Practical Theory

Taking a break from education talk for a much more important topic.

New Jakob Photos!

Seriously, it's pretty amazing to watch him grow up. There are a few of those photos where he looks really much older than 21 months.

And he's talking more and more every day. He's an amazing and wonderful little boy.

(When I have insomnia, I blog. And this seemed like as good a time as any to, as Christian suggests, put my philosophical cards on the table.)

This list could easily have ten times as long. I believe a lot of things about education, it seems. The ones that are here tonight are foremost in my mind these days. With that...

This I believe:

1. I believe that, in the end, if we were serious about reforming education in this country, we would start with three simple (but expensive) premises:
   
   1. No classes over 20 in K-8. No classes over 25 in 9-12.
      
   2. No schools over 600.
      
   3. Pay teachers a living wage.
   
   
   
2. I believe that we have the ability to make this happen in this country, but not the political will, and I believe .
   
   
3. I believe that if other professionals had to be "on" as much as we expect high school teachers to be, they'd all riot and demand a lot more money.
   
   
4. I believe that progressive education works for any number of reasons, but primarily because it dares all stakeholders to care about the work that they do every day. Teachers, students and administrators all can take ownership in the work they do. And I believe that when they do, really powerful stuff happens.
   
   
5. I believe that the average urban teaching contract makes this kind of teaching far harder than it has to be. And I believe that class size and teaching load are the two biggest impediments -- even bigger than salaries.
   
   
6. I believe that, in spite of that, we must find a way to build more progressive institutions in our cities. And I believe we can. But I also believe that we will need reforms beyond the school-based level if we want the movement to be sustainable in the long term.
   
   
7. I believe that teaching is a calling, but I believe our system too often takes advantage of those who believe that.
   
   
8. I believe that for us to be able to change our students' lives, we have to allow them to change our lives as well.
   
   
9. I believe that the first and most powerful rule in teaching is: Care. Care. Care. Care. Care. And when you don't know what else to do, care more.
   
   
10. I believe in my students. I believe in their ability. I believe in their creativity. I believe in their intelligence. I believe in their dedication to the things they believe in. I believe in their energy. I believe in their innocence, even when they try to act more worldly than they are. I believe in their insight. I believe in their ability to overcome obstacles in their lives that would make many of us want to give up. I believe in them.

I am not a Green Party member, nor do I plan to be any time soon, but Jim Horn draws our attention to the Green Party Education Platform. As he says, when will a major party candidate run on this?

Revitalize Public Education

• Equalize School Funding with Federal Revenue Sharing: Federal financing of all public education (instead of by regressive local property taxes) so that every school has the resources it needs to provide the highest quality education for every child. Use a simple formula based on student population with adjustments based on need to help bring up school quality and student performance in poor communities.
  
• Decentralized Administration: Cut through stifling centralized administration with site-based planning, policy-making, and management with participation by parents and teachers with release-time. Maintain central support staff for decentrally administered schools.
  
• Class Size Reduction: Federal legislation and financing to reduce student-teacher ratios in classrooms to 15 to 1 in all public schools.
  
• Preschool Programs: Federal legislation and financing for public schools to make available Head Start-type programs for pre-Kindergarten children starting at age 3.
  
• After School Programs: Federal legislation and financing to make available after-school recreational and educational programs for all school age children.
  
• Children's Health: Clinics in all schools to check eyes, teeth, and general health at all grade levels. Healthy food at breakfast, lunch, and after school programs. Birth control information at middle and high schools.
  
• Improve Teacher Training and Pay: Improve the quality of teachers with support for career-long training. On-the-jobs apprenticeships for teachers-in-training. Teacher pay scales comparable to other professionals with similar education and responsibilities.
  
• Multicultural Teaching Staffs: Strengthen affirmative action programs to recruit and support ethnic minorities to enter teaching at every level: teacher, aide, assistant, apprentice.
  
• Tuition-Free Higher Education: Federal legislation and financing for tuition free education at public universities and technical schools for everyone who wants it.
  
• Oppose the Privatization of Public Schools: We oppose all schemes for corporations to pursue private profits at the expense of public schools and schoolchildren.
  
  • No School Vouchers: No school vouchers from public budgets for private schools.
    
  • No For-Profit or Religious Charter Schools: Stop the diversion of public funds to for-profit corporations or religious organizations running charter schools with unaccountable administrations, uncertified teachers, and segregated student bodies.
    
  • No Commercialization: Stop turning school children into a captive market for commercial marketing interests with franchises that undermine democratic funding and accountability.
    
  • No High-Stakes Testing: Stop the curriculum takeover by commercial standardized test and test-prep corporations. Stop linking administrator and teacher pay and student graduation and retention to standardized test performance. Stop reducing education to answering multiple choice questions. Put teachers back in charge of ongoing, genuine assessment in the classroom
  
  
• Curriculum for a Multicultural Participatory Democracy: We support a democratic public school curriculum that fosters curiosity, critical thinking, and free expression, that explicitly promotes democratic and egalitarian anti-racist, anti-sexist, and multicultural values, that replaces Eurocentric with multicultural textbooks and other curriculum materials, that does not sort children into academic and non-academic tracks, and that is academically rigorous with high expectations for all children.
  
