Miss Bennett in the Bay

Apparently, someone besides my mother reads my blog.

Angela, of The Cornerstone Blog and The Cornerstone for Teachers, has featured one of my posts as one of the January 2009 Cornerstone Accolades. This post received the “Best Post on Teacher Accountability Award,” which makes me feel pretty darn good about myself. It’s nice to get the old “atta’ girl” every once in a while, especially since I pretty much only get that from myself, Scott, and Jess.

Here is my award:

Cornerstone Accolade

Which is fabulous, because not only are lol cats amazing, but also because I have won my first Major Award as an amateur blogger. How very exciting.

This week was one of those up and down kind of weeks- the kind where I simultaneously love my job and yet question why in the heck I want to keep doing it.

First, two really touching stories. Yesterday, we had International Day in my class. The kids were invited to bring in food from their culture, and they shared about what they brought and why it was special to them. While they ate the food, they colored a flag from a country different from their own. It was fabulous! I had about 6 parents come to help during the actual party, and they just loved it. They helped me pass out food, made sure all the kids were happy, and helped me clean up at the end. I was blown away by their generosity. There was so much food that we couldn’t possibly eat it all! I couldn’t believe how much food the kids stuffed into their tiny bodies. It was really cool how they were so respectful of each other and the new dishes they tried. The families who brought in food also gave us the recipes, which I will copy into a class cookbook for everyone. I know that this is the kind of thing the kids will remember when they look back on second grade, and this is the kind of thing that really makes me love teaching.

This week was report card week, which means we had short days to give us time to fill them out. I used those short days to have conferences with the families of my students who currently aren’t on track to meet their Big Goal at the end of the year. One of those students is A, who has actually made quite remarkable progress so far. The problem is that he started so far behind that he needs to work extremely hard the rest of the year to even be close to ready for third grade. Admittedly, he has moved from a completely non-function to a semi-functional state in my class. (For example, at the beginning of the year, his writing was nonsense. He didn’t know to write vowels in his words. So, the word like would be written lk. Now, his phonetic spelling at least includes vowels: lik, which is definitely a huge step in the right direction.) He came to his conference with his mom, and through the translator I explained that without some serious hard work on all three of our parts, A wouldn’t be ready for third grade. I told them I believed that A could do it, but that he would need to be in intervention for the rest of the year. The next day, after intervention, I walked A down the hall.

A: I’m scared to go to third grade!
Me: Why is that?
A: Because I’m not ready for it!
Me: You’re not ready for it yet. But, we’ve got plenty of time left here in second grade. And I promise you that I will not let you leave my classroom in June without being ready for third grade. Think of all the progress you’ve made so far! We just need to keep working hard.
A: Ok.

I could tell he was still feeling apprehensive, so I made sure to point out to him progress that he’s made in class that day. The last thing he needs is to lose his “I Can” right about now.

When I think about A and the other kids in my class like him, I feel inspired to work harder than I already am. I can’t let them down. A deserves to learn how to read. It isn’t his fault that he went to a crappy school last year. It isn’t his fault that nobody in his family can help him at home because nobody in his family can read in English. He didn’t ask to be put in this situation, and neither did the rest of them. That’s the kind of thinking that makes me want to teach forever.

But then, on the other hand, I’m stuck in a place that is mired in mediocrity. Whenever I start to feel like I’m really making a difference, something else happens that pushes me back. Whether it’s another ridiculous bureaucratic request from the district, a last-minute time-wasting edict from the principal, or the mountains of benchmark and unit tests I must give to my students, there is always something that prevents real, meaningful change. I have come to the conclusion that unless there is sweeping leadership change at all levels, a district that is as badly mismanaged as mine will never be a great school district. And that is the kind of thinking that makes me want to get the heck out of my classroom and try to attack this problem from another angle.

It has been an exhausting, crazy week. I worked all last weekend. I also realized yesterday that I have literally worked at home every single day since coming back from Colorado on January 3. So, I’m not working this weekend. My bag is in the closet. I’m taking some well-deserved freedom. I even saw a movie last night (gasp!).

