Downsizing North Ave: The First Step in the Right Direction

On March 11^th, many administrators and central office workers found confirmation of the rumors swirling through the North Ave halls – job cuts were coming and they would be large. Baltimore City Public Schools Chief Executive Officer, Andres Alonso announced that $110 million dollars would be cut from the central office budget, along with approximately 300 jobs. This funding reform would then allow Dr. Alonso to redistribute more money directly to the schools, allowing principals to have increased autonomy and decision making power to distribute per pupil funds.

While the redistribution of the budget and deflation of the bloated North Ave bureaucracy represents steps in the right direction to reform our troubled schools – they are only the first of many necessary steps. To ensure meaningful reform is supported by the central office, North Ave must create a cohesive environment and staff that is able to effectively respond to the needs of the community, schools, teachers, and administrators.

To ensure change in our schools, staff members must be able to communicate and collaborate with each other. Currently, communication within the school system is blocked by a phone system where more than half of the listed phone numbers for employees are wrong. The organization of the building must also be completely overhauled so that employees can find each other through the maze of hallways. North Ave employees literally have created sets of directions to guide staff and visitors to their offices through unmarked doors and dead-end hallways. If an employee gets lost finding their way to that office, forget a helpful secretary pointing you in the right direction – they have no idea themselves or are downright offended to be interrupted from playing solitaire! Same goes for happening to dial one of the many wrong extensions – expect to be hung up on.

Organizing a building and phone system so that employees can actually work together may seem like simple and “duh” suggestions, but they lay the foundation for more meaningful reform to occur. The next necessary step would be basic training on customer service and how to appropriately handle community and parent inquires, but that issue will have to wait for another day.

Dr. Alonso, City Schools CEO, presented the 2009 budget and his Fair Student Funding proposal at a school board meeting last month that outlined how $40 million will be redistributed from North Ave’s Central Office to the schools. The goal is to give principals more autonomy in how money is spent and how students are supported in their individual school therefore holding principals accountable for the progress made by students. This plan includes cutting over 300 full time jobs from North Ave. and working to concentrate the resources where the kids are: in the school buildings.

In an article written on March, 14th in the Baltimore Times, Baltimore City Schools to shift millions of dollars from Central Office to classrooms, Dr. Alonso says, “After I heard there was not an afterschool program or an arts program in the schools, I felt that it needed to change. And it could not change by somebody here (in the Central Office) making decisions-but from the perspective of the resources in the schools and people in the schools making decisions about what is best for students.”

I could not agree with Dr. Alonso’s statement more. I spent about an hour talking to a group of students yesterday about why they repeatedly said their high school wasn’t a “real high school.” The bottom line: everyone must do the same thing, take the same classes and there is very little opportunity for engaging in activities, classes or clubs that really interest an individual student. One of my girls is very interested in studying music, especially singing, but our high school does not offer music classes, band, orchestra or chorus. Another one of my students pointed out that there are no AP classes for students to take advantage of to prepare for college. High school is the time when students are supposed to be exploring a variety of disciplines, classes and activities in preparation for choosing a college major or general course of study for their post-secondary education. If we are not offering these options to our students, how will our students know what career path to choose? How will they get excited about going to college to study their passion if they don’t have an opportunity to develop a passion?

I am excited that principals are being given the opportunity to address the unique issues that inhibit the students in their school from achieving. After school programs, tutors, arts programs, educational trips, sports, AP programs and curriculum resources are just some of the things that money can be used for based on exactly what that population of students needs and wants. I am also excited that principals must thoroughly prepare a budget, including having a public conversation with their school communities, before submitting their proposal. It is important to do the proper research before allocating funds based on what sounds like a good idea. I hope many of our students are able to benefit from this restructuring of the way funds are spent in Baltimore City.

Alonso and the Windmills

Once upon a time, there was an idealist, who was also a theorist, an educator, a believer, and perhaps even a “charmer,” who would one day grow up to be the CEO of the Baltimore City Public School System. Swept up on a stream of intellect, through the current of the American dream and guided by the immigrant experience, Dr. Andres Alonso’s came from Cuba to be a crusader. At lease that’s what I inferred from his character after having read the July 2006 New York Times article, “An Unfailing Belief in the Power of Teaching,” by David M. Herszenhorn. This nearly forgotten profile of Alonso describes him while overseeing curriculum instruction for New York City’s 1.1 million publicly enrolled students with a near Naderesque (or Joan of Arc) panache.

Unmarried and with an adopted foster child whom he once taught in his own classroom, Alonso holds an unwavering belief in the individual power of a teacher. There are no “at risk” children and poverty is no excuse for a failing school. Students are brought to school “as is,” the parental responsibility practically relinquished, because if they had better kids, they’d send them to school too. Ultimately one gets the sense from Alonso that teachers really are powerful entities and one should expect them to be nearly incandescent in their ability to transform students. How can you not be a teacher and not have a high expectations? Regardless of mitigating circumstances, we’re all believers, right man? Every student can go to Harvard, Alonso did.

