are interested.  I have written some other grants to attract the interest of certain funding streams (and have been gratified by managing to get that interest, and the cash that accompanies it).

The problem is that not everyone is quite the grant-writer I am.  Not every teacher has the time to pull a grant together.  And some very basic needs - like school supplies - do not sound as awesome as "Help my students make extremely awesome sewing projects about their science learning" or "Caitlin Flanagan sucks: we want garden tools."

So while I certainly hope that all the world continues to enable my students a world-class, interactive and project-based Kindergarten, I'd prefer that all students could have the same experience through public funding.  The system we have now is unfair.  My students and my school do not have the advantage of generous local funding; we are lucky to have Donors Choose as a resource.  But there are equally-deserving schools that aren't able to make up the difference this way.

So far I am batting 1.00 on conferences: no no-shows three days in.  This is very exciting for me, since I really need to get them all done in a week and not try to run clean up.

In other school news, I am wearing my spiffy new school hoody featuring art from a well-known children's book author (sadly, not Tomi Ungerer, but almost as good) made specifically for our school.  The shameless scrounging to awesome thing is a staff trait; one of the teachers got the art and another got us a deal on the printing.  If we can just arrange for a Banksy mural we're so set.  Also,  I had a cute little  plaid-and-crinoline number to wear with the sweatshirt.

Why My Job is Awesome.

1. I get to blow minds with science - by dyeing a flower using colored water, by blowing up a balloon with yeast.
2. I get to blow minds with arts and crafts - with water resist painting, with suncatchers, with oil pastels.
3. I get to read all of my own personal favorite children's books, including my all-time childhood favorite story The Journey (one of the Mouse Tales) and the gruesomely fascinating, hunger-causing Zeralda's Ogre.
4. I get to do daily ab exercises as part of my instructional routine.
5. I don't have to sit at a desk.  In fact, I don't even have a desk.

Six Reasons Why Michelle Rhee Isn't the Answer.

(NB: Edited and expanded from something I put on my facebook a couple of years ago.)


1. Ms. Rhee seriously considered voting for John McCain because - get this - she is so afraid of what Obama and the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad Democrats will do to education.

...the hell? "McCAIN: Because underfunded public schools and skeevy for-profit charters are better than the dread teachers' unions."


Dude, isn't the Obama administration's education policy bad enough?  We knew it would be like this before he got elected, too.

2. Ms. Rhee demonstrates a critical lack of understanding culturally responsive education and more broadly of social justice. It is her stated opinion that any arts, music, or otherwise "imaginative" (her words) programming should not be provided to students unless they have mastered reading. Similarly, she is disgusted by classroom meetings, TRIBES and so on.

I missed the part where teaching arts was absolutely entirely antithetical to literacy. One of the key premises of CLRP is that the arts are critical to a powerful and multifaceted literacy, actually.

But that's Ms. Rhee's problem - she sees a teacher's responding to a student's needs as "soft bigotry", if you will. It is evidently beyond her ken that social justice requires that we give students the tools they need to succeed - both by using the most effective strategies and by being absolutely explicit about the strategies we choose (so that students can succeed even in, say, a wretched KIPP school, where blindness to white privilege is required for a hire).

White Liberal Social Darwinism.

Only in San Francisco, seriously*.

According to denizens of the Aggrieved Reverse Racism Brigade, San Francisco (the city?  the district?  each and every resident?) is attempting to ensure "equality of results" (er, the usual phrase is "equality of outcomes", but I think the intent was to dumb it down for dimwitted Kindergarten teachers).

There is only one way to respond to this:

No.  There is no equality in outcome or in opportunity being attempted here.


How could you even say that with a straight face?

Let's look at some of those conditions here.

1. How many white people live at Sunnydale, originally slated to be torn down in the 1950s?
2. Are you aware of the location of Superfund sites in San Francisco?
3. How about of the breast cancer spike?
4. The asthma spike?
5. Taken a look at school funding inequities within the District lately?
6. Seen any of the figures on educating high-needs children?

That's just a teeny scrape on the pyramid of institutional racism.  There are your starting conditions.

