Jose Vilson's Blog, page 38

Bad Teachers [Running Out Of Time]

A few questions to ask yourself before you talk to me about bad teachers.

What is a bad teacher? Out of the dozens of teachers you’ve had, how many of them would you actually call “bad”? Are you successful because or despite those teachers? Did your school environment exacerbate or blunt the effect of the bad teacher? Would you have “made it” if the bad teacher was a good teacher? What do you think the percentage of bad teachers is right now? Where are they? What do they look like? What’s the difference between what you think is a bad teacher and what the school system says is a bad teacher? Do the characteristics of a bad teacher make them bad employees in other organizations? Why or why not? Are good teachers made or born?

Once you’re absolutely sure about those questions, let me ask a few more:

Should education be an immediate reflection of a democratic society or one formed based on markets? Should we inherit ideas from other industries like medicine, law, or technology? If not, why not? If so, why and which? Which non-educators would you trust with making educational decisions? Why? Are any of the systems from any other industry we look at more or less transparent than our current education system in America? How much influence should powerful leaders from other industries have on our education system? To you, and only you, are the leaders of other industries perfect leaders for education because of their affluence, intellect, or bold ideas that might give every child in America a true chance to succeed here?

If you’re a teacher, here’s a few more:

Can you point to a few teachers who you think are good in your school, including yourself? Would you be OK with these teachers teaching your child or other people’s children? How often do you speak to your colleagues about the few (if applicable) teachers who you consider to be bad teachers? What is your consensus on that? Has there been disagreement? Why or why not? Have you looked at the new teacher evaluation systems and tried to figure out the flaws in those systems based on the teachers you considered bad? Do you get mad that administrators don’t just do their job, file all the paperwork necessary, and hire someone better in place of those bad teachers? If you’re in a union, do you blame your union for the “bad” teachers staying around?

Are you a bad teacher?

Leo Casey made it a point a few months ago at the Albert Shanker Institute to mention that I ask harder questions of myself than I ask of others. Suffice it to say, that’s why I looked at the TIME cover on Thursday with a bit of disdain. For once, I’d love for the “pay the good teachers more, fire the bad ones” meme to go away as if both were equal. I’d love for some of the slander and misinformation about our profession put out by major news outlets to not coincide with the dissolution and consolidation of the fourth estate, because teachers deserve better journalism than “Sal Khan can do better than you.” I’d love for the term “college and career-ready” to come with a disclaimer about the expense of trying to go to college and the vice grip of rising inequity in job salaries once our children get into the workforce. I’d also love a full stop on Bill Gates having an idea and having an outsized influence on everything and everyone before we even ask a few of us as educators.

Once that conversation’s done, I’d love to see another conversation about teachers doing the best job possible given circumstances and perhaps still not being good enough for every single child in the classroom, how vexed we get feeling like they have to answer to 21st century masters (technology, for example) via 20th century rules (rote memorization, exorbitant testing), how perhaps some of our colleagues don’t actually care about the students in front of them, how so many of us come from different schools of thought on how to educate kids so the idea of “bad teacher” might also depend on personal annoyances with others, how we might not even be able to trust each other until we come together around the idea of pedagogy, and how much more complicated it is to try and judge than trying to slam an apple with a gavel.

Enter nuance. But it’s hard to differentiate between those who want solutions and those who want to be left alone. It looks like outrage all the same, even when it’s not.

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Bad Teachers Everywhere, All The Time, Even You

In my last post, there was a big conversation in other areas about this idea of “bad teachers” and whether I should have paid more attention to discussing “bad teachers.” Cameron Diaz notwithstanding, the term “bad teacher” is a super-sensitive topic, one I don’t wish to treat with kid gloves, but a fine-toothed comb, because it merits serious discussion, especially through a racial and class lens.

But let’s this out of the way: there are bad teachers.

