Jose Vilson's Blog, page 34

Raisins Exploding In The Sun

“… when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.” – Adrienne Rich

“And yet it was impossible for me not to notice that the overwhelming majority of activist educators who gathered for this conference in Chicago were white; it was impossible not to notice that the folks with microphones who made explicit calls for anti-racist activism, culturally responsive pedagogy, and the development of educators’ cultural competence were people of color …” – Chris Thinnes

“Be wary of those whose identity is rooted in opposition, those who would literally be lost without someone to hate.” – DeRay McKesson

When Anthony Cody invited me to the Network for Public Education Conference to talk about teacher authors, I was a bit nervous. Within the last year, far too much crap had happened for me to not call people out. With so many of the lessons we as educators doled out for free to our colleagues in these activist circles, one has to wonder why we even have to put up with this if our unions are reluctant to speak to social justice without carefully manufactured press releases and tawdry statements (more on this tomorrow). How much closer to home do these issues have to hit before people engage as they must? And, if people bristled at my suggestions above, why invite me when they know I won’t keep my mouth shut?

Fuck it. I’ma go anyways.

Admittedly, I felt less like I was walking into a welcoming clubhouse, but a bat cave, if you will. Even the warm reception from friends and allies from across the country didn’t quell the awkwardness I felt listening to some of the off-the-cuff commentary underlying the workshops across the schedule. Prominent Chicago activist Jitu Brown and Newark Union Student president Tanaisa Brown spoke of education activism from the eyes of the voiceless and most affected by current edu-deform. The idea that people of color had a voice that chose to uproot centuries of inequity didn’t faze the general tone of the conference. Whereas the tone towards testing, Common Core, and privatization ranged from sadness to rage, the idea that NPE could pivot towards the happenings in Ferguson, Baltimore, or even a few miles away from the Drake Hotel in its centrality didn’t spread farther than the spaces where people of color presented post-plenaries.

Disappointment reigns, but not too much. Because it means I would have expected a larger-than-life transformation from leaders who generally must placate their members, many of whom aren’t ready to hear that they, too, are complicit in systemic edu-racism.

In my questions, my prodding, and my jokes, I hoped to get attendees to challenge their own activism by expanding their own world views. I spoke to education leaders directly and indirectly about social justice education and creating new leaders that might address these issues with more nuance, but to no avail. While teachers booed and hissed American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten and National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen-Garcia about their views on Common Core, Gates funding, and teacher evaluation, I sat decreasingly enthusiastic as Rekia Boyd’s name hadn’t been dropped once. Every person in attendance was a real person, but the whole affair from the questions to the answers and the reactions felt scripted, even the erasure of these issues happening right in our classrooms. Our classrooms full of Rekia Boyds, Freddie Grays, and Blake Brockingtons couldn’t get our white educators to cede the mic to those of us who might push them towards empathy.

People wanted me to challenge Randi on her endorsement of Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul because that’s exactly the issue I give a fuck about. Because if I asked people to challenge themselves on their endorsement of the overt and covert racists within our ranks, that’s a non-issue. No, thank you.

But all is not lost. Theresa Collins (along with Chris Thinnes) will lead the Progressive Education Network to take on these issues with a strong strategy for inclusion. Melissa Katz will teach students different from her with equal parts humility, cultural competence, and empowerment. Jesse Hagopian will speak to the convergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the #OptOut movement in radical overtures as he promotes More Than A Score. Valencia Clay will continue to embrace her angry Black kids from the classroom in Baltimore, MD. Jennifer Berkshire might get yelled at for interviewing TFA leader Brittney Packnett, but the fans who understand will continue to embrace her for her growth as writer and, yes, as ally. Cynthia Liu will expose the misdeeds of Los Angeles Unified School District while helping us build the #educolor movement. The opportunity to convene with these folks and the dozens of folks who appreciate this new vision for dialogue was worth every mile I traveled over there.

Xian Barrett asked us to heed Chicago parent activist Rousemary Vega’s words, “Leaders don’t build followers; they build leaders.” To that end, Xian is that leader, complicating the routines of adults across the nation by pushing forth students and fellow activists. His guidance, along with a handful of folks in my life, make sure this lion can roar. Every chance that people get to expose my brother from another mother, you give it to him, because he works in complicated situations and snatches justice from the jagged teeth of oppression.

Speaking of which, the last event with Karen Lewis felt odd. We were asked not to touch the now-legendary union leader who, because of her treatments, couldn’t be too close to the rest of us. This probably added to the legend, but I digress. She didn’t have to say much to get us cheering. Xian, Valencia, and I sat down next to each other listening while watching her and Diane dialog, and her deflecting responsibility for the 2012 Chicago strike to the grassroots organizers who made it possible. She called out friend Michelle Gunderson from the crowd to rousing applause. She then called out Xian Barrett for his efforts. Then, she just said, “Jose Luis,” without my last name, the way my mom might reach out to me, not before she reaches for a belt, but reaches out to acknowledge me as a part of her life.

