July 2010 Archives

- A Poem about 'Underperforming' Schools,
about Turning Around & Turning Out-

by Bill Schecter

They say that the tests scores are too low,

Did they mention my students are hungry?

that the school is underperforming and must be

Did they say many have no fathers at home.

"turned around," that all the teachers must be

that few parents will attend

turned out, fired, or reapply, though

Open School Night because of that

only some will be rehired. Administrators

second job, or no job, and that

who have long forgotten what a

our phone calls rarely get answered? Oh,

classroom looks like say we teachers

did the President happen to mention the drugs,

do not care enough (that I did not care),

the poverty, the gangs, the 25 students murdered

that we whine and make excuses, because

in Chicago this year? Did

we are in it only for the money,

someone perchance recall we didn't just stay

or that we are incompetent. Some

for a year or two to burnish our resumes for Wall

even call us racists and union hacks,

Street, but made a commitment to kids, to classrooms,

and so good riddance to bad rubbish. And

in fact pledged our lives to them, for whom we

they claim Charters can do a better job, without

stole time from our own families, long evenings,

bothersome unions and crazy pay scales,

grading, preparing, plotting that they too might hope,

that test prep can better proceed unimpeded, when all

dream, smile, eat, learn, whom we not only tested

members of the "team" are stuck on the same

but hugged, or provided a shoulder to cry

dreary page, paid piecemeal, per test score, to

on (as required) or loaned money to, or went over an

facilitate (what's called) "accountability," so that the

assignment -was it for the 5th time?- because of illness, or absence or

kids don't get sidetracked by music-art-drama-

language, or no textbook, or...or... or. Did

field trips-laughter or creative lessons

that phantom principal, office-dwelling total stranger,

that might take too long to think about, and

even know I was proud to be a teacher, that I gave

can even launch unintended flights of fancy,

my all, for 5-10-20-30 years, with no ambition

or burn up way too much time by

beyond these children, no desire to shuffle paper,

requiring actual real-life participation in

to hoard data, no desire to standardize souls,

ExperimentsdDebatesSimulationsDiscussions,

but only to help children grow, to enlarge spirits,

after all, there is serious business to be done,

stretch minds against all the odds

I mean the business of education,

never mentioned in polite company.

which the businessmen will show us

The bell has rung. School is out.

how to do. So, time now for the new team

We are out.

to get down to the grim

So, tell me,

task at hand.

what's in?

Bill Schechter was born in New York City and was educated in its public schools. He later taught history for 35-years at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional H.S. in Massachusetts. Now retired, he remains active in the struggle to save public education from those who would privatize our schools, standardize education, destroy unions, and de-skill the teaching profession.

photo by Chuck Olynyk, of Fremont High in Los Angeles, "protected" from protesting teachers and students.

What do you think?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

This month we have been intensively focusing on the issues surrounding struggling schools, and the Department of Education's heavy-handed set of options for such schools. Today I am sharing a guest post from two advisers to Congresswoman Judy Chu, who explain some of the key elements of the proposals she has offered.

Guest post by Howard Adelman & Linda Taylor

As Secretary Duncan has recognized, turning around schools that are not doing well is a formidable task. It is also a task about which many ambiguities and controversies swirl (see our recent policy analysis report entitled: Turning Around, Transforming, and Continuously Improving Schools: Federal Proposals are Still Based on a Two Rather than a Three Component Blueprint (Center for Mental Health in Schools, 2010 online at http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/turning.pdf ).

"The truth is," as Joanne Weiss (U.S. Department of Education) has stated, "we don't know exactly how to turn around schools. The truth is also that excuses and inaction don't help students who are trapped in these schools. It's a real dilemma, not a fake one."

Given all the uncertainties associated with turning around, transforming, and continuously improving schools, it is essential to keep analyzing deficiencies in blueprints and roadmaps guiding policy and practice. Such analyses are especially important with respect to low performing and failing schools and provide a basis for developing new directions.

It is important for everyone to understand that Congresswoman Chu's report constitutes more than a critique of the four turnaround strategies. While it's inevitable that respondents to the Chu report will continue to focus mainly on the battle over the four turnaround models, it will be unfortunate if the unique contributions of her plan to strengthen our schools are given short shrift.

In particular, the Chu plan elevates the focus on enabling students to have an equal opportunity to succeed at school by underscoring the need to comprehensively and systemically address barriers to learning and teaching and re engage disconnected students. This emphasis makes it the first federal level proposal designed to move school improvement policy from the type of two to three component blueprint that our analyses indicate is needed as a primary and essential facet of school turnaround intervention. The intent is to provide a unifying concept and umbrella under which all resources currently expended for student and learning supports are woven together.