As far as attempting equality in outcomes, how you could create evidence that anyone in San Francisco is attempting that is beyond me.  Are many forces - including SFUSD - trying very hard to ensure a quality education and college readiness for all students?  Is San Francisco attempting to offer medical care - thereby increasing productivity, life expectancy and ability to care for oneself - to the city as a whole?  Arguably, there is some attempt to enable equality of outcomes.

The thing is: it's a massive failure, and no one is trying that hard.  Yammering about being Beyond the Talk and being Beyond the Talk are two different things; no action SFUSD has taken leads me to believe that we'll be going beyond talking about Beyond the Talk.  Demanding A-G requirements is as powerful as mandating CASHEE: sounds good, no proof it'll do anything but increase the dropout rate.

Ultimately, what these semi-educated claims tell me is that the huge simmering vat of ignored privilege and sunny colorblindness that characterizes San Francisco's white liberal community is nearing a fast boil.

This is why I do not particularly care if San Francisco ever desegregates its schools.  Honestly, my school has a better chance of succeeding in its mission without having disruptive, anti-change elements like these in our community.  The students at my school are not the people who need to knock some sense into the ambience.

It is necessary work, of course.  Like it or not, the only way to ensure eventual equality of opportunity is to get all the stakeholders on board, and that includes the families turning to private schools because the public schools are scary social engineering places.  (Hack.)  And I do believe that it is the responsibility of white allies to do this work.  But I need a break from it, because I'm about to bash my head against the monitor to put it out of its misery**.

In other more cheerful news, I got a winter jacket.  With my thrifted Haider Ackermann culottes I cut a very Novakian figure in it and am more pleased with myself than usual.

*Okay, not really.  This particular blend of happy talk left politics and racism you don't see everywhere, though.  It's like a Ron Paul convention with more hugs.

**Which speaks to my own privilege, but you know what?  I am going to need to cut myself some slack on this one and reflect later.

Courtesy Teacher Sabrina over at failingschools.wordpress.com.



I personally ordered six or seven of these, although I feel that the standardized test amount is unacceptably low.  Horse-choking quantities would only allow for six or seven weeks of uninterrupted testing, and that is simply not enough data for our laser-like foci.  Elephant-choking might be better.  Or that snake that swallowed the alligator?  That snake-choking.

That snake eventually exploded, of course, which is about exactly what the educrats and for profiteers have in mind for public education.

Despite it being a four day week, this one felt long.  Mostly it was the heat, I think.  Everyone is a little grumpier and stinkier, but being forty days in there's more to get done before we turn to popsicles and water experimentation.

We also had a giant walkthrough, which I guess had positive feedback.  It was still kind of useless, though.  There were a lot of high school administrators walking around.  They were in my room for twenty minutes; it was a twenty-minute whole class instruction period where we hit a bunch of reading standards quickly for review and not for mastery.  I can't imagine how you understand this if your mindset is high school, where you would have a lesson plan and formal instruction/guided practice/independent practice stuff going on.

It also explains why all three of them had to get up and see what I was drawing on the kids' hands with dry-erase markers while the Resident led a phonics chant.  I mean, I guess in high school you might draw a skull and crossbones (designating detention) or something.

(Dry-erase pictures: more loved and easier to manage than stickers.)

Even staying for twenty minutes - which is a lot better than wall-walking, for sure - there is so much you just can't know.  For instance, when they came in I was drawing a letter person using letters the class suggested.  I was picking sticks to call on kids.  My sticks are loaded: if I think we had better call on you more often, you have extra sticks.  But you don't know this unless I tell you.  And the kids were all super on-task.  I mean, in terms of participation, engagement and behavior they were unbelievably on target.  (Really.  At the end of the day the Resident and I speculated that Thursday would be hard because they used up so much positive energy on Wednesday.)  That suggests we have decent procedures and protocols to guide behavior toward learning, but they were largely invisible (especially, again, if your mindset is high school.  The way I heard it, high school students can monitor their own need for pee breaks and whatnot).

Anyway, there were no interesting questions or pushing feedback that applied to anything happening in Kindergarten, so from my perspective it was kind of useless.

They gave us all their guiding question stuff and problem statements, and they say they are focusing on instructional leadership as opposed to nostalgia/witch-hunting.  The whole problem statement+consultant bearing Power Point leads to my problem statement with the Redesign.