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.

photo c/o

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Of Challenge and Controversy (Why I Support Marylin Zuniga)

Prison is not justice.

When you’ve grown up with cousins and former students revolving in and out of Rikers and Sing-Sing, preferring incarceration to the instability of what we constitute as free, then you’d know why justice is not truly served by throwing people into jail and doing away with their lives. I’ve seen humans thrown in prison through human casualty, human error, human prejudice, and human cruelty, too. Society throws living organisms that represents said persons, breathing carcasses bereft of the souls that once made their indiscretions youthful. The masters of the day often dictate what justice looks like, with policemen and women willing to execute on said distortion and judges preside over the show, obeying a set of abstract laws that the people supposedly want. That’s why the masters always say “the people vs.” even if we the people didn’t actually elect or select the person representing us, and, in many cases, we might object to an unfair carriage of whatever show happens in the courthouses. Thus, all prisoners are political as far as whatever the current politic is concerned.

That’s why, regardless of what we believe about former journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu Jamal and the murder of Daniel Faulkner, we must ask ourselves whether putting Abu Jamal on death row would a) bring Faulkner’s life back and b) show others the humanity it takes to still believe in the humans our society has placed there.

Thus, I support Marylin Zuniga, burgeoning social justice educator. When the story first hit, conservative forces including the local Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association began to descend upon her, and in certain circles, doxx her at every opportunity they got. Other mainstream news sources picked up on the story as well, including The Root, but I got involved because Orange, NJ is close enough to New York City for it to hit home. The stirring headlines read similar to yellow rags during McCarthyism or what one might read in James Bond flicks during the Cold War.

None of this made sense to me, so I asked the people on the ground. After numerous conversations with close friends and fellow educators in the area, it didn’t take much time for me to jump feet first in supporting her by calling her superintendent’s office and via this erudite hashtag, which I did not create but I take some credit in amplifying.

The first honest question I get is, “If your son was in that class, would you want your son’s teacher delivering letters to a killer in jail?” The answer depends on how we phrase the question. I would have wanted Ms. Zuniga to request permission from me and the other parents in the class before hand-delivering the letters, even if my son requested that she send his letter to Abu Jamal. I would also want assurances that names and addresses were scrubbed from the letter. I would also hope it was in the context of a lesson in restoration and rehabilitation for those in dire straits. But ultimately, yes, this is a fine activity. The second honest question I get is, “If this was a KKK member who had killed a Black kid, would you have the same feeling about this?” In my disposition, the answer is a complicated yet. If I believe in social justice, and I do, and the context of the lesson was compassion and rehabilitation, then I would want that letter sent.

My activism is predicated on what is necessary at the time I activate. Thus, I, like so many others, including the parents of her students, demand complete reinstatement for Ms. Zuniga. Looking at the breadth of vitriol thrown in Ms. Zuniga’s direction, one must realize that negotiating from the middle (“give her a suspension until the next school year and have her under a two-year probationary period with mentors”) is a losing strategy for what people close to the situation would call an honest rookie mistake.

The third honest question for anyone following this should be, “Why this? Why not other cases that merit your attention?” To that end, we as a whole need to challenge ourselves to work through the things we consider imperfect and complicated. Race as a social construct is more complicated than Black and white, so why would we expect situations that involve race to get simpler with race as an ingrained layer? 21st century activism means delving into situations where the heroes and villains haven’t been narrated for us, or are simply ideas, and, instead, work with the given elements to restore a sense of peace, akin to the classrooms we occupy. More so, how do we demand the difficult work of working through racial situations of others when we have so much to do of this ourselves? Self-healing matters.

To paraphrase Dr. King, the ultimate measure of a person isn’t during times of comfort and convenience, but during times of challenge and controversy.

During the last week, I fielded plenty of phone calls, messages, and e-mails either in support or against Ms. Zuniga, wanting to see if perhaps I made a mistake or my moral compass was jarred from a trying school year. I remain steadfast in the belief that I’m working with the same heart and mind that fueled so many of my successes and setbacks before. After reading and re-reading all presented material, this case falls right within my passions for social justice, the recruitment and retention of teachers of color, and due process for all educators, even those who are still early in their careers.