We note that some critics of the Chu plan continue to marginalize the focus on the third component for school improvement. Rather than appreciating that it is a primary and essential component, they characterize it as focused mainly on matters such as family engagement and community health and social services. Much more is involved.

With respect to addressing barriers to learning and teaching, Chu's report emphasizes that learning supports need to be organized into a comprehensive system for a full continuum of interventions to enable every school to better address barriers to learning and re engage disconnected students. She outlines that key strategies include:

• building teacher capacity to re engage disconnected students and maintain their engagement
• providing support for the full range of transitions that students and families encounter as they negotiate school and grade changes
• responding to, and where feasible, preventing behavioral and emotional crises
• increasing community and family involvement and support
• facilitating student and family access to effective services and special assistance as needed.

In addition to promoting healthy development, the full continuum of interventions mentioned spans systems to (1) prevent problems, (2) respond as early after onset as feasible, and (3) provide for severe and chronic problems. Each of the strategies she mentions encompasses complex arenas that must be fleshed out at each level of the continuum.

Our research over many years has clarified that school improvement planning and implementation has substantially ignored most of this leaving many good teachers in the untenable position of having too many students for whom well designed and implemented instruction simply is not enough. This continues to be the case as seen in the first analyses of the Race to the Top applications.

Moreover, the federal administration's proposed Blueprint for Reform continues to primarily emphasize two component thinking. The blueprint states that enabling equity of opportunity requires moving toward comparability in resources between high and low poverty schools, rigorous and fair accountability for all levels, and meeting the needs of diverse learners ... by providing appropriate instruction and access to a challenging curriculum along with additional supports and attention where needed.

However, sparse attention is given to additional supports and attention where needed. The commitment to equity and opportunity for all students is stated specifically as the third of five priorities. The closest the document comes to delineating supports to meet this priority are sections on Meeting the Needs of English Language Learners and Other Diverse Learners (i.e., students eligible for compensatory and special education) and Successful, Safe, and Healthy Students.

In both instances, what the blueprint indicates amounts mostly to tinkering rather than system transformation.

While there is language about a new approach, there is continuing neglect of extensive systemic deficits related to interventions targeting student diversity, disability, and differences. The limitations of the blueprint with respect to this priority are underscored by applying two lenses that are not widely used:

(1) how schools try to directly address barriers to learning and teaching and

(2) how they try to re engage students who have become disconnected from classroom instruction.

These two lenses bring into focus the considerable resources currently expended on student and learning supports and illuminate fundamental flaws in how these resources are used. And, they help expand understanding of the full range of systemic changes needed not only to prevent and reduce the problems cited in A Blueprint for Reform, but that are essential to reducing student (and teacher) dropout rates, narrowing the achievement gap, countering the plateau effect related to student population achievement scores, and in general, alleviating inequities.

To illustrate the point, we define the third component as focused on addressing barriers to learning and teaching and designate it as an enabling or learning supports component. As with the other two components, an enabling or learning supports component needs to be pursued in policy and practice as essential and fully integrated with the other two in order to combat marginalization and fragmentation. As outlined, the component provides a blueprint and roadmap for transforming the many pieces of student and learning supports into a comprehensive and cohesive system at all levels. It is stressed that the three component framework does nothing to detract from the fact that a strong academic program is the foundation from which all other school based interventions must flow. Rather, an enabling or learning supports component provides an essential systemic way to address factors that interfere with students benefiting from improvements that are made in academic instruction.

We suggest that only by unifying student and learning supports will it be feasible to develop a comprehensive system to directly address many of the complex factors interfering with schools accomplishing their mission. And only by developing such a system will it be feasible to facilitate the emergence of a school environment that fosters successful, safe, and healthy students and staff. It is emphasized that school climate is an emergent quality that stems from how schools provide and coalesce on a daily basis the components dedicated to instruction, learning supports, and management/governance.

Across the country, pioneering work to enhance student and learning supports heralds movement toward a comprehensive system for addressing factors interfering with learning and teaching. For example, two states, Louisiana and Iowa, have completed designs for this third component (i.e., a Comprehensive System of Learning Supports to address barriers to learning and teaching and re engage disconnected students) and are moving to build capacity to implement it. (Hawaii also initiated such a framework, entitled a Comprehensive Student Support System, but has yet to implement it effectively.) A number of districts in other states also are moving in this direction.

