Jose Vilson's Blog, page 35

For What It’s Worth (On Blogging As A Teacher for Eight Years)

I hadn’t realized this until now, but I’ve now been blogging on this platform for eight years. I don’t feel all that different, but I’m almost certain I am.

Looking through some of my older posts, I feel like a whole different writer, probably because I got my butt handed to me on numerous occasions by different editors along the way. As a classroom teacher, I don’t have the luxury of studying in writing workshops during the weekday or staring at Microsoft Word all day until a piece is well-crafted. So, with the hour and change I have left in my day, I try to get my point across as urgently as I do my lessons.

What’s changed a lot too is the audience. It used to be a few cool kids and my significant other. Now, everyone but my significant other reads it. To wit, Central keeps blocking my site across all NYC DOE computers, but not within Central. Someone’s reading, so it ought to be them. (Thanks, DeBlasio.)

If I look at this list of education bloggers, it almost feels like there’s no reason to put any new voices out there as almost every experience seems covered. The top 50 are generally group blogs, blogs on Education Week or another big site, or corporate-sponsored blogs under the guise of education technology. Being in the top 50, by whatever metric one uses, might have done me some favors, to be sure. It’s also brought its fair share of challenges, including racist trolls and politically motivated so-called allies. My hood sense flare up almost immediately, so I can see right through these folks’ motives.

So why blog as a teacher? What’s the point if it seems most edu-bloggers seem most interested in copying the template of ed-tech bloggers or activist bloggers and never developing something new?

Because we desperately need it so that we can break the molds. If the only artifact of good teaching and blogging left on this Earth was Renee Moore, I’d be perfectly fine with that. Sadly, that won’t be the case. We’d be left with … well, I won’t name names due to politics, but suffice it to say, it ain’t cool. We need more voices that write with complex profundity, ones willing to challenge the establishment and themselves at once. I have a whole host of folks whose blogs I love and continually grow before my eyes in scope and vision, and it’s not enough. With all these folks writing about education without having stepped foot in a classroom as an adult in a meaningful way or at least respecting the voices of folks at the schools, and all these other folks who leave the classroom and work for a corporation to still call themselves teachers, we need people within the schools talking about the work of schools from a personal, professional, and political lens.

I don’t think we need more me’s, since people are only catching on to my blueprint now. I do think that people need to get more real about the conditions within schools and disrupt for the sake of progress, not for the sake of disruption. Write with risk involved. Write like the only way someone’s ever going to hear you is if you put your job on the line for what you say. As I’ve said elsewhere, go hard or go home.

Same rules apply.

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The Crosshairs of High Expectations and Poverty

Everything is for the kids.

Want to create a new program? Say it’s for the kids. Want to implement a new policy? Tell them it’s for the kids. Need to raze an entire school in a densely populated school district? Preface it with “We did it for the kids.” Need to convince the public that a frivolous measure of student learning like a VAM score should be weighted more than the collective work of everything else the educator does? Just tell some sympathetic media that the kids benefit here. Want to tell kids you’re right only because you’re in the classroom? Hide behind kids. Need to take cover while people of color don’t like your racist remarks? Tell them the kids you work with are predominantly poor and definitely Black or Latino.

I’m not here for the “both sides” nonsense. This discussion merits more than that.

Our schools are currently underfunded, and our governments currently exacerbates this through long-standing property tax laws and inadequate state and federal formulas for funding schools. With such little political will to truly overhaul our public education system, frustrations ought to bubble. The safety net has withered from under us as our student population has become more diverse, and we’ve had little recourse in the educational debate but to stick to linguistic bunkers when discussing under-performing students:

“Kids don’t do well because of poverty!”

“Are you saying poor kids can’t learn?”

“Poverty means kids can’t sleep or eat well, and when they come hungry to school, they can’t concentrate.”

“That just sounds like an excuse to not teach students to the best of their abilities. We can’t accept that!”

These are arguments all worth listening to, even if the sources sometimes come off as suspect. On the one end, we have to acknowledge that poverty sucks the life out of our kids on multiple measures, from health care and life expectancy to school resources and college admissions. The more we use the word “poverty” to discuss learning and living conditions, the more we speak to social justice because, for many of our students, just getting to the classroom can be a struggle that many of my colleagues can’t comprehend. With the way poverty manifests itself in our schools, schools can’t always take the same trips, have the same lunches, or afford the same speakers to galvanize students. Schools in these environments are more likely to get shut down or restructured, and their teachers and administrators turn over more often because it’s that much more difficult.