• Support Bilingual Education: Minority-language children with limited English proficiency must have instructional programs that build on their native language and culture while building English proficiency.
  

Why does it take a third part to advocate this? Why have we gotten to the point as a nation that the rejection of the commercialization of public education sounds radical and out of the mainstream -- to say nothing of the other parts of the platform?

This may seem like it comes out of nowhere, but it comes from a conversation I had with a friend tonight about what I think SLA can be.

This may sound strange, but I want SLA to be much more than a "good school." Honestly, I want it to be more than a "great school." There are a lot of good schools out there... schools that do a good job of educating their kids and preparing them for the world after high school.

That's not good enough.

Our school has the chance to be transformative -- for all involved. And really, that's what it has to be about. At the end of the day, beyond the test scores, beyond the grades -- schools like SLA (and Beacon before it) have the chance to fundamentally change the way students and teachers (and administrators) see themselves.

I believe that a lot of reason that's true is because of the pedagogy of these schools have, at their core, a dare to all involve -- take ownership of what you do... and know that we will ask that believe that what you do in your time with us will serve as a representation of who you are.

That's what portfolio education -- capstone education -- performance-based assessment does. It dares students to look at their work and say, "This represents who I am. I stand by this work as part of me." And it dares teachers to create curriculum that is part of who they are.

And then when you have a group of people -- teachers, administrators and students -- who dare to ask, "Why will this school be different because I walked its hallways?" then you have a place where all participants are changed by the experience. And with luck, that energy -- that spirit -- can spread... and we can dare to hope that the transformation can affect those outside our walls as well.

And we should settle for nothing else.

Being a good school isn't good enough. We have to be willing to change and be changed by the experience.

For reasons of confidentiality and such, I cannot post the list of interview questions that I'm sitting here revisiting for the 300th time... perhaps when the process is over, I can write more about it... (that's another reason I haven't been blogging lately, this has been consuming my thoughts of late.)

But what I can do is ask: What are the questions that you, as a founding principal of a small, progressive high school like SLA would want to ask your prospective founding faculty?

20. The author most closely associated with the theory of clinical supervision is
A Fielder
B Cogan
C Flanders
D Berliner
E Getzels

22. A trend that will probably affect public education is that
A parents will place a greater emphasis on literacy due to multinational competition
B a larger percentage of the school-age population will be made up of minority children
C education is becoming a federal responsibility
D there will be greater choice between public and private schools.
E economic restructuring will force more women back into education

These are two sample questions out of the Arco Preparation for the Praxis II Exam. Why do I know that? Because I have to take the test in a week and a half, and this 140 question multiple choice test means more -- according to the state of Pennsylvania -- than my experience, my ideas or my graduate coursework -- and it also means more than the opinions of the people in the School District of Philadelphia who saw fit to hire me to run SLA.

And these are the kinds of questions I'll face. I sat there doing the sample questions, and every reason I hate these tests for our students came flooding to the forefront of my mind. To the first question, I read a fair amount of education theory, and yet those names didn't ring any bells. Does this matter? Is it more important to know an author's name or is it more important that I understand the concept of clinical supervision as one tool for working with teachers? Apparently, it's about regurgitating the name. (The answer is, apparently, B. Knowing that, of course, did nothing to make me a better administrator.)

To the second question, I'd argue that NCLB and the federalization of the standards movement will "probably" affect public education pretty profoundly, and yet, according to the book, B is the better answer. To those of us teaching in the cities with our majority minority populations, that doesn't really affect us nearly as much as NCLB does, and had they asked me to write about one of those topics, I would have happily taken it on... but no, filling in the bubble sheet by reading the mind of a test-writer is a much better way to certify our administrators.

And why is all this important? Because in today's New York Times, Michael Winerip writes that FairTest, the test industry watchdog organization, is in serious financial distress.

This is bad news for all of us who worry about the increasing corporate influence in education, who worry about the test-makers becoming the curriculum writers, who worry about the damage that high-stakes tests are doing to our schools and our students.

The article is a must-read, and anyone who questions the need to have a watchdog organization to make sure that the test-makers don't overstate their influence need only read the comments of the testmakers:

Kurt Landgraf, the president of the testing service, which administers the SAT, wrote in an e-mail message: "Perhaps if they had been more attuned to the public's support for using tests to help teachers teach and students learn, then they might have had wider support."

To that I make this pledge: I pledge my support to FairTest with a donation that matches the amount of money I have spent on the Praxis Exam and all the test-prep books I have bought to figure out how to pass this crazy test.

If ETS gave away as much information as FairTest does, do you think they'd have the money to pay their CEO over $1,000,000 a year?

Support FairTest today -- fight for our rights as citizens to still have a say in the way we educate our children. (And our adults too...)

Call it the February blahs, but it seems like it's getting tough to sustain the revolution a bit these days... My friend Christian Long is threatening to go out in a blaze of posting glory over at think:lab, and many of the bloggers I read on a regular basis seem to have gotten a bit more quiet lately.