Thus, whether or not the impending reauthorization of the ESEA incorporates a three component blueprint, we anticipate more and more movement in this direction at state, regional, district, and school levels. The call for ensuring equity and opportunity for all students demands no less.

Over many years in the roles of classroom teacher, district support staff, school administrators, and university researchers and teachers, Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor have worked with schools, districts, and state departments to enhance equity of opportunity for all students. As co-directors of the federally funded national Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA, their current focus is on systemic reforms to enhance school and community efforts to address barriers to learning and teaching and re-engage disconnected students.

What do you think? Does Congresswoman Chu's proposal offer struggling schools a better chance to transform?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

There are two worlds at every school. There is the world we teachers inhabit, full of lesson plans, procedures, academic standards and learning targets, where we tend to think of our students primarily in terms of their academic abilities, and their strengths and weaknesses we are working to overcome. And then there is the world our students inhabit, where the most important challenge is not always doing well on a test, or completing a project, but instead is how they manage to fit in with their peers.

The new MTV series, If You Really Knew Me, takes us into our students' social and emotional world, through an extraordinary project called Challenge Day. As teachers we observe the cliques, the occasionally mean behavior, the bullying, and sometimes we intervene to try to protect the vulnerable, or to make our classrooms safe spaces. Some schools have programs to fight bullying. In my classroom I used class meetings to discuss how we treat one another, to try to get my middle schoolers to be more humane. I had marginal success, I would say.

But Challenge Day takes a different approach. Through an intense day of communication exercises, students are challenged to open up and share their experiences and feelings. In so doing, they discover that one thing they all have in common is a sense of isolation from one another. They also discover that this isolation can be bridged when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable.

Students are confronted over racism, sexism and homophobia. There is space to apologize, and room for forgiveness and a fresh start.

When we were in school, we learned how to read, write, and do math-we even learned how to drive a car-but no one ever taught us how to be ourselves. No one taught us how to deal with the thoughts and feelings we carried inside us every day. No one taught us how to discover our personal truths, how to express our love, how to connect in a deep and honest way with other human beings, how to communicate with our siblings or our parents, and certainly no one taught us how to grow into the parents we wanted to be to our future children.

Today, as adults, we pose the question: if we never learn these things-truth, love, connection, communication-then does learning anything else really matter?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 8:47 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The goal of my blog is to promote dialogue, and my post from two days ago has stirred some spirited responses. I want to share and respond to one such comment, from a reader with the name "Achieve_Hartford!," in the spirit of seeking some common ground.

Achieve Hartford! writes:

I disagree with the premise that there is some philosophical chasm that exists between "teachers" and "ed reformers." In reality, I think there's simply a huge communication gap that people are just not overcoming. Having been a teacher, and considering myself a very balanced ed reformer (it's not about charters and choice and tests - its about really good schools), I don't think ed reformers are "teacher bashers." A tiny minority, maybe, but the vast majority of understand fully that teachers make all the difference, and would never blame teachers for not being able to combat all the effects of poverty. When people look at changing schools (including changing the way teachers are evaluated), they're looking not to cast blame on anyone for what's happened; they're looking to cast responsibility on someone for what will come. The message that's not being communicated well by ed reformers is this: "In light of there being no other viable means for eradicating poverty, the schools have to take up the charge." This is far from teacher bashing from where I sit, and this is what needs to be discussed.

To reiterate: ed reformers are saying that schools have to impact poverty because nothing else can, which leads to schools taking on much more responsibility and having MUCH higher expectations cast upon them for combating the effects of poverty. If you perceive a philosophical chasm, the gap is not with how teachers are viewed, it's with whether schools can or cannot be the means to eradicate poverty. I submit: if anyone thinks that poverty is going to get fixed through some other manner - by all means suggest a plan. Let's use this conversation to discuss that. I, for one, agree with the the ed reforms that say that the only chance we've got to do this is through the schools.

Dear Achieve Hartford!,
Thank you for taking on the task of defining and defending the position of the Ed Reformers.
You should know that I entered the teaching profession 23 years ago in order to make a difference for children from poor backgrounds. I did not imagine that poverty would have to be cured in order for me to make any difference. So I think it is possible for schools to make some difference, and of course we should do our best to make every school as effective as possible. So please do not interpret my critique of the ed reformers over this issue as some sort of abandonment of any efforts to improve schools, or denial of the value of education as a source of individual and community improvement.

But let's take on your presentation of the argument. You write:

"In light of there being no other viable means for eradicating poverty, the schools have to take up the charge."

