Month: August 2012

Empathy for a Teacher

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Empathy for a Teacher

In the airy, sun-filled space that will house my son’s foray into formal education, I watched as a tow-headed classmate named Thomas patrolled the edges of the room, choking back tears.

It was the first day of school – and my wife and I were doing our best not to hover too closely over Leo, who was, thankfully, already hard at play in the newly discovered puzzle section. Leo’s co-teachers, Ms. Allison and Ms. Luz, were busy greeting (and consoling) parents, organizing materials, and helping the 28 children – each one their family’s own special miracle – find a way to feel comfortable amidst an unfamiliar world.

For a few moments, I noticed that Thomas was alone. He wandered purposelessly in search of ballast, his cheeks streaked with salty tears. Another boy in the class noticed, too – clearly a veteran of this multi-age classroom where children spend their first three years of school with the same teachers. Without any adult prompting, he went over to Thomas, took hold of his hands, and gave him a welcoming hug.

I felt as grateful as if Thomas had been my own child. Such compassionate behavior in someone so young was a clear reflection of two things: his parents, and his teachers. Sarah and I gave Leo a final hug and walked quickly out of the room, choking back our own tears. It was someone else’s turn to help raise him.

I’ve worked in schools my whole adult life, so I’m more aware than most of the daily challenges and rewards of being a classroom teacher. I’m less aware of how different the classroom starts to look when your own child is in it. But I’m starting to see now how easy it is, if we’re not careful, to view the miniature world of our children’s classrooms through a single, self-serving lens – what is being done to meet the needs of my child, all day, every day?

On one level, this is not an unreasonable question. When we turn our children over to their schools and teachers, we are required to take a serious leap of faith. And, to be sure, I expect Leo’s teachers to get to know him well, to help him understand his own strengths and weaknesses, to give him comfort and challenge him, and to help him fall in love with learning. I also recognize that some days will be better than others, that he is one of many, and that his teachers are not superheroes. Like the rest of us, they are works in progress.

I worry sometimes that we have lost sight of the monumental, sometimes insurmountable challenges of being a classroom teacher. It is the most difficult, most rewarding job out there – filled with daily doses of a complex web of human relationships, emotions, needs and aspirations. Of the 3.2 million teachers in the United States, nearly two out of five are still in their twenties. Nearly nine out of ten are (still) female. And despite the surge of support for better pay, no one is in it for the money.

We know this. Yet we tolerate or participate in conversations about school reform that paint teachers into a two-dimensional corner – you’re either an aging, selfish laggard coasting to a cushy, state-supported retirement package, or you’re a youthful, sleep-deprived warrior willing to forgo any sense of work-life balance to personally deliver your students to the promised land. I’ve met and worked with both stereotypes – and I’d say they account for no more than 5% of the workforce.

Throughout the rest of the profession, you’ll find committed adults like the ones my son has. You’ll find curious professionals who are always searching for ways to get better at their craft. And you’ll see people who are trying to transform the way we think about school by replacing the timeworn expectation that the child must adapt to the school with the revolutionary notion that the school must adapt to the child.

That sort of personalization and support is the sort of vision of schooling our children need. It’s also a lot harder to do well, day in and day out. It is, in other words, not the sort of thing teachers can fulfill by themselves.

So let’s keep our expectations for our nation’s teachers high and fair. Let’s keep our cool when everything doesn’t unfold exactly as we’d like it. And let’s do our part as parents to ensure that every classroom is not just filled with caring adults like Ms. Allison and Ms. Luz, but also with compassionate children like the boy who helped make Thomas feel at home.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Origins of a Dream

Posted on | by Sam

Every year, we pay tribute to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. with school assemblies, community programs and – to the delight of students and teachers alike – a national holiday. Yet how many of us directly connect Dr. King’s heroism and accomplishments to his faith in – and use of – the five freedoms of the First Amendment?

Consider the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the iconic rally that introduced King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to white America – he had delivered those lines to black audiences many times before – and produced the most memorable petition for a redress of grievances in the nation’s history. Nearly every American is familiar with King’s speech that day. Many of us were asked to memorize it as students. But few if any of us were also taught about that day – and the Civil Rights Movement – in the specific context of our founding principles as a nation.

At the time, Congress was wrestling with whether or not to pass President John F. Kennedy’s civil rights legislation, and young and old people across the country were being jailed for peacefully assembling to protest the South’s policies of institutional racism. And although African American leaders had talked for more than twenty years about staging a national march for civil rights in Washington, one that could harness all the energy and persuasive power of the movement thus far, the decision to have the march on August 28, 1963, was not finalized until July 2; that meant march officials had less than two months to coordinate, transport, organize, and prepare for the thousands – maybe even tens of thousands – of marchers they expected.