On Tuesday, the teacher’s union called a mandatory general meeting, so school ended at 1:00 so we could all drive over to a massive church for this meeting. We were there to hear about the Governor’s proposed budget cuts. Many rumors have been flying around that we will have to shorten our school year by a week, we will have to give up our nice 20 students to 1 teacher ratio and go for something more like 30-to-one, and that we will lose all auxiliary programs. We learned that basically, any proposal that Governor Schwarzenegger has come up with so far would require changing either California Education Code (that mandates a certain number of instructional days per year) or state law (that mandates a 20-to-one ratio in K-2 classrooms.)

Ah. So, issue here is what it always is: the State Legislature hasn’t done anything yet. Now, I haven’t lived in California very long. I don’t know much about the political history of this state, but seriously folks, something has got to change. I come from a state where things get done. (They might be totally misguided and ultimately bad for the state, but at least they’re trying.) Here, all we ever hear about is how State Democrats and State Republicans aren’t able to compromise. Really? You like to sit around all day long and argue, while the state is going you-know-where in a hand basket? In the State of the State Address the governor proposed that the lawmakers stop getting paychecks for everyday that the budget is late. Now, there’s an idea. Light a fire under them!

Then, on Wednesday we received word that the district was going to implement a spending freeze on Friday, which means that all extra spending has to stop. What that really means is that no paid interventions can happen, as well as getting paid for any trainings or anything I might be going to. There was debate as to whether we could do intervention on a volunteer basis, particularly what would happen if some teachers decided to continue intervention for free and some decided to stop. That all ended up not mattering, though, because on Thursday night we got an email that said that “in light of additional research and clarification” paid interventions can continue beyond the spending freeze (but all other spending must stop.) I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what other research they were doing (maybe they researched the fact that they are PI 3 and face state action if scores don’t improve) but either way I’m just happy that I’m going to be paid for the extra 4 hours every week that I teach. That’s an extra $350 per month, which is pretty nice to have around. I would have ended up teaching those extra hours for free, because I feel a strong moral obligation to teach all my students how to read, but on the other hand, not being paid for work done at work is utterly ridiculous. Situations like these make me realize the importance of unions. To a teacher’s union, improving work conditions means getting paid a competitive salary. Teachers don’t get Christmas bonuses, they don’t get a substantial pay raise every year, and their salary already starts out significantly lower than jobs in other fields. For many teachers, teaching extra hours is one way to make up that deficit. For the district or state to take that money away due to mismanagement of funds is just criminal.

All the craziness of this week has given me the sense that no one is really in charge. I wish I could say that I’m not surprised by that, but I am. Here’s hoping that things can start changing on Inauguration Day!

I finally managed to get my hands on the summer issue of One Day, the Teach for America alumni magazine. (For some reason, they send it to my parents’ house, even though they have my current mailing address.) In this issue, alumni were asked how they would reinvent the profession of teaching (provided, of course, they ruled the world.) Whenever I think about teaching, I think about in three levels: job (as in, “Man, this job is ridiculous sometimes”), profession (as in, “Why are you still in this profession if you think ‘these kids’ can’t learn?”), and career (as in, “I really don’t know how you could sustain a career in teaching.”) One of the contributors to the article took these three levels and changed my thinking about them. This contributor is Kilian Betlach, a Bay Area ‘02 corps member whom I observed when I first joined TFA. He writes:

As it stands today, teaching is not a profession. It is a never-ending entry-level vocation, divorced from foundational understandings of training, accountability, and advancement. If we are to enact meaningful reform, we must rescue teaching from its status as vocation and volunteerism, and recast it as a profession of rigor, creativity, and unlimited impact.

It’s so true, isn’t it? Just about all I ever hear when I explain to people that I am a Teach for America teacher, that yes, I teach in the inner-city, yes, my students are low-income English learners, and yes, I did do this on purpose, is “Wow. That’s so respectable. I could never do that.” Oh, you mean, you wouldn’t want to take a huge pay cut and work longer hours? Why ever not? Personally, I love my job, and all I want to do is become a better teacher. But Kilian is right. As long as teaching is perceived as a vocation, a short-term choice, the profession will never be professional. He continues:

It is not uncommon to hear teachers dismiss their credentialing programs as useless and ineffective. Doctors, pilots, and plumbers are not expected, as teachers are, to learn their profession on the run, by trial and error, by searching for ideas on the internet, or by attending disparate workshops.