There’s not any one definition of “bad teacher,” but bad teachers persist for a plethora of reasons, many of which can be found in unionized and non-unionized districts. Having a union probably makes this a harder conversation to have due to collective bargaining agreements and the like, but that’s not a bad thing either: good teachers need this imperfect protection more so. I just think when we have this discussion, it’s always in the context of urban epicenters and not through the lens of school itself, regardless of where your school is.

Everyone has the conversation in school, too. Who are the best teachers? Who are the worst? Why? In a staff of 40 teachers, people generally agree on one or two colleagues who could and should transition to other means of employ. It’s no diss, but they’ve either never been good to start, or lost the passion to do so wholeheartedly along the way. You may catch them sleeping in the teacher’s lounge not grading anything, or squawking at another kids to sit down for the life of them. They might be cursing at the kids, telling them to shut up and not to move a muscle, or cutting down colleagues for no other reason than giggles.

Teachers who deserve to get fired right on the spot.

But then there’s another level that merits discussion. There are the teachers who consistently tell kids that they’ll work at McDonald’s if they fail their classes, as if serving someone’s albeit plastic food is some sort of dishonor in a tough economy. There are the teachers who see a kid sweeping floors and determine that it’s because they’re destined to be janitors, never worrying how their schools stay clean. There are the teachers who consistently give their student low grades on an English paper because there’s no way the child knows how to speak that well given their upbringing and skin color. There are the teachers who advise their students not to go to the same college they attended, even when they had a perfect GPA and scholarship offers from the school, because these teachers don’t want their own institution to change from the way they remember it.

This happens far more than you know.

There’s a host of unreasonable behaviors, some of which don’t get addressed on any teacher framework that’s currently used to evaluate teachers. There are perfectly rated teachers who are perfectly racist teachers. They have great test scores, great pedagogy, great classroom management, and great animus towards the students in front of them. Are they bad then? This also makes me add multiple caveats to the diversification of the teaching profession too. This piece is a double-edged sword because people of color might want more teachers of color in classrooms, but what happens to teachers of color who teach in predominantly white institutions? We don’t have to go far back in history to see that, once administrators saw diversity in schools, they started to fire teachers of color in droves in retaliation against integration mandates.

Never mind that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep teachers in classrooms where the schools don’t function well. Who’s gonna fill those spots? Oh. Right.

Which leads me back to this idea of environment because, no matter how we slice the bad teacher, the environment in which they work mostly allows for it, either through lack of support for the teacher or helping the teacher transition towards another profession, either through self-realization / identification or administrators pinpointing. Then again, each school has to define what teacher qualities make a difference for their students, which would make the idea of “good” vs. “bad” relative from school to school.

For the rest of us who range anywhere from fantastic to working towards competent, we have to ask ourselves to reflect harder on whether our students see us as good or bad. Even those of us who think we’re absolved may not be.

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Week 8: Bleeding Openly [Am I A Bad Teacher?]

“I can’t. I just can’t.”

After class on Thursday, I started to strongly reconsider why I wanted to do this project I’m having my students do. The premise is for them to understand operations with scientific notation by modeling the solar system. This went off mostly without a hitch last year and I got some of the most brilliant pieces I’d ever seen from students that the school usually expects less from. This year, I improved on it a bit and hope the results feel better.

This year, the students did do a model with me, and then they would do one on their own with different dimensions. While many of the groups have been up to the task, a few haven’t, and it’s required a little more out of me to push and insist. In a couple of groups, I’ve come close to pulling ears and cheeks … metaphorically, of course.

Is project-based learning all it’s cracked up to be or is it just me?

Most of my other colleagues have gone about their business without doing any projects and they seem cool as cucumbers while I’m pushing my students to complete this with a little more vigor. It’s critical that I remember the hard work of the many overshadows the misguided few. Then again, who’s guiding? What’s guiding? Is it me or am I fighting something learned from years prior and trying to push sails with my bare hands?

