In which I enjoy italics immensely.

Teach a primary school for a few years, and people begin to make certain conclusions about you:

• you own puff-painted clothing;
• all your shoes are sensible;
• you never, ever raise your voice;
• you are not too bright.

Seriously.  I once had a research fellowship, and the principal investigator - who had a kid in Kindergarten - told me he had assumed I "just a teacher" until he heard what high-faluting fancy University I attended.  And when he heard the esoteric field in which I earned a B.A. and M.A. together in four years?  Well, then he "realized [I] must be pretty intelligent".

Which your average teacher is, for the record - along with fast on their feet, able to sing, paint, sculpt, and jump rope credibly, and so on.

I wonder if this explains the miserable quality of research spouted at teachers all the time.  I'm not just talking the fact-free spin stories about charter schools (again, no more successful and sometimes far worse than real public schools) - I'm talking actual learned research.

Well, half-learned.  Ruby Payne's credentials are iffy at best, and her understanding of simple terms like peer review is limited.  That said, she sure makes a lot of money off school districts - although I was never more proud to be a teacher in my old district than when an audience of its teachers chased Payne's second off the stage.

But you also get bad research from actual university professors, which is presented to teachers with no critique to be swallowed whole.  I think now of Drs. Hart and Risely, who discovered in the 1990s that poor children have a "vocabulary gap" and that that gap lowers their IQ.

Hart and Risely never trained as linguists; I did, so upon simply hearing their conclusion about a million-word vocabulary gap I began beating my head against convenient hard objects.  When I later heard them explaining how their conclusions were not racial because they ignored all data about race, I waved my copy of the Lingustic Society of America's resolution about Ebonics in the air before resuming to bashing in my own skull.

I'm fairly well-spoken and I know the research around vocabulary gaps and deficit models in language study quite well.  I can tell you why Louisa Cook Moats doesn't actually understand language, and note that the research that might have cleared up this issue for her was completed in the 1950s.  So I generally make it my business to politely critique any professional development guru who starts yammering about Hart and Risely (I also thank the ones who sniff at the idea of the vocabulary gap).

Their shock is always magnificent.  "This is data from UNIVERSITY RESEARCH PROFESSORS," they huff.  "YOU are a KINDERGARTEN TEACHER.  I know that reading probably challenges you, but trust me: THEY DID RESEARCH."

So I really think it's best to provide my fellow educators with some links that will assist them in such situations.  "Well," they can say diffidently.  "It's true I'm just a lowly Kindergarten teacher, charged with teaching our future.  But I've read these papers by learned university professors who also challenge the deficit thinking Hart and Risely assume.  Have you?"

This little review essay sums up both the broader problem with deficit assumptions while taking on Ruby Payne and Hart and Risely.  It's a nice start; anyone looking for more of the same is welcome to comment - I've got citations from the 50s to the present day ready for my fellow educators of high-needs students who are tired of hearing about how the fabulous and brilliant children in their classrooms have been destroyed by their rotten upbringings.

Good News, Coping Strategies, Buy in Bulk Esoterica

Good News: Some generous person or organization funded all the Donors Choose projects in SFUSD today.  I got two, one a biggie for recess equipment, which makes me feel better about not having resubmitted the grant for a loft.

Coping Strategies: Something that comes up in teaching at high-needs schools is secondary trauma: many of your students are traumatized, and that trauma is shared with the educators on site.  And there's trauma just associated with teaching in a high-poverty environment, or in dealing with systems that really aren't set up to do the best for children.  Everyone has some coping strategies for these issues, maladaptive or not.

I have a new one: every time I am upset about classroom stuff or irritated with the district's utter disdain for certain necessities (heat) or fondness for extra-legal procedures that take forever, I am going to up the weights I use at the gym.  At this rate, I will be scary cut by May.

Teacher Esoterica, Buy in Bulk: Those little cups that you get pickled ginger in sometimes?  About 2 ounces and food safe?  Those and the lids have dozens of uses: fill 'em with pre-portioned paint for easy clean up, distribute high-density snacks like dried fruit, store beads that have been sorted by color, etc.  These are so great I want to buy some for every teacher at my school and just see what other uses people discover for them.  They are not perhaps the most waste-sensitive solution, but we reuse them many times and besides, my class is rumored to be the best composters at the school.  So I figure they can have a pass to save me a little after school work.

Bill Gates and His Laboratory.

Oakland Unified wants to close some schools.  It's planning to close thirteen schools, most of them small schools.  Small schools are very expensive to run - in particular, they increase administrative costs.

Bill Gates and his eponymous foundation were huge drivers of small schools - they sent a functionary to a staff meeting at the school were I was teaching to try to find teachers to support such an effort.  (They failed; we had seven hundred and fifty K-6 students and a mess of portables, sure, but things were good.)  I asked the functionary what would happen after the three years of Gates cash; he admitted that the costs would fall to districts - and that the costs existed.