I agree with you that this is the central stance of the education reformers. I disagree that it is a viable one. Here are the problems I see with this.

First of all, let's take a look at the means by which we are attempting to achieve this. NCLB set up mandates for intensive statewide systems of testing to determine achievement levels. Can we agree that students in poverty have disadvantages that affect their performance on these tests? We then use these tests to identify the schools where students perform the worst, which winds up always being the schools in the poorest, most violent neighborhoods. Then we label these schools failures, and demand that half the staff -- or at least the principal -- be fired as a condition of the school receiving improvement funds.

The theory of action here is clearly that the teachers or principal - or maybe both - are responsible for the failure. And the rhetoric that surrounds these actions reinforces this, as you can see if you read any of the justifications for the firings at Central Falls or Fremont High.

Very simply, this will not work. Schools can and must play a role in fighting the effects of poverty. But schools cannot do this work alone, and that is what has been demanded here, even in your argument. You say "...schools have to impact poverty because nothing else can..." Where is the foundation for this statement? If we look at the history of the past fifty years, we see some very interesting things.

Take a look at this New York Times article from a year ago.

The article states:

Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President George W. Bush's frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect.

Although Black and Hispanic elementary, middle and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test than they did three decades ago, most of those gains were not made in recent years, but during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s. That was well before the 2001 passage of the No Child law, the official description of which is "An Act to Close the Achievement Gap."

So let's pay attention to this. The achievement gap closed NOT during the decade when federal education policy focused on holding schools and teachers accountable for student test scores, but in prior decades when we actually DID something to change the conditions in which students learned. We actually desegregated schools, and brought students in our communities together from across town. We created magnet schools, and experimented with a variety of creative approaches to reach students from different backgrounds. I know this well, because I was a student in the Berkeley public schools in 1968, when we underwent voluntary desegregation, and I went to a new school in fifth grade as a result.

But we decided that was too much trouble, and gave it up. In Wake County, North Carolina, this week, one of the most successful desegregation efforts in the nation was abandoned in favor of a return to "neighborhood schools."
Across the nation schools have become re-segregated, and as I pointed out in my post, none of the great advocates of civil rights in the current administration have much to say about this.

There are two assumptions in your statement "schools have to impact poverty because nothing else can..."

First: Can schools impact poverty?

I believe schools can have a marginal effect on the level of poverty in a community. Unfortunately I think there are far larger economic forces at work, and education is just one part of the puzzle. When we look at the past fifty years, we often see education cited as the cause of our troubles, or the hope for our salvation, but usually this is overblown. In 1983, according to the Nation at Risk Report, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." The report called predicted dire consequences for our mediocrity. Few would argue that the report spurred immediate widespread improvement, yet the nation won the Cold War and underwent sustained economic growth during the decades that followed.

Second, can nothing else make a difference regarding poverty?

We have seen an aggressive pursuit of public policies that actually expand the gap between rich and poor - namely the tax cuts from the past decade, which greatly favored the wealthy. Now we are reaping the harvest of those cuts. Our governments are not adequately funded, and services for the poor and unemployed, and education as well, must be cut to make sure we can continue shoveling money at the war department.

I think the statement that "nothing else can make a difference" regarding poverty is a surrender to the relentless logic of the elite, who insist that all available money must flow to them. We are supposedly living in a democratic society. We need to take our economy back from the elites who hold it hostage. If we care about poverty, let's get some policies in place that create jobs for the poor, and stop pretending that "holding schools accountable" is going to make a bit of difference.

What do you think? Can we effectively fight poverty by making schools responsible? Can nothing else be done to address poverty?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Tuesday evening our grassroots group, Teachers' Letters to Obama, held a teach-in featuring educator turned Congresswoman Judy Chu and conservative education scholar turned critic, Diane Ravitch. (You can hear the recording here.) There were many memorable moments in our conversation, but the one that is resonating with me is Dr. Ravitch's description of her meeting with top White House staffers, including Arne Duncan and Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel. The meeting, she said, was pleasant enough, but there was no traction. No interest in what she was saying. Emmanuel actually left midway through, saying he had more important things to do.

She had been told they did not want to hear criticism but instead positive solutions, so she did her best to prepare such solutions. But in the end, they did not really seem interested in anything she had to say at all.

So far this has been our experience in seeking to interact with the administration as well. We should have been natural allies. Many of us raised money and campaigned for Obama, and celebrated his victory. We are educators not because we seek a comfy government job, but because we care deeply about our students, and their right to the best education we can offer them. We have been critical of education policies - but we have plenty of positive suggestions based on our firsthand knowledge of our students and schools. But we have no traction, no way to connect.