That’s why the discussion about bad teachers feels personal to me. I don’t consider myself a bad teacher, or incompetent, or ineffective, or any of the other adjectives that might suggest I don’t know what I’m doing. I am, however, still standing at the crossroads of experimentation. Taking risks when I don’t really have to don’t often feel like they pay off. I love seeing my colleagues try new things, work with new technologies, and explore their neighborhoods, but when I’m trying, I’m biting my nails more often than I feel I should. I’m meticulously looking for the right behaviors, the right triggers, the right questions.

Are the kids asking me too much? Am I being too helpful? Should I be more stern here, more forceful here, more relaxed here? Am I overthinking this? Probably.

Every year, I’m hoping that the times I’m a great teacher far outweigh the times I’m not as great, aiming for 100% of the time, though that might not be possible. I also hope that, by reflecting this openly, I can see what I’m doing that will sustain me for the decades to come in this work, and hopefully for people who follow me on this. Being a reflective practitioner in this day and age requires a lot more bleeding openly and hoping that your skin gets stronger with every bruising.

Does being a bad teacher mean you’ve accumulated enough bruises that you no longer feel them? I’m not sure, either.

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When Teachers and Students Fight

The latest viral video comes out of Baltimore, MD, where the Orioles weren’t the ones swinging. This video, a shaky mess that needs watching and re-watching to fully get what’s happening, starts with a student pacing back and forth while the teacher makes a phone call to someone, presumably a parent. The fight ensues when the student throws a binder to the teacher’s face, prompting the teacher to charge at the student. The women exchange a few profanities, and the typical school crowd gathers ’round, further instigating the fisticuffs.

This is not a post where I defend the teacher.

Coincidentally, when I spoke to the producers of This American Life about classroom management, I offered that most of my classroom management is based on conversations. As a teacher of color, students expect me to yell at them, to shame them into getting their work done. While that might be effective in the short term, it leads kids to tune me out, and not take any threats I may dish seriously. Instead, I insist and push the right buttons to prompt them, and when they disappoint me, they know.

In my nine years as an educator, I’ve been in the middle of a few, tight situations. I’ve broken up a few fights, exchanged a few words with students and parents in some heated conversations, and even came close to witnessing some dangerous things happening just outside our school building. At any given moment, there is a human reaction to fight (not flight), and to think it appropriate to up the ante on the hostility we see, but then we have to ask ourselves a few questions:

What does fighting create in the long term?
Is fighting reflective of an environment of healthy, student-centered learning?
Is it professional to take things to the next level?

We all know the answer to the question of whether teachers and students should engage in physical fighting. Even things like martial arts or boxing are dicey without serious supervision. I just also wonder what happened for the teacher to feel as if fighting the student was the only recourse for what may have happened prior to the video. We still have school environments that, despite some adults’ best efforts, feel unsafe, hostile, dangerous. The solution, as far as I can tell, isn’t more police officers or security.

It’s the proactive conditions we create that assure a high sense of respect and responsibility. This might be easier if the students already have a certain sense of responsibility or structure they come in with, but it’s disorienting to know that we can’t teach all of our children self-empowerment and healthy life habits.

Most teachers I know have had some point of conflict, where fingers are waved, voices are raised, and stares burn holes through students’ heads. Yet, the difference between successful and unsuccessful teachers in those situations wasn’t just common sense; it was a set of alternative ways to approach the situation. Besides, teachers have a lot more to fight, and our own students shouldn’t be on that list.

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Writing Yourself Right Out Of The Burning House

“Dear Self (& other writers)–If you’re not writing with the urgency of exile, what’s the point? Which is to say, your writing should convey so much immediacy, fire and risk that you chance being kicked out of something with each line.

Your writing should make you fucking quake.”

– Airea D. Matthews

Kelly Wickham shared this quote with her friends recently and also commented that she thought about my recent post about … well, about life as an educator of color writing about education. I must have pored over that post for four hours before hitting “Publish” because, as usual, people might take it the wrong way. The e-mails and comments came almost immediately, many supportive, while a couple made me roll my eyes.

Even to this day, with the volume of educators of color writing about their experiences, it’s no match for the understanding that folks of color as a whole have to do things twice as well and work twice as hard to achieve any semblance of success.