After ?#?ISupportMarylin? made national news, I reflected on what all of this advocacy meant while we wait for Ms. Zuniga to get due process. Many of us weather online threats accompanied by American flags, naval crests, and reasonable racists just to assure that social justice education could breathe for another school year in Orange and perhaps across the country. Similar avatars lined my messages when I advocated for boys and girls of color whether they were victims of police brutality, outdated immigration policies, or victims of educational inequity. Imperfect as the circumstances may be, we have to believe that our hearts and minds are in the right place. With so many of our youth knowing prison second-hand through their parents, their older cousins, their extended families, writing letters to prison is the catharsis that allows our children to hang on

Our words and activism can’t just reside behind lit screens and gray keyboards, but in the streets and the classrooms where our present and future learn. Until justice is truly served, not just for Ms. Zuniga, but for all social justice educators, fairly and equitably, we must lock arms.

Jose

photo c/o

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The Short Hand on the Clock (On Common Core State Testing)

It happens every year, no matter whose tests I proctor. My heart beats faster. Pencil points blunt and break, and I swoop in with a quick replacement. Students look up at me from their papers and I make a signal to look back at their papers instead. A few students take naps and I look at them with equal parts disappointment and envy, assuming they’d triple check their answers before putting their heads down. On the other hand, in the eyes of a middle schooler, what would an extra couple of correct questions do that a 10-minute nap can’t? Oh, and half the class is still working as the test time runs out.

“You now have 10 minutes remaining to complete this section of the test.”

The theory of relativity applies to testing time, too. Running out of time isn’t a concept that matters with 90 minutes left. Even with 75 minutes left, the number of questions doesn’t seem insurmountable. Students really start to fidget when they’re only halfway through the book and there are 30 minutes left, the audible sighs making their jittery hands still. My active proctoring, pacing back and forth through rows and aisles like a patience mouse in a closed-off maze, doesn’t figure into their calculations.

After seeing a student scribble down their answers with the mightiest stroke possible, causing their pencil to split in half, I felt a fury in me clench my throat. September was my 90th minute, trying to orient myself with the task at hand. By November, I still didn’t feel too worried about what I could cover, even though I noticed that the majority of students didn’t have 100% accuracy with their exponents. By February, my skin might have broken out in hives if it could, and by March, I was resolved to the idea that I wasn’t going to cover everything by April. This Common Core show must go on.When policymakers rushed through getting us these Race to the Top funded standards, there were three big reasons why Common Core proponents told everyone else we should believe in the Common Core:

There would be less standards to teach, just with deeper understanding of the topics presented.Thus, there would be more time to teach each standard.Every topic is connected somehow to one another, so even if you don’t get all the way through a topic, the standards are cohesive enough that students would inevitably get the tools necessary to make it to the next level. (coherence)

One of the CCSS proponents’ major talking points is that Japan might only cover 50% of its curriculum in a year, but they beat Americans in international math metrics. After a few years of teaching Common Core to fidelity, I’m not convinced that any of the talking points make sense, despite some researchers’ best intentions. With testing coming in April for New York State, we’re asked to get more rigorous, go deeper, flip this and that, give difficult tasks, work on our assessments, throw in some exit slips to check for understanding, and, yes, get more rigorous than the day before. Because rigor means hardship, and indeed, CCSS has hardship written all over it.

Somehow, we lose track of time with all the time we think we had.

As a teacher, I’ve covered 90% of the pre-test material, but did I strike the right balance between depth and breadth? Did I go too fast for my English language learners, too slow for my highly numerate kids, or too tedious for any of the kids who go fast-slow-fast daily? Can I tell based on a test that spans over three days, 90 minutes each, but sits in the back of the collective educator ethos? Will I have enough time to grant students access to this knowledge through my work or will I have to go teacher-directed for all 140 days leading up to the exam?

What does student-centered look like when time grabs classrooms by the throat?

We’ll ignore the idea that perhaps we don’t have less standards in middle school. Instead, I invite you to reconsider our ideas about learning. As often as we studied ideas of linearity and parallel lines, we have to respect that student learning doesn’t work that way. Learning is not linear. Our structures suggest all eighth graders in the age of Common Core are learning the same material in parallel, that too comes into question with ten minutes left on the test.

There will be students who will have left the test with some confidence in their knowledge of the material, others not so much. They might all express the same feelings: ambivalence, elation, or frustration. Later on this year, June or August or whenever Governor Cuomo decides to release test scores to the public, students and educators will have those experiences in the classroom encapsulated in a set of numbers. In all those minds, the most common questions throughout will center on time, and whether we’ll ever have enough.

“This is the end of the test. Please put your pencils down and put your answer sheet inside your test booklet.”

Student tries to sneak in a few more words on their essay. You and me both, kid.

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Opting Out of Everything

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of speaking at Organize 2.0’s annual conference, a gathering of some of the country’s most influential organizers to speak about thought leadership as a classroom teacher. I had far too much to say over a 20 minute period, so I read a portion of my book and spoke about our current education reform issues. I got plenty of applause for hounding Andrew Cuomo and speaking up about racism, sexism, and homophobia in our communities. I also had an opportunity to shout out a group like Change the Stakes because a) they’re in NYC b) they have materials in Spanish and c) they’re in my neighborhood. Needless to say, I believe in parents opting their students out of the standardized tests, especially if they can meet the requirements for grade advancement. (Actually, even if they can’t, but that’s another post.)