On the other, too many of us in communities of color (not just Black or Latino, but Asian-American and Native-American communities too) have seen “highly trained” teachers who come into classrooms with pity and, eventually, resentment when teaching the students there. Many people of color acknowledge the condition they’re in, but they can’t afford for teachers to think of them as “poor” kids. In Latino communities for instance, when they hear “poor,” they also hear pobrecito, which translates to poor thing. People in poverty don’t want others to see their kids as poor things, but as people living in a condition they can’t control right now. They entrust their local institutions to do the best job possible, and for every good or average teacher who buoys up their children, there are those one or two who ruin the experience for a generation, too.

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.

That resentment leads people to turn to homeschooling or, in more recent times, charter schools. (Mostly white) activists are quick to dismiss the concerns of these parents, so, under the guise of “We want you and those schools don’t,” parents will turn to charter schools in these instances. Of course, it also means we have no idea what happens when our students get into school. For profit schools and the non-profit industrial complex have partnered up to shift the national dialogue about what school means, but those schools have made their names with zero-tolerance discipline policies and rampant de-matriculation too, so perhaps people are too quick to call it a solution.

With folks willing to give away our children of color to poverty pimps and school-to-prison-pipeline funders while so-called progressives build canoes for the kids to swim down the tubes (and all of them thinking they’re working against each other), perhaps political talking points for social justice activists of color just won’t do.

It’s important for all stakeholders to recognize that poverty matters and that achievement is a complex manifestation of environmental factors. It’s also why we shouldn’t treat outliers as miracles nor as rebuttals, but as case studies for us to examine in full (one of my bigger beefs with EdTrust / Doug Reeves 90-90-90 Theory). It’s important for all stakeholders to recognize that, despite and because of this, educators have to work to the best of their abilities because we are what’s left of the social safety net. Educators have to work in the aura of hope because our job is necessarily different, complex, and public. That also means our government officials need to vociferously support and properly fund schools in ways that make equity possible.

Instead of dwelling in the frustration of black parents or using the word “poverty” whenever we need an argument about the achievement of students of color, we’re better off discussing the systemic marriage of poverty and achievement while using our individual pockets of influence to affect change.

This isn’t an either / or argument. It’s a lot closer to the truth than 99% of what I read, though.

Hope that helps. Because, whether good or bad, all of it is for the kids.

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There Is No “How To” For Teacher Leadership

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the New Teacher Center conference in San Francisco, CA to discuss teacher leadership. It felt like forever since I used the words “teacher leader” to describe myself, but people have no idea what to do with me since I am in the classroom with a full program and am mentoring and speaking out about different ideas in teaching. Thus, teacher leader.

Most of my evaluations for my teacher leadership workshop were sterling, surprising because I had to follow folks like Dr. Baruti Kafele, Jeff Duncan-Andrade, and Elena Aguilar, all of whom have solid reputations on the Left Coast in their own right. It must have been the GIFs, but it could also have been the time I left for folks to think through and develop their own plans for teacher leadership within their tables. Yet, two or three folks brought my rating down on one of the dimensions for not actually talking about how-to become a teacher leader.

Believe it or not, I wasn’t mad. By eliciting reflection questions for everyone, and giving folks time to call out some of the pressing issues with teacher leadership (like when the rest of the staff doesn’t believe in that teacher leader), I thought I had done better than 95% of other workshops I had been a part of. Yet, I forgot to tell people exactly how to do it.

Now that I think about it, I don’t have a step-by-step guide for becoming a teacher leader, either.

It’s difficult. Most schools develop teacher leadership through content area, like the head of a department or someone who takes the minutes in a grade-level meeting. Some schools might have one or two people who teach part-time and work on curriculum or technology, but those tend to be more progressive than most districts’ standards.

Most people only go to teacher leader groups when they’ve already felt that quality in them or they don’t feel like they have a choice but to lead without leaving the classroom.

Plus, teacher leadership, like anything, depends on the school the teacher is in. Therefore, if the school isn’t compatible with the latest teacher leadership trends, then teacher leadership won’t work. How that environment is built will determine what the environment needs, and what that environment needs determines how and how well the teacher leads.