We’re not just working against the visual description of what education leaders should look like, no matter what “camp” of education you come from, whether that be ed-tech, education activism, or education reform. We’re working against redlining and gerrymandering, which disadvantages schools where teachers of color often work (and lose their jobs from). We’re working against stereotype and assumption, as if race is the only value we bring to a discussion, even when we clearly jump the hurdle for content and pedagogy.

And, for once, when we do want to have the race conversation, at a time when it’s finally en vogue to do so, and we’ve created some vehicles for having that discussion, teachers of color don’t necessarily want white educators to come in and ask, “Am I cool to come in?” It’s not because we’re unwelcoming per se. To make the analogy to hip-hop, some folks come into a conversation like the Beastie Boys and some like Iggy Azalea. The Beastie Boys come into rap and create their own lane without acting like hip-hop was theirs to own. Iggy, on the other hand, appropriates rap as a means to success and chides those who call her out on it.

Similarly, when I used the names I did in my last post, I didn’t expect that the dominant feedback to be “I didn’t know this about manual retweeting.”

Umm, it wasn’t about that. It was the idea that, when we come into a conversation in which we are privileged, how do we amplify those doing the work, whatever work it is? Manual retweeting isn’t some cardinal sin of social media, but, compounded with other elements, can make it look to others like you’re making yourself (yes you) the center and architect of the conversation. The thrust of the last post was the idea that we need to closely consider the perspective of others and put forth the ideas of those most marginalized by this country.

Why would I, for example, make myself look like I know everything about feminism and then not actually have conversations with women about their views AND listen intently for how I can help? Does the space I occupy need to be at that center or should I defer to the women I know who are experts at this lived experience?

Right.

If your hustle is based on making sure everyone sees only your face and your posts heavily extrapolate from the work of others, I don’t know what to tell you. It just seems to people (from many walks of life, mind you) that if your best effort as an influential person is to make yourself, your feelings, and your thoughts the only ones that matter, that’s not a real relationship. This has even worse implications across race and gender lines because of the heightened conversations over the last decade about women writers and writers of color trying to gain access that seems rather easy for white men to hop into at will. When so many of us have to go unpaid for an “opportunity” or have to feel privileged when so-and-so name dropped us (or else), that’s not real to me or anyone else seeing what I’m seeing.

Issues of race, gender, and class aren’t some “special” you do if you’re sincere about true diversity. These things have implications in all the work we do.

But you’re mad I name dropped. Fine. I don’t apologize, though. If anything, I hope it makes you boiling mad so you can have that conversation out in the open. The mechanisms so many of us have to operate under just to do the work we do still exist. If you’re one of those mechanisms, just stop.

I’m not integrating into a burning house.

photo c/o

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Race, Class, and Acceptability As A Connected Educator [Aspiring To Karen]

Karen Lewis matters to me for a myriad of reasons, both personal and activist. She isn’t just the leader of the Chicago Teachers’ Union and the CORE caucus that took the education world by storm with fiery oratory and community-centered energy. She symbolizes a new vision for progressive education reform, one that speaks proactively about the education deforms with the nuance that only a Black woman such as herself can. With all due respect to the past and present leaders of all sides of education reform, she embodies the voices of those most disenfranchised by the last decade plus of the newer status quo with an extra layer of earned and hard-fought classroom credibility. She bellowed twice as hard because, until these reforms get to suburban moms and dads, they burn through Harlem, several parts of D.C., and Dade County in Florida with not so much as a gavel in favor of our name.

She is why we must continue to go hard because we’re not going home.

It’s been a few months since #ISupportMDA trended on Twitter, a hashtag I started and so many of my friends backed as pushback for a friend and committed unionist. I’ve kept my mouth shut about it since because it brought the rifts that so many folks of color had experienced in our years as education activists and because I’m a teacher, but not necessarily yours. Not that I didn’t already have the ears of former NEA President Dennis van Roekel (or any other leader of any other K-12 education department at the time), but a group of us grow ever concerned that, no matter how much we support our unions, we’re still looked at as second-class unionists, because a few phone calls, a letter, or a blog post could diminish years of work we’ve put in for these institutions.

