Testing Day, and No Love for the Charters

Last night I spoke before the Board of Education and the superintendent's cabinet. Once again, I brought a prepared musical presentation.

Here's the full testimony on YouTube.

And here are the lyrics:

Testing Day (To the tune of “Yesterday”)

Testing day….Common sense just seems so far away

But these bubble sheets don't have to stay. Why not cut down on testing day?

Racially…There is still such inequality

Inappropriate, developmentally, and not to mention, visually.

Why give in to lies? It destroys us, day by day

I say, something's wrong! I refuse, for testing day

Testing day. You've got such a tricky game to play. 

With the problems that you hide away. They're all because of testing day.

Stop the madness...testing day.

As a few parents of public school students, teachers of physical education, one disgruntled neighbor, and a leader of substitute teachers, spoke about various issues such as class size, staffing cuts, or school climate, a vocal and privileged majority spoke in favor of the expansion of a nearby charter school, from a single K-8 program housed in two buildings to an additional K-8 and a high school. It was nauseating to hear parents and teachers from this school, one after the other, talk about the wonder of small class sizes, team teaching, innovation, exciting ideas, extended hours of course...and then asking for more. 

Do they not understand that those who are getting this opportunity are doing so by taking away from the students who are not? Are they not understanding that the main reason that they have such a lovely student body there is that the school skims the "cream" off the top of the city student population? The lottery process is supposed to be fair, but the only people who apply to the lottery are those with the wherewithal to do so--the literacy, the time, the transportation. Also, in this school, students are guaranteed a spot if they have a sibling who attends. Particularly now as this school has gotten more popular, they end up with fewer spaces available for the newcomers.

Proponents of charters claim that charters are public schools, just like the ones in the school system. No. Charter schools are private schools funded with public money. They take public money but can pay teachers and staff whatever they choose. 

I received an emailed compliment from someone whose child attends that school, whom I've known for a few years. She enjoyed my testimony and my song. I haven't responded to her yet because I just don't want to say what's really on my mind--funny that you're sitting there supporting this thieving charter school when I know that you and most of the other parents in that room would be paying happily for private school if it didn't exist.

A Manufactured Obsession with Measuring

A parent approached me to tell me that at a school district community meeting a few weeks ago, she was impressed by both the passion and knowledge displayed by my badass mom and me. She asked how my son was doing in kindergarten and I told her that he loved it and was doing an excellent job. I worried that he would stagnate because he is ahead academically when he came in, but the way that his teacher works with him and encourages him to use the same strategies that she is teaching the class in order to solve more advanced problems (like sounding out multisyllable words or solving more complex math equations in his head) has led to massive growth. He is also doing well socially.

She asked me questions about teachers and how my son's teacher seemed to be so good at differentiating, where her kids were not having that experience, even with smaller class size at a private school. She is considering making a switch for her kids, to their neighborhood public school. We got to talking about measuring effective teaching and I said that I didn't stand behind any measurements of teachers that use test scores as the primary measure, and she agreed.

I then told her that my sister, in a different state, teaches in a very challenging school and isn't judged in the same way, that while test scores are examined, and evaluations do happen, they just don't make as big of a deal about it and they focus on building stability and keeping the environment positive. So this parent asks me "then how do they measure teacher effectiveness?"

I realized at that point that this language has been brought into our local education dialogue thanks to that horrible grant from the Gates Foundation and their "Empowering Effective Teachers" program. Thanks for nothing. Who is being empowered, and who is being disenfranchised? Administration is being empowered. Testing companies are being empowered. Pearson education has a LOT of power. Teachers are powerless. Teachers, forced to give more and more standardized tests, spend a greater percentage of their time telling students that they are unable to offer any assistance. Time spent testing is time not connecting. The question of how teacher effectiveness is measured has gotten so entrenched in our everyday education chat--because we were speaking from one education-minded parent to another, not teacher to teacher--that even a person who just finished telling me how excited she was about the concept that a public school teacher could better serve her children's needs has no problem questioning how another teacher in another public school is being measured. Even though she agreed that test scores do not tell the whole story, the concept of measuring effectiveness is so ingrained in the public mindset around here that she had no problem questioning another district that doesn't do it the same way.

My response regarding my sister and her effectiveness: "They just don't obsess over it like we do here." And yet, my sister gets excellent results both in the factors that can be measured numerically and in those that cannot. Without having an Office of Teacher Effectiveness.

"us" and "them"

I admit guilt.

My previous teaching positions were in a densely populated state where, rather than having the typical setup of cities, suburbs, and outlying rural areas, everything just seemed to run together. Additionally, every dinky little town had its own school district. Some even had K-6 or K-8 districts that fed into a high school that was its own district. There were still some large urban districts, but those were "over there" and much of the state assistance went to "those people" "over there." I did my job and while the school population where I taught was very racially and economically diverse and had many of the same problems as the urban schools, it still wasn't one.

Having attended private school in my younger years and then an urban magnet program for middle and high school, the idea of families being afforded more "choice" in their education sounded pretty good to me, because I didn't know any better. I should have taken my parents up on their threat to throw me in public school earlier, because I probably would have saved them years of therapy. But I digress.

I'm realizing exactly how much I shut myself off from "them" "over there" because I never bothered to visit any schools in those urban areas.

In another state I visited one of "those" schools and really got to know some of the students. That school has since closed, the city is pretty much bankrupt, and I'm sure that school has since been reopened as a charter school. But the kids I knew, who are now adults, were real kids who worked hard, and their teachers were real teachers, who cared about the students and did the best they could for them.

My point is that there's a lot of talk about school choice and about families being able to choose a school and be "rescued" from their neighborhood school. But when school systems take kids out, or drive them out, or give in too much to the push for "choice,"  there is no mention of the students who are left. No thought given to the kids who are left without a school, and no special care taken to incorporate them into a new school community if their school does close.

I've even been guilty of saying "well yeah, we're an urban district, but we aren't THAT bad." Forgetting entirely about the teachers who work incredibly hard, who received the same training as those teachers in the sparkly zip codes but aren't getting the same results due to factors beyond their control. Maybe trading one set of problems for another--plenty of kids in sparkly zip codes don't respect their teachers because their parents make five times as much money, while plenty of kids in poorer schools have been torn down so much that it is difficult for them to respect anyone or anything.

Now that I'm committed thoroughly to the fight for public education in my city, and across the nation I have a message to yell into my megaphone that I wish I had learned earlier, because now I feel like a jerk, and I apologize.

THERE IS NO "THEM" ANYMORE. There's just us.

I don't fight corrupt education "reform" just for the sake of my own children's school experience. That would be terrifically short-sighted. I fight for their friends, especially the one whose parents aren't able to fight. I don't attend meeting upon meeting just because I like to complain. I don't like to complain--I like people to do what they're supposed to do and not to take advice from idiots and then I don't have to complain.

I am truly sorry for not having understood this all in my early years of teaching and adulthood in general. By all accounts it wasn't even this bad before 2010 or so, even though the NCLB years were pretty bad too.

As penance, I will continue to care about other people's children.