That’s the long and short of it. With so many blueprints out there, can there only be one?

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What Works For My Kids

The New York Times’ Anna North recently asked me if I was a believer in learning styles, and I’m like, “No.” That’s not my fault, really. As a younger teacher, many of the veteran teachers told me the long list of initiatives that they’d seen come and go in education research, where “education research” is a pejorative, not a compliment. Multiple intelligences. Learning styles. Workshop model. Differentiation. The new math / everyday math. Now? Systems in place. Common Core. Data-driven instruction.

Every time an initiative comes out, we’re subjected to another professional development session where the person in front of us, administrator or book-hustler, stands in front of us, lauding the latest and greatest. We shift in our seats, prepared to get another set of gobbledygook splayed across our already bloodshot eyes. PowerPoint presentations with tiny letters and business clip art help make convincing arguments for why this specific pedagogical trick will work for our students this time for real, for real. Unconvinced of its efficacy, teachers hope this goes away, and, when it doesn’t the first few times, start to implement the language without trying it to fidelity.

Here, it’s easy to blame educators for not having the courage to try something that a random stranger came in with, akin to salesmen trying to develop a monorail in small towns. But teachers with experiences like this might not be so easily swayed, thus the resistance to anything new. Some might call it part of the anti-intellectual movement, but I believe it’s just a general resistance to the oscillating quality in professional development and the haphazard policies our districts espouse. Like, how many of these “movements” go by the wayside when a politician moves, foundation money dries up, or another non-profit comes up with a bigger and even better idea that’s totally researched-based?

You’d be right to say that, because policymakers don’t actually take education research seriously, it’s harder for us to take education research on the whole seriously (except those who confirm our biases), the education research that actually might make our students learn better gets lost in the shuffle. The words “sustainability,” “quality,” and “systems” come up so often in edu-jargon, but many education firms are in the business of moving statistics for their specific bias, and not for the benefit of schools writ large.

That’s a scary prospect for an educator who’s just trying to make sense of it all. Of course, the clash between researchers and practitioners is nothing new, but, like most of these boondoggles, it’s worth re-examining so we can get to some real work. The more years I accumulate in this profession, the more techniques I find useful from colleagues who aren’t in the education research field. If we want to see real movement on education-related research, maybe researchers and practitioners should sit at the same tables.

It’s pedagogy over everything. How do we have better conversations on what works?

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Why We Need Black History Month In The First Place

Recently, PBS Newshour asked for my thoughts on Black History Month. After noticing that even some people of color railed against the idea of such a month, I decided to write a primer on why we needed them and why this matters for our students, all of them:

I wanted to give the students a 10-minute lecture on the fact that groups used to lynch people of color for public display, that Emmett Till was around their age when he was savagely beaten and killed for supposedly flirting with a white women, that at their age, I saw Rodney King get beaten on video for trivial matters, and that Amadou Diallo, the man who police officers shot at 41 times after mistaking a wallet for a gun, worked in a grocery store I frequented in high school.

Instead, I said that I too knew how they felt, and I too saw what they saw, and I too wanted justice for the murders of young men and women of color. I also mentioned how their feelings might be further complicated by having relatives in the police and armed forces. I don’t believe they are bad people, but, as with anything, sometimes the jobs we do puts us at odds with the people we want to be. That includes teachers. The conversation showed me why highlighting their voices mattered more than my own.

Read more here. Share. Comment. Thanks!

photo c/o

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White Administrators’ Guilt

“This race discussion doesn’t apply to me.”

Whenever we say that racism isn’t just discrimination of one set of people towards another, but a systemic set of power structures that benefits one (white) group over another. This goes double for principals and assistant principals because, when your standing already endows you with more power than others in the building, your responsibility towards being cultural competent is doubled as well.

We have racist administrators in our schools, some overtly and some covertly. Our school system has yet to assess for racism because education reform assumes that “high expectations” shows up in the form of raising test scores, a bullshit shortcut instead of addressing some of the racist attitudes espoused by some of the highest-ranking adults running our school buildings across the country. It’s easier, mind you, to get rid of a principal for racist tweets or calling staff members gorillas, but implicit bias shows up in ways that aren’t so obvious.