Radical.

During the Q&A period, a concerned parent asked, “But what if my kid needs to use those test scores in order to get into a better school?” These are the types of questions meant to stymie speakers, as if I hadn’t seen it already. People who asks these questions presume that the speaker isn’t a parent themselves, and that there isn’t a negotiation between “parent as expert” and “for the public good” that society has to find ways to balance all the time. I replied that we first need to define what a bad school and a good school are. Secondly, that there are multiple ways to demonstrate that a student has learned something, and I can’t see too many principals who would reject a student who has a strong portfolio of work.

Eventually, I find out from other attendees that the “parent” also works somewhere that should work at the behest of teachers, students, and parents, but that’s another matter completely. This idea that the standardized test is the ultimate way to ensure passage to the next level sounds like pseudo-meritocratic drivel.

After leaving the conference, my blood only boiled hotter after hearing a commercial in Spanish telling Latino parents that the upcoming state tests are designed to improve students’ cognitive skills, so they should be encouraged to take them. Excuse me? Whoever paid for that spot (my bet: StudentsFirst) forgot to mention that tests don’t explicitly teach anything. Teachers do. Tests don’t go up or down magically or because of raised standards, but because of what happens on a daily basis in schools.

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.

In fact, I wish I had a refusal letter handy for a bunch of different things I need to opt out of. In no particular order, I’d like to opt out of giving the exams, of being rated on standardized tests, of arguments that say “students need these tests to learn”, of educators not openly supporting other educators when they decide to do something about the testing regime we’re still beholden to, of contentions that these tests are similar to the SAT / ACT when colleges are paying less attention to those things, of folks on all sides silencing voices of color opting their students out by saying opting out is a mostly white suburban moms issue, of giving America’s public monies to private testing corporations for the express purpose of perpetuating testing, and of any mandates that shutter schools on the sole basis of achievement on these tests.

I’d like to opt in to more resources and redistribution of said resources so that the more students need, the more we give. I’d also like to opt our kids in to demonstrating their learning through multiple factors. I’d opt into professional development that would make me a better facilitator for students showing their own learning, too. It’s the right thing to do.

The largest question about the opt out movement for folks is color is whether these tests help highlight our educational inequities via numbers. Opting out students stands as a powerful rebuke of the idea that standardized tests should be the primary determinant as to whether a school stays open or not. So if opting out is an option for you, please do.

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Recruiting Educators of Color In The Time of Race To The Top

Educators have espoused the phrase, “We didn’t come into this for the money,” an aphorism that’s allowed for the passage of regressive education funding in many states across the nation. This phrase came to me as I watched pictures of Atlanta educators handcuffed and led to jail cells for racketeering charges in connection with one of the largest education cheating scandals in American history. Just before that, the 2014 National Teacher of the Year chastised the first-ever Global Teacher Prize winner for saying that now wasn’t a good time to come into teaching except if you want to go to an independent school. The tension between two seemingly unrelated stories gave me pause as an educator of color.

If you’re a young person of color coming into teaching, why would you come and what would make you stay?

How do you look at this system and not rage at the idea that there’s more accountability for folks who want to keep their schools open over bankers robbing the American public and getting slapped in the wrist for it? More than some of the biggest accountability evangelists we’ve had in the last decade? How do you see the ways our children get treated all across the nation through so-called no excuses charter schools and feel like you can partake in that, inflated test scores or otherwise? How do you look at the teacher who got the largest prize for teaching ever, watch her say, “Please, not now”, and actually come into teaching after all?

That also includes all the other factors educators of color are prone to: lack of teacher autonomy, risk of school shutdown, lack of equitable resources, and conflicts over discussions of race, class, and gender.

As Sabrina Stevens often reminds us, calling these problems “systemic” often depersonalizes the issues, pulling the responsibility away from many of the bad actors who’ve allowed us to get to this point in education reform. Policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were sold to communities of color as grand equalizers, a pack of silver bullets meant to close achievement gaps for all children. With all the “successes” people feel like claiming on behalf of black and brown children across the country, most of the reforms look like a boatload of shortcuts, none of them meant to bring true equity for all schools. Data, like so many reforms we’ve seen in recent times, only served to make incremental change by bringing achievement down and then bringing it up incrementally.

