The Sacred Profession

We will never solve our education crisis if we meander around the extremes of our party platforms. Rather, we must reward methods that yield success and abandon those that continue to fail, regardless of politics.

– Gabriel Ozuna, college sophomore at Yale University writing for Pass the Chalk

I’m am feeling pretty proud today because one of my former students has a measured, thoughtful and hyperlink-filled posting over at Teach For America’s blog “Pass the Chalk!” After last night’s Presidential town hall/cage fight it was refreshing to hear a call for solutions over partisanship from the next generation.

What I find interesting about education and politics is how everyone agrees reform is urgent and necessary yet there seems to be a lack of creativity in implementing solutions. Certainly NCLB, Race to the Top, and the Common Core represent bold strides into new territory however I also believe the time has come to correct the agressive swing towards frequent high-stakes testing and return to a measured, yet accountable, approach that includes the arts and humanities.

At the same time I am unsurprised by the lack of federal solutions to what I believe is a local problem. If education is the Civil Rights movement of our time we can hardly expect legislatures and bureaucrats to do the work of what must be a grassroots movement. Though it is one small contribution it feels pretty great to have had the privilege of teaching a young man who is already taking part in demanding more from his elected officials. I was once told “our students are the messages we send to a future we will not see.” With former students like Gabriel and his classmates, I am more than hopeful about seeing an education revolution well within my lifetime. Indeed, it is already underway.

Those of you who know me or who have been reading my blog will know I am an ardent and public enemy of Advanced Placement and so I was delighted to see the article “AP Classes Are A Scam” on The Atlantic website. The article’s author, John Tierney, claims AP classes are “one of the great frauds currently perpetrated on American high-school students.” I would only add that for minority students in under-served schools or areas of high poverty, AP classes become inadvertent tools used to perpetuate underachievement in the communities who need to succeed the most. Students with the highest academic performance are tracked out of mainstream classes and promised a college preparatory curriculum but instead receive a frustrating and ultimately ineffective education in random minutia. Add to this the additional problems brought on by a teacher who teaches her AP class by assigning lengthly readings from a college-level text and lecturing for 40 minutes or more every day and our struggling students are completely left behind and even less ready for the potential rigors of college. I know because this is how I rolled for 5 years – long enough for my students to graduate, spend a year or more in college, drop out and return to campus to ask me why I didn’t prepare them to be successful. Ummm . . . I was too busy teaching you to pass the AP exam?

AP classes are necessarily aligned to AP assessments which do not mirror college-level rigor, require broad and trivial fact memorization (a skill Wikipedia has made obsolete everywhere but on Jeopardy and 3G-less West Texas), and fail to build critical skills like expository writing based on research. Tierney does a nice job outlining the problems with AP courses in his article. Read the full article here and thanks to Jenny Corroy for bringing it to my attention.

What is your experience teaching or taking AP classes?

I was a senior in high school the year of the Columbine massacre and I remember thinking it would be an isolated incident that would never occur again. By the time I became a teacher, I realized I should at least think about what I would do if I found myself in a similar situation. Most of us have been trained on some sort of “Code Black” protocol where we lock the door, turn off the lights and get away from windows but yesterday on NPR I heard a story about an alternate approach – fighting back. The report centered around what is called “ALICE” training which stands for Altert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate.  ALICE trainers assert school shooters end up hitting more people because students and teachers hide and stay still. Instead, they recommend strategies like barricading the door, throwing a large number of items all at once at the attacker to distract from a rushing tackle, and running in zig-zags to avoid being shot.

It is hard to know what you would really do under in an actual situation but I believe it is worth some mental planning. Consider David Benke, the now famous math teacher in Colorado who tackled a gun man at his school in 2010. Benke thought about what he would do if a shooter ever entered his school and he said, “If something happens and there’s something that I can do about it, I want to try and do something about it.”

This is not a topic I have discussed at length with my fellow colleagues but I am interested to hear your thoughts. As teachers, what is our obligation here?

“[The school] I imagine has much more open, collaborative workspaces. I imagine the students come in, and they work with their mentors. Their mentors will be both students, possibly older students or students who have shown maturity, and the master teachers. They will set goals. Based on those goals that they are trying to achieve, they have a rough allocation of how they might want to be spending their time. One day a student might want to go deep on trigonometry. Then, he or she might spend two weeks researching some problem in biology or writing a short story.”

– Salman Khan, founder of the online video tutorial site Khan’s Academy

The consensus is building for a new kind of school model! Check out this interview with Salman Khan from The Smithsonian.

The case being argued in front of the Supreme Court today is the result of a lawsuit brought by a white student, Abigail Fisher, who was denied admission to the University of Texas in 2008. That same year a young black woman, Tedra Jacobs, with a similar academic record as Fisher was accepted. My sister-in-law Sarah Garland (who is sitting inside the Supreme Court right now listening to arguments!) has a new article posted over at The Atlantic that looks at Jacobs’ story. She shows how affirmative action can be tremendously helpful as well as explores reasons why it does not always serve as the equalizer it was designed to be (click here to read it).

No, that isn’t the US congressional building – it’s the Texas State Capitol (but Texas’ building is bigger, naturally)

This past year public schools in Texas were hit with the double whammy of a $5 billion dollar cut from education funds as well as the roll out of a new higher stakes testing system called STAAR. Under the new testing system students will be tested more frequently and for more subjects; additionally, results will be linked to promotion and graduation requirements. The exams were developed to align with new “College and Career” standards however from what I’ve seen these standards are a far cry from providing more conceptional learning rooted in critical thinking and strong literacy skills.

At the same time Texas has held off from applying for Race to the Top funds and only just submitted a waver for NCLB; however, many experts predict the waver will be denied due to it’s lack of compliance in terms of standards rigor and teacher evaluations. Add to this the fact Texas is one of only four states not adapting the Common Core Standards and it is sometimes easy to get a little down. Texas Tribune reporter Morgan Smith wrote a great article exploring the relationship between increased testing and decreased funding to teacher burnout (check it out here).

Because of the tight link between eduction and local control and funding Texans, and those living in other states, need to make sure we know how our representatives are voting on education. And so here’s a quick reminder for my fellow Texans: today is the last day to register to vote in Texas. Click here to get it done http://GottaRegister.com/