But, rather than embrace the Chicago model of developing coalition with a wide array of folks, folks consistently pretend to be about diversity. Almost as bad as not including folks of color is using folks of color as cover for not having to deal with critique when issues of race and class come up.

I fear the Internet only exacerbates this. Even though folks like Pedro Noguera, Lisa Delpit, and Gloria Ladson-Billings are the shoulders on which many of us stand, the new wave of us who talk about race unabashedly have made ourselves harder to ignore via social media. Before, when I said something about race, no one had a thing to say besides, “I can’t comment on that one.” Then Gary Younge of The Nation says something and it’s like, “Oh snap, we gotta respond!” That gets patched up with friends like Xian Barrett and activists like Jitu Brown getting on their board, but the topics still center on a “broader American agenda,” the crux of Younge’s critique.

Because my colleague Tom Whitby has a conversation about race and doesn’t have a person of color there just for nuance’s sake, even as I appreciate the fact that he got to this point where he wants to have that conversation. Larry Ferlazzo wants unpaid responses to a question about race and class … shortly after I unfollowed him for appropriating, not curating, via manually retweet, so many of our causes without so much as a dialogue. The Bammy Awards still troll me anyways, just to make sure I knew my commentary was nominated, but my “working twice as hard” wasn’t as hard as his half.

Because the NEA, who I appreciate a lot, still hasn’t put out a statement regarding Michael Brown or any other major racial incidents that have happened with the murder of Black boys and girls in America.

Because Anthony Cody and Mark Naison, who talk about race often enough from their respective soapboxes, still don’t take the next step in the work by calling folks in when the people in their circumference, mess up badly.

Because umbrellas, even though people of color usually get rained out.

Because even the UFT and the AFT, my teachers unions, have to lead the charge, before I or any of my colleagues say something, especially as the race disparity between teachers and students changes all across the country, regardless of whether they support teachers’ right to an opinion. As much as I’m grateful for their support of my employment, it unnerves me when not all educators create a safe and warm environment for our students of color to come into. I know, I know, Randi Weingarten and Michael Mulgrew marched for Eric Garner. Yet, in order to spite them, teachers across the boroughs figuratively spat on the children.

Because Stephanie Rivera only gets praised when she speaks to their issues, but not to hers. Because Rafranz Davis has to pay her own way when others of equal (or less) caliber get the red carpet thrown at them for conferences. Because Sabrina Stevens and Albert Sykes lead fairly prominent organizations doing marvelous work, but they’ll never get the props because leadership models.

Because so many of us of color still waver between calling you in and calling you out.

Because my book is good, but, as far as some activists are concerned, it’s no Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch, (who endorsed my book, mind you), and it’s based on my blog, so it has less merit.

Because we’re OK with so-called single-issue allies like the Tea Party over the Common Core, but not OK with people of color, women, and members of the LGBT community (some are all three, mind you) calling us out for this.

Because folks of color and so many more can’t or won’t say it aloud because acceptability, Internet followers, and speaking opportunities need people to mold themselves like Vicki Davis or any other corporate-sponsored so-and-so.

Because I rarely hear the words “sexism,” “racism,” or anything that involves struggle over non-safe topics like anti-testing used by anyone but a handful of us.

Because, right after #ISupportMDA, everyone had their profile raised in their respective enclaves. Except for Melinda.

Is this the price of thought leadership on certain issues?

The Internet only seems to exacerbate the issues we have face-to-face, too. Where connections are supposed to help us thrive and congregate quicker, it often makes racist and sexist acts easier to spot, leaving unresponsive institutions in a position that’s decidedly anti-Internet. It helps people jump into molds that quickly quell the fears of uproarious and independent thinkers in the least privileged positions who go off message even when it might benefit folks to listen. People will take the last 886 words as a mean-spirit reprise of themes we thought were done already. To the contrary, this is a reminder that we all have a long way to go, and whether I consider you a friend or not, you ought to know this too comes from a place of learning.