It’s a twisted game, but one that many educators who work in data-centric districts learn to play. That’s the other element that doesn’t bode well for the future of the profession: many of us who do enter the profession see the value of keeping our schools open and would do just about anything to make sure it stays open. Speaking to many educators who’ve had schools shut down from under them, I often got the sense that they taught as well as they could until the very last day, even when they knew the rugs would be pulled from under them as soon as the last bell rang. If the community relies on these schools to educate the students in their neighborhood, have memories attached to them, and have services and benefits for the entire community, then the adults in these buildings usually feel that their best efforts will somehow keep the school open, policymakers’ intentions with the school notwithstanding.

The 11 educators we saw arrested in Atlanta, mostly women and mostly Black, didn’t come off as criminals racketeering for massive profits, but as scapegoats for policies written on the backs of their children.

A large part of me also thinks most educators in a similar predicament would make similar decisions to the handful out in Georgia. They’d stay in the profession if they could because the tests are a nuisance to deal with and not the impetus for their day-to-day work. The tests say more about what a student didn’t learn than what they did learn in class. Standardized tests and one-directional accountability disintegrate quicker when the children and staff members happen to be of color. The incentives laid forth by merit pay proponents went right back into schools in the form of school supplies, trips, and lunches adults had to pay for in those buildings where cheating scandals arose.

Rampant cheating won’t get solved as long as the money that teachers didn’t come into the profession to get is spent on drilling teachers and students with data as solution.Is our democracy truly that if the idea of “choice” isn’t much of a choice, but a chance, and perhaps not even an equitable one? Can schools, regardless of label, attract and retain people who want to work in the most difficult situations if our society continues to reflect that hardship on them? When we look back at the history of the K-12 pseudo-accountability era of the early aughts, will the 11 faces of color currently parading our computer screens be the lasting image? If so, will we use that as a recruiting tool for future teachers of color? Who will be the one to tell them that this job has the potential to be 90% awesome, but that 10% outweighs the other 90% in teacher effectiveness rating, and will inevitably cause conflict between them as the person in front of the kids on a daily basis and the administrators who aren’t?Who can prepare educators of color for the moment when the student who looks like them didn’t pass the exam? Our system isn’t ready to do time for that, that’s for damn sure.

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Gerson Borrero Interviews Me on Teachers of Color [Video]

In the middle of the heated debates about Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “bold, disruptive” changes to education (more charters, higher emphasis on test scores for teacher evaluations, and the voluminous echo of firing bad teachers in exchange for money that ought to go to already underfunded schools), I sat down with City and State NY’s Gerson Borrero. Many New Yorkers might recognize him as one half of the NY1’s Political Rundown with Curtis Sliwa, and now he’s a senior editor at the Politico offshoot City and State NY.

We talk about everything from teachers of color in New York to why, in some ways, Governor Cuomo’s education policies might be worse than former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s.

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Why I Disagree With Robert Reich on College and Career Readiness

Last week, many of my friends shared this article from Robert Reich, a critique of the current “college for all” movement that’s forced millions of students into post-college (and for many lifelong) debt to private universities and for-profit banks in the form of loans. From him:

The biggest absurdity is that a four-year college degree has become the only gateway into the American middle class. But not every young person is suited to four years of college. They may be bright and ambitious but they won’t get much out of it. They’d rather be doing something else, like making money or painting murals. They feel compelled to go to college because they’ve been told over and over that a college degree is necessary. Yet if they start college and then drop out, they feel like total failures. Even if they get the degree, they’re stuck with a huge bill — and may be paying down their student debt for years.

I agree with most of the article. Much of the piece is centered on middle to upper-class white parents insofar as some of the social indicators are concerned. I can see how the pressure to push everyone to college only exacerbates inequity, because all the first and second generation college grads I know always feel a responsibility to give back to their families, an added burden that only makes middle-class status even more unattainable. Even when I went to college all those years ago ahem, people in those circles were talking about MBAs and masters degrees as the true barometer for gaining entry into the middle class.

Now that I’m 10 years deep into teaching, I think getting everyone through college as it currently exists is a horrible idea.

Yet, whenever someone brings up the idea of vocational schools and training, I tend to wince, not because vocational schools are somehow lesser than four-year colleges, but because the idea usually comes from teachers and school staff that want to dump troublesome kids somewhere, anywhere really. A few years ago, I found liberals who brought up vocational training to be, at best, myopic. Not much has changed.

Whenever we bring up vocational schooling, we should always keep in mind who folks have in mind when they say these things. Do we have vocational schools distributed across New Rochelle and Scarsdale as well as Harlem and the Lower East Side? Will we bus rich kids from the suburbs into those schools if there are no spaces available for vocational schools in the suburbs? And how does that affect the current Common Core agenda of “college and career ready?” Who’s going to college? Who has legacy? Who’s getting a career? Who’s going to have to go to college to get that career? What careers are favored and valued in our society? Who sets the prototype for what those careers would look like? Who has the access to the types of careers that are sustainable, professional, and valuable to our society?

These questions surely complicate Robert Reich’s piece, and necessarily so.