There is an oil and water phenomenon at work here. Our perception of the reality in our schools is so drastically different from that of the administration that the two cannot seem to coexist in the same space and time.

To be fair the paradigm of school reform we are facing did not begin with this administration. They have merely adopted it for whatever reasons. But let's be clear about what we are up against. We can offer positive solutions all day long, but until we share a common awareness of reality, we will not be heard. So what is at the heart of this disconnect?

The central claim of the "education reformers" in and out of the administration is that our schools, and in particular, teachers who hold low expectations, are the reason for the differences we see in performance between different socioeconomic groups. To bolster this, they cite research that shows that some teachers are better able to lift student performance than others. So, if we had nothing but great teachers like these, our problems would be solved. But while many of us have invested heavily in our own efforts to become more effective, and in processes such as National Board certification that offer ways to demonstrate and elevate our practice, these processes alone are not going to eradicate the inequities faced by our students.

Ironically, the administration co-opts the language of the Civil Rights Movement to proclaim education as "the civil rights issue of our generation." The leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s were deeply concerned about education, but they understood very well that fighting poverty was fundamental to the health of their communities. So-called reformers have turned civil rights on its head, and no longer worry about the resegregation of schools, or the vast inequities in funding between wealthy and impoverished schools, or the widespread poverty and violence in these communities. Now these are dismissed as excuses offered by the real culprits, those teachers who set low standards and allow their students to fail, and the unions that protect them.

Martin Luther King, Jr, said in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964,

We have developed the greatest system of production that history has ever known. We have become the richest nation in the world. Our national gross product this year will reach the astounding figure of almost 650 billion dollars. Yet, at least one-fifth of our fellow citizens - some ten million families, comprising about forty million individuals - are bound to a miserable culture of poverty... the poor in America know that they live in the richest nation in the world, and that even though they are perishing on a lonely island of poverty they are surrounded by a vast ocean of material prosperity.

Why can we not recognize that poverty matters? Why is this anathema to the education reformer? The scholarship on this stretches back decades. Poverty produces a whole range of conditions that directly affect student performance. Studies show that the children in homes where the parents are on welfare hear a fraction of the vocabulary of the children in homes of well-educated parents. Poverty is associated with family instability. I know from frustrating attempts to make phone calls that many of my most disruptive and dysfunctional students were not settled at any particular home, and were being shuffled from one parent to another, or living in chaotic group homes or in foster care. As I shared in my blog last week, there is strong evidence that neighborhood violence results in traumatized children, compromising their ability to focus and learn.

But this awareness is forbidden. It is an article of unquestionable faith among the education reformers that the only causes for poor outcomes that we are allowed to acknowledge are bad schools, bad teachers and low expectations. And any attention to the causes I mention above is cited as strong evidence that the teacher in question holds such low expectations, because otherwise, why would you seek to offer "excuses" such as these for poor performance? In fact, we are told to banish such thoughts from our minds, lest they tempt us to make excuses for our students or otherwise lower our standards.

According to the education reformer, raising issues such as hunger and violence is equivalent to throwing in the towel on these students. Because apparently these conditions are beyond society's capacity to address - so educators must take on the impossible challenge of teaching students to excel without allowing these factors to interfere whatsoever.

What we have is an education reform agenda driven by willful blindness to the cruel effects of poverty. Why is this blindness necessary? Because to open one's eyes to these effects actually requires that we take steps to correct them. We have chosen to abandon any societal attempts to diminish poverty. Over the past three decades our society has greatly expanded the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and the gap between the wealthy and poor grows wider and wider.

It might be argued that on the teachers' side, there is a corresponding blindness, an unwillingness to recognize that there are, indeed, poor teachers who ought to leave the classroom. While our unions are obliged to offer teachers a legal defense as part of the processes in place to handle such situations, I have not found that teachers as a whole are blind to the need for some professional standards. We can agree that there are a small number of ineffective teachers who may not belong, but that does not mean these individuals are the cause of our systemic inequities.

Who would desire this blindness to the effects of poverty? Not the poor. Not those of us who work every day in these communities. Only the elite, and those who serve the elite. They cannot see the truth. The truth burns their eyes. We need to show them the truth at every opportunity.

