Things have been quite busy with grad school lately, but I do keep up with what’s going on in education.  I just don’t have much time to write a whole lot about it.  One of my old professors, who feeds me a lot of good info, sent me an interesting article:

For Students Raised on iPods, Lessons in Bridge

My reaction:

Interestingly enough, for my basketball players, it took the experience of losing their first game 66-12 to before they would even listen to the head coach and myself.  They finally realized that they couldn’t do it alone.  From that point forward, they were much easier to coach.  And especially so when we started experiencing a mix of success and failure.  They could see how harder work led to better game-time performance.

I really believe that one of the keys to low-income education is activities, whether they be basketball, bridge, or something else.  I saw major improvements in work ethic inside and outside of the classroom in the basketball players I coached and taught.  It made me conclude that most people probably learn to connect hard work to success through sports, hobbies, and other activities.  Video games may be helpful to an extent, but they don’t teach kids the apprenticeship role that would most transferable to the classroom.  Kids need to learn to teamwork and the value of learning from people who have experience.  The students I taught that had outside activities were noticeably more disciplined and self-motivated.

Unfortunately, when basketball season ended, the old behaviors came back.  To me, this just says that one season of basketball isn’t enough to change deeply ingrained habits.  From this, I conclude that students really need overlapping activities, year-round, to constantly reinforce the hard-work/success connection.

For schoolwork, that connection just isn’t immediate enough for kids.  You don’t win or lose based on your math skills until you find out what colleges you got into.  By then, it’s way too late.

That title is a mouthful, but I couldn’t figure out how to shorten it.  There was a sad and thought-provoking story published in the Baltimore Sun about a child with behavioral issues who died in Baltimore last week.  It raises questions about–as the title of this post states–the challenges of working with children with serious issues.  The story is about the aids and the bus driver whose jobs are in limbo, but I felt a definite connection with my own experiences teaching, and the difficulty of preventing challenging students from taking actions that harm themselves.  The original story is here:

Questions raised as family prepares to lay student to rest

My reaction:

The issue of trying to control multiple students with severe behavioral and/or emotional issues is very fundamental to what is challenging about urban education, and it’s something that doesn’t get enough press.  The mere act of discussing the fact that kids from low-income settings tend to have a higher incidence of these sorts of issues brings up feelings of classism and racism.  Yet, the truth of the matter is these issues have a huge impact on a teacher’s ability to do their job.  I’m going to get politically incorrect now and get into my thoughts on this hot-button issue.

If severe emotional/behavioral issues are prominent enough and go unchecked by the management systems a school has in place, they start to affect the entire climate of the school and the behavior of students that don’t even have the same sorts of issues.  Actions and behaviors that should seem really out of place become commonplace and you start seeing a lot of copy-cat behavior.  I’ve experienced situations as a teacher where a class that seems out of control returns to order with the removal of a single student.  Once, a girl I taught actually remarked, “there goes our ring-leader”.

The fact is, classroom teachers not equipped to deal with some of the issues that the children can bring in the door.  Public education with low-income populations can work, but there needs to be an understanding that the needs of the students as a whole are greater and consequently, there need to be more resources allocated.  Children with emotional/behavioral issues that cause disruption to the general ed setting need very small settings and interventions, and they can be gradually be integrated into larger settings as their issues are resolved.  In most cases, they can and should probably be integrated with general ed students, as long as the group size is kept very small.  And obviously, they need the highest quality teachers.

Just imagine how much Baltimore City life could be changed if the most difficult students could be effectively educated?  It can be done, but not without the resources.  The question is, do we have the fortitude to make the necessary investment?

According to some dude from the root, the answer to inner city education has been right under our noses for several decades, and it’s a technique known as direct instruction.  Check out the original article here:

We Know How To Teach Black Kids

My thoughts:

 

The New York Times recently profiled what’s going on in education in Baltimore.

(P.S.  As part of their analysis, they visited Green Street Academy, where my girlfriend and former roommate teach.)