This is all too close to home. My own credentialing program was a huge waste of my time. The only thing worth while I got out of it was getting my preliminary credential in one year instead of two. Otherwise, I can’t even count the number of things I learned from it, because they amount to exactly nothing.

Also, can you imagine visiting a doctor who was still in the middle of their training, but not being mentored by some form of expert in the field? I’d imagine it would look something like this: “OH, wow, I have never seen that color in nature before. Hang on just a sec…” (Doctor pulls out blackberry to Google for possible causes of your strangley-colored rash.) “Hmm. Well, here. Try this. If it doesn’t work, I can email my mentor. They probably won’t get back to me for a few days, since they have to mentor about 30 other doctors as well. But, I’m sure your condition isn’t life-threatening. Don’t worry.”

Yeah, right. Can you say, “law suit?” What is it about the profession of teaching that allows this sort of thing to happen? I can’t even count all the times I’ve spent hours scouring the internet for how to teach this or that, only to discover that the lesson was too easy or too hard for my own students. An expert teacher would have known that the lesson wouldn’t have worked and adjusted accordingly. But because I (and all other new teachers, TFA or not) don’t have that experience, we spend days, weeks, months, or even years experimenting on group after group of kids before we finally get it right.

Not to say that new teachers can’t be effective- they totally can. The difference is really just that new teachers have to work much harder and longer to find those effective lessons. Kilian proposes a new way of training teachers, one based on the medical residency model:

These resident teachers would work for an academic year with an attending teacher, immediately participating in all professional responsibilities and eventually owning complete units of study. This more authentic model rescues student-teaching from unaccountable contexts of summer school and end-of-year laxness and provides more comprehensive and accurate training. Perhaps most importantly, residents learn firsthand from proven attendings and see effective teaching applied in the exact context in which they will work.

I think this may be similar to some student-teaching programs out there already. The ones I know of already are a semester long, and require the trainee to work closely with the master teacher. However, the main drawback is that it’s only a semester, which in my personal experience, was just about enough time for me to realize what I was doing wrong. I needed that second semester to get on track, to teach effectively, and to make significant gains with my students. Also, the student-teacher is not necessarily learning in a place that is even remotely like the school they are eventually hired. So, a teacher could student-teach in a high-income district where teachers are given freedom to write their own units of study and then be hired in a low-income district where teachers are required to follow a curriculum word-for-word. I know that good teaching is good teaching where ever you are, but seriously, shouldn’t the training for our profession be about more than just classroom basics? So often I hear old-school veteran teachers say, “Oh, well, as long as you get your classroom management down, you’ll be fine.” Actually, no, you won’t. You could have a class full of perfect angels who sit in scholar position silently all day long, but if you don’t know how to teach them how to read, you aren’t doing your job. Which brings us to Kilian’s next point:

We must institute evaluation measures that value inputs over outputs. We must develop merit pay and accountability systems that make improvement a professional imperative rather than an act of personal pride. We must invest site administration with the power to hire the teachers they want and fire those they don’t. Until then, we will continue to function less like a profession and more like rec-league T-ball, where everyone gets to swing but no one keeps score.

This profession needs to be held accountable to more than just NCLB. Personally, I think tenure should be done away with. Job security is nice and all, but in any other profession, if you don’t perform to standards, you’re fired. That’s it. I don’t care how long you’ve been in this career, and frankly, it shouldn’t matter. What should matter is only, did your students make the growth they needed to make? If they didn’t, then there needs to be a truly collaborative, non-judgmental model about how to get your students where they need to be. Plenty of charter schools I’ve seen out there are already doing it this way. So, why can’t public schools do the same thing?

I’m not saying that these changes will instantly close the achievement gap. There are plenty of other problems to be dealt with. But we’ve got to start somewhere, and I really think it should be making the profession of teaching actually professional.