What do you think? Does the awareness of the effects of poverty cause teachers to lower their standards, and thus perpetuate poor outcomes? Are the "education reformers" willfully blind to the effects of poverty?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 8:19 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Congress is currently considering reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, with some modifications put forward by the Obama administration. This law was originally enacted with little input from educators, and our students and schools have paid the price. Over at Teachers' Letters to Obama, we are seeking letters from teachers expressing our firsthand understanding about what works and what does not, as a means of informing those who make policy. Los Angeles teacher Chuck Olynyk has offered such a letter.

From: Charles V. Olynyk
Social Studies teacher
Los Angeles Unified School District
stiepnik@yahoo.com

Dear President Obama, Secretary Duncan and Members of Congress:

Several members of our Teachers' Letters to Obama (TLO) group of educators recently had the honor of sharing with Secretary Duncan our concerns with the direction of federal education reform's Race to the Top initiative. I was one of them--or rather, was scheduled to be, as the conversation was cut short.

Following that, in various publications were reports of Department of Education assertions that teachers support RTTT. This claim is expressly contrary to the position statement we issued, nor does it reflect the sentiments of thousands of teachers who have reported corresponding with you, Mr. President.

Some clarification is in order.

Improvement or "turn-around" programs for struggling schools must be flexible and participatory. Teachers, students, and community members need to be involved in discussions and problem-solving. Moreover, we do not believe the current four options are adequate and recommend instead the strategies in the Strengthening Our Schools proposal now before Congress.

I will speak directly to one attempt to "improve" a struggling school.

Until June 25 of this year, I taught World History at John C. Fremont High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. While we were a school with a checkered past, (including having principals lasting an average of 23 months) we were a school on the move. Our test scores were on the rise, in fact had been for a number of years. We were not on the California list of worst schools because of said rise.

It can be attributed to dividing the 4600 students on a year-round calendar into thirteen Small Learning Communities, each with one counselor seeing to the needs of 400 students. Teachers shared the same kids. Problems could be spotted. Help could be given.

Additionally, from October through December, the Fremont faculty voted to collaborate with the Los Angeles Education Partnership (LAEP) to strengthen the SLCs and improve instruction and support for students. At the same time, Fremont finally developed a Single Plan created by teachers, parents and students. This was the first time that teachers wrote the single plan document rather than an administrator. It was the first time that the parent advisory councils at Fremont wrote out their recommendations and these were embedded in the single plan. The plan called for clear action steps to address the key focus areas such as ELA, Math, Graduation, Parent Engagement, and Attendance.

Yet, on December 9th, 2009, Superintendent Ramon Cortines designated us for "reconstitution". That later became "restructuring.". What I do know is that the principal did not have to reapply (because it was his first year), but the entire staff was told to reapply or be moved elsewhere; they were also reassured that most would have their jobs, as long as signed and agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding, which would assign additional duties to the returning staff. Teachers were also "invited" to joined "committees" to advise the restructuring/reconfiguration of Fremont High. You will please make note that the teacher input was to be of a purely "advisory" nature. Parents were to be informed and made a part of the process, as were students.

Yet a new structure for the school was developed without teacher input. The thirteen learning communities or SLCs were to become six Academies of 500 each, and three 9th Grade Centers of 600 students, served by a single counselor. I cannot stress enough that to increase the counselors' caseloads by such percentages will prove detrimental to the students, whose education is to be improved by this folly. Add to this, in a school where the average 10th grade student misses 25-30 days out of a 162 day school year (year-round schools on our schedule have longer but fewer days than traditional schools), a block schedule, which was voted down by the faculty, is now being instituted; for those not involved in education professionally, each day missed by a student will actually impact them all the more severely.

In addition, the Superintendent said the parents and students would be informed. Yet a group of teachers were able to collect over 700 signatures of parents who lived nearby and who were not informed at all of changes at the school, nor input solicited.

Another factor has to be tossed in: while teachers were reassured by Superintendent Ramon Cortines, the Local District 7 Superintendent Dr. George McKenna III and the principal that most teachers would retain their jobs if only they were to reapply, it turns out that in order to obtain a School Improvement Grant (SIG), that Fremont could retain no more than 50% of the original faculty. Aside from the issue of just being plain underhanded, you will now have a faculty at a "struggling school" (which did not make the California worst schools list because of improvements in test scores), which has had the average teacher last less than three years and the average principal last 23 months, with 50% new staff. It should also be noted than many of the positions for Fremont, which begins the school year on July 6th, remain unfilled or will be filled by long-term substitute teachers.