A Mission to Transform Baltimore’s Beaten Schools

My thoughts:

It’s an interesting piece. I most people agree that Alonso has had a
very positive impact, with respect to what had gone on in the city prior
to his arrival. He’s ruffled a lot of feathers, but overall, he’s been
much more successful navigating the politics and gathering consensus for
the sweeping changes he makes than Michelle Rhee was in DC.

One thing that caught my eye was how they mentioned that old black
educators are getting pushed into retirement. I think the author missed
something there. I don’t think it’s just old black teachers that are
getting pushed into retirement, I think everyone is getting pushed into
retirement. The system has become very high-stakes, and there is
immense amount of pressure to perform. In my experience, teaching was a
60-100+ hour per week job, and I still wasn’t able to actually
accomplish all the work I was technically supposed to be doing.

As a result, there is massive teacher turnover in City schools. Teach
For America gets a bad rep as a program that produces teachers for two
years who then leave the district they were placed in to do something
else. This isn’t precisely true, because many TFA teachers stay for
several years beyond that, although I’m sure the vast majority leave
within five. But I think if you look at the population non-TFA teachers
within the same schools TFA places teachers, you would see almost the
same statistic. You’ve got a diminishing group of older veterans, a
constantly flowing group of new teachers, and not a whole lot of
classroom teachers in their 30’s and 40’s.

I think a fundamental problem with education is that the general public
has no idea how intense the job of K-12 teaching in a low-income,
high-pressure setting is. I have friends who have left teaching for law
school, business school, banking, engineering, and just about every
other job under the sun, and for 90% of them, it’s not because the money
wasn’t good enough in teaching in the city. With little exception, they
are happier and less stressed out after leaving teaching. Yet, to the
general public, teachers are a bunch of bums that couldn’t get real jobs
and have too much vacation time.

Unfortunately, this means that rather than building a solid, experienced
teacher corps, new teachers constantly have to be trained from scratch.
Many K-12 educators say that it takes about 5 years for a teacher to
really approach peak effectiveness, but few people reach that level in
inner city schools.

Yet, I don’t hear a lot of talk about the retention problem directly.
The closest people usually come to talk about retention issues is when
talking about compensation and the currently fashionable movement toward
of merit pay. And although on the face of it, paying teachers more
seems like a worthwhile idea, I don’t think it’s the answer. I think
it’s going to provide a moderate bump in recruitment, but that it will
make little to no difference in retention. I think this because of all
the people I know who left teaching, not one of them left because of the
pay. At least in Baltimore, teachers actually do get paid reasonably
well, compared to the cost of living. People leave because it’s just
too intense for the vast majority of even the elite group TFA recruits.

The current direction is to try to recruit, train, and retain a corps of
highly paid superhumans who can actually handle the job stress. I think
the real answer is to find ways to split the jobs of classroom teachers
and administrators so that they can be taken on by teams of normal
people, who can pool their talents together–even if it means they don’t
get as much. Until the expectations of the job become more reasonable,
poor retention is always going to be a major impediment to any
meaningful improvement in K-12 education.

If you have the chance, check out the series Teach: Tony Danza on A&E.  To sum it up, last school year, Tony Danza decided to teach English at Northeast High School in Philly.  I’m not sure it’s quite comparable to the TFA experience–he only teaches one class period per day and he has a mentor teacher in his room at all times.  Also, his school is in the city, and I could be wrong, but Northeast appears to be a bit nicer than most where TFA teachers are placed.  But, generally, it does capture the experience.  He does all of his planning, and his mentor teacher simply observes.

It’s incredible that as much as Tony Danza must be used to performing for people, he’s actually quite awkward in the first couple of episodes in front of the children.  But it’s also really endearing to see how much Tony cares and how hard he tries.  He really goes out of his way to connect with the kids on a personal level, and he puts himself out there, even though he knows the kids think he’s foolish.  In a lot of ways, I wish I had been capable of lowering my guard while I was in the classroom.