Gates didn't spend any foundation cash on research, and ended up pulling small schools cash early when the schools ended up making no real difference (except for the added costs).

Gates now has a new solution for the districts he's burdened: cut pensions, raise class sizes and institute performance pay.  Apparently, the financial issue isn't the additional administrators on the payroll thanks to small schools, or the increased building costs small schools require, or the costs associated with school closings, or falling school budgets.  No, it's the teachers.

Needless to say, Gates has put as much research into this as he did small schools.  I'm sure the effects will be predictably similar, if not worse.

It's time to stop allowing big pocketbooks to experiment on our public institutions.  They aren't even willing to clean up after themselves, and they want to punish us all for their messes.

It's time to stop allowing Bill Gates opportunity after opportunity to destroy public education.  Yes, he made a lot of money by taking A prompt out of the public domain and selling it as his own program.  Yes, he has a great deal of interest in public education although not so much that his children attend public schools or anything.  Yes, we often learn from our mistakes.

But Gates shows no learning: he's still jumping in with both feet and a blindfold.  When it ends up he's landed on concrete, he demands public money for his hospital bills.  He's unwilling to research first: it's all urgent urgency, and it's better to fail a few years of children than look at any data beforehand.

OUSD should bill the Gates Foundation.  Once Bill's cleaned up after himself, it might be possible to start taking him seriously.

More Unsent Letters

Dear Christian Science Monitor,

How nice of you to send me a teaser magazine suggesting I subscribe to your publication.  The contents of that teaser were exceptionally instructive, particularly when you explained how money doesn't matter to school success.

As you see it in your center-right, two-sides-to-every-issue faux contrarianism, some schools are making it work without a penny extra.  Apparently they do this through merit pay.  Since my understanding is that merit pay would, in fact, lead to higher salaries, I must assume money is being cut elsewhere - either through destroying retirement funds or cutting student programs, I suppose.

Despite there being not one datum that supports merit pay in any way, I have to tell you you're missing the obvious:

Money Does Too Matter.

Money matters for my students, who annually get more crowded classrooms with fewer resources.  It matters to their families, many of whom live in poverty with all of its deleterious effects on school success (bad health, trauma, poor nutrition, food insecurity, housing insecurity...).  It matters to me, because I am on track to spend more than my "Hard to Staff" bonus on the school supplies California won't buy this year.

It matters to the many, many upper-middle class parents - some of whom undoubtedly work for the Monitor - as they willingly pay five and six and seven times more than California's per-pupil allocation in search of well-funded, low-poverty private schools.


And it definitely matters to you, editors of the Christian Science Monitor.  What underlies all this "school success has nothing to do with cash" nonsense is selfishness.  "Public schools take too much of our hard-earned tax dollars," you huff and puff.  "We need that money for other things, like tax breaks for the wealthy.  After all, private school tuition is higher than ever!"


Your teaser made it abundantly clear that your publication is not to my tastes, and I'm not the kind of reader you want.  In the future, to save on paper and postage, I recommend that you cross-check your purchased mailing lists with public teacher credential databases.


All the Best,


E. Rat


 

Accountability

I really hate the "teachers need to be held accountable" argument.

To what, exactly, are you planning to hold me accountable?

You see, I go to work every day and spend at least eight hours in close contact with children.

Do you really think so little of teachers that, despite that close contact and all the empathy it requires, we don't hold ourselves accountable to those children and their families?

Are you really willing to say that I don't care and refuse to take responsibility for the children in my class whose needs keep me up at night?  Who make me laugh and laugh and laugh?  Who have heart palpitations over the awesomeness of snails?  Who memorize the Hog-Eye spell* and pore over Zeralda's ogre's herald (baby crying, crossed by fork and knife) just like I did when I was a kid?  On whom I will spend in excess of a thousand dollars this year because you won't?

Because if you really believe that - if you really believe that teachers don't care about what their students learn - there's no argument to have.

Anyone who really and truly believes that really and truly believes that teachers are some evil ogre organization, unionized to destroy children.

There's no debating with someone who refuses your essential humanity, and if you think I don't care about my students' progress, you refuse mine.

In the end, every teacher I know holds him or herself to higher standards than John Arnold, Lloyd Blankfein, John Paulson or the capitalist of your choice.  And no matter how bad you think the schools are (and you're wrong on that anyway), teachers have done far less to harm children than any derivative or collateralized debt obligation has.

*Hog-Eye, Hog-Eye, magic stare/Make him itchy everywhere/on his nose and in his hair/even in his underwear!  Fetch me a Goldman managing director and we'll see if it works!

Where Are These Eager Replacements?

Gary Rubinstein, a far bigger person than I am, has been writing a series of posts that are a "debate" (by email) with Whitney Tilson.