If all of these highly-paid EDs, Associate and Assistant Superintendents are "instructional leaders" (debatable anyway), who's doing macroanalysis?  We had eight Assistant Superintendents and a host of other District people wandering about, all focused on a tiny problem statement about one school.  This is the gist of the redesign: the Central Office is Watching You.  Assuming best intentions, we're all going to go laser-like on little school site problems and save the world.  (Thinking like your average SFUSD peon, we're stuck in a giant game of Pass the Buck in which teachers will always lose.)

But someone has got to look at the big picture.  We have a District-wide problem educating the kids who live at Sunnydale.  Just as you can't offset the entirety of that problem to institutional racism, you can't say that fixing classroom practice issues will fix everything.

The problem is bigger.  Many Sunnydale families don't trust us, which makes it hard to collaborate with them.  Many students living there have PTSD or poverty-related health problems: we need to focus on their social-emotional and physical needs, too.  And critically, if you live at Sunnydale the chances that you attend a drastically under-resourced school is very high.  This is a case where we haven't tried money, and it would make a difference.

Of course, if no one is doing macroanalysis, you can ignore the whole child, ignore District complicity in creating the current relationship we have with Sunnydale families, and holler righteously that "it's not about the money".  All these newborn instructional leaders can put the blame where it tends to end up: on the teachers.

Oh, (my fellow) White People.

Pointing out that SFUSD has a long-standing access problem is offensive to some element among SFUSD stakeholders.

How depressing.

Fear of these people is one of the reasons why SFUSD will never do anything actually beyond talking when it comes to the radical changes needed to ensure school equity (HINT: it involves money).  I mean, I was just threatened for mildly stating that the school enrollment process has some access issues.  This is a well-known fact, and data on the issue are helpfully posted on SFUSD's own website.  Apparently this is a case of The More You Know, the More You Are Clearly a Proselytizing Socialist Liberal Communist Fascist or Whatever.

I so call BOO on that.  I don't post anonymously on forums and I'm not working terribly hard to hide my job location.  I take responsibility for what I say and do.  I go ahead and go beyond the talk every day, and I don't wait for SFUSD to catch up.

In other news, the latest SFUSD article in the Chronicle suggested layoffs are coming again.  I suspected that Garcia's (public) claim that the point of the contract concessions was to avoid layoffs next year would come to nothing.  It's a little irritating that we're still talking about the $113 million shortfall - couldn't they have waited until that figure was updated? - and the central office had a bit of a redesign that necessitated many more big dollar contracts and we're ALREADY on layoffs again.

But seriously, after last year the White Trolls of SFUSD really should get with it.  I go to Board meetings and after announcing my name and job location, I join with my colleagues in noting that going Beyond the Talk requires action, and if you're not willing to take it then you are nurturing institutional racism.  And at least once the majority of the Board and Cabinet wasn't texting so I know they heard what I said.

So, as I was saying: BOO.

Unified's Doings.

1. This is the first year of the "Central Office Redesign", or "What do you mean you don't know about our redesign?"  Unless you'd made it your business to read the Powerpoints the District entertains itself creating (this one had a cow theme, if I recall correctly), you may not have known a redesign was in the works.

This summer I sat on a panel of SFUSD educators.  We were asked about the redesign.  Of the five panelists, two were aware of its existence and neither of us were certain that they really intended to roll it out this year.  SFUSD also did a study of redesign awareness among teachers, helpfully pulling the teachers to be interviewed from the teachers who were at the central office over the summer helping write assessments to be used as part of the District-wide systems creation meant to accompany the redesign.

I'm guessing that knowledge about the redesign among that select group was pretty high.  In the end I was also interviewed for this study and my knowledge was pretty high, I suppose, but also far more skeptical (well, I'm assuming).

I am not really enjoying the redesign because it means that there are now some other people in power who have a different idea of what EDUCATION looks like.  Whatever the wallwalkers before them liked, they don't.  If it was standards, now it's objectives.  If Do Nows were in, now it's class meetings.  Whatever.  I have been teaching for a long time.  I have a documentable record of success in the classroom.  I am always interested in learning something new and whatever feedback I can get, but I am not adopting the latest craze in reform just because someone at 555 Franklin read a neat new book over the summer.  And at this point, how I do what I do in the classroom flows from what I believe education should be.  If I don't know your philosophy and you don't know mine, then it's very hard for your advice to be applicable to my situation.