And although Tony is extremely enthusiastic about education, you can see how hard teaching is for him.  He makes tons of rookie mistakes, and he’s really hard on himself, as all good teachers are.  He gets visibly worn down by the workload and frustrated by the red tape.  He gets bogged down with extraneous requests.  At one point, another teacher questions his commitment to teaching, asking if he just wanted to know what it’s like, or if he really wants to teach.  Tony clearly loves the idea of teaching, but he responds that he’s not sure if he could do another year.

I’ve said it a million times, but I think something is wrong with teaching as a profession.  Obviously, there’s no career that you can just walk into and be an expert.  But there are very few other professions where that’s exactly what is expected of you.  Our schools will never be able to retain talent as long as they keep chewing it up and spitting it out.  I don’t care how you incentivize it.

My hat is off to Tony Danza though.  The guy is almost 60, and I’m sure he’s got it made financially.  Yet, he volunteered for one of the toughest jobs in this country, and he does his best, with plenty of enthusiasm.  Check this show out, so far, it’s one of the best I’ve seen on TV in a while.

I went down to Georgia this past weekend for a family reunion that included a lot of family history.  Interestingly enough, much of it had connections to my experience teaching.  I’ve often felt that teaching must be harder now than it was in the past, because my experience was so brutal.  Well that might be true of the recent past, but there was a time not so long ago when things were far more difficult in many ways.

As part of our tour of the historical archives of a town in Georgia that is the historical home of much of my family, we learned about the school that blacks attended in the area from the end of slavery until the end of segregation.  School for blacks was held in a one room school house and education from 1st to 7th grade was provided simultaneously by a single teacher.  The only supplies provided to the school from the county were hand-me-down books and a single chair, for the teacher’s use.  Education ended at 7th grade, at which point, kids were big enough to go pick cotton.  There was no option for high school, let alone higher education.  And yet, some of my ancestors did manage to attend historically black colleges.

While the proprietor of the archive spoke, relatives of mine nodded their heads in affirmation and mentioned their own memories.  Obviously, all of this is old news to anyone who has ever taken a class on US history, but hearing about it from people who actually lived through those times made me really think about it.  Reflecting on the fact that there are still people alive today who were educated in these completely unequal conditions, it made me think, of course we’re still struggling with the education gap, you just can’t fix the effects of systematic discrimination overnight.  We learn a lot from our teachers, but we also take in a unquantifiable amount of information from our families and our societies.  How much of a disadvantage is it to a child to be raised by parents who never had the opportunity to go to high school at all, let alone a good high school or college?  How much is that disadvantage compounded when it’s the norm for an entire community?  We’re only a few generations past segregation.

I think that what makes education so difficult today is that we are finally starting to take the challenge of educating these urban kids seriously.  It has only been within the past 10 years that No Child Left Behind forced educational standards upon every school in the country.  Until then, kids were graduating from inner city schools, but it was a lot easier to pretend that they were actually getting an equal education.  I wonder how long it will take for the country to realize that “equal” will not be achieved until “separate” is done away with.  In the meantime, I think teachers face a different sort of difficulty than they did during segregation.  Then, there were no resources, but I doubt there was much in the way of standards and scrutiny either.  Now, teachers have a lot more resources, but also the pressure of working under a magnifying glass.

As I am no longer a teacher, I will no longer be fueled by as many ideas or experiences, and, I imagine, my impressions of inner-city education will become decreasingly current.  So, I probably won’t be writing much more on here, besides the occasional commentary.  In a moment of boredom, I took a peak at http://teachfor.us, a website that provides blogs, and although it is for obvious reasons, it did strike to see on the front pages a whole new set of users with recent posts.  The changing of the guard has occurred.