As much as I’ve benefited from establishing an independent platform that gives me access to readers like you all without having to fit into the MSNBC / CNN mold, I often wonder to what extent putting out so much of our lives so people can re-terrorize our existences through microagression and galvanized tattletaling does anything for the struggle. How we react to our most disenfranchised and underrepresented isn’t through symbolic gesture, but through organizational refocus and pro-activity.

Which leads me back to Karen Lewis. Even as she fights her personal battles, I’m warmed by the thought that she didn’t just give it her all in 2012, when the press and groups like Democrats for Education Reform went after her arguments and her person, when they poked fun at her weight, her temperament, her unwillingness to bow down. She also paved the way in those classrooms, explaining molecules and chemical reactions to students who probably got more than they bargained for when they entered her classroom. Her husband John fought in schools too, pushing kids academically and athletically even as Chicago systemically decimated (and then some) the population of Black public school educators. I’ve never heard or read anything from Karen Lewis that I thought she didn’t feel in her heart. I never get the sense that she hasn’t listened to all the arguments, processed them, and still held tightly to her principles. Honesty gets harder when your profile gets elevated, but she remains Karen Lewis.

I aspire to that honesty, that love, that powerful sense of self. That sort of connection, intersectional and clear, is super-hard to replicate.

Inspired by this Roxane Gay post

photo c/o

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My History As An Elective

The first result from a Google Search I did on Indigenous Peoples’ Day was a racist rant from someone who clearly has a chip on their shoulder for the minimal advances that people of color have made in this country. It reminds me of an old adage used in my college days: white history is taught as a core course in college while other peoples’ history an elective. The idea that Christopher Columbus ought to be celebrated as an explorer and colonizer of a new world while opening the gateway for transatlantic slavery and genocide baffles me. Even more baffling is that I didn’t come into this awakening until I matriculated into Syracuse University, where I was forced to live with, not simply live amongst and walk by, people with different world views and experiences.

Syracuse University isn’t just a university known for Ernie Davis, Vanessa Williams, Joyce Carol Oates, Jim Brown, Bob Costas, Vice President Joe Biden, and Carmelo Anthony. It rests on the land of the Onondaga Nation, one part of the Iroquois Confederacy. Anyone who’s ever driven up to Syracuse has seen the signs, but can willfully ignore these signs because, in a few more miles, one sees the Carrier Dome appear past the high hills. On the Syracuse campus, not unlike other campuses, I learned about computers inside the classroom, and my history mostly outside the classroom.

Except for the few electives I had the chance to take, most of the stories and accounts that pertain to histories of people of color came from outside the classroom.

My fervor for soaking up these histories was evident in the long roster of organizations I either joined, started, and / or led. I met Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka through the Student African-American Society. I came into contact with Felipe Luciano, Howard Zinn (!), and Edward James Olmos through Latino Undergraduates Creating History in America (La LUCHA). I deconstructed the model minority myth with Asian activists as a part of Asian Students in America. Radicals on my campus put me onto The Miseducation of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson, Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black by bell hooks, and A People’s History of The United States by Howard Zinn in conversations with fellow students, not any formal conversations.

These lessons happened almost nightly. In the middle of coding, I started to look at the decade plus of schooling as a pruning and pressing, a means to get me to access the dominant language, as if learning that the histories of people who looked like me or my neighbor meant nothing except as accessory to the eventual winning of white people in this country. Even those who consider themselves poor would rather be that than Black of any sort while those in the upper echelons lie in their pseudo-allegiances based on color. Whether right or wrong, I soaked up these books and joined all these organizations as a means to fill in a canyon-sized gap in my being.

The curriculum kept saying “You can make it too!” Then I understood manifest destiny. For some, not all.

So when I hear that Seattle democratically voted that Columbus Day would no longer be celebrated, reframed now as Indigenous People’s Day to salute those who’ve been wronged for centuries, I see that as a moment of learning and healing. Are these symbolic gestures enough? No. They never are. But is it a signal to educators to teach other histories, to acknowledge even for a fraction of the year to have these conversations? I can hope.