He says that we continue to force kids through a funnel called the four-year college track, but, some of our kids are forced down  school-to-prison pipeline when they’re not forced down the four-year track. I would rather have high-schoolers choose their own path, and equip them with the skills to thrive regardless of what they choose. With wealth being one of the best (if not the best) predictors of SAT / ACT scores, one has to pay close attention to the ways in which we perpetuate systemic inequity by genuflecting to the current American capitalist zeitgeist.

In the middle of ripping apart the idea that everyone has to go to college, we should pay close attention to who does or doesn’t have to go to college and whether those jobs that do or don’t require college will be there for those with the least access points. Until then, my kids will keep hearing “college.”

p.s. – This essay on Kevin Carey’s book The End of College written by Audrey Watters and Sara Goldrick-Rab is so, so good.

photo c/o

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This Is Not A Test, New York Edition [Thanks, NYCoRE]

First, let me thank the New York Coalition of Radical Educators for putting me on. When they originally asked me to come on, they wanted me to do “This Is Not A Test,” the poem, but the urgency of now called. Without further delay, here’s the video from this past weekend. (Special shout-out to Norm Scott for the video.)

Welcome, New York, to the latest installment of a people’s march

For the next four minutes, I will ask you to defy protocol

Disband the status quo

Bust open these deformed gates

Unlock the teachers’ lounge

Unlock the teachers’ lounge

Unlock the teachers’ lounge

I beg your pardon, but I am not your proctor

I march with the protestors, and our hands are raised,

A pledge for a new narrative

This is not a test!

This is not a test, Mr. Duncan.

This is an assessment written against the idea that the dates and places of our history

Can be shrunk to the choice between B and C

And that is our purpose for this assembly

An extended response to a failing corporatist agenda

A reflection on the state of our most public of options

Measured through the rubric of human rights

But this is not a test!

This is not a test, Ms. Tisch

Take note: this is not us asking

This is not us begging

This is not us pleading

This is us fighting for all things equal

This is us uniting as a more perfect union

This is us reminding New York of a promissory note unpaid

This is us writing our own documentation when politicians refuse our kids the

opportunity

We are all DREAMers, and this is not a test!

This is the generation of children from the classrooms

where teachers boldly stood and thought kids could learn

Educators, stand firm, whether in cafeterias, mess halls, or prison halls,

School is in session

And we submit our entire lives for millions of students a year

So even when I stand in front of the class, I am always StudentsFirst

This is not a test!

This is not a test, Mr. Cuomo

This is an exam unmoved by presidential aspirations, a test you’ll have to retake because the bar’s too high and I?

A bubble you cannot erase

A commission you cannot deactivate

An ethic you cannot dismiss

A mouth you cannot tape

A heat you cannot beat

And you look like you’ve lost weight with approval ratings so slim

Our message so indigestible, I am a cuisine you cannot eat

As my kids who you’ll never visit would say, let me go in

I am a zephyr teaching out here for a decade, so I am a debate you cannot win

Let me be obstinate, obtuse,

Grant us reprieve from VAM or simply vamoose

Hold not our public monies hostage the way billionaires cradle your subservient neck on the Upper West Side

Opt out of Wall St. handouts the way parents have opted out of your Pearson-poisoned handshakes and back-pats

Democratize, neo-liberal Democrats, because we’re past polling for justice when it’s just-us

Choke not our public schools into submission and cop your plea afterword

I can’t breathe, and this is not a test!

This is not a test, Mr. King

Given an answer sheet, these students shaded in L-O-V-E over A-B-C-D

A set of standards commonly set forth long before

Acing geography by means of peace instead of war

Shaping the world henceforth

They will elevate our math to where the sum of the people is greater than the parts

Becoming fluent in the languages of English, Spanish, and caring

New York, please put down your pencils

This is not a test!

This is not a test!

This is not a test!

Deformers, you are dismissed.

photo c/o

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New York City’s Fractured Relationship With Teachers Of Color

I forgot to tell y’all something at last week’s teacher of color panel. Our system is simply not suited to support teachers of color.

In last week’s discussion with Linda Darling-Hammond, Bettye Perkins, Cliff Janey, and Richard Ingersoll at the Teaching and Learning Conference, we had a lively discussion on the shortage of teachers of color. My comments came out of left field because I’m sure some of the audience members wanted me to get more academic. Yet, after looking at the panel, I knew the work of the panelists there, all of whom have laudable pedigrees in their craft. My role was, as usual, to keep it real.:

When I say that institutional racism is a crucial factor in teacher shortage, it’s important to understand a few things:

High poverty schools in New York City already have staff diversity, with about half of all teachers in these schools coming from Black, Latino, Asian, and other backgrounds.
High poverty schools tend to get shut down, transformed, restructured, and taken over more frequently than low poverty schools every and anywhere in the country where this practice is common.
As the school poverty levels get lower, the levels of Black and Latino teachers decreases dramatically (Asian teachers level off at 5-6% throughout.)
Teachers of color have entered the profession at faster rates than their white peers.
Education is highly valued as a profession in communities of color. For example, African-American college students consider education as one of the highest-desired fields they’d get into post-college.
Teachers of color leave the profession at faster rates than their white peers.
According to Ingersoll and May’s work on this, teachers of color leave because they’re frustrated with administration [non-specific], with overtesting and accountability measures, and autonomy, not salary.

