Jose Vilson's Blog, page 27
January 18, 2016
Are You About That MLK Jr. Life?
My latest at Medium delves into the questions I have for those who invoke Martin Luther King Jr. in their crusades for personal gratification. Here’s an excerpt:
Even before the Common Core State Standards came into vogue, our entire system, whether public, private, or otherwise, have sought to keep children quelled and believing in an American Dream that was barely accessible. The truth and message of MLK, however, often contradicts these caricatures of him, and we should heed that if we truly believe in his message.
For more, please read my latest over at Medium. Share. Recommend. Thanks!
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January 13, 2016
My Reaction to the President’s State of the Union Address
Anytime the president of the United States shouts out teachers, that’s definitely a plus. Well, sorta.
As a math teacher, I appreciate the emphasis on STEM in that it has the potential to open doors to students who normally don’t get those opportunities, or that’s the presumption. I graduated with a degree in computer science, and through the four years at Syracuse U, I saw my brethren of color either drop out completely or transfer to another major within the first couple of years. This wasn’t for lack of intelligence, either. The learning curve for some of my colleagues, even the ones who graduated, was steeper than people who already had coding languages in their middle and high school curricula. It taught me that much of the talk around tech needs to start in the K-12 sector across the board, integrated with the maths and sciences in a way that allows students to deconstruct problems on their own.
But, after last night’s State of the Union Address, I had a few questions that pressed upon my chest the minute President Barack Obama was done with the STEM segment in his speech. continue reading
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January 10, 2016
My New Year’s Resolve
I’m supposed to tell you that I want to lose weight. I’m rounder than ever, so that’s a lofty goal.
But that’s no fun, and I’d rather not spend your time talking about dietary supplements and instead tell you about my visit to the US Department of Education, my second trip to Washington D.C. in as many months. This time, I got the chance to speak to Acting Secretary of Education John King, known primarily as former New York Commissioner of Education, his legacy tarnished by the mass opt-out movement across New York State. I had never met him until he got to D.C., so my only impression of him (mainly from articles, blogs, and memes) was that of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s puppet, placating to the hedge fund managers and charter school CEO’s wills and whims.
Since moving to D.C., he’s gotten a chance to hear me speak to him three times, and in two of those times, I got to ask questions that I hope would make him change course. Or at least I got to say that I told him what I felt to his face. I already felt like I won.
This conversation was about recruiting and retaining teachers as part of a nationwide policy. Adults like to sit in tables discussing possibilities, messaging items that might happen for chance if all the right elements are there. Sometimes, you hope the right people are there to deliver the message and make it actionable for the betterment of public education. Other times, you’re just hoping that the person with the most power in the room can differentiate between heartfelt, thoughtful statements and candy-coated trash. Having a seat at that table (along with folks I consider friends) assured that we’d take the conversation deeper, and that we did.
I can’t speak for everyone else in the room, but I can tell you what I said.
I can tell you that I put cultural competence on the table. I can tell you I spoke about the characteristics of a “bad teacher.” I can tell you that our highest need schools need our best, and it has to include strong professional development. I’m pretty sure I also mentioned that we need our teachers in these highest need schools to be looked at as actual professionals with their own set of skills. I specifically said I couldn’t stand the idea that certain teachers got seen as pedagogues and others as disciplinarians and deans, which ultimately determines their career track.
I can tell you Mr. King listened and wrote plenty of notes. I can’t tell you if, in the next 12 months, he’ll have the capacity or the political will to act upon what I mentioned.
There was a time, right before Race To The Top was enacted, that I might have said my feedback on this would create a significant shift in schools. I could have advocated for diversifying the teaching force and integration right when former Secretary Arne Duncan brought the hammer on the country with Common Core State Standards and teacher evaluations tied to test scores. But now, with the ESSA act, I have less confidence that there’s the political will to make that happen. Kicking the accountability game back to the states is the worst form of political ping-pong we’ll see in education.