Having ADHD, I lack the patience and impulse control to deal with such people.  I don't approve of Mr. Tilson's profession, which I believe is morally suspect and bad for public schools.  And I definitely don't like his attitude, his inability to take data seriously, or his utter lack of reflection.

This, though, BEGS a challenge:

My bottom line: deliver results in the classroom for kids, or go find another profession. There is no shortage of college-educated adults who would be grateful for that job, especially in this economy! 


Mr. Tilson.

Get over yourself.

I personally teach at what is, for the third year in a row, an offically-designated "Hard to Staff School".  That's right.  There's something about my school such that people - college-educated adults who are "delivering results in the classroom for kids"* - leave.  Indeed, they leave without the prospect of future job.  They leave even though they're not beholden to a now-ended two year commitment.

I suppose it could be the terrible, child-hating veterans like myself scaring away these eager young educators.  But ancedata suggest otherwise: my Resident Teacher just signed on, so I didn't drive her away.  She'll be joining my long-time classroom volunteer, who moved back to the Bay Area to take a job at our school.

I suspect that it's the annual pink slip, the lack of supply money, the ongoing march of ten-hour days and weekends at school, the endless need to write another grant, attend another IEP or make another home visit, the relentless drain of media and education reformers denigrating your work, and secondary trauma visited by hands-on work with seriously traumatized children, families and communities.

Or it could be the worker's compensation-covered allergic reaction from mold, asthma aggravated by vermin infestations, and the prospect of yet another 15% pay cut if state revenues don't meet projections.

Whatever the case, Mr. Tilson, there aren't a whole lot of eager-beaver unemployed persons - even unemployed teachers - lining up to take the jobs at my school.  The District even chucks a little extra money at us as an enticement to take the job and stay.  It doesn't seem to have had a big impact, since we haven't cleared that list of hard-to-staff schools.

But there sure is a shortage of adults clamoring for my job.  And you're certainly unwilling to take it, no?


*As opposed to delivering results in the classroom for America's DVD producers or something.  I think that at Ed Reform School, they teach you to tack a "for the children" sentiment to every sentence you piously pronounce.

Short Rant

The next politician, pundit, deformer or school official to worry about the technology gap and students unprepared for the glorious global computerized future economy* owes my classroom new computers.

I have two seventeen-year old computers in my classroom.  One of them cannot be connected to the Internet; the other valiantly attempts it but crashes attempting to load anything not optimized for seventeen year old computers (for instance, email).

These are a far more severe impediment to my students seeing themselves as people who use computers than state legislation with which SFUSD schools are in compliance already.**

*bleargh on that anyway.
**And good on you anyway, California!  Anything that gets commenters at the Chronicle that riled up is a positive without even considering the merits (and in this case, the merits are considerable).

Counseling Out Five Year Olds.

Here's an example from the New York Times:


By then, Matthew was throwing up most mornings and asking his mother if he was going to be fired from school. Worn down, Ms. Sprowal requested help finding her son another school, and Success officials were delighted to refer him to Public School 75 on the Upper West Side.

Matthew, by the way, was five or six at the time.  And he's puking and worrying about being fired.  From school.  For not lining up so good.  And he's a kid with three successful years of preschool.

So the charter recommends that he find smaller class sizes...down at the local public school.  You can't make this stuff up, I swear!

But here, it's staying after school to practice walking in the halls.  I swear I am telling the truth when I type that the school claims this is "high expectations", not "punishment".  I tell you, even George Lakoff didn't consider reframing this serious.  This is doubletalk.

For the record:
Maybe it's just my ADHD, but I think nine hours a day with more than 23 children and line order and SLANT is a bad environment for all children.  That's not expecting a certain standard of behavior, it is demanding robotic adulthood from five year olds.

ETA:
Link to Ms. Sprowal's article about her family's experience at Harlem Success Academy.
I'll note that "shadowing" is something we recommend if a child is really struggling to transition to Kindergarten.  The child usually loves it, the caregiver gets a better feel for how the class works and can make suggestions about how to help the child succeed.  In this case, it seems like the obvious fix for Matthew would be more active time - free active time and also kinesthetic learning games, etc.  I think that the (often very-early career) teachers at these boutique boot camp charters tend to avoid these types of activites because they don't look or follow as cleanly as a call-response direct instruction lesson.  That's a shame for all kids.

Debate for Deformers

Having comment-threaded with any number of pro-charter, pro-reform types, I think I've discovered their primary strategies for debate.  They have limited data in their favor, so it's a lot of buzzwords and reframing while building straw men.  Some favorites:

"It's all about the children."
What they intend to signify: This is generally used to end arguments.  You see, they're for the children!  So whatever they said is okay!
Deform Subtext: "Unlike you, who hate children and are in it for the awesome teacher salary."
How to respond: It ends up that everyone can be for the children and disagree on the best way to serve their needs.  Mentioning that - or taking umbrage at the subtext - refuses the reframing intended.