The organizers rushed to plan the march so it could occur while Congress was still debating the president’s civil rights program. They also wanted the march to coincide with the centennial celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, the January 1, 1863 declaration by President Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the nation’s third bloody year of civil war, “that all persons held as slaves” within the Southern states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

Almost a hundred years since that war’s end, African Americans were still waiting for Lincoln’s words to be fulfilled. Indeed, although the formal institution of slavery had long since passed, laws discriminating against African Americans had immediately replaced it. In response, march spokesmen promised that the event would be a mass demonstration for freedom, and that the protesters would, peacefully, assemble at and around the Lincoln Memorial. The goal was to pressure Congress to pass Kennedy’s proposed civil rights legislation and to establish 1963 as the year racial discrimination in America ended for good.

Concerned about a backlash in Congress, Kennedy administration officials expressed reservations. Speaking to a Washington Post reporter, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy sympathized fully with the cause and supported the marchers’ right to petition the government, but wondered if the march would achieve its desired result. “I certainly think at the present time Congress should have the right to debate and discuss legislation without that kind of pressure,” he said. Meanwhile, President Kennedy met privately with the leaders of the march to express his concern that it might damage the chances for passage of the civil rights bill.

According to John Lewis, the Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and, at 25, the youngest of the civil rights leaders , the President said: ‘We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol.’ Publicly, however, the President praised the planned march as a “peaceful assembly for the redress of grievances”–with strong emphasis on the word “peaceful.”

In the weeks leading up to the national march, newspapers ran small stories about violent clashes between civil rights protesters and local authorities in different parts of the country. While white officers wielded clubs and occasionally fired shots, black protesters were arrested by the hundreds – sometimes after demonstrating peacefully, sometimes after throwing bricks or breaking windows.

Meanwhile, the prospect of tens of thousands of black protesters in the nation’s capital–at a time in the nation’s history when racial stereotypes were deeply grounded in ignorance and fear–was enough to prompt some rather extraordinary measures. For the first time since the days of Prohibition, Washington, D.C., banned liquor sales. Fifteen thousand paratroopers in nearby North Carolina were placed on alert. And white journalists peppered black commentators with questions such as, “What is it that Negroes really want?” The African American psychologist Kenneth B. Clark did not shy away from the question. The black community, he told The New York Times three days before the march, wants to “give vitality to the democratic promise by using the machinery of democracy–the courts and the constitutional guarantees of freedom–to press relentlessly toward unqualified equality.”

Like Clark, the leaders of the march understood that the best way to counter the general population’s willful ignorance of racial injustice was by utilizing each of the First Amendment’s five freedoms to appeal to the nation’s conscience. They also realized the fight could not be seen as theirs alone; they had to demonstrate that all Americans had a stake in their success. Consequently, at a press conference in New York on August 18, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, the president of the American Jewish Congress, called on American Jews to join the march. In so doing, he urged, American Jews would also be protecting their own freedom, “for we have long known that no group is secure unless the rights of all are safeguarded.” On August 23, the Catholic Bishops of the United States urged in a joint pastoral letter that Catholics get involved as well, declaring that the conscience of the nation itself was on trial.

That spirit of brotherhood was reflected in the final program of speakers for the march, which began with an invocation from the Catholic archbishop of Washington and included remarks from the clerk of the United Presbyterian Church and the president of the Synagogue Council of America. “America must not become a nation of onlookers,” urged Rabbi Prinz, who was also on the program. “America must not remain silent. Not merely black America, but all of America. It must speak up and act, from the President down to the humblest of us, and not for the sake of the Negro, not for the sake of the black community but for the sake of the image, the idea and the aspiration of America itself.” Prinz’s words reached thousands of television viewers across the country, who tuned in to see images of white, brown, and black faces at the massive assembly. ABC and NBC even broke away from their regularly scheduled afternoon soap operas to join CBS and broadcast the program in its entirety.

The march neared its conclusion when the final speaker – thirty-four-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. – approached the podium. By 1963, King’s eloquence and charisma had led him to become the person most identified with the goals of the campaign for civil rights. By the time he rose to speak, police estimated that the crowd had grown to more than 200,000 people – far surpassing even the most optimistic estimates of the organizers.

Although he had spoken to countless black audiences over the years, most white Americans – including President Kennedy, who was watching the march on TV – had never heard King deliver a complete speech. Aware of the importance of the opportunity before him, King stayed up late into the night before the march, working on the language of his remarks. By the time he put down his pencil, however, he felt the speech was not his best work. Emotionally powerful in some places while politically subdued in others, King’s prepared remarks reflected his conscious decision, given the audience and occasion, to sacrifice some passion in order to achieve the march’s ultimate goal – the passage of Kennedy’s civil rights legislation.