In any case, I came out of there feeling like I spoke to what teachers go through on a daily basis. Whenever I’m in a position to be invited, as an unbought, unfiltered educator, I continue to push hard on the levers of equity and justice in ways I hope folks at the federal level can comprehend. I take this responsibility of having a voice seriously, which is why, when invited, I don’t half-step. As for Mr. King, who follows me on Twitter, I hope he’s willing to push past the education reforms that haven’t worked and actually ride this third wave, progressive and truly civil-rights focused.
My heart is exactly where it needs to be on these issues. I carry this weight with as much humility as I can. Hopefully, I did you all proud.
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January 3, 2016
These Feet Will Drag (A Poem)
I haven’t written a poem in a few months. Don’t judge me. These are the words I choose to recite while getting back to work tomorrow.
I’ll drag my feet to the classroom,
but,
once present,
these words will flow
these ideas will go
these desks will hold
these minds will know
these markers will glide
these works will clarify
these lessons will fly
these students will, too
These students who society finds problematic
Will solve these here problems
I shall bear witness
And drag my feet back home
Weary from exhausting the day’s possibilities.
Blessed.
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December 30, 2015
The Top JLV Posts of 2015 (According To You And Me)
According to thousands of you, here are the top ten posts 2015 with a few words from each post. This blog surpassed a million views since inception. Considering I’m doing this without any major sponsorship, publications, or well-regarded co-signs, I’m ecstatic about this and so much more. Without further adieu, here they are:
Opting Out Of Everything
“I wanted to listen to the whole commercial, but, instead I hurried up, paid for my groceries, and got the hell out. You guessed it: I opted out.”
We’re Wrong [Reflecting on Spring Valley High]
“If I’m the black male educator who’s seeing that and I don’t react, the first words out of my mouth ought to be ‘I was wrong, and I’m sorry.'”
I’m Not Racist, But My Kid’s Not Going There [On Segregation]
“The tale of two schools begins and ends with a white school and a black school, and, no matter if the schools are equal by any measure that our society deems credible, one will always be different from the other. Segregation.”
Where Have All The Teachers of Color Gone? [With Answers]
“When education reformers of present-day wanted to disrupt their education systems, they competed against each other in their shows of force by shutting down, breaking up, and privatizing schools with majority students of color.
Guess where teachers of color, not so coincidentally, tend to work?”
The Blackout (Why #BlackLivesMatter Owes Nothing To You)
“Just before I almost hit the comment button, I thought to myself, “What would this bring me besides more burning bridges?”
Then again, if the bridges are that flammable, then maybe they were going to burn regardless.”
The Crosshairs of Poverty and High Expectations
“Racism, classism, and sexism manifests not just in the structures that hinder our most troubled schools, but also in many individuals within the system itself, carrying their rather visible knapsacks into our schools and dropping their bag of rocks on our kids.”
New York City’s Fractured Relationship With Teachers of Color
“Whenever we raise the bar for supporting a subset of educators, we help all teachers. Not a trickle down, but a gushing up.”
The Investment (A Message To New Jersey Teachers)
“We can’t operate like police do. Our jobs are not about breaking down children. We can’t keep contributing to the school to prison pipeline.”
Get Up Offa That Thing (Summer-Shaming)
“Summer-shaming is a thing, and I’d rather not engage in it, because when someone calls me Jose in the middle of a week day, I don’t have to correct them until at least September.”
Raisins Exploding In The Sun
Which is odd because, when I asked her back in the fall why she was running for mayor, she said, “If you don’t see someone actually doing something, then you gotta step up, don’t you?” So I guess it’s on us now.
Some of my unranked faves that you may have missed:
11. How I Engage With New Teachers (Gems from the Dirt)
12. Of Challenge and Controversy (Why I Support Marylin Zuniga)
13. Pedro Noguera Leaves to LA and We’re The Remainder
14. Shut. It. Down. [On The Battles for Racial Equity and Public Education]
15. This Is What Has To Be Done [#WhyIWrite]
Thanks for making this one of the most well-read education blogs in America, and for doing the work of putting our students at the forefront of change. See you in 2016.
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December 28, 2015
A List of Things I’ve Learned in 2015
For one, don’t make lists because it makes people reach for things that aren’t there.