When I say, “it’s not about a salary, it’s all about reality,” I’m echoing an axiom that’s been shouted from the rooftops by so many educators of color. Many of us know what we’re getting into, but we see the inequities firsthand. We have different pathways by which we got in, either alternative certification programs like Teach for America and NYC Teaching Fellows or traditional routes like Bank Street College or Hunter College. We get recruited with plethora of images of heroism and “pay it forward” theatrics, which I fully understand. For many of us who sought to affect change in our schools, we’re immediately snapped out of our naiveté, staring directly at the outdated curricula, the flimsy laptops, and the antiquated infrastructure and think “It’s worse than I thought.”

Thus, we leave.

What’s more is that, when teachers of color seek schools that have equitable conditions, we won’t get hired in those places because they tend to be predominantly white institutions. Funny how this discussion of more teachers of color rubs some folks the wrong way, as if there’s an army of colored teachers coming to take seats from white teachers and stripping them of their jobs. In fact, white teachers in New York City seem to have more options, namely teaching in low-, medium, and high-poverty schools and central offices, and consultant jobs, and the intra-school non-profit industrial complex, and administration.

It’s easy for us to forget that some of my skinfolk ain’t my kinfolk, and not every teacher of color ought to teach our child. That, too, goes across the board. We need to look at the color of every teacher’s conscious, for sure. It just so happens that the color of teachers’ skins can be a deterrent for society to find their character. Racism.

Anecdotally and personally, I can tell you the last 12 years of BloomKlein felt like an investment in corporate culture as well, and with that came many of the tropes that sought to fracture the relationships between veteran staff and new staff. More of the people who came to inspect schools and deliver the accountability framework happened to be young and white with a grey suit to boot. In Tweed-run meetings, people with only a couple of years of teaching experience felt comfortable with deriding veterans in high-poverty schools as doing things “the old way” and “doing a huge disservice to the kids.” This had a profound effect on teacher morale across the school system, but was particularly acute for veteran teachers of color, who were often the only adults left after years of turmoil at their schools.

We need to create equitable funding systems, professional development around cultural competence, and better systems for teacher voice and autonomy, things that don’t differ much from what all teachers want. The stakes are higher for people who tend to work in high-poverty schools, which just so happen to have more people of color across the board. Within schools, we need to find ways to have substantive, difficult conversations so everyone in the building can reflect on their practice and better serve students, and that includes discussions of race, diversity, power, and community relations.

Whenever we raise the bar for supporting a subset of educators, we help all teachers. Not a trickle down, but a gushing up.

But, if I’m looking at all these pieces in sum, I would think our system is inhospitable to teachers of color. Because, if you invite someone to your house and you underfeed them, berate them, and treat them unequally, why would you expect them to stay?

photo c/o

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Up Next

I’ve changed my mind. We need to lift folks doing the work.

A few years ago, my former principal, a colleague and I attended a special conference at New York University at the behest of one of NYC Department of Education’s deputy directors, who was slated to be on this crucial panel on high schools. NYU’s School of Education would present its findings on high school graduation rates, finding that the Bloomberg administration had falsified graduation rates in the name of looking like education reform was happening. The formula was simple: instead of calculating students from freshman year to senior year of high school, NYC schools started to calculate from early senior year of high school to graduation. Anyone can tell you that’s prime-cut bologna, but the rest of the country followed suit because, when it came to Joel Klein’s era, something had to be done, even if we found it was actually nothing.

As I went to get some coffee and bagels, I noticed a gentleman by the name of Pedro Noguera stand next to me with a few graduate students swarming around him to make sure his event felt flawless. Just then I decided to introduce myself before the proceedings began, not looking at him directly because I was preparing my coffee and trying not to look too in awe of his previous work.

“What’s going on, Dr. Noguera?”

“Hey, what’s your name?”

“Jose. Vilson.”

“Cool, where are you from?”

“I teach in Washington Heights. Math to 8th graders.”

“That’s cool, that’s cool.”

“By the way, I plan to blog about this. I’ll share it with you when I’m done.”

Pause. This was back when Twitter still only allowed manual retweets, and newspapers had more authenticity than their separate but equal online content.

“Oh, that’s fine. Keep doing your thing.”