King approached the podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looked out at the sea of faces silently awaiting his words, and began – still with mixed feelings, one would imagine – to deliver his remarks. Initially, the young preacher followed his prepared speech word for word. But toward the end, the spectacle of the moment, the history of the location, and the historic promises of the man whose marble likeness towered behind him prompted King to wander off the script.

As he began searching for a different note on which to conclude, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, sitting just behind King on the platform, asked for the refrain of a speech she knew he had given many times before. “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin.”

So he did. “I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

The rest is history. Yet despite progress, including passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other subsequent changes in the law, much of King’s vision for America remains unfulfilled today. Indeed, despite King’s plea to his fellow Americans to “lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood,” racism and prejudice continue to plague the United States. For an afternoon, however, the image of thousands of peaceful protesters stretched out before a solitary, passionate young preacher gave Americans a glimpse of what Lincoln – the Great Emancipator—once termed “the better angels of our nature.” The New York Times called it “the greatest assembly for redress of grievances in the capital’s history.” And President Kennedy, in a press statement following the march, spoke about the hope the march had embodied: “What is different today is the intensified and widespread public awareness of the need to move forward in achieving these objectives – objectives which are older than the Nation,” he said. “The cause of 20 million Negroes has been advanced by the program conducted so appropriately before the Nation’s shrine to the Great Emancipator, but even more significant is the contribution to all mankind.”

(This story originally appeared in the book First Freedoms: A Documentary History of First Amendment Rights in America.)

The First Day

Posted on | by Sam

(Still working on my new book about the 2011-2012 school year, and thinking today about the way that journey began, exactly one year ago. Here’s another sneak peak into how it’s taking shape. As always, comments and feedback welcomed.)

The morning of her first day as a first-year teacher in a first-year school, Cassie Hurst exited her small studio apartment in Dupont Circle and walked West, against the grain of her former colleagues and her former life.

They were there across the street to remind her, perpendicular to her path, walking North to South: women in fancy suits and flip flops on their way to K street consulting jobs. Cassie felt jubilant as she crossed New Hampshire Avenue and watched them disappear from view. It was one of those jobs that first brought her to DC, right after graduating from college. Her goal was to save the world, and environmental policy seemed like a good place to start. Yet after two years on the job, all she’d learned was how to make nice-looking binders, and how long it would take her to rise up the totem pole. She’d never been so unhappy. So she decided it was time for a change.

Cassie neared the street-level entrance to Green Earth, which was spending its first year on the second floor of an office building that was still weeks away from finalizing a long-overdue punch list of renovations. Her phone rang. “I’m worried about you,” her mother said. “I’ll be fine,” she answered. She’d slept soundly for eight hours the night before. She was ready.

It was 7:00 am.

Cassie walked up the steep concrete stairwell to the school, past a patchwork of electrical tape, hanging wires, and homemade signs welcoming children and families to their new school. No families had arrived yet – the school day didn’t officially begin for another ninety minutes – but as she entered the room, her room, it occurred to her that the mere existence of a space in which to welcome people was its own cause for celebration.

Just two days earlier, the hallways had been buzzing with last-minute preparations. Workmen installed new windows in every room – a task the school’s executive director, Laura Graber, had begged the building’s owner to complete for weeks. A volunteer made her way up and down the hallways, using a green marker and stencil to affix room numbers. The white-haired father of the school’s board chair installed wire rods on the wall above the school’s welcome desk. And boxes of furniture waited to be unpacked and arranged in the main central space they called the zocalo.

All signs of the recent chaos were long gone by the time Cassie sat down at the tiny chair behind her tiny half-moon desk and exhaled. There was nothing left to do but wait.

 * * *

When her alarm clock went off the morning of the first day – 6:50am as always, and always the annoying beeping sound because nothing else would rouse her from her deep sleep – Emily Serber hopped out of bed and into the seventeen-minute routine she had honed over the previous two school years. Bathroom. Teeth. Face. Makeup. Seven minutes. Then six minutes to get dressed and four minutes to find her keys, grab her lunch, and head out the door to cross Meridian Hill Park – or, as it’s been known locally since becoming a frequent site for political demonstrations in the 1960s, Malcolm X Park.

Four years earlier, Emily was a senior student at Brown, and Michelle Rhee was a freshman chancellor of DC’s public schools. When Serber saw the December Time magazine cover of Rhee holding a broom and promising to clean house, she decided the nation’s capital was where she’d start her career.

Under Rhee’s leadership, Serber thought DC had a chance to show the rest of the country what was possible when an urban school system decided to judge teachers by their merits, to set high expectations for everyone, to up the level of rigor in urban classrooms, and to help the kids that had been most poorly served in the past by refusing to keep doing things the way they’d been done before.