"I need to go get ready for my students."
What they intend to signify: Again, an argument-ender: "You can respond, but I won't, because I spend all July getting ready for next year!"
Deform Subtext: "While you spend it on the internet, because you hate kids and don't work hard."
How to respond: Isn't it sad that deformers can't write three sentences in ten minutes?  Seriously.  This is deform-speak for taking one's ball and going home.

"NO EXCUSES!"
What they intend to signify: All children can master high expectations if we just demand that they do!
Deformer Subtext: By mentioning poverty/trauma/language, you have refused to keep adequately high expectations.  You must show movies all day in your class.  While you sleep.
How to respond: You might mention that responsible educators refuse to blind themselves to their students' milieu: it's part of communicative competence.  Indeed, truly having "no excuses" means that you are well aware of the challenges and adapt your strategies accordingly.  Notice I'm talking about strategies.  Deformers are so outcome-focused that they do not often think about input.  It's absolutely possible for me to expect my high-needs students to reach high standards (indeed, in early elementary, they generally are expected to outperform high-income children).  It means that I'm going to have to challenge the pedagogy expected, though.

This is part of my issue with the merry KIPPsters.  I've trained stacks of them, and they tend to share an inability to think about how a classroom of low-income children of color might respond differently than a classroom of upper middle class white children.  They tend to see behavior issues rather than cultural pragmatics.  So they teach a lot of white upper middle class metalinguistic features (SLANT, etc.), but the base assumption is not additive - you have communicative strategies and I am teaching you a new set - but subtractive - you have no communicative strategies or the ones you have are bad, so I am teaching you some.  Because this is how KIPPsters think, they really don't get what you mean.  And it's generally useless to explain it to them: they start talking about their one black friend or colorblindness and then you end up needing this classic:

"You are blaming the children."
What they intend to signify/Deformer Subtext: You refuse to have high expectations, and you hate kids, and so on.
Precedent: Chances are good you mentioned cultural competence.  I recently got this one for noting that KIPP's discipline strategies cause actual harm to children, and when those children leave KIPP, the harm remains.
How to respond: Go to one's own blog and respond there.  There's no point in reasoning with such people.

Why Selection Matters

I've been reading a lot of material online about charter schools and selection.  Some points should be unquestionable at this point:

• Charter schools use a variety of methods to self-select incoming students;
• Charter schools generally have free, far-reaching expulsion policies;
• Charter school attrition is more severe and more lasting than public school attrition;
• Charter schools enroll a student group not like surrounding regular public schools.

Given this, the focus of articles is generally on exposing the lie: in the end, KIPP and its ilk probably aren't that exciting.  (Full disclosure: given the low-quality, test-first KIPP pedagogy and their long hours, their test scores don't surprise me.  I find it interesting that their actual rollout is so poor they can't "transform" SIGgy schools.  I have to assume this is due to their extraordinarily low teacher retention.)

What you don't see is attention paid to the schools that take everyone else: the regular public schools.  I teach at one of those schools.  And the charter school enrollment problem negatively impacts us.  It isn't okay to say that the charter schools are helping a self-selecting bunch of kids, because they are actively making good education harder for everyone else:

• Those kids expelled go somewhere, like my school.  Not only do they bring whatever challenges their charter chose not to deal with, they have suffered real emotional harm from the expulsion experience.  I don't care how tough that eleven year old looks: it's still an ELEVEN year old child who's just been told that he or she is not good enough to stay.
• Cherry-picking high performing students with motivated parents means the students left behind are a more concentrated bunch of high-needs children.  Our class loads become more challenging because there are more high-needs students.
• Those very high-needs students tend not to test well, and there are lots and lots of sticks associated with bad test results.
• Nor do we receive more money, in general, because we now have a more difficult student population.  Even the Weighted Student Formula SFUSD uses doesn't have metrics that cope well with this.

What I'm saying is that what KIPP does harms the schools around it.  This isn't even "for the greater good", it's "for the good of a very few with lots of hot press...at the expense of everyone else."

Suuuuuuuuuuuure they did.

I've read half of Joel Klein's Save-Our-Schools proposal in The Atlantic.  So far, I understand that we will save schools by value-added teacher performance pay and, um, not complaining about poverty.