Getting rid of all the teachers or even half the teachers does little to address the deeper problems. The key is to personalize the learning, to develop relationships. I keep thinking of an anthropology book called "Small Is Beautiful," by Schumaker, which can be applied to those struggling schools. Isn't this the concept behind Small Learning Communities, to personalize education, the village raising a child, to cite the West African proverb? To be able to have (besides the smaller class sizes we all long for but will probably never appear) a group of teachers sharing a group of students (at the Mont, each SLC is about 400, which works for US) so that we know the problems of the kids and are able to plan for grade-level and vertical teaming, lowering the number of students who "slip through the cracks." One of the successes we had in the use of SLCs is what I call the Legacy Effect. Brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews and cousins learn to look
forward to being in the same program, which builds success.

Extending the year won't do it, nor will an introduction of block scheduling, because these students already have a bad track record for attendance; the block schedule looks like a quick-fix to recover lost credits. Our faculty has also voted against it. So, short of reducing class sizes, I think this might be the best path. Growth and progress seem slow, but do you want to build quick and shoddy or for long-term? At this point, not only will there be a shortage of qualified teachers (isn't that what NCLB was about, to begin with?), but now I personally know juniors who have decided that they do not wish to sacrifice their educations to this grand experiment--and they have brothers and sisters... Many sophomores I know are following suit. The New Fremont will not only bleed qualified teachers, but the students we entered this profession to serve.

It is my hope that I put a human face on what is happening in the name of RTTT and school improvement. The "turn-around" program for Fremont High School has been neither flexible nor participatory. Teachers, students, and community members were not involved in discussions nor problem-solving. Let this travesty not repeat itself in other schools. Learn the lesson of Fremont High. I recommend you closely examine the strategies in the Strengthening Our Schools proposal now before Congress.

The future of our schools is in your hands.

Charles V. Olynyk

The subject of "turn-around schools" was the focus of the Teachers' Letters to Obama teach-in Tuesday, July 13. We heard from Congresswoman Judy Chu, who has introduced legislation in Congress called Strengthening Our Schools, which offers a much sounder framework for school improvement. We also spoke with Diane Ravitch, who has been a vocal critic of NCLB and its step-children, Race to the Top and the ESEA Blueprint. The recording of the dynamic session can be heard HERE.

What do you think of Chuck's experiences at Fremont High? How could we do a better job supporting teachers and students at struggling schools?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Today I feature a guest blog from California Congresswoman Judy Chu, who will be one of our speakers at next Tuesday's Teach-in -- Turning Around Failing Policies. Congresswoman Chu is that rarest of people -- a policymaker who actually understands education by virtue of her firsthand experience as a Community College professor for twenty years, including 13 years in East Los Angeles. She has put her understanding to work in creating a proposal now before Congress, called Strengthening Our Schools. Here are her thoughts:

In April, the students, parents and faculty at Elliott School in Lincoln, Nebraska learned district administrators had reassigned their principal, De Ann Currin, to another school for next year.

But school district officials praise Currin and her work. "It's hard to imagine a principal with more mission and passion for the children than De Ann," said Lincoln's associate superintendent. And they call the move "repugnant". However, the current requirements for schools to qualify for the Administration's School Improvement Grants (SIG) forced the district's hands.

Elliott School needed to adopt one of four "turnaround models", or else it wouldn't get a piece of the $3.5 billion in federal funds available to fix failing schools. Even though Elliott opted for the least intrusive one, the Transformation Model, it (like all the others) still requires the current principal's dismissal. So Currin was out.

When the price for fixing our schools is the dismissal of the educators best situated to do so, there's something wrong. The essential problem is that current policy focuses more on finding someone to blame for poor schools than finding solutions to fix them. Indeed, the Administration's requirements that underperforming districts adopt one of four rigid turnaround models, without focusing on external factors on academic performance is mistake.

It ignores the mountains of data that proves even the best teachers and schools will fail students who can't focus on learning because of hunger, abuse or a lack of English proficiency. And it makes teachers the scapegoats for poverty problems faced by the entire community. At schools like Elliott, where 90 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced lunches, we should be extending our hands - not pointing our fingers.
The most frustrating thing is that the administration knows this. By pushing for programs like Promise Neighborhoods, it's quite clear that the importance of supporting our children outside of the classroom isn't lost on Secretary Duncan or President Obama. Unfortunately, in the SIG program, it's simply nowhere to be seen.