2015 is the year people forgot some of my titles. I am a full-time teacher at a middle school with a predominantly Dominican-American student body. I am a father to a toddler, a partner to a wonderful woman, a writer for some prominent outlets, and the founder of an activist collective. I don’t get much sleep, and don’t eat as well as I should. I am invested in making my thoughts into reality. I am overweight, but that hasn’t slowed me down much. I contain multitudes, and some take priorities over others. I am a proud Black Latino man, working hard to understand what that means in the context of today.
This post is dedicated to a whole list of folks I’ve had to leave behind in 2015, including some of your favorites, folks writing indirect posts at me until I had to call them out on it, folks jacking my style and using it in unethical ways (I see you), and supposed allies who created parody social justice accounts with my name involved thinking I didn’t peep that. (We did, though.) I walked into many a lion’s den and still came out roaring. I angered and vexed a few folks who once endorsed my book This Is Not A Test. Even some family and friends tested my mettle, and that provided plenty of learning experiences as well. With more speaking engagements came more opportunities for well-meaning white educators to walk out on me when I said the words “Black lives matter.” I haven’t stuttered all year on that principle, though.
Wouldn’t you know? We been hurt, been down before. When our pride was low, looking at the world like “Where do we go?” continue reading
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December 20, 2015
A Bit About The “End” of No Child Left Behind
I’m not a fan.
I do think we need to have a nation education reform. I do believe that there should be as much federal oversight as possible in the name of equity. I just happen to disagree vehemently with the folks who’ve been doing education reform on the state and federal level. This ping-pong politic where we think we’re making a dent by giving education back to the states makes me nervous, even in “blue states” like New York. If we keep ping-ponging the same thing, i.e. standardized testing and the deprofessionalization of the teaching profession, then ESSA is no different than NCLB, RTTT, or whatever acronym you’d like to throw in my direction.
Can’t trust it, folks. Those of you believing the media hype that No Child Left Behind is over are in for a rude awakening when your schools stay underfunded and your child overtested.
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December 16, 2015
Hope and the Teacher
My colleague asked me point-blank: “You’re saying you don’t think you’re having an effect on kids?”
I guess I should have been more poignant. I’m also not one for small talk, an affliction I acquired from years of nervous ticks when I spoke in normal situations. I also suffered from an extreme case of “I respect this person’s current work on these issues to not be honest.”
The thing about teaching, writing, and advocating at the same time is that I’m simultaneously aware of the energy it takes to teach my 150 students at 45 minutes a class for an entire day and the legions of self-interested actors who, at any given moment, would turn these very children against me. That’s our current educational discourse, an overlay of the socioeconomic and political realities of a nation at risk of every and anything at all times. Everything is right or wrong and the only way to fix it is to double down or completely change course. Every person is either good or evil. We must choose a side, one for each eye, if we’re granted that at all.
In my positionality, I am hopeful things will change. I am doubtful anything will. continue reading
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December 13, 2015
The Dea(r)th of Opinions [TFA and Writing As A Whole]
Back in 2009, ChalkbeatNY fka Gotham Schools had its first fundraiser featuring then-NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and NYU researcher and former education reform cheerleader Diane Ravitch. He was there to give one of many speeches about the disruptive education reform he and former mayor Michael Bloomberg embarked on since the early aughts. Ravitch, on the other hand, read an excerpt on said legacy from her best-selling book The Death and Life of the Great American School Ssytem. By then, my blog was already blocked from all NYC public school computers (except those in central and with administrative privileges), so getting an invite to an event with most of the movers and shakers from NYC’s education sphere felt special for a guy who only had a PC and an Internet connection.
The handful of us who were typing about education policy didn’t see a dime off it, and because it was so new, people didn’t think I had ulterior motives.
Fast forward to today and it felt like everyone finally has attempted blogging, and telling folks you use social media for writing doesn’t shoot giggles up people’s throats. In many cases, folks assure you are getting paid if you’re writing on a regular basis. It’s hard to tell whether someone truly believes the things they’ve written, if the person in the avatar is the author of the piece, or who e-mailed the author on key information in the article. Organizations have teams of folks who write pieces, ostensibly because people think it’s more authentic when it comes from a blog instead of an article. Journalism has changed in palpable ways, at times blurring the lines between investigation and hypothesis.