I can tell I will have a lot of things to say about this piece, but briefly:

1. Hey, Joel!  BOO! Based on my read of the article, Klein just had a heart attack because a scary teacher from the scary teachers' union just scared him.
2. Joel claims a whole mess of teachers have told him how they hate their jobs and don't do any work but are just hanging on for their pensions.  LIE.  Like any teacher in his or her right mind is going to tell their Chancellor - who spent years itching to cut teacher pensions - that.
3. Joel neglected to mention that teacher salaries are capped.  He suggests that some teachers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars.  They aren't.  He was, though!
4. Joel claims he has a proprietary secret NYPS study that shows teachers don't work very much.  He is citing a secret data source you can't see.  I'm going to call that another LIE.  If you have those data, prove it.
5. Joel doesn't really get state-level funding AT ALL, but the way he heard it I will be rolling around in my pile of state money as I always do come August.
6. Hey, Joel?  Even Bill Gates has had to publicly take back the teachers-more-important-than-anything-else claim.  That would be because it's WRONG.
7. Erik Hanushek is at the Hoover Institute, which is located at, but not actually part of Stanford University.  It is a notorious right-wing think tank, Joel, which frankly is pretty obvious from the name.  Of course, you cite several pundit party organizations without mentioning their bias.
8. There are some real acts of targeted bad statistics in the article, but I'll get into that when I finish the piece.

Superintendents Can't Fail

During the first week of professional development before I started my first year of teaching, the Superintendent of the District came to do a meet-and-greet with Kindergarten teachers.  He mumbled genially about how boys and girls are different even in Kindergarten to a room packed with slack-jawed, horrified educators.

Within two months, he was out.  There were five different Superintendents (counting interims) that year.

The guy they finally hired came to my classroom on the second day of school the next year.  Our school had had massive renovations.  We were hoping to show him that these renovations had not included fixing a badly-leaking wet wall that would, along with a large hole in the roof, lead to the utter destruction of the Kindergarten storage room.  That did not happen, since this Superintendent arrived surrounded by a large entourage of educrats, all of whom apparently had critical things that had to be said while I was teaching.  Such was the affect of the Superintendent, coupled with the noise, that three children immediately burst into tears.

That guy didn't finish the year either, although before he left he was chased across the school lawn by our school secretary, bearing the (newly deceased) black widow that had occupied the lock mechanism of the Kindergarten bathroom.  (Really.)

None of these folks went into retirement, though: they just went on to new jobs.  Usually, they brought golden parachutes with them as thanks from their old Districts.  Those parachutes cushioned them from the fall of their eventual post-retirement pensions, which often were as much as fifty thousand dollars less than the several hundred thousand they were used to earning annually (not counting post-retirement consulting fees, of course).

Nor do they typically leave a long record of success behind.  I outlasted nine Superintendents in my old school District; none of them presided over increased achievement.  Rod Paige's "Texas Cheat-a-Thon Miracle" took him all the way to national office.  Chicago hasn't seen much from its Renaissance, but Arne Duncan sure did.  Jean-Claude Brizard left behind angry teachers and unhappy parents in Rochester to take on CPS.  And let's not start on ex-Chancellor Rhee.

These Superintendents like to talk about accountability, but they themselves are accountable for nothing. They're ever eager to introduce various value-added schemes for teachers, but never for themselves.  They criticize teacher pensions, but do not fail to take their own in full.  They preside over layoffs and budget cuts but find no reason to take any pay cuts themselves.  In short, they are far too often hypocrisy in action.

Educrats go home.

I am so tired and exhausted and fatigued and careworn and adjectivized of hearing that overturning teachers' due process rights "professionalizes" my profession.

If these people were serious about professionalizing my profession, there are any number of ways to do that that receive no interest from the deform crowd:

• They could stop expecting me to purchase my own office supplies.
• ...and my own office furniture.
• They could make every effort to ensure I can visit a restroom when I need to. 
• They could make sure my office is clean and safe.  You know, like making sure it even has a bathroom at all (two days with no water!  Thanks, City of San Francisco!  The twenty-minute K bathroom line on the upper-grade yard thanks you!).
• I'd have an expense account for the art supplies.

Okay, I need to stop now.  We didn't have water, but we did have a hairdresser on site, and now many teachers are boasting feather extensions.  We look fantastic.  I have given up on the hope of checking out of my classroom today - I need to open the school Sunday anyway - but I'm still joining Team Kindergarten for snacks and drinks after school.  Fancy people complimented my vintage McQueen getup at a fancy education thingamajig last night.  All of my chicks are adopted, and we should have working bathrooms and water fountains today.

And it's the last day with my awfully cute class.

Doomsday May Revise

...and a whole week of fun times before it!

Having taught in financial climates adequate (2001 with a lot of II/USP money), bad (2002-3), worse (2004-5) and gruesome, yet predictably more gruesome each year (2005 - on), I am surprised that this year's May Revise may actually present a budget so bad that some school districts will get over the whole "find a way through" nonsense.

Actually, I am kind of hopeful that they will: that some districts will have the courage to say no, to refuse to present the state with a budget, to call for system-wide strikes and basically demand that California fund its responsibilities.  Let's face it: the state is used to grumbling and lawsuits followed by massive cuts and somehow limping through.

We need to draw the line.  It is not okay that some districts are back to 31:1 AM/PM Kindergarten with one teacher, no aides and no supplies.  It is not okay that basic aid districts will still manage to keep their "essentials" - art and music and labs and computers - while I eagerly await the day that the solution to the plumbing problem in the boys' room near my classroom is not "keep the door open all the time".