She got placed at an elementary school in Mount Pleasant named after the founder of the U.S. Naval Academy: George Sutpen. It was a bumpy beginning: six weeks into her first year, she got switched from 1st to 3rd grade to replace someone who’d had a nervous breakdown in front of the children. Since then, she’d had two relatively stable years to hone her craft, and she felt like she was starting to warrant the praise she often received. And yet as she turned onto the long, sunny sidewalk that stretches in front of the three front doors of the only place she’d ever worked, Ms. Serber wondered if this year would be her last.

She entered the school’s weathered gymnasium to search for her co-teacher, Emily Creagh – together they were known as “The Two Emilys” – and meet the sixty third graders they would escort up the spiral stairs, past the main office and the colorful mural depicting Columbus’s arrival in the new world, to room 121. Children as young as three and as old as eleven stood or sat in clumps across the gym floor, waiting to be escorted to their homerooms.  Parents received last-minute registration and information forms, while interpreters moved back and forth between groups to make sure each family understood what was required.

Near the gym’s front door, Ms. Serber approached a young boy she’d heard the second grade teachers complain about last year. “How you doing, Harvey?” she said, smiling and putting an arm around his shoulder. “Did you have a great summer?” Harvey shrugged, his head down. Nearby, two girls smiled at each other – new friends perhaps? – each still holding with one hand the leg of her father, each performing her own distinct pirouette.

 * * *

As Emily Creagh waited for her friend and co-teacher to arrive, she scanned the faces filling the gymnasium. A pack of boys twitched with Puckish energy and abandon near a girl receiving final words of encouragement from her grandmother, still dressed in the traditional dress and headscarf of their home country. It was like an airport terminal – people of all shapes and colors, some reuniting, others struggling to say goodbye.

Emily Creagh loved airport terminals. Ever since she’d been a kid, following her father’s military postings around the world, she craved the sorts of spaces where you were either going somewhere exciting or being met by someone you love. As she waited for her new crop of 3rd graders to gather, Ms. Creagh felt more hopeful than she had her previous four years as a teacher. After two years of working in tandem, she and Ms. Serber finally knew what they were doing when it came to teaching kids, really teaching them, to read and write. And that summer, they’d been told that everyone coming into their class was reading on grade level – an unprecedented accomplishment– thanks to an intensive reading program the school had administered the previous Spring.

In response, the Two Emilys planned for a very different sort of school year. They bought a slew of new books – beautiful, challenging books – and spent the final weeks of August arranging their room and establishing a library that would be both inviting and well matched to the levels and interests of their kids. Ms. Creagh sat on the bottom step of the bleachers and ran her fingers around the spout of the electric kettle she’d brought in to make tea each morning, imagining the success stories that lay ahead.

 * * *

Carolla Aguiar put the phone back in her pocket and sat near the window of the Metro car as it passed above the Potomac River on its way out of Virginia and into DC. Every morning, Carolla called her mother in Venezuela for some Jarabe de lingua. Word medicine. On that morning they chatted about the challenges of working in a brand-new school; other days they might talk about family members, or the latest news from home, or God. But the one topic they never talked about was the one Carolla most needed to discuss: that she felt she was living in a private prison, and that she was starting to become paralyzed by fear.

The train entered the Dupont Circle station. Carolla stepped onto the escalator and scanned the crowd for children wearing Green Earth t-shirts. A smile goes a long way, she thought, as she recalled what it felt like to attend a new school and not understand a single word that was said.

It had been the happiest time of her life. Her family had moved from Caracas to Houston. Carolla was ten and knew nothing of America; she thought it was the name of her new school. Everything smelled new on that first day, including the lunchbox in which her mom had placed handwritten cards of all the English expressions she’d need to make it home again.

Because of her light complexion, Carolla’s homeroom teacher didn’t realize the new girl didn’t speak English until midday. But the new girl was already hard at work. We’re only here for two years, her parents had told her in the days before the start of the school year. Use that time to speak English. Don’t hang out with the other Spanish speakers. Figure out who the smartest kids are – and mimic what they do.

She was fluent by Thanksgiving break.

Since then, Carolla had grown increasingly fascinated by the ways people learn a new language. It had been a long and winding road to the classroom – in Venezuela, it was cooler to dream of being a journalist or a TV producer, and she had already given both a try – but as she crossed the busy maze of cars and buses that filled Connecticut Avenue to reach the front doors of Green Earth, Carolla felt she was on the verge of the best year of her professional life – as long as her personal life didn’t get in the way.

 * * *

Kim Ortiz updated the enrollment numbers on her clipboard as homeroom after homeroom filed out of the gym and into the wide hallways of her school. Things always changed over the summer – families moved, families changed their minds, families got deported – and the first day of school was Ms. Ortiz’s first chance to get a more accurate head count. It was the least interesting part of her job as a public school principal – with the most important ramifications. School budgets were determined by student enrollment, so until Ms. Ortiz knew how many bodies she had in the building, she couldn’t know how much money she’d have to spend on them.

