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schools

A How-To Guide for Social Change?

By | Homelessness, The Race to End Homelessness | No Comments

Despite the recently beautiful weather beckoning to everyone to spend their days outdoors, it is an exciting time to be a student in Baltimore. For years, students and teachers have complained of dreadful facilities — from broken equipment to roach infestations to undrinkable water, Baltimore schools were not a safe place to learn. Transform Baltimore, an agency determined to update all Baltimore school buildings through an aggressive $2.4 billion loan and rebuilding plan by 2020, has been organizing students, parents, teachers and legislators to follow a funding model to change the face of schools in the city.

Sound Familiar? Baltimore is in the middle of another long-term plan to change a social issue. While Transform Baltimore is an eight-year plan and The Journey Home is a ten-year plan to end homelessness, both are ambitions road maps to change. Unfortunately, as I have mentioned before, we know that one of them is not really working. As Baltimore’s Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness passes its fifth birthday, there are more people experiencing homelessness in Baltimore than when the plan began. A new draft of the plan was released earlier this year, but the new draft so greatly disappointed service providers that the city council needed to intervene and ask for revisions.

Will the bright futures of improved Baltimore schools go the way of the plan to end homelessness? It is possible that the next few years could see failed development, unfinished renovations and continually crumbling existing schools, but something tells me it won’t be that way. Transform Baltimore has taken impressive steps to ensure that it can succeed. Even though The Journey Home is approaching middle age, its authors could learn a lot from Transform Baltimore.

• Communication: Transform Baltimore began with community organizing. It has over 30 member organizations that represent youth, parents, educators, and community members. Meetings began in 2011 to gather ideas and plan for rallies and demonstrations. This organizing allowed for the perspectives of multiple stakeholders to share ideas and get involved in the project. While the first draft of Baltimore’s Ten Year Plan involved stakeholders, the rewrites failed to make use of the many experts on homelessness in Baltimore. The Baltimore City Housing Authority has the most housing resources in the city, but was not invited to comment or contribute to the plan’s rewrite.

• Best Practices: Baltimore’s strategic plan is based on a model that has been successful in three cities. IndianapolisBuffalo, and Greenville, South Carolina are each in the process of dramatically updating their school buildings. It was by examining these school districts that Baltimore was able to create a financial plan that would provide necessary funding for this project. As I have lamented before, Baltimore has stayed woefully close to home when planning to end homelessness. While the consultant for the plan was actually Canadian, there is little evidence that practices from any other city struggling to end homelessness were ever discussed.

• Funding: In early April, we learned that Transform Baltimore lobbying has been successful. A bill that would commit $1.1 billion for school building and renovation passed both the house and senate, and is on its way to Governor O’Malley’s desk. The new draft of the Ten Year Plan fails to demonstrate where much of its funding will come from. Funding for ending homelessness has primarily been focused on keeping shelters and existing agencies running, rather than on new solutions.

Baltimore students and educators deserve nothing less than excellent school facilities. It appears that Baltimore might be on the way to providing this, making the city a true leader in education reform nationwide. If this plan is successful, it will mean supreme growth for the city’s young people, but also a strong model for the city’s population experiencing homelessness. A road map for social change is a valuable asset, one from which other advocates might learn.

IMAGE CREDIT. [Allford Hall Monaghan Morris]

The Lynchpin of Suspensions

By | Education | No Comments

This week, The Baltimore Sun‘s education reporter, Erica Green, ran a story on a controversial Baltimore City Public Schools incentive program: teachers and principals are eligible for monetary rewards up to $9,500 for successfully reducing suspension rates.

Great, right? Educators can be compensated for reducing suspensions:  improving school culture and decreasing disciplinary issues to keep kids in school and safe environments.

Oh, logical fallacies are so sneaky!

Logical fallacy: A reduced number of suspensions are necessarily the result of improved school culture and/or a decrease in serious misbehavior.

Likely reality: A reduced number of suspensions are the result of assigning fewer suspensions.

If Destiny and Jaqueline get into a physical fight in class, the suggested disciplinary action in the Code of Conduct is a suspension, but the actual disciplinary action comes down to administrative discretion. If the principal is eligible for a monetary reward for reducing the number of suspensions, on which side of the disciplinary action spectrum do you suppose that discretion will fall? It doesn’t take a doctorate in behavioral psychology to imagine the negative consequences of this policy.