It is not okay that I can look forward to an ever-increasing class of kids who have not had adequate nutrition, medical care or preschool.  It is not okay that that half of those kids will have experienced major trauma, five will be homeless and four will have diagnosed learning differences.  It is not okay that I will be expected to ameliorate all of the above while buying all materials beyond pencils and integrating technology using two computers that are 15 years old and cannot load the local newspaper, let alone Google Maps.

I do not anticipate that SFUSD will be one of these districts, given that Beyond the Talk is a lot of talk about systems and MAPs and Redesigns and Overcoming the Historic Power of Demographics.  The District can't even get itself behind the symbolic action of, say, having its top brass take some solidarity pay cuts.  So I don't think we can expect any actual challenging of institutional racism.  I'm sure there will be some good rhetoric around how California won't fund SFUSD, leaving it with no choice but to sacrifice its neediest.

Unfortunately, the buck doesn't stop with California.  We need to have the moral courage to take responsibility for the actions we take - or that we fail to take.  What SFUSD chooses to do is not constrained by the choices it claims to have.  If this is a state of emergency, then the conditions demand extraordinary action.

Hard-working teachers putting that extraordinary effort in every day can look forward to a meaningless Day of the Teacher resolution and a rather more concrete pink slip.

That says a lot about how Beyond the Talk we're really willing to go.

The Good, The Bad, The Irritating

GOOD.

• Going to the "Balenciaga and Spain" exhibit this week with another stylish Kindergarten teacher.
• Jeremy's Sweeps sale brought this Armani salvage dress I'd been admiring since November to my home.  It's a little big, which makes it just right for Kindergarten wearing.
• On break!  I'm going in one day to work and feed the snails and once to feed the snails and that's it.
• At long last, I am clearing my closet and divvying up the rejects.
• It seems reasonably likely that I will get another Resident Teacher next year.  I really think it's a neat program for teacher training and I love having a second adult in my room all the time.

BAD.

• Still at 7 of 15 classroom teachers laid off.
• What with the state budget and the all-talk-and-hand-wringing attitude toward equity in SFUSD, it's hard to imagine that changing.
• Because I got very sick and actually had to leave school to go to the doctor, I still have two conferences to do.

IRRITATING.

• I read my District email and in my SFUSD News Blast there were some platitudinous, Hallmarky sentiments from our Superintendent.  These were along the lines of "Even though we laid off half your staff and told you to come up with a budget that provides a generous twelve cents a child, y'all need to focus on meeting our goals of access, achievement and accountability.  It is just not Beyond the Talk to talk about all the stuff you're cutting and all your colleagues who are leaving."

...which, you know, is a lot easier a sentiment to talk about than to have, and one easier to have if you're not actually laid off and, frankly, make more than four of those laid off teachers do combined yet have taken no pay cut beyond furlough days.  It's also easier to stand up for those important values if I will be doing all the actual standing while you blame the state funding situation.  And it's a whole lot easier not to think about the people who might not be there if they don't comprise half the teaching staff of your site.

• I filled out my survey about the 4 March PD.  Even though my actual name is on it, I tried to be honest, although I ended up putting in a lot of "don't knows".  (Also, the questions were kind of...I dunno, they were more about "Do you understand that we are doing inclusion and you better like it" than "Was the presenter good?  Do you feel we are ready for the important work of moving toward a services model?  What do you need to be ready for that model?" Of course, maybe these questions are only of primary importance to K-6-9 teachers this year.)  
• Since I read the big report when it was released, I did not learn a lot of new facts.  Since someone at my school sits on the committee for this redesign, I generally can have all my questions answered right away.  Yet I have no idea how this will work out next year, and the parking lot questions I submitted have not been answered.

...this worries me because I am getting the feeling that, barring an incredible amount of work over the summer, the rollout is going to be pretty atrocious.  Again, it's easy to have a plan for an overdue redesign and it's a lot harder to live out that plan, particularly in a budget scenario like the one we've got.

I may be feeling this especially hard this week because I have had a lot of interaction with various service providers over the last couple of months.  Some have been awesome.  For instance, I filed a PT screen and heard from the screener the day she received it.  The screener also said she'd be happy to provide suggestions on activities and/or modifications in general: YAY!  Some have been teeth-grinding.  I feel like SFUSD's over-identification of poor children of color has among some providers led to a refusal to do any screening of poor children of color, even when a room full of professionals and the child's parents agree that despite the child's remarkable gifts, we are struggling to provide the experiences that will allow the child to learn.  I still think that screening - or just observing and providing suggestions - would cut down on over-identification while helping all children excel.  Yet more than once I've had the experience of asking for advice/observation and being given the strong sense that asking for help means that I am abdicating my responsibility for going Beyond the Talk.

