An Education Divide

How does a kindergarten class of 40 sound to you? Or a high school class of 60? Well, in Detroit that can happen now.

I’ve never met any teacher who said bigger classes will make my job easier or help students learn more. However, I have often heard from those in power that class size really matters (and then the unspoken “for my kids”). Public schools are allowed to have bloated class sizes and inadequate resources, but the social elite ensure this never happens to their kids.

And still, none of this really gets to solving the real problem: poverty. Students in poverty are disproportionately at risk over all other students.

Raising expectations with new standards or additional required credits does not solve Johnny’s problems at home where his father left and his mother isn’t home much as she works so much. Higher expectations and new learning targets don’t help Cindy get the breakfast she misses every morning or the hits she takes each night from her step-father.

America’s students in schools with less than 10% poverty are among the world’s best while schools with more than 75% struggle mightily:

Poverty rates make a huge difference in student achievement. Few people are aware, for example, that in 2009 U.S. schools with fewer than 10 percent of student in poverty ranked first among all nations on the Programme for International Achievement tests in reading, while those serving more than 75 percent of students in poverty scored alongside nations like Serbia, ranking about fiftieth.

I only wish America’s policies matched the research and allowed this nation to solve the truest indicator of future success or failure: poverty.

Bought and Paid For Charter Schools

How do you get charter schools on the ballot in a state that has previously rejected them three times by popular vote? You buy the signatures to get the initiative on the ballot.

Here are the amounts of money given to the charter school movement in Washington State:

• $1,000,000 (Bill Gates, Microsoft)
• $600,000 (Alice Walton, Wal-Mart)
• $500,000 (Jeff Bezos family, Amazon)
• $450,000 (Nick Hanauer, venture capitalist)

Now that’s $2.55 million dollars from essentially four people (granted, Jeff Bezos got $50,000 from his parents). When popular opinion is not with you, buy the signatures as the leaders of the signature gatherers did in Washington State.

The signature gatherers were often paid on average between $1 and $2 per signature gathered. One gatherer claimed to have gathered over 9,000 signatures!

When I asked a gatherer at my local Safeway why I should sign up, she told me that it would save our schools. When I asked “how,” she didn’t know. Sad.

How about those donors take the $3.3 million dollars given to this initiative and instead hire 550 new teachers to lower class size and target the neediest of students?

National Boards Completed

This year I undertook the massive task of completing my National Boards, and I set two goals for myself. First, I wanted to complete the process and send off my box. Second, I wanted to complete the test as soon after submitting my box as possible.

I know, I know. My goals essentially were about completing the National Boards process and I did. However, this was no small feat for me since I have (no joke) 12 other outside-of-my-basic-teaching-assignment duties (coaching, bargaining, etc.) in addition to the National Boards attempt.

What ended up happening is that I planned out the process and completed all of the submissions in January, February, and March–not how I would recommend completing the process–and took the test in early April.

I feel good about the test. Four of the questions were much like what I give my students, and the other two covered ELL and struggling learner issues, which I haven’t had to deal with very often. so I hope I answered those well enough. I did review for those, and that definitely helped me.

Overall, I did not feel like the National Boards process forced me to change my teaching–I hope this is a good sign of what I had been doing–but it did cause me to be a bit more reflective on how I approach lesson planning, student interactions, and recording data. I feel like I’ve always done well in these areas, but the National Boards process made me sit down and detail the “why” of my decision-making.

• Why do I get to know my students?
• Why do I structure my lessons into small segments of individual, small group, and large group approaches?
• Why do I record who responds to questions, in what way, and with what frequency?
• Why do I keep so many records of student progress and social behavior?

These questions had to be answered in detail and had to be connected to my knowledge of my students.

Maybe the key here is that education is moving more towards extra record-keeping, more detailed data sheets indicating how much I know about my students. In the past I would have my evaluator pick a student, and I would explain the student’s strengths and weaknesses in reading and writing. Now I have to provide printed or written data showing the same thing, often in the form of assessment results rather than the more informal means of the past. My word is not enough; proof has to be provided. The National Boards process mirrors this change in education.

Wish me luck this November when the scores come out. The last couple of years the scores came out right after Thanksgiving, so I’m hoping that I’ll have one more reason to give thanks.

NEA-RA

My favorite quotes from the NEA-RA:

• “Those who think they are too smart for politics are often ruled by those who are dumber.” (Caucus guest speaker)
• “In our efforts to leave no child behind, we may have accidentally left all of the teachers behind.” (Teacher of the Year, Rebecca Mieliwocki)
• “put laid-off educators back to work” to best improve the economy (Paul Krugman)