Unfortunately, the attention to the flaws of this initiative obscures the crux of the matter: suspensions don’t work. Suspensions have almost nothing to do with school and everything to do with home and parenting.

In 13 years of rigid Catholic schooling – where you could get detention for the wrong-colored socks, being one minute late, or wearing a flagrant hair accessory – I never got a single detention. Why? Well, because I was a goody-goody. But ALSO, because I did not want to even fathom the sort of wrath I would incur from my parents for receiving disciplinary action. Because I was terrified of even a single indiscretion on my “permanent record,” which I believed was very important because my parents told me so since forever. Because I knew the disciplinary action I received from school would pale in comparison to whatever my father deemed a suitable punishment. I did not worry about school infractions. I worried about what my father would say when he found out. I still shudder to imagine.

So what happens if this sort of disciplinary support doesn’t follow through at home? Nearly all of the punishing effect of detentions and suspensions are predicated on parents reinforcing the seriousness, legitimacy, and severity of these consequences at home.

In reality, many of my students viewed suspensions as a mental health day: a day of video games, Cocoa-Puffs, and Facebook.  At worst, they were bored. At best – vaaaaacation!

As a teacher, I had many students with incredibly supportive parents – we chatted frequently on the phone, via email, and at conferences. They checked homework, helped with studying, and monitored grades. Not so coincidentally, these students were never in danger of being suspended.

For fairly obvious (yet complex) reasons, it is the students who do not receive adequate support and attention at home who are usually the repeat offenders for misbehavior, violent conduct, and truancy. Suspensions won’t work, because the lynchpin of the punishment is missing. Unfortunately, sending a message that extreme or violent misbehavior will be ignored or downplayed is a recipe for school chaos – that message travels fast.

What to do? These students do need some form of disciplinary action to send a clear message that certain behaviors will not be tolerated. However, they are also likely in desperate need of additional support services. Unless you have an intensely Hobbesian view of human nature, it’s fair to say that students don’t generally go around cursing, punching, and threatening people without an underlying cause.

Without digging deeper to unearth and address the root causes of the misbehavior, those students (and their schools) will be caught in a vicious cycle of crime and punishment. Maybe they need therapy and counseling services, maybe they need a positive outlet for aggression (like joining a sports team), maybe they need a personal tutor… but one thing’s for sure: a mental health day won’t fix the problem, and neither will sending them back to class.

Stand to Reason

By | Education | No Comments

In the wake of tragedy, we scramble to make sense of the senseless, derive meaning from the meaningless, identify causality (or at least, correlation) in the randomness.

We…

politicize
criticize
proselytize
sanitize
quantify
qualify
verify
justify 

the violence.

Our ability to reason is a hallmark of humanity. 

And humans have been trying to make sense of violence among men for thousands of years.

“For as humans are the best of all animals when perfected, so they are the worst when divorced from law and right. The reason is that injustice is most difficult to deal with when furnished with weapons, and the weapons a human being has are meant by nature to go along with prudence and virtue, but it is only too possible to turn them to contrary uses. Consequently, if a human being lacks virtue, he is the most unholy and savage thing, and when it comes to sex and food, the worst. But justice is something political, for right is the arrangement of the political community, and right is discrimination of what is just.”

– Aristotle, Politics

“Hence arose the first obligations of civility even among savages; and every intended injury became an affront; because, besides the hurt which might result from it, the party injured was certain to find in it a contempt for his person, which was often more insupportable than the hurt itself. Thus, as every man punished the contempt shown him by others, in proportion to his opinion of himself, revenge became terrible, and men bloody and cruel.  This is precisely the state reached by most of the savage nations known to us: and it is for want of having made a proper distinction in our ideas, and see how very far they already are from the state of nature, that so many writers have hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel, and requires civil institutions to make him more mild; whereas nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive state, as he is placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes, and the fatal ingenuity of civilised man. Equally confined by instinct and reason to the sole care of guarding himself against the mischiefs which threaten him, he is restrained by natural compassion from doing any injury to others, and is not led to do such a thing even in return for injuries received. For, according to the axiom of the wise Locke, There can be no injury, where there is no property.”