And I'm not alone in that sense.  The attitude that educators are getting is toxic.  It inspires educators to avoid asking for help.  The children struggle, the educators struggle.  No one is happy.  No one is supported.

...and don't even get me started on RtI.  I am of the strong opinion (it's the ADHD) that little modifications should be widely available to all people, and that children benefit from knowing when they need a fidget/a deep breath or that they need a pencil grip/noise-canceling headphones to succeed.  So the idea of RtI seems great.  But a lot of RtI actually requires supplies, and while I did sew my own weighted stuffed animals and bought my own special pencils and HWT magna boards, I can't spend all of my money this way.  (It cuts down on my New York vacation pin money, and quite honestly a little souvenir from the Met isn't going to cut it.  I'm thinking dress.)

A quick scan at the numbers

...suggests that I won't have to worry too much about reading people ripping on my school (about which they know nothing).  SFUSD has some enrollment statistics out, and I'm going to guess based on my read of these that the people who will not be happy to have been assigned our school are not also the kind of people to complain about same on the internet.


If the offers match the population we enroll, our school will remain fairly diverse but continue in its general direction (more Latino and Asian children, fewer African American children).  (Our school has been diverse but in flux for a number of years, and diversity should be understood to mean "few if any white children".)

In this we are not common, and I will be interested to see what the new assignment system does for district-wide school diversity.  There are some stunning numbers in the data release - 78% of offers at Grattan, for instance, are to white children.  (This would tend to suggest that the idea that the nefarious and secret discriminatory quota policies of SFUSD will finally die, but I both digress and doubt it.)

In other news, I think we must have won the Layoff Sweepstakes but SFUSD doesn't seem as inclined to let us have the data on that this year.  (Perhaps because we disseminated it so widely.  You should've seen Eric Mar!  I thought his eyes would pop out of his head.)  In between noting that there are solutions to inequitable layoffs that don't involve overturning unions or turning to education deform, I managed to get my crafty layoff posters up this week.  So now we turn up the noise.

I mean, like to 11.  That's the problem with laying off all the young things: they can still organize and get loud AND show up to teach tomorrow.

Simply, SFUSD cannot claim to be going "Beyond the Talk" if they are willing to lay off nearly half of our staff.  How many elementary classroom teachers got pink-slipped?  Less than fifty.  There are what, eighty elementary schools in the District?  And my school gets seven of those?  It's not about seniority: it's about equal opportunity.

The district's courage should not rest entirely in its southeast side teachers - but it does.  Their annual reward for doing a job that the state refuses to fund and the district refuses to value is a pink slip.  What does that say about access and equity?  Given SFUSD's long history of failing poor children of color, there is a pressing need to build relationships and trust.  Boo-hoo-hooing about seniority and legal requirements is fine - but you can't also pretend that you aim to build that trust.

Hence: 11.  Or louder.

Your White Privilege is Showing.

Ahem:

Prioritizing the desires of the most powerful stakeholders will never make for a progressive argument.

Repeat: never.

I am tired of hearing about FAMILIES FLEEING THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS and how we need to get them back.  Even if those WEALTHY WHITE FAMILIES FLEEING THE DIRTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS came back to those schools, they have no history of advocating for any group other than themselves.

Aaaaaaaaaand they do that enough already.

The progressive argument is for building strong and well-funded schools serving the families already there. The progressive argument does not fantasize about how meeting poor children will be good for rich ones.  The poor are not there for your edification.  The progressive argument agrees that diversity is an important social value for all, but doesn't put the onus on achieving it on the oppressed.

Oh, and the progressive argument definitely doesn't fail to notice the block-by-block segregation that characterizes our city.  The neighborhood school proposal ensures that those WEALTHY WHITE FAMILIES will attend school with their fellow pale moneyed.

In closing: if there is a progressive argument for neighborhood schools, BeyondChron didn't make it.  They do provide an excellent example of San Francisco progressive politics at their worst: willfully blind to privilege.

Patient Zero

One of the reasons teachers take more sick days than you might is really obvious: we get sick more often than you do.  I spend my days interacting with 300 children, twenty of those very closely, all school year.  As a Kindergarten teacher, my students are young and building immunity to childhood diseases...by catching them.

There is not enough hand sanitizer, hot water and soap in the world to protect me - and if there were, the dry skin from constant washing would lead to new entry points for germs anyway.

Since becoming a teacher, I've contracted classic common colds and flus, immunizations notwithstanding (remember the year they guessed wrong on the virus?  I sure do).  I've been exposed to conjunctivitis and strep throat more times than I can count - not to mention head lice and fifth disease.  I've also managed to get some more exotic illnesses.  I missed mononucleosis in college so I could catch it in a Kindergarten (two weeks out of work).  I've had whooping cough (the entire winter break with coughing fits to spare for January).