2. I was going to yammer about the special education report, but what I think about that is so complicated that I had better not.  Also my laundry is done and I must hang up my harem-panted jumpsuit before it is too wrinkly to wear to school.  It is a key part of my hot-weather wardrobe.

Deep Thoughts: I Don't Really Have Them.

1. Does it bother anyone else that the "All these lower-income children many of them of color don't all need to go to college!" brigade is led by the racists who brought us the poorly-researched, worse-cited and intentionally misleading The Bell Curve?
2. It is better to pay the taxes one owes than to donate cash to schools.  Goldman Sachs et. al merrily dodge their way through the more esoteric portions of our tax code and starve the public sector - yet receive accolades when they toss a couple million at a charter endeavor.
3. None of these "best and brightest" currently telling me how to do my job have any evidence that they are, in fact, terribly bright.
4. Related: Three years in the classroom and conflicting reports (from one's own mouth, no less) of one's success there does not an expert make, MICHELLE RHEE.
5. Every so often in teaching, one has a student who is just on your wavelength.  It's neat and it doesn't happen every year, which is why yesterday I hosted the latest meeting of the Ladies Who Love Clothes (More Than You) in my classroom.
6. One week until the first field trip.
7. Having a Teacher Resident is so great that I am preemptively getting worried about possibly not having one next year.  Our school community is under increasing stress - the economy is bad everywhere and worse for people who were already low-income.  The stress manifests itself in underslept, underfed and underhoused five year olds and a prevalent air of tension.  We need two adults because our kids need reliable, known and loving faces who are not themselves drowning in a sea of needs.
8. If this budget is the best the state Congress can come up with, they really should've just not bothered.

Businesses aren't really that good, actually.

I am so very tired of the idea that running schools the way we run corporations is a good idea.

Looking out at the wreckage of the me-first, you-never economy - a system in which some marginally smart but exceptionally greedy people made out quite well while everyone else and all of our societies teetered on the edge of collapse - it's a bit rich to think that these cats have any idea what they're talking about.

One of Michelle Rhee's big funders in DC is ex-Enron.  I don't care that not all Enron employees were criminally liable for the company's failure.  This creep was an energy trader, and all Enron energy traders - all of them, every last one - built an unsustainable system (the Enron book was worth less than nothing when finally cracked open at UBS) predicated on gaming California.

The conduct may not be illegal, but still: their business plan amounted to "Let's go long on California power, milk the system any way we can, and laugh while California goes dark.  It's okay, because they deserve it.  Shouldn't have let us write their deregulation scheme, huh?  SUCKERS."


I do not believe that the idea of making a buck on someone else's bad planning, ignorance, good nature or bad luck is a value worth enshrining.

Nothing Good Comes from Capital Letters.

As a field, education has got to be the most prone to reinvention of the wheel.  This happens on a classroom level.  Every day, precious prep minutes are wasted as a teacher tediously nudges a line around the screen in pursuit of perfect journal paper for her students - paper that a teacher down the hall perfected two years ago.  You can see it at the school level of course, and also in districts.  SFUSD, for instance, has had at least three different adoptions of Mainstream English Language Development over the last twenty or so years.

Wheel reinvention at the management level becomes sinister quickly, and is always occasioned by Capital Letters.  When new math becomes New Math and balanced literacy becomes Balanced Literacy, trouble awaits.  After all, balanced literacy is just the careful balancing of phonics and whole language approaches.   Balanced Literacy means you need Fully Trained Consultants, a rocking chair in every classroom (Ravitch's discussion of San Diego covers this key point lest you think I jest) and lots and lots of professional development binders.  Balanced Literacy means that there is not just a framework and a guiding philosophy but a checklist and a pile of naughty notes for bad teachers.  Balanced Literacy is expensive and teachers resent the cost and the back brace of a framework from which there can be no deviation; balanced literacy is cheap good teaching with lots of fun literature and interest and the freedom to take a roll around on the floor break as needed.

I suppose some of this happens in the interest of replication; if you have some kind of framework ("A Rocking Chair in Every Classroom") it's easier to roll something out across a district.  But when teacher and school initiative and adaptation to circumstances is less important than your Capital Letters, you have a problem.  Particularly when adaptations are obviously and objectively effective.