No more is this true than the latest venture from Teach for America sympathizers, Corps Knowledge. Lyndsey Layton’s piece on the aforementioned group pokes several holes through this faux-poration. The following quote made my eye twitch:
The Corps Knowledge campaign is run independently of TFA, although many of those involved in NYCAN and TFA know each other. Matt Kramer, a former co-chief executive of TFA, sits on the board of NYCAN’s parent organization, 50CAN. Kevin Huffman, a TFA alumnus and former Tennessee education commissioner, sits on the board of Corps Knowledge.
“We certainly talk, but this is separate from TFA,” Bradford said. “TFA is letting us take her sister out, and we said we would bring her back on time.”
The word choice is, at best, befuddling from Bradford, creepy and insulting at worst, but so is this operation. There’s a person who literally (in the literal sense) just raised $500,000 to start an operation that refutes bloggers and dissidents who do most of the opposition for free, in their spare time. In some ways, I understand this from an operations perspective. Every corporation has a PR department, and I don’t see TFA as an animal that needs to work any differently.
Yet, I think how I’ve spent close to a decade at a fraction of what this Bradford guy was able to get and I’m floored that someone would pay that much money for one guy to say “no.” Either that, or maybe I wish I had gotten on that gravy train sooner.
Authenticity eludes these folks. Feel free to have a nuanced discussion about TFA because I’ve certainly done so on numerous occasions. Say you don’t like the eyeroll-inducing, acerbic ways that TFA critics come for current and former corp members. Say what you will about the share of blame any and all sides of those working in education deserve for the disservice done for children of color.
But please don’t tell me TFA needs $500K to do what a few folks they already have on staff can do. They have $330M in revenue, and, even if they had half of that, they’d still run laps around the type of critics they say they’re refuting. This is one of the many instances that the money would do better in the type of school TFA says it wants to save.
I suppose in this environment, where folks have a hard time determining what’s real or not, you should put your money on making sure that specific opinion doesn’t stray into authenticity. Please, spare us.
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December 8, 2015
The Students Always Do That
Real talk: I haven’t been feeling myself lately.
We’ve had a plethora of school program changes. In sum, I ended up with me having five periods of five classes. I don’t blame anyone in my building. I do find it inappropriate to make such hefty changes in freaking December, more so for the students than for me or the adults in the building. I’m also not one to make thoughtless changes for the benefit of test scores, because if I wanted to work in a test-prep factory, I would have.
The custodians had to install a revolving door for my classroom. Or at least that’s what I imagined.
With all that in mind, I fully intended on rolling under my covers when my alarm went off a few days ago. I still found my shoes and socks on my feet, v-neck over my collared shirt, slacks rustling while I made my way to the bodega. I ask for my tostada y cafe, the usual when I have a long day. I ran into one of my newly acquired students. I see him at least twice a week, but never knew him except for his awkward maneuvers through the tight grocery lanes.
Today, he decided to turn around, wish me good morning, and say, “Mr. Vilson, your class is already one of my favorite classes.”
See? Like, it’s like people know that the more kids I get, the more I’m just gonna make do. Every time I cover a class, I find myself wondering what it’d be like to teach that specific class. With these new classes, I let them sit where they liked so I could memorize their names in two days (!), then sit them with folks they can work with. I’m catching them up in the things I already did with my other two classes. I’m getting a sense of their habits, their intelligences, their levels of participation, their misgivings.
In other words, I’m actively loving to teach in a system that’s hostile to this love.
The students always do that. They always find ways to remind me why I withstand adult-level nonsense, why I’m proud to tell everyone I teach middle school, why I don’t mind having tough conversations with students when they’re not doing well, why I stay a few minutes after-school, and why I come in 30-45 minutes early for work.
When I do, I don’t expect to get compliments with my coffee, but it’s a start.
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