– Rousseau, Second Discourse On the Origin of Inequality

In the wake of tragedy, we search for meaning.

To reason is human. 

A Four Point Plan for the Next Four Years of Education Policy

By | Education | No Comments
  1. Decentralize Funding – Bloated bureaucracy and red tape at the district level creates unnecessary logjams at the school and classroom levels. As teachers and students move increasingly towards individualized and highly personalized teaching and learning, the system must decentralize decision-making about curriculum, funding, hiring, technology, professional development, and evaluation to the school and classroom level so that education professionals can make decisions that are appropriate for their school and students. In Baltimore, CEO of Public Schools Andres Alonso decentralized school funding and gave principals full autonomy over their school budgets. This allows principals to collaborate with teachers and the community to assess the needs of the school and prioritize funding dollars to provide the appropriate resources. Furthermore, by valuing every teacher salary in the budget at the mean cost to the district, this budgeting structure has completed eliminated Last-In-First-Out hiring practices.
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Not Another Blog About Why I Left Teaching

By | Education | 9 Comments

Every August, I would lose my mind (and half my paycheck) at back to school sales. Did you know there are an infinite number of ways to design a delightful classroom? Catchy themes, notable quotes, color schemes – joy! rapture! highlighters! Where would our imaginations take us this year? We read mythology and hosted our own Greek Olympics; we analyzed poetry and performed original works at our Poetry Slam; we studied Renaissance art and painted modern masterpieces. We read and performed Shakespeare with a resident actor. And all that learning paid off – my Language Arts classes had the highest reading scores in the school. I was rated “Satisfactory.”

I loved teaching. I just hated being a teacher. I resigned in April and felt the wave of relief that accompanies right decisions. But this is not a blog post about why I left. If you want to read one of those, you can go hereherehere, or here.

You already know why I left.  Hardly a day goes by without a cathartic blog or cheeky op-ed from teachers, parents, and politicians waxing poetic about deplorable school conditions, misguided school and district leaders, poorly implemented evaluation policies, and the sheer physical and mental exhaustion of teachers. Several idiots post snide comments about getting out of work at 3pm and having summers off.

We already know why teachers leave, but what would make them stay? “Stay,” because there is not actually a problem attracting teachers to the profession – we just have a problem keeping them for more than five years. Programs like Teach for America have proven that attracting people to the profession is mostly in the marketing. Lots of people like the idea of teaching; precious few can tolerate the realities of the profession.  We are left with a pool of martyrs and masochists, mostly, which does not smack of sustainability.

I have spent the past month in my first professional non-teaching job. Let me tell you about the luxuries of my new job.

I have discovered that there are more than 25 sites on the Internet. Gosh, some of these news articles and videos sure would have been helpful when I was teaching Social Studies. Speaking of which, I now have time to read the news. A lot has happened in the world these past three years, during which I was buried under a mountain of bureaucratic tasks.

I have regained the freedom to pee as I please. I can’t overstate this. Gone are the days of dehydrating myself until 4pm. A bevy of beverages! Water, coffee, tea, juice – as much as I want. (I don’t even have to ask to use the restroom. I may just go.)

I have learned that there are happy hours on days other than Friday! People all over the city enjoy an hour (or three) of happy every day.

My boss does not stand at the door of my cubicle and watch me work. We do have meetings every week, though.

At lunchtime, I eat my lunch. Sometimes we go to Chipotle, which is a real thrill.

I’m not being flip. I’m reclaiming my life, my autonomy, and my personal health and happiness, which somehow got lost in the shuffle as I let teaching consume me. A teacher’s work is never done, because their charge is Herculean. And instead of lauding teachers for the tireless super-heroes and heroines they are, we vilify them. We closely monitor them. We strip them of autonomy and professional choices. We call them lazy, because they’re trying to do the work of 10 people and come up short.

Why do half of teachers leave the profession? Why do half of teachers stay?

This is a blog about solutions and staying power.  Let’s talk sustainable systems and long-term planning, instead of bemoaning band-aid fixes and emergency certifications.  Let’s create schools and classrooms that will allow teachers to enjoy the anticipation of August all year long.