Over the summer, Ms. Ortiz had spent her time obsessing over a different number: 38. That was the percentage of children at Sutpen who were reading at or above grade level. She wondered what her grandma would say if she were still alive; something direct and honest like: “I don’t mean you no harm, but . . . what in the hell are y’all doing at that school?”

Ms. Ortiz needed some more of her grandma’s advice to manage the year ahead. Mabel Ezekiel had raised two daughters out of nothing and both had earned PhDs. She always knew how to push people, and she never got caught up in how people felt about her. Do what you have to do, and don’t apologize for it.

A year ago Ms. Ortiz had tried to do just that after learning about the Reading & Writing Project in New York City, and seeing what it had done for children and schools across the country. This wasn’t some fad of the moment; it was a proven model that had been applied by well-trained teachers in schools across the country for decades. I may not be able to do anything to guarantee that families read to their children at night, she thought. But what if I could guarantee that every classroom at Sutpen was staffed by teachers who knew how to help kids fall in love with language?

It was the kind of choice her grandma would have encouraged her to make. And she’d made it, knowing it was going to ruffle some feathers, especially after replacing someone who’d been the principal for eighteen years. Change was always difficult in schools; asking teachers to change what they’d been doing over the course of their entire careers was something else entirely. Yet when she heard folks speak nostalgically about the way Sutpen used to be, she’d think, “That’s great . . . but we have a 38% reading proficiency!”

Kim Ortiz watched as the last homeroom left the gymnasium and updated the enrollment chart on her clipboard. She touched her belly instinctively, the baby inside her still too small to be felt.

 * * *

In the new apartment she’d moved into after the separation that was a long time coming, Dora Benitez closed the bathroom door and quietly got herself ready so her son could grab a few more minutes of sleep. She looked across the street at the buildings of the Walter Reed Medical Hospital, selected the outfit for her first day as a principal – blue shirt, tan pants and sneakers – and thought back to the apartment in Corpus Christi she’d lived in as a child, the one on 6th street with the roaches and the gunfire.

That’s where the wanting had begun; it started the first time she visited a friend’s house on Ocean Drive. Why don’t we have that? How can I get that?

Her dad saw the change in his oldest daughter’s face in the following weeks – saw the building anger and resentment. There’s a difference between being schooled and being smart, he said. Education is a bridge or a border. Choose.

As a child, Dora often fished with her father. Leave it there, her dad would tell her as she recast impatiently. Wait it out, wait until it tugs. Learn to distinguish between the tide and a fish pulling on the lure.

One time she felt a tug that left no doubt. Her father watched the rod dip. She tried to pull back with enough force.

Daddy, I can’t do this.

Don’t ever say that.

The rod dipped lower and lower. Dora’s father got behind her, added his hands to the pole and screamed, REEL IT IN!

The child strained as hard as she could until a stingray emerged, its wings wider than the rowboat in which they sat. The father grabbed it before it could strike and pinned it on the floor of the tipping craft. He reached in his boot for a pair of pliers, pulled the stinger off, and bellowed at his daughter to pull the hook out.

In seconds the ray was back out of the boat and struggling back down into the Gulf’s greenish waters. Father and daughter lay there, exhausted and breathing hard. She felt like crying and laughing, then and now. He was always getting her into situations like that – situations that were bigger than she could handle – and then pushing her through them. That’s what kept him alive, she thought as she rustled Roque from colorful four-year-old dreams. He was making sure I had some of it in me.

 * * *

By 8:15am, half of Cassie’s students were still missing. As the new arrivals uneasily made their way to the pegs to hang their backpacks, she entertained the others by persuading them to join her in a can-can line. Cassie moved with energy and joy, her long arms active and welcoming. The students’ faces tilted up to closely watch the strange new woman with the narrow glasses and the wide eyes.

Students were still filing in at 8:30am, but Cassie began the day promptly. “Alright friends, let’s have everyone join me at the carpet calmly, quietly, and with everyone under control.”

Most children followed straight away; one boy still clung to his mother. She leaned down to give him a final squeeze, and then another. Cassie’s co-teacher, a dark-skinned woman with a calm disposition named Kelly, inched closer to sit nearby, smiling. The boy shifted his grasp to a full-waist hug, one eye on Kelly. She modeled a deep breath for him by lifting her shoulders and letting out a long exhale.

The boy’s grip loosened, and the mom left without looking back; he cried weakly. As Cassie explained to the rest of the class how their morning meeting time would work, Kelly knelt in front of him, speaking quietly so only he could hear.

 * * *

 “In our class,” Ms. Creagh explained, “we’ll start every day here, on the carpet, in a circle. This will be a space where we greet each other, get to know each other, and build a bridge from wherever we’ve all been earlier in the morning to wherever we want to go together later in the day.”