I read this article with a deep fascination and almost with a twinge of repulsion. I don’t I think I’ll ever have the idealized view that Alonso has, that all students can be remedied by a saint-like teacher, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t occur daily in Baltimore City classrooms, nor does mean that I teach from the basement of a Machiavellian sentiment. I feel many teachers in BCPSS have a keener understanding over time of exactly how powerful we can be as individuals, and at the same time how helpless; that there are many varying shades of grey, from the teacher, to the public, parents, neighborhood blight, to the corner drug market that funds a child’s food supply, seasoned public servants can see how these factors enable or disable a child to learn and mature.

I sometimes worry that although I admire Alonso’s tireless spirit and his belief in the power of a school, I fear that he is blind to those that can’t see his beautiful, nearly pristine vision. And it’s not because they don’t want to, nor are the educators and concerned citizens unwilling, but rather because they simply can’t see a vision that has not manifested in the world that they live in. Sometimes I look at the smiling Alonso, astride a horse and ready for battle with petulant glee, as a crusader, and like many crusaders he may have lost the vision of reality in pursuit of the quest.

1 Day until MSA.

As I sit here posting to this blog, I recognize that tomorrow is the first day of the MSA. In Maryland and Baltimore City, that test is the be-all and end-all of school measurement. I've killed myself all year to help my students get set to be successful, and now there's nothing left for me to do but hope for the best. I think this year I'm even more nervous because I know what the test means, and I also know what it looks like and how my students did last year. If I can't crack the code this year, I just don't know what I'll do.

Urban education is all about results; the kids look so stressed out but in a good way, and even though I tell my students that the test is important to them and it shows how much they have learned, I also knows that it is more about my performance than theirs, or at least that is how I'll be judged. It's also very sad to boil down my experience with them to just one test, since I'm so proud of their daily progress, of their excellent BCRs, of their commitment to improving and to going on to high school.

Regardless, I'm proud of them and me, because it's been a long year and we have worked our tails off. So we'll see on that front.

I wanted to mention two important articles from my NCTE email blast. I love NCTE because they keep me updated on important national trends in education, from the interesting to the controversial. The first link is to an article from Minnesota about bussing inner-city students to suburban schools. It appears that students who went to suburban schools didn't do better on state scores. The problem with the data is that students haven't been adequately tracked for progress. Also, students who chose to bus were probably made to do so by involved or informed parents, which makes it difficult to really understand how student behaviors changed or didn't change because of the bussing. What it does say is that inner-city education isn't working, and systems everywhere are searching for answers, even if it means getting rid of urban education altogether.

http://www.startribune.com/local/16183752.html

The other link is about how Denver is adjusting test scores for minority and low-income students so that they can get into gifted programs. I think this shows just how important true equality is in public education, and it also shows what I have been saying in class--we have programs now that are good, but we have to make them more equitable for students. This doesn't mean that what we have isn't worth fixing, it's that we really need to look at more than just data when deciding on students, teachers, and schools. Quality can often hide behind numbers and irregularities.

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_8442882

The Newest Big Ol’ Band-Aid for the Drop Out Problem

For the past month or so there has been quite a buzz around BCPSS about the state’s proposal to raise the minimum age of attendance from 16 with parental consent to 18. When presenting this debate to my students, they immediately said, as I would imagine, most people would “Of course! We should ensure that all students get an education!” When looking at the numbers in a recent Baltimore Sun article, I was a bit astonished myself. In Maryland last year 10,294 students dropped out last year. That’s in one year! As a point of comparison, this is about a hundred people less than the borough, Freehold, that neighbored my town growing up. These numbers alone suggest that the drop out rate is an alarmingly serious problem. In my school alone, I have seen about a dozen of my own students leave school this year for one reason or another before receiving their degree, some of them seniors. It is devastating and seems senseless.
What would this look like? According to the February 11th article “Drop Out Rate Targeted”, would result in an increase of “21,000 students” and would require 1,000 more teachers. It would mean an incredible increase in spending as well. Educational spending however would offset other areas of government spending. So would this be a wise move?
My take—No, if it were only that simple! Drop-out rates are a symptom of the systemic problem. If the compulsory attendance age would have solved the issue of drop outs, this would likely have been put in place years ago. To further emphasize this point, one need only look at the definition of truant according to MSDE. Students who are identified as truant are those with more than 10 absences. This, quite unfortunately, describes a large body of students in the city school system. This is students up to the age 16. The vast majority of these students are not being brought to truancy court for their poor attendance. Raising the compulsory age to 18 would only increase the number of students who were in violation. In order to ensure students were in compliance with the new law would require an influx of resources that the state, in my opinion, is not willing or able to address. Furthermore, it does not seem that legal action is the best method to ensure that our kids get an education. It would however ensure that they were in a school building for at least a portion of the day some of the time. Schools would become “holding grounds” for students who have no interest in being at school but due to financial penalties are backed into a corner.
I strongly believe that all of Maryland’s children should be in school until 18 years of age at which time they have earned a high school diploma through hard work and meaningful academic and social interaction. Unfortunately, this is not the state of our schools. The government could be far more successful at their drop out prevention by looking at the root of drop out itself. Raising the age of compulsory attendance is a big old band-aid for a gaping wound.

It's Spring 2008 and we're back!