We’re still waiting for people to fully integrate everyone’s history without prejudice. It also means everyone who’s doing the teaching will have to look at their own teaching with a new set of lens, before we pillage these “alternate” histories as well.

photo c/o

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Not Good Or Bad, But Kids Nonetheless

This summer, I had the pleasure of going to Philadelphia’s Wooden Shoe Bookstore on my This Is Not A Tour book tour, co-sponsored by my publisher and the Caucus of Working Educators (a caucus of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers). In the midst of having conversation about race and education reform, I wanted to send a message of hope in the bleakest of times, knowing full well that in weeks, the teachers in front of me would have to teach students not unlike mine. These are the conduits and gurus to our children’s learning.

Obviously, Governor of Pennsylvania Tom Corbett doesn’t agree, as he decided to break contract with the PFT mid-day while they were teaching students. This sort of mid-day political shocking of our system doesn’t stretch the imagination of anyone watching politicos shuffle laws and contracts like cards and fast hands. The fact that it came while school was in session only added a coal-colored taint on another so-called education governor’s legacy.

Yet, the most impressive reaction didn’t come from the adults, many of whom drew up signs and blasted officials up and down for the Corbett’s School Commission decision. It came from the students. That night, I received an e-mail from one of the students asking me to help get the word out about the Philadelphia student strike on behalf of their teachers. When I woke up the next morning, the pictures showed up on my timeline: students gathering in front of Science Leadership Academy, belting their concerns and participating in this thing we call a democracy.

A few minutes later, I came off my computer to greet my students. How do I teach them democracy? Can I be a conduit to that in a district that’s anti-that? Are we asking our students for rigidity and complacency, and how can we separate the idea of control and discipline without dousing their independent fires? That’s the struggle, often a lot harder than it looks.

It usually starts with remembering that kids, unlike adults, still have a long way to go before we hold them ultimately responsible for all their actions. Thus, there’s no such thing as a good or a bad kid. There are only students growing in one form or another. It’s equally important for me as the adult to learn these distinctions, too. The student strikers have surely had their set of issues in the classroom, but it doesn’t take away from the degree to which they risked their education to speak up for their own education.

But they have to be taught. Not that they need teachers to learn this, but it helps.

photo c/o

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A Progressive Education Agenda, Whatever That Means

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending the Nation’s “What’s Next for Public Education discussion, a collaboration with the New School featuring AFT President Randi Weingarten, NYU Professor Pedro Noguera, The Marshall Project journalist and author Dana Goldstein, and well-known parent activist Zakiyah Ansari, moderated by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes with a few words from NYC Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña. Overall, I thought it was a good primer for some of the issues facing education. For those who hadn’t heard these issues from these perspectives, it might have been good to hear.

This piece isn’t about the panel per se because I’m sure you’ll read plenty of that out there.

My initial critique of the panel is that it would have been nice if there was a current teacher or student on the panel on there. As much as I got love for my colleagues on there, I also think it might have added an interesting dimension to have one of us (didn’t have to be me) up there. Even so, I felt a sense of elation getting an invite. Kenzo Shibata name dropped my book in their education issue and the organizer for the event invited me personally. Compelling.

As I listened to the panelists, I had written a question on an index card that went something along the lines of “In light of recent events like Ferguson, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride and the statistics showing the ever-widening gap between a predominantly white teaching staff and a non-white student body, what should be the teachers’ union position on racial and social justice?” I thought it was a fair question. The controversy surrounding the teachers who wore the NYPD t-shirts on the first day of school needs serious re-examining.

Then again, so does school funding and equity. So does integration and what it actually means to have it on a substantive level. So does teacher pay and the perceptions of educators in our profession. So do the living conditions of the children we teach. So does the school-to-prison pipeline and how, if we’re not fighting against it in some way, we’re complicit in its perpetuation.