Ms. Creagh sat on a chair at the base of a carpet, encircled by thirty nine-year-olds that formed a human frame for the rug’s colorful map of the United States. “Today we’ll start simply, by greeting each other and learning each other’s names.”

Ms. Creagh watched as her new students rose hesitantly to introduce themselves and shake the hand of someone else in the circle. Over the years she’d come to believe that the time they took each morning for these sorts of non-academic endeavors was more valuable than anything else she did as a teacher. It was, in her mind, the way school was supposed to be – a safe space in which children could learn about themselves and each other, and a ritualized place in which the anger and anxieties of the more troubled students could be surfaced and released.

Sitting across from her at a cluster of student desks, Emily Serber was not so sure. She’d always rolled her eyes at the touchy-feely stuff. She’d also been trained to focus on academic data and backwards planning. The mark of a good teacher was having strict expectations and clear consequences – and translating those into measurable progress in a student’s ability to learn. Not once in her training had she learned about the merits of building a sense of community in the classroom. She admired efficiency in herself and in others, and a morning meeting about a group of children’s non-academic thoughts and feelings was anything but efficient.

She’d heard the arguments – that the social curriculum is as important as the academic curriculum, and that how children learn is as important as what they learn. She’d also seen ways in which the ritualized morning time had paid off for some of their most troubled students over the past two years. Those were the students that drove her – the boys and girls who’d been ignored or forgotten or overlooked for too many years of their young lives. And it was thinking of their possible futures that made her wonder about the redemptive limits of learning to cooperate; what those children needed most to escape the cycle of poverty was to learn how to read.

Ms. Creagh asked for a volunteer to read the morning message to the class, while Ms. Serber scanned the faces in the room, searching for clues about the children that sat before them.

 * * *

As Laura Graber peered through the window of Carolla’s classroom to check in on the Elephants, she noticed no one was eating.

“Que comer!” Carolla repeated as a boy stuffed books under his shirt, while another leaned dangerously back in his chair next to a quiet girl sucking her thumb. The lunches sat largely untouched.

Laura knew Carolla could take care of herself; she was one of the school’s most experienced hires. Yet it was clear that two very different tones were emanating from the two Kindergarten classroom.

Over the summer, Laura had randomly divided Green Earth’s five-year-olds into two sections: the Aztecas and the Tainos. As a bilingual school, the plan was for the sections to alternate days between the Spanish and English classrooms. It was just the first day, and yet while the Aztecas had cruised along without much interruption in English, the Tainos had presented a cacophony of challenges in Spanish since the moment they arrived. Laura wondered if the relative lack of Spanish spoken in the homes of her families might explain the stark contrasts between the two rooms, or if it was something different about Cassie’s or Carolla’s approach. Time would tell.

“Para, mira y escucha,” Carolla sang, trying to transition the group into some form of cleanup. Bodies spun around her in a feral ballet.

At 3:30pm, Carolla opened the door of her classroom to signal the end of the day. She smiled weakly as the Zocalo grew loud with the voices of adults and children.

Laura stood at the top of the stairwell, greeting families in Spanish and English. She felt this was her most important job as executive director: providing a face for the parents, answering any and all questions, and freeing up Dora to focus on the needs of the faculty. The queue of families stretched all the way down the stairwell and out the front door. Laura marveled once again at the trust that had been placed in her.

It had been five years since the idea for Green Earth first surfaced in the minds of Laura and a few other parents. They all had children at the same Quaker preschool, and as they all started looking for schools, they realized that a lot of what they sought wasn’t out there. Laura was not an educator, and she didn’t know much about charters at the time, though what she knew was generally critical. She’d heard people say that they skimmed the best students, siphoned valuable public dollars away from the schools that needed them most, and provided a way for corporate entities to establish moneymaking ventures where they didn’t belong. Yet as she expanded her own research and investigated the uneven landscape of DC schools, the main thing she noticed was that the charter schools always seemed to be the places with the most vitality and diversity.

Then she saw the length of their waiting lists, and she realized the city could open as many as fifty new schools and still not meet the demand. For the first time, she started to imagine leaving her work at a non-profit and actually trying to start a school from scratch.

Laura and her partners – a core group of 12 people – met over potluck dinners and glasses of wine. They researched real schools and dreamed of ideal ones. And then, after a year and a half of hard work, they deployed a team member to deliver the 100-page application to the city’s authorizing body, the Public Charter School Board (PCSB) – only to learn that their team member had gotten stuck in traffic, and the application had arrived too late.

The news was devastating – and then they learned the PCSB decided it would not accept any new applications the following year. That meant that by the time the elementary school they’d spent the past two years dreaming about could actually receive a charter and open its doors, another two years would have to pass, which meant Laura’s children – and the children of all the other founding families – would all be too old to attend it.

Over another potluck dinner, the team asked itself: Do we believe in this model because it would be great for our kids, or are we trying to make the best possible school for all kids?