Sadly, because I was packing for vacation, I missed the opportunity to go to the welcoming reception for the incoming 2010 Baltimore corps members a couple weeks back.  As much as I would have liked to be there to see what the next generation of TFA people looks like, I didn’t really feel all that bad missing out.  It’s weird, but just a handful of days after the end of the school year, a sort of separateness from TFA has settled not just on me, but on pretty much everyone I know from my corps.  People (including one of my roommates) have already relocated to other cities.  Just a year ago, we did our best to prepare the 2009 corps for what they would encounter in the placement process, Institute, and the first year of teaching.  Now most of us have left the picture, and they are the seasoned veterans (of one year!), carrying the mantle of the Baltimore Corps.  We taught them what it meant to be part of the B’more Hard Corps, just like the 2007 corps taught us.

And to extend that thread of moving on, the process doesn’t seem to be limited to corps members.  There’s also a constant shuffling amongst the regional staff.  Besides a couple people who become institutions for a few years at a time, most people are in and out.  This year, our executive director, who is a long time Baltimore institution, is moving on up to join the national leadership staff.
I guess it’s just the nature of things.  And of course I can’t fling blame around, because I’m making moves too.  It’s probably all just part of the overall trend in our society of rapid movement between jobs and careers.  Still, there’s something about all this churn that just seems too rapid, too frantic, and too brutal.  You approach the machine with good intentions, and it chews you up for two years and spits you out.  How many people have the stones to linger in a system like ours in Baltimore?  My girlfriend does, but most of us don’t.  Even of the people from my 2008 corps that decided to stay in education, most either change schools or they are proceeding tentatively, eying future prospects outside of the classroom.  Simply put, teaching is a difficult job and I don’t think it’s a job that nurtures new talent and rewards people for sticking around long enough to be really good at it.

Missing the reception was just symbolic of the fact that I’m no longer part of the current Baltimore Corps.  I’m one of the mostly nameless, faceless conglomerate of Alumni, that abstract group of people that supposedly went through the madness of teaching in Baltimore in some distant, irrelevant past.  One of my roommates had a close friend from high school end up in the 2009 corps.  I remember my roommate telling me last year that although he was excited about reconnecting with his friend, he had very mixed feelings.  He couldn’t shake the feeling that he wouldn’t wish upon his good friend the abuse he had endured during his first year of teaching.  In many ways, I feel similarly toward the 2010’s.

I would never say that the TFA experience is on par with serving in the military in wartime, but I think there are parallels.  I put any job where someone’s immediate survival is at stake on a tier of its own in terms of difficulty and stress.  But inner city teaching–and, by extension, the TFA experience–have to be near the top of that next tier.  At this very moment, the 2010’s are about a week into Institute, experiencing their first hours in front of real students.  It almost gives me chills to think about it.  There’s no way they can possibly imagine the highs and lows they are about to experience.  God bless them.

Inspired by my own writing, I’ve been thinking about my last post for a couple days now, and I want to continue that line of thought.  First of all, despite my criticisms, I am very proud of the progress my students made.  They may not be where they should be, but many of them come such a long way.  I’m so critical though because as far as they have come, it’s not nearly enough.  The children didn’t create the problems of their communities and schools, but unfortunately it’s up to them to make very mature decisions to break the cycle of poor education and poverty.  Although I believe people need to be responsible for themselves, I don’t believe the culture of non-achievement was created by inner-city residents alone.  The society outside the city has always played a major role.   The problems we fight now are the result of centuries of unequal treatment that persist even until today.

Even though I said the root of the problem is cultural, I think that the more fundamental issue that drives these cultural issues is concentrated poverty.  Most of my students, regardless of where they were born, live in areas that are overwhelmingly poor.  Behaviors and events that would be extremely exceptional in most communities are commonplace in places like Baltimore, because of concentrated poverty.  There’s is pretty obvious connection between poverty, low education, reduced opportunities, crime, and social dysfunction.  I believe the real first step to narrowing the achievement gap is to integrate the schools and communities.  The problem is, most Americans don’t want their kids exposed to the harsh realities of poverty, so I don’t know if I ever expect aggressive integration to occur.  The sad truth is that we all want help poor people, as long as they are “over there”, not actually living in our communities.