(Of course, Tim Fredrick then blew me away today with his post about reflective utterances in the portfolio process today... and it was his first post in a few weeks... maybe that's telling.)

For me, I found myself starting to resent the blogging process. I wanted to turn off for a bit because between feeling like I had to write and I had to read, I was just feeling overwhelmed. It helps that I was sick as a dog last week, but I also found that I was reading everything... blogs, EdWeek, EdLeadership, the Marshall Memo... and I was trying to process everything... and I was (and to some degree still am) starting to really grind my gears. And I found that it seemed like many of the blogs and articles were saying the same thing.

So what did I do? Well, my body gave out and pretty demanded that I didn't do much more than work and rest.

And the beautiful thing was that when I came back today, the blog was still here... my news aggregator was just as full, and my wife had recycled a few of the magazines that I hadn't gotten to yet.

And I think that this is important. We all are driving ourselves to write and write and write and read and read and read... but we also have to remember to do. I've got the first interviews for SLA coming up this week... we've got building meetings... and soon, I'll have teachers to co-plan with and our first parent meeting to host. And yes, blogging about all this stuff is still very important to me... and I'm also realizing that I can stop trying to write so many closed posts and get back to what I was doing in September which was writing more open ended posts that solicit responses.

And I'm also going to give myself the time to enjoy my son and my wife's company... to enjoy the hours after work as, every now and again, just after work hours. (I've loved the Olympics this past week and a half.)

And I'm going to do that in the hope that what I do write on here will be worth reading about... Because this does have to be sustainable. In the end, it moves us closer to the Open Source Schools... where the best ideas are shared, changed, remixed and changed.

Now we all need the time to make it happen.

I have a long post running around in my head about sustainability and small schools... but I'm just too tired to write it.



(Sorry I've been away... I'm coming out of the February blahs and will be writing more this week.)

Sunday night, my body reminded me of just how painfully human I am, as I got absolutely clobbered by the flu. I don't get sick all that often, so it's not a bad reminder during this planning year to take care of myself... and certainly a look at the last few months suggests that there hasn't been a ton of that going on.

So tonight, as I take a break from working on staffing issues, I'm enjoying a few little things.

First -- an added bonus of moving back to Philadelphia is that I can now watch Penn basketball on Comcast, and tonight my alma mater whooped Princeton 60-41. Any time Penn beats Princeton, it's a good day... to be able to watch it, all the sweeter.

Second -- we'd been fiddling around with my workspace in the new house. I have a little sitting room on the third floor, and we realized that a desk wasn't going to work. But hey, I use a laptop, who needs a desk? We played with a little coffee table and a low chair. Bad for the back. We moved my favorite comfy chair up here. Better, but typing on your lap all the time actually isn't that much fun. So Amazon.com had the answer... a laptop cart that could be pulled next to the chair. So now, really for the first time since I was living full-time in NYC, I have a comfortable work space at home. In fact, this is a lot more comfortable than any work space I've ever had. I'm so happy about it, that I put up a flickr photo of it. (Although, I already have moved the cart to the other side of the chair... comfier that way.)

And I'm blogging about this because I think it's important.... not that I now have a comfy work space... or that my alma mater won a game (although those are both cool), but because as we all blog and work and teach and try to change the world, it's easy to get caught up in all that... and it's far too easy to forget to enjoy ourselves in simple ways. Not every big idea happens as quickly as we'd like. Not every big battle ends up as a winner. And not every Quixotic adventure ends up well. (Hey, Don Quixote doesn't fare too well at the end, remember?)

So as we all write and teach and work and stay, as Jim Pederson says, busy, we also need to remember to step back every day and enjoy small victories and little joys. We have to remember to do the things that replentish us and bring us joy. With luck, that will give us the energy to tackle the bigger questions....

Tomorrow.

Shirley Grover, principal of the School of the Future, refers to herself as the "Chief Learner" of the school, and as I progress through this year in my own development and as I talk to prospective teachers for SLA, I'm realizing what a powerful notion that is. Much of blogging, for me, is reflective practice of thinking out loud about what I'm learning. And of course, since blogging tends to go hand-in-hand with reading blogs, I learn a ton from the people I read.

I just took the on-line test that goes with Now Discover Your Strengths and three of my top five strengths all dealt with learning. (My five, for the record, were "Strategic, Input, Learning, Ideation and Woo.") And it's funny, because I don't really think of myself as a student -- really more of an activist than an academic -- but it's true that I love ideas. And I love figuring out what I can learn from other people. I think it was what made me an effective teacher -- the kids really did feel that I enjoyed learning from them, and sharing the stuff I was constantly learning.

And as I talk to teachers who are applying for these founding positions, I find myself really being drawn into the conversations that center around how these professionals learn. Who do they read... what is their process... and how does they think that process will affect their students... their colleagues... the school?

I think if we have a building full of people, students and teachers, who can't wait to share what they are learning, we'll be well on the way to success.