Laura held bits and pieces of that journey in her mind as she chatted with a grandmother lingering at the school’s front door, near the bowl of fruit children reached into as they left. “The origin of our vision is that kids learn best through play and through things that are relevant to their lives,” she explained. “And that’s why I think the charter model is so powerful; when you start with questions like ‘why not’ or what can we do,’ everything becomes possible.”

 * * *

As the last of their aftercare students ran out of the room to head for home, Ms. Serber turned to her co-teacher pointedly. “Is it just me, or are these kiddos not reading on a third grade level?”

Ms. Creagh looked up from the pile of papers and grunted her agreement. Before her was a colorful stack of “Hopes and Dreams for Third Grade” – an exercise they always did at the beginning of the year to learn about each child’s interests and outlook. A few of the notes seemed age-appropriate, like Francesca’s wish “to go to the Baltimore museum and see the dolfin show,” or Albert’s modest hopes to “play outside.”

Then there was Noemi’s aspirational goal, expressed in nearly unintelligible spelling: “I hope to lun to slpel wrs because a m ging to go te colejig.”  And there was Rodger, a fragile, thickly-bespectacled boy whose dream was merely unintelligible. “Matlattrusala is big. You like Matlatirusla.”

“It does seem like something got lost in translation,” Ms. Creagh added as she changed into her running shoes. “But let’s give it some time. We don’t need to reinvent ourselves yet.”

 * * *

By 5:00pm, the hallways of Green Earth were empty again except for the teachers and staff. Laura retreated to the office she shared with three other people to review some of the logistical issues that had proven harder than they’d expected, like organizing snack time or getting the children to and from the nearby park for recess. Cassie opened her laptop for the first time all day to send off a few emails to the parents of children who’d been especially good. Carolla did, too, and wondered how long she could delay going home before anyone started to wonder or worry.

Dora walked through the hallways to invite everyone to join her in Cassie’s room for an end-of-day celebration. She smiled as she spoke, reflecting an energy the teachers were unable to match.

“The only way to end our first day is with a party!” said Dora. “Everyone, please come and join me around the rug.”

The staff rose and arranged themselves in a circle.  Most of them wore Green Earth t-shirts; almost all of them were young women in their first or second year of teaching. Dora had worked in schools for more than a decade, and she knew how exhausting the first day could feel. Teaching had its own form of conditioning, and no form of summer study could prepare you for the grind of standing on your feet for seven hours without a single break.

“This is a party for people who ate lunch today,” she began. “Who gave someone a pause or a timeout today. Who taught someone something valuable. For anyone who hugged someone else. And this is a party to celebrate the ways we lived up to our mission.”

Dora looked around at the faces in the circle. “Thank you all for what you did to successfully launch this school. You were wonderful today. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

Numbers game

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Numbers game

Twice in the same week, I’ve been named one of the top education activists/tweeters in the U.S! What does this mean? Nothing, of course. But it still feels nice.

You can decide for yourself if there’s any merit to either list — the one where I’m #22, or the one where I’m #13. Either way, thank you for reading, checking back, retweeting, and spreading the word about all things transformational.

Reimagining Our Schools, NOW

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Reimagining Our Schools, NOW

It’s a presidential election season, which means we can all be sure of two things: conversations about education will take a backseat to more “pressing” issues like the economy and foreign policy, and Congress will once again do nothing to address our desperate need for a new federal education policy.

However, just because our elected officials can’t get the job done doesn’t mean the rest of us are powerless to be the change we wish to see in the world. In fact, local educators could do a lot to sidestep national policymakers by committing to do just three things this coming school year:

1.   Be Visionary – Almost every school in America has a mission statement to guide its short-term decisions. Almost no school in America has a vision statement to guide its long-term aspirations. Is it any wonder that educators feel overwhelmed by the day-to-day responsibilities of their work?

One of the defining characteristics of any transformational organization – whether it’s an elementary school or a Fortune 500 company – is an ability to manage the creative tension between a distant vision and an up-close focus. As educators, that means it’s essential we keep an eye on the daily progress of our students in subjects like reading and math. And it means articulating a long-range goal to which we aspire, and being mindful of which decisions will get us there – and which will take us off course.

As an example, consider Science Leadership Academy, a public high school in Philadelphia with a mission of “providing a rigorous, college-preparatory curriculum with a focus on science, technology, mathematics and entrepreneurship.” SLA’s mission clarifies the curricular focus of the school, but it tells us little about what shapes its philosophy of learning. For that, you need to consider its vision: to consistently ask and answer three questions – “How do we learn? What can we create? And what does it mean to lead?”

That extra layer of specificity is helpful not just to prospective parents, but also to SLA students, staff and administrators. And while educators are right to feel that the last ten years of federal education policy have narrowed their work to little more than basic-skills literacy and numeracy, there’s nothing preventing schools from taking the time to dream bigger.