So, until people realize that we need a new round of integration, I think the next best strategy is to attack this negative culture that thrives and propagates in poor areas.  This is analogous to managing the symptoms of a disease when you can’t cure the root cause.  I don’t know if it’s a battle that can be won on a large scale, but it certainly needs to be fought.

Today is my final day at Hopkins, attending the last lecture of the last class I need to complete the requirements for my teaching certificate.  I’m forking over about $1600 for this class so I can get a piece of paper that I likely will never use.  But it seems like I should have something tangible to represent the amount of experience and formal education I accumulated these past two years.  Anyhow, my professor, who is awesome, is pretty lax about computer usage in her class, so I spent much of my class time composing this entry.

I’m going to get a little controversial today, but sometimes there’s a need to have unpleasant discussions.  I’ve tried to be careful in the phrasing I use, but I’m sure I have left room for things written here to be interpreted in ways that I don’t mean them.  If you think I could be more clear about what I mean to say and what I don’t mean to say, please let me know.

I truly believe that the problems of education in the inner-city are essentially cultural in nature, and that’s all it comes down to.   I say this because of the huge difference in performance between kids that were born and raised in Baltimore, kids that moved to Baltimore later in life, and foreign-born children who end up in Baltimore.  I firmly believe that kids in Baltimore have the same inherent intelligence as kids anywhere, excepting for the handful that suffer from lead poisoning (yeah, lead poisoning, in the 21st century, insane, right?), so something must explain the differences in achievement.

I have taught foreign students that have come to the US not speaking a lick of English and seen them make unbelievable progress.  I have also taught foreign students who have started out strong and then stalled.  Without exception, my foreign-born students have been extremely respectful and hard working upon arrival at the school, but they mature in different ways.  The difference seems to be in how much the student assimilated into the “Baltimore culture”.

Let me be clear about this, when I say “Baltimore culture”, I’m not talking about any kids in and of themselves, I’m talking about the beliefs and behaviors many of them exhibit.  Let me start by saying there are positive aspects of the Baltimore culture.  Chief in my mind is that most of my Baltimore students seem to be extremely gregarious and socially aware. But from my observations, regardless of race, the  negative aspects that describe the dominant Baltimore culture  are anti-intellectual, overly interested in attention to self,  negligent of long-term planning,  looking to slip by with minimal effort, disinterested in exceeding expectations, and demanding of instant gratification.  In many ways, I think the Baltimore culture imitates the culture of our society as a whole, just on steroids.  I’d sum it up by describing it as a culture of entitlement, to the extreme.  And it seems to be infectious.  When kids move in from outside the city, it seems like it’s usually only a matter of time before they start exhibiting those traits.

I strongly believe that there is nothing innate about those negative aspects of the culture;  they are taught and learned, just like algebra.  There are people who subscribe to these culture values everywhere, but in most places, the level that we see most of these behaviors would be considered extreme.  Here, it is the norm, and academic success and jail are the extremes.  I can try to explain to the kids that what goes on in Baltimore would be considered absurd where I grew up, but to kids who grew up only here, what they see is just reality.  The newcomers tend to fall in line either because they want to fit in or because it looks like fun.  The bravest of them choose to retain outsider values and remain on the fringe of the school social environment.  And to be fair, I do teach the occasional Baltimore-raised student that has managed through excellent parenting and good choices to remain out of the fray, but I can only think of a couple examples.

As educators, to me the only cures to this cultural issue are:

a) getting all kids out of this toxic environment (by busing or  boarding school)

b) diluting the environment by integrating the schools, or

c) changing the city’s culture, starting with the school building.