Like, what if an administrator always finds a way to write up and suspend the children of color in their building? What if they talk down to Spanish-speaking parents and treat them as bothersome ignoramuses? What if the administrator looks at the white teachers in the building as the only way the school will reform and points at the veteran teachers, typically of color, as part of the problem? What if they tout their degrees to the kids not as a source of inspiration, but as a way of saying “You’ll never get there and you don’t deserve to be in my midst?” What if they look at the students and assume the father isn’t present or the mother doesn’t care? What if, when visitors come, the administrator only visits classrooms where the students speak the King’s English and puts all the kids who speak only Chinese in the basement? What if they refuse to say the students’ names right, make fun of them for not being called “Jim” or “Sarah,” and yell at them when the students when they’re using their own language amongst their friends? What if they only sit next to other white administrators and assume the Latino administrator probably got the job at a struggling school and because she has connections with the superintendent?

What if your administrator is racist?

And that’s only one level. What if the administrator sees a staff member doing something racist and says nothing about it? Are they complicit and, if so, doesn’t that almost make them racist by association? If they see a student suddenly dip in grades in only one specific class and that child just happens to be the only student of color there, shouldn’t that pique an administrators’ curiosity? What if the teacher has the highest test scores in the building, but genuinely treats the students as “those” and “these” constantly?

Is racism in schools just a manifestation of unfounded anger or does it happen when we stand by and let folks do it, too?

From my purview, white administrators’ guilt, on the surface, suggests that they hold low expectations for the students in front of them. They use the dialogue about poverty and outside influences on student achievement as a crutch for why students can’t learn rather than an understanding that they must try hardest because, in spite, and even so. On a deeper level, though, white administrators’ guilt is the idea that the people of color in front of you are less than human, unworthy of their pristine, yet unalienable education. That idea manifests in bigger issues like high suspension rates and zero tolerance policies and more subtle ideas like teaching students how to clean up their accents and only acknowledging American holidays.

But please: don’t point to Martin Luther King Jr. posters hanging in their offices and think that’s enough to get a pass. Plenty of young men and women of color hang in various ways in these schools, often at the principal’s behest.

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Rescinding My Invite to Governor Andrew Cuomo

First off, Governor Andrew Cuomo is never getting an invitation to my classroom nor would I want him anywhere near my students.

The most likely scenario is that he stops in for 10 minutes, listens to me do some math, stares at me coldly with the kids whispering “Who is this guy?” to each other, smirking with an “I told you that I’d drop by” look. Then, he’d ask me for time and I’d shake my head and his people would look at me like, “Come on …” and I’d begrudge it and say, “Make it quick,” and then he’d make a bold proclamation about the good work we (!) are doing to improve my students’ test scores and I’d snicker loud and roll my eyes and then he’d strut out of my classroom the way some guy in the suit who drops an explosive dump in the bathroom does. I’d gag shortly thereafter, wash my hands, and hope I never remember that day happening to me.

I’m not backing that.

Cuomo doesn’t seem at all swayed by the faces and names of students, educators, and parents doing hard work in arduous conditions, but will sweep whole commissions under a rug for friends with nice ties and good ties to him. He already invades our homes with his faux-ratory every morning, pretending that his solution for public schools will serve “every child” even though his calls for equity never include any tax restructuring methods or fulfilling school funding mandates. To wit, another commercial that plays alongside his education speech excerpt features his StartUpNYC program that offers an ingratiating incentive for companies to come to the state that include no business, corporate, sales, property, state, or local taxes for ten full years.

How he purposefully neglects funding in favor of his corporate friends doesn’t stun me in the least. How his finger can contort so the index faces teachers befuddles me to no end.

He’s become so predictable, too. How is it possible that he might want to walk into my classroom, listen to the discussions, take in some of the non-Common Core aligned banter, watch students produce math work, and think exactly half my job is to prepare students for a six-hour exam? If ramping up the testing accountability measure to 50% is a means of doubling the percentage of ineffective teachers (after his own bill didn’t fire enough teachers to his liking), where, pray tell, will he find educators that would want to fill the 10% – 20% of staff he’d like to fire? (Also, how does he make a political party for women without holding into account that most teachers, by a grand majority, are women?) How does testing my students more legitimize the students’ learning when you’re reducing our jobs to test preppers? How does he think driving public funds for private entities is the same as equity, as if the floundering donations of a select few combined with paltry public education funds is equivalent to a robust and reliable funding source that gives all schools equitable resources? If you’re not about improving working conditions for every child, then how do you think your corporatist ideas for school reform will make equity possible?