2.   Be Specific About What Matters Most – Everyone agrees that in an ideal school, young people acquire the skills and habits to develop not just intellectually, but also socially and emotionally. According to our lawmakers, however, the mark of a successful school is still disproportionately based on reading and math scores. That’s ridiculous – but so are we if we refuse to take the time to explicitly identify which additional skills and habits we want students to practice and acquire.

This sort of work occurs informally in most schools, which hold generalized values for things like character, collaboration and empathy. Sometimes these words may appear on a wall;  other times they may get discussed during an advisory class. But there’s a big difference between implicitly valuing something in a person and explicitly committing to ensure that a person embodies those values.

The good news is that in a lot of schools, this sort of work has already begun. At the Project School in Indiana, educators work every day to nurture three sets of habits in their students: mind, heart and voice. And at the MC2 school in New Hampshire, students are assessed by their ability to master seventeen habits of lifelong learning – habits with specific rubrics and sub-skills that build a clear map for personal growth and evaluation.

Imagine if every school took the time to decide which skills and habits were most important to them, and then went the extra step by deciding how to measure what matters most?

3.   Be Comprehensive – It is both necessary and insufficient to craft a shared vision or identify which skills are most important for a young person’s overall learning and growth. What distinguishes transformational schools from the rest is their commitment to align everything they do – from student assessment to teacher evaluation to parent inclusion – around what they aspire to become.

This is not a code our elected lawmakers are likely to crack anytime soon. So let’s stop waiting. Let’s use the coming school year to take back our profession by raising it to a different standard of clarity and possibility. And let’s start holding ourselves accountable to a vision that actually reflects what we know is required to leave no child behind.

Hey Tom — When it Comes to Ed Reform, China is the Least of Our Worries

Posted on | by Sam

Tom Friedman has a new column about education in today’s New York Times in which he almost makes an important point about the state of K-12 schooling in America, and what we can do to improve it.

The thing Friedman gets right is the easy part — the fact that despite the willingness of American politicians to keep beating the xenophobic drums and lead the chant for everything to be “made in America,” American businesses are already operating in the flat world of globalization and cost efficiency. Consequently, Friedman writes, “the trend is that for more and more jobs, average is over.” In other words, if you aren’t uniquely skilled to succeed in the modern world, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be back looking for work.

Fair enough. But then Friedman shifts to talk about international scores on the PISA test, and America’s consistent mediocrity vis a vis the rest of the world. Then he quotes the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher, who asks us to “imagine, in a few years, [that] you could sign onto a Web site and see this is how my school compares with a similar school anywhere in the world.” According to Schleicher, parents could then “take this information to your local superintendent and ask: ‘Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland?’”

I’m sorry, what?

Don’t get me wrong — in the modern world of school choice, parents need more and better ways to compare schools, and the PISA is probably the best test out there for gauging the overall health of a nation’s educational quality (largely because its questions tend to be more open-ended and challenging than the U.S. versions, which are often straight multiple-choice). I’d even bet Schleicher envisions that when American parents learn, say, that Finland has a completely different approach to teacher recruitment and development, they will start demanding that we abandon our crisis response to the teaching shortage (i.e. Teach for America) and devise our own Marshall Plan for teaching.

I’d also love it if that happened. But it never will if our lead vehicle is little more than a web site that helps parents compare America’s PISA scores to China’s.

Why? Because America needs to have another conversation first — the one that actually clarifies what we now know about how people learn.

The good news is . . . we know a lot. More than ever before, we can assemble a picture of the ways our brains respond to and make sense of information. We can help people diagnose their individual strengths and weaknesses. And we can offer models of schooling that previous generations could only dream about — models in which children not only love going to school, but actually acquire relevant skills and understandings about themselves and the world.

The bad news is we aren’t having that conversation, and we aren’t elevating those stories. We talk about “achievement” as though it’s a proxy for “learning,” when in fact it’s a proxy for “3rd and 8th grade reading and math scores.” We propose incentive structures for adults that ignore what we know about how motivation works in human beings. And we propose comparing schools to other ones around the world before we actually understand what a healthy and high-functioning school really looks like — and requires.

What Schleicher envisions is right in spirit: a comparison platform that would empower parents, principals and teachers to demand something better. Until we deepen our collective capacity to imagine something bigger than the world of schooling the rest of us experienced, however, all a platform like that will do is improve our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

This is what student learning looks like

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on This is what student learning looks like

This movie was produced by five-year-olds as a culminating project for a study of butterflies and habitats. It’s worth noting that this happened at a first-year-school that had never done this sort of thing before. Just to underscore that this sort of thing is possible anywhere, as long as the community is committed to letting kids demonstrate what they’ve learned in engaging, creative ways.