The first two options involve major taxpayer expense and force the successful schools to have to deal with low-income children (gasp!), so they are likely to never be implemented on a large scale.  The problem with the last option is that, for many of the kids, all the work we do in school to promote positve culture is systematically undone when dismissal bell rings, especially that last bell that starts summer break.  I see our original 6th graders, who were so sweet last year, exhibiting some horrible behaviors in the hallway as rising 8th graders.  It’s as though somewhere, they leave school to go somewhere to be trained to recite explicit song lyrics and curse at each other, with no regard for who is in earshot.  Of course, middle schoolers are crazy everywhere, but they are a special kind of crazy in the city.

Major change seems to be past the horizon for now, because frankly, to most Americans, what happens in the inner-city is out of sight, out of mind.  But that’s starting to change.  Thank goodness that awareness of the issues in education are finally starting to attract more and more notice from the general public.  Teach For America is now a household name.  People from outside education have heard of DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and former Chicago schools head/current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.  Well-informed or not, pro or con, everyone has an opinion on No Child Left Behind.  Thinkers in education are continuing to plan the next big surge to close the achievement gap.  So far, there are lots of ideas, but few projects that have shown unqualified success.  In the end, there just isn’t going to be a silver bullet, and my belief is that the problem isn’t going to get solved without some major introspection and sacrifices on the part of every American.  I just don’t think at the end of the day that it’s possible to warehouse our poorest, least educated citizens in ghettos and provide them with quality education at the same time.  Separate-but-equal didn’t work after emancipation, and it’s not going to work now.  I hope that one day, people will get pissed enough, like they did in the mid-20th century, and there will finally be another civil rights movement.

I may be leaving teaching, but I’d like to think that I’m not running away.  I strongly believe that these kids deserve educational opportunities, regardless of what cultural issues exist.  As I move on to the next phase, I know I will find ways to remain strongly involved in the discussion of how to change education in our country and in the lives of kids on a day to day basis.

Tonight is the eve of the last day of school for me, it seems like a good time to reflect on what I have learned from these past two years.  I have learned a lot of lessons.  I could have done a better job of reviewing and reteaching.  Challenging the kids to do it right, and sending them back time and time again until they get it right worked.   I should have given the kids more opportunities to see unrelated problems at the same time so that they could learn how to differentiate, because on the final, a lot of kids applied incorrect methods because they didn’t properly recognize the type of the problem.

This semester, I broke things down to the very lowest level.  I taught them to deal with exponents by turning them into multiplication, and then I taught them all of the shortcut rules.  That way, even if they got confused on which rule to use, they could always fall back on their fundamental knowledge of what an exponent is, and solve the problem in a longer, but still valid way.  What I wasn’t able to fully teach them was how better to utilize formulas, heuristic methods to check answers, and how to derive the rules on their own, on the fly.  Most people don’t realize it, but these are the little tricks are basically all that separate those who are “good” at math from those who think they aren’t.

It really is sad in one sense that I won’t have the chance to do better.  It hurts to have all of this knowledge, earned with two years of blood, sweat and tears (well, sweat and tears, for sure), and know that I will never have the chance to use much of it.  But on the other hand, I have wanted out for so long now.  I am so tired of the daily feeling of being ignored.  I am tired of the frustration of knowning how much these kids learn on the rare occassions that they apply themselves, but 90% of the time being completely unable to get that to happen.

I have had the opportunity to teach brilliant kids, respectful kids, and hard-working kids.  Occassionally, I have had the pleasure of teaching children that fall into all three categories.  This semester, the simple difference between kids who performed and kids who didn’t came down to who listened.  I feel like I have honed my ability to teach a skill or a concept to a kid to the point where I was pretty successful, even with students who don’t have strong background knowledge.  But I can’t teach a kid who won’t listen.  As I’ve graded the final exam, which is basically a selection of math problems from each objective we went over, it’s so obvious who got what material.  I can actually see who listened, who actually did their homework, who was absent for an extended period of time, and who slept in class.    I just hoped the kids learned as much as I did.