I doubt it.

So please, don’t visit my classroom. My door has now been open, sometimes reluctantly, to adults of many backgrounds, some well-intentioned and some not-so-well-intentioned. In the time I’ve spent harboring these visitors peering through me and my students like my classroom was a fish tank, I’ve learned that the most powerful visitors rarely came to support our efforts. Save for one or two superintendents, they came to find fault with nary a step for improvement. It might astonish Cuomo to know that teachers crave timely, informed, and powerful critique on technique and pedagogy, and that some of our best strategies for student learning don’t often coincide with student achievement. There’s certainly lots of discussion to have about teaching quality and accountability, but slapping teachers around for the public to watch doesn’t help anyone, much less public schools.

So it shouldn’t shock him when he comes knocking, and I turn my back foot to the door, pushing forcefully as I get into my unit on functions.

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A System of Ninety Equations

I barely know what week I’m in right now. We just finished the second marking period and we’re just starting to get into systems of equations. I went through a few moments of “I can’t believe this is what they turned in” to “Yes, exactly, this this this!” and everything in between. I’ve known loneliness intimately in school, embraced it, and hoped it meant my voice meant more and not less. I went from goatee to moustache to beard back to moustache, and shed as much hair as I’ve shed frustration in the last month.

Linear relationships would be so much easier if children learned this way, too.

I’d determine the pattern and hope they could progress just as consistently as the tables we’ve developed. They wouldn’t have to go through the same point of origin, but they’d at least grow continually, at a consistent pace, with a discernible slope. But they don’t. Students can keep coming to class and not keep learning. Or not. Students can keep having their materials ready for class. Or not. Students can keep doing well on my quizzes, homework assignments, and participation. Or not.

In other words, I’m in a perpetual search for the solution to 90 separate graphs, realistically un-graphable. Let’s see what the next two quarters of the year look like.

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Exclusive: The Classroom and the Precinct, Accurately [The Enemy]

My people,

I recently wrote an article for the upstart mag The Enemy, expounding on my thoughts about the relationships between teachers and the police, pulling together Mobb Deep, Frank Serpico, and others for a piece that was / is absolutely necessary. Here’s a glimpse:

To the eyes of the American public, it might seem like none of these are connected, but, to many people of color, the school-to-prison pipeline has been lifted out of the underground and become part of the mainstream understanding of how this country works. When teachers continue to reinforce their allegiance with the darker elements of police brutality, we signal to disenfranchised communities that in fact, their lives don’t matter, from the time they step into the classroom to the time they’ve been pushed – not dropped – out.

As early as five years old, students of color start seeing a education of a different type than that of mainstream America. Suspensions of pre-K students of color get served at three times the rate of white pre-kindergarteners. These zero-tolerance policies are more prevalent in public and charter schools that are predominantly comprised of students of color, so a student getting arrested for wearing the wrong uniform or insubordination becomes commonplace for many of them. Police officers patrol schools in the name of keeping them safe, but, with metal detectors and cell-phone vans serving as the gatekeepers for these schools, does the heightened focus on safety keep students out of school as well?

To read more, click here. Please share this article as well. I would love your feedback.

Jose

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Less Is More When It Comes To Teacher Time [Edutopia]

My latest at Edutopia stems from a conversation I had with National Teacher of the Year Sean McComb and Maryland Teacher of the Year Jody Zepp last month at the Maryland State House for the Maryland State Education Association (MSEA). We talked about everything under the sun, but one of the things that made people shift in their chairs was my proclamation that we need to cut teacher time in half. Check the flow:

However, in countries that have done away with those arguments, they’ve learned that teachers do much better by having less classes, less students, and more time for the mounds of paperwork they’re obligated to grade. McComb agreed as well, stating that, if we do the math based on the number of students he has compared to the time he gets in school to grade, he has about 20 seconds per student to grade their papers and give feedback. Of course, he would have to work at home and work extra (unpaid) time to finish his grading, but it seems wholly inefficient to make teachers do work at home when they could just get the time right there in school.

Read more at Edutopia. Like. Share. Let me know what you think. Thanks!

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