All these problems (and many more) deserve more solutions. With all the brainpower on the stage and in the audience, I like to think that we couldn’t, for once, come up with more solutions than “no.” I often fear that people who talk about education fall into two big loud camps: the ones with a business-centric plan that looks thorough from a birds’ eye view and the ones shouting no and hoping the general public sees why. A progressive strategy or approach ought to have a platform of its own, chock full of yeses and amens about what schooling ought to look like.

After many years of coming out of speeches feeling validated for my outrage, I for once wanted to walk out of a panel feeling like public education will be OK in some form.

It’s been about time we come up with a strategy, too. Many people want to win a debate, not talk to the people most affected by detrimental education reform policies. Too many people forget that the issues we think have universal appeal, like anti-testing, charter schools, and the Common Core might have implications across racial, gender, and class lines and we’re in serious need of people who can weave through those nuances. (Here’s where I’d ask us to follow the lead of Deborah Meier or Lisa Delpit here, but perhaps I’m asking too much.)

As always, my critiques come from a place of learning. I just can’t help but wonder what a broad coalition of folks creating and building might look like. Putting a student or teacher on the panel as a proxy for re-framing the current vision of expert might have worked on some level. Also, Dana Goldstein’s Teacher Wars and Pedro’s voluminous works have solutions galore. At some point, we need to build coalition around those issues, something that The Nation and The New School can build on.

Otherwise, I’ll just get back to lesson-planning, imperfectly and with a whole nation on our collective shoulders.

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Week 4: All The Students [World Teachers Day]

On Friday, EduShyster visited my classroom, the last leg of her NYC tour. Anyone reads this blog knows I have a profound respect for her writing and her approach to talking about education, so much so that, when she asked if she could visit my classroom, I enthusiastically said “Yes!” Or something. Anyone who knows me gets that I believe in open classroom door policies (except during change of period), but it’s especially humbling when people who aren’t my colleagues want to visit my class.

In any case, the whole week forced me to see that the honeymoon was officially over. Students had stopped turning in work faithfully, so I had to hand them a serious dose of reality: their first progress reports. As they’re yelling in joy or despair, or simply pouting at the new paradigm that is my class, I just listened to the sounds, waiting patiently for them to understand the urgency I have for their work for the rest of the year. The things they may have felt were acceptable in prior math classes was officially over, and simply yelling at them wouldn’t work.

The words “I always get a 90 in math; why does this change with you?” rarely phase me. A few years ago, when I graded leniently, I never heard those words. Yet, I didn’t feel like my students were as sufficiently prepared for post-middle school life. I cared about them socio-emotionally, but I allowed their mistakes slide, hoping in time, they’d see their own errors. These days, that’s just not sufficient, and for that, it’s harder to get a 90 for things like nice handwriting and pretty pictures. I have to know that they know. I don’t need them to know things the way that I know it, but at least know it well.

Whatever “it” is.

That’s been the bubbling despair I’ve been working with in the past few weeks, the idea that I have to improve my lessons because they’re not up to snuff with my ideals. Inside the classroom, I don’t care for the talking points, the edu-jargon, the condescension, and the ranking of rank and file members in the school and in New York City. I care about whether or not I can do a better job for the students in front of me. I’ve failed miserable plenty of times, but I’m always hoping those days have less and less effect on them every year. Even as I write this, I have a handful of students I’m lesson planning for, making sure I can over-occupy their minds and waste not one brain cell in my room.

After class on Friday, which was interrupted by a lockdown safety drill, EduShyster and I got to talk about education reform as a whole. Shortly after she left, however, I started to think about why, even with some of the nonsense I think about, I’m so optimistic this year more than the last six years of my teaching. I have this enormous privilege in teaching. Yes, I fight for equity in the places mostly likely to be underfunded and over-stigmatized, but I’m equally blessed to have a profession and a calling all wrapped in one.

Then I got back to attacking the 11-pile monster, the sets of papers I had yet to grade because I obviously don’t like myself. 90 students, all with their individual needs. All the students. I got this.

photo c/o

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