That’s as far as it went. He didn’t come off angry, dismissive, or blustery, and seemed to approach his work matter-of-fact-ly. I caught similar vibes from folks I observed over time, people whose names ring bells and whose presences makes otherwise well-behaved educators shove others for a space in line. (It also makes folks with erratic egos mad jealous, but that’s a whole other post.) After that conference, I still asked myself how I can find my own voice when I still don’t know what my voice ought to sound like, and how many others, Pedro included, already do it so much better than I ever could.

This also came at a time of intolerance for me. More of my personal heroes felt suspect and susceptible to avarice and nonsense. I started to feel like no one ought to look up to anyone, and everyone ought to only look within for inspiration. As those parts about them started nagging me, I felt like disengagement was the only way to purge myself from their flaws, their tics, their inexcusable mistakes.

For months, I felt trapped by my own understandings of them until one day, one of them said, “People who fall in love with my divinity quickly fall out with my humanity.” Or something like that. Shortly after I stopped following their works.

That’s kinda how people do, especially as they reach certain echelons in our minds. “The bigger they come, the harder they fall” has taken on new meaning with the plethora of gossip we have at our fingertips. This is the critique counter-culture we’ve fallen in love with, as if paved roads and lit streets just happen to appear in front of us, and not by the works of someone(s) who perhaps had greater insights than her or his peers. In education, it’s even seedier because folks will try to kill a person’s career if the words “Gates,” “charter,” or “of color” appear on their resumé. as if their own biases don’t merit some examination.

Not to mention that I stay in awe of how Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis looked me in the eyes a few months ago while recovering from surgery and said, “See? I told you I’m good.”

I reflected on this on my way to Washington, D.C. for the 2015 National Board Teaching and Learning Conference, where I was slated to do two panels: one on the shortage of teachers of color with Linda Darling-Hammond, Bettye Perkins, Richard Ingersoll, and Clifford Janey, (Thanks, Leo Casey and the Albert Shanker Institute) and a second on teacher authors with Dan Brown, Ilana Garon, and Matt Blackstone. A few years ago, I might have felt in awe of the opportunity.  I can’t tell if it’s because I was running on five hours of sleep or because I knew who I had to represent as much as what I had to represent, but I felt like I belonged.

There’s the first layer of “How many teachers get to talk to others about their expertise?”, a second thicker layer of “Your friends and family are here, so there’s no need to feel afraid of what you might say,” a third of “Well, they invited you here, so they’ll have to deal with it when you say whatever it is,” and a deeper fourth of “I had to work thrice and four times as hard for this because of my background, and I could only get on there with ‘damn good’ where ‘reasonable’ would suffice.”

For some, they can get a meeting with a White House special task force with little to offer. I don’t see any other way but to work like a Slash guitar solo. That’s why we must elevate the folks who we believe in, even if we think they need no elevation. When we think their work matters, we can and should support them early, often, and however we can. Otherwise, we’re directly disincentivizing good works.

It also felt strange because, when people mentioned my names with other featured speakers, no one blinked. In  a few instances, people even wondered why I hadn’t been “up there” at a few of the plenary sessions. While waiting for the hostess at Busboys and Poets, my friends looked for my book and found it right near Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life, and that felt right to us. I signed more than a dozen books, and it only felt weird that I couldn’t break out my pen fast enough. NEA Vice President Becky Pringle namedropped me after asking a good question for the audience. Pedro Noguera gave me dap and asked me about my book, which he wrote the afterword for.

AACTE president Sharon Robinson came up to me after her plenary and said, “I look at you and say you’re the future of this. You’re up next.” Or something like that.

As I’m riding on the train now, I think to what my day-to-day looks like. A 5:30am alarm awaits me tomorrow, Raisin Bran and the news for breakfast. Many students will learn from me and each other, and some won’t. Teachers and administrators will worry about the upcoming standardized testing season. I will have prepared a lesson keeping in mind my pledge to teach as students learn, not as teachers teach. At 3:30pm, I’ll take a deep breath. This will happen four more times this week, 70 more times this school year. As with most of the work I do, I’m hoping I can spray some victory in the places where pungent defeat smells eternal.

I won’t miss the conference because breaks like these are meant to be temporary and uplifting at once, so we can continue the work we do. Still, because life can be so thankless in these efforts, we need spaces for re-affirmation. Any temporary space that can’t reaffirm us isn’t a space I want to work in.

The things I do happened as a result of the folks whose shoulders I stand, never by accident. In the space I occupy, my ego can never get too large because there’s humbling work that needs to be done in aeternum. My job and family ground me the way anchors hold fleets at harbor, so even my celebrations last no more than a day, muted in the question of “What’s next?” shortly thereafter.

photo caption: LeBron James after losing at the 2011 NBA Finals

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