This year, I have missed more days for District-sponsored professional development and events than I have for illness - for whatever reason, this has been a year of Fever and Chills on the Weekend, but Just a Runny Nose by Monday.  (Also, I can now teach fairly easily through the annual bout of cold-with-laryngitis.)

Beyond that, I think people forget that teaching as a profession is not sitting at a desk eating muffins.  I can't even go to the bathroom when I please.  I really need to be in a good, generous mood all the workday long.  I spend my day on stage, performing for my loyal audience.  And so does every other teacher.  This is emotionally wearing work.  It leaves you open to illness.

Those Teachers Are So Lazy with The Contracts Bust 'Em Already has been a popular trope lately, making its appearance in the New York Times and the usual teacher-loathing sources.  It's offensive.

Brief Flu Thoughts

1. If Michelle Rhee doesn't want uppity bloggers casting aspersions on her students' results, maybe she shouldn't have offered so many contrary reports of same.
2. And if she just now noticed those uppity bloggers, she really needs a better Google alert on her name.  I think the Daily Howler commented on the issue four or five years ago.
3. We need to move away from the idea that diagnosis is in itself a negative.  Locally, maybe the move toward inclusion will do this.  But right now, we are ignoring students' needs in the name of not labeling learners.  Given the dark and racist history of SFUSD's special education referrals, it's an admirable impulse.  But some students have real needs.  These needs can often be ameliorated in the classroom, but they won't be if they aren't named and teachers aren't given support in doing so.
4. For instance, I know some things about sensory processing issues.  I can generally offer support to students who need tactile feedback, proprioceptive development, etc.  But there is far more I don't know and therefore can't support.  When we can't assess students who are struggling for special needs, how can I serve those students well?
5. In short: learning differences are differences, and differences are good.  Diversity makes us richer, not poorer.
6. Ms. Rhee's Cult of the Teacher plays into this, too.  If the teacher is the driver of all student achievement or lack thereof, then he or she - if truly motivated - needs no support or guidance to reach all learners.  If he or she would just work harder, everything would be easier.
7. Of course, the thoughts of anyone who duct-taped students' mouths closed on any issue in education should be taken with a veritable Bonneville of salt.

I am not at work today because I have the flu.  I am very thankful we celebrated Valentine's Day Friday because a rainy celebration day on my poor Resident Teacher would be a truly terrible thing.  Today is the first day I have been awake for more than three hours in a row since Friday afternoon.  This is a big achievement.

Some things NEVER change.

Preparing for a $19 or a $330 cut per student in funding next year, SFUSD is as usual planning for massive teacher layoffs: 300 to 400, presumably with EduJobs and maybe with retirements counted in already.  This year, my school can actually anticipate more layoff letters; presuming the same plan as last year, the following will definitely be noticed:

• all of 1st grade
• 2/3 of 2nd grade
• all of 3rd grade
• 1/2 of 4th grade
• all of 5th grade

with an additional four notices if they also send layoff letters to teachers with four years' seniority in SFUSD (in which case, they will notice all but three classroom teachers).

Undoubtedly there will be plenty of hand-wringing about how terrible it is that the Superintendent and BoE are required to utterly upend high-needs schools, but they're going to do it anyway and get hinky if anyone suggests that it's their fault.  It's that mean state!

So let me be the first to assure SFUSD that it is, ultimately, their decision.  Going "Beyond the Talk" is a radical action.  Inequitable layoffs are a status quo action.  You can't balance these things out.  Blaming union contracts, seniority, etc. doesn't exonerate you.  The shady self-dealing of the state GOP (I can balance the budget and increase school funding, leaving a three billion dollar reserve: bet you can too!) doesn't exonerate you.  We need to take responsibility for our actions.

I do think SFUSD has options other than massive layoffs that still allow them to sign off on a budget (although I am tired of hearing about STATE TAKEOVER from those who would lose their jobs in that case, gotta say!).  Some of them are straightforward: time to make some big cuts at the top at the Central Office.  Frankly, 25% paycuts to all EDs, Senior Directors and Superintendents of every ilk are not too much to demand.  Legal needs to cut down on its use of the unrestricted General Fund, and like the Special Ed redesign, should be forced to account for its legal decisions (SFUSD: Fighting Every Access Ramp Since 1901).  I recognize that Legal is used to being the end all on all law, but I must note that their opinion is just that.  (FYI, Legal?  Your opinion on layoffs and equity?  LAUSD settled.  Because they were going to lose ugly.)

In other news:

• I have an offsite PD thingamajig today, which means that I cannot walk to work and must get on the bus.  BOO.
• As of yesterday afternoon, I was 40% to filling a Donors Choose grant to get a big big fan and a space heater for my classroom.  We have already lost heat twice this year, and 40s classrooms with full-wall window exposures need the heavy artillery in air circulation technology.  Of course, going Beyond the Talk might be construed to mean the District should undertake liveability issues, but I still have lead pipes in my classroom so I suppose not.