That's why I've proposed a different approach, the Strengthen Our Schools (SOS) Framework, which ensures this omission in our nation's education policy won't be a permanent one. The SOS approach provides flexible turnaround approaches that meet the unique needs of America's individual communities and school districts. More importantly, it addresses the problems like poverty, lack of parental involvement and language challenges that plague the student populations of our most troubled schools. Because, if we don't address the obstacles our students face outside school walls, we'll never turnaround what goes on within them.
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The subject of "turn-around schools" was the focus of the Teachers' Letters to Obama teach-in Tuesday, July 13. We heard from Congresswoman Judy Chu, who has introduced legislation in Congress called Strengthening Our Schools, which offers a much sounder framework for school improvement. We also spoke with Diane Ravitch, who has been a vocal critic of NCLB and its step-children, Race to the Top and the ESEA Blueprint. The recording of the dynamic session can be heard HERE.

What do you think of Congresswoman Chu's proposal? Will you join us on Tuesday to discuss these ideas with her and Diane Ravitch?

(image used by permission)

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A startling new study has profound implications for school improvement efforts. From Reuters:

A murder in the neighborhood can significantly knock down a child's score on an IQ test, even if the child did not directly witness the killing or know the victim, U.S. researchers reported Monday.

The findings have implications both for crime control efforts and for the heavy reliance on standardized tests, said New York University sociology professor Patrick Sharkey, who conducted the study.

They can also explain about half the achievement gap between blacks and whites on such tests, he reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As I have reported in this blog, the five "chronically underperforming schools" on the state list for restructuring in Oakland are all within a five mile radius, and all in neighborhoods rife with street crime and violent murders. In 2008, 124 people were murdered in Oakland, the vast majority African American - some were high school students. This map shows the areas where these murders occurred, and the neighborhoods with the densest markers are precisely where the chronically low-performing schools lie.

This corresponds closely with a dramatic study done several years ago focusing on the prevalence of PTSD among children who live in violent neighborhoods.
Researchers found that:

As many as one-third of children living in our country's violent urban neighborhoods have PTSD, according to recent research and the country's top child trauma experts - nearly twice the rate reported for troops returning from war zones in Iraq.

According to a social worker who works with these children:
"PTSD can look a lot like attention-deficit disorder ... with the lack of concentration, poor grades and inability to sit still."

Teachers of students in these neighborhoods are familiar with these symptoms. There is another aspect of this that I have observed. You might think that in such a violent environment people would look to authorities like the police for safety - and occasionally they do. But among the youth, the police are often feared and despised. Students wear t-shirts that say "Stop Snitching," to put pressure on one another not to cooperate with police. The police are perceived by many as a hostile occupying force in these neighborhoods. This suspicious attitude towards authority spills over into the schools and corrodes relationships between students and teachers as well.

I believe the pressure to raise test scores makes this divide even worse. Teachers are given less and less leeway to meet their students where they are, to focus education on topics of intrinsic interest to the students, and must focus instead on covering large amount of content attached to rigid timelines. And the designation of students as Far Below Basic reinforces the perceptions many students have that they are not capable of succeeding in school.

But the larger question this raises is what the root cause of the achievement gap itself is. Most current "reform" strategies (such as those in Race to the Top and the ESEA Blueprint) are rooted in the belief that the differences in achievement are a result of good versus poor teaching. Of course a highly effective teacher can make a huge difference, but the pervasive effects of environmental factors such as violence, poverty and nutrition are going to exert constant downward pressure on the academic performance of students in these neighborhoods. And we can close down and reopen schools every four or five years for the next century and still not be likely to make hungry, traumatized children into eager learners.

We will be far more successful when we recognize that teachers at these schools face particular challenges, and provide systemic supports to give them additional time and resources to cope with these conditions. If students are coming to school traumatized by violence, they need counseling. They need teachers with the flexibility to drop the Dibbles for a day and have a class discussion on the drive by shooting that occurred the night before. They need nutrition programs to ensure they are well-fed. Sadly, most of these services are currently being severely cut, rather than expanded, due to the lack of funds.

Most of all, these schools need to be elevated as places of honor in their communities, not denigrated by the State and Federal government labeling them and their teachers as failures.

The subject of "turn-around schools" was the focus of the Teachers' Letters to Obama teach-in Tuesday, July 13. We heard from Congresswoman Judy Chu, who has introduced legislation in Congress called Strengthening Our Schools, which offers a much sounder framework for school improvement. We also spoke with Diane Ravitch, who has been a vocal critic of NCLB and its step-children, Race to the Top and the ESEA Blueprint. The recording of the dynamic session can be heard HERE.

What do you think? Have you seen the effect of violence on your students' academic achievement? How should we be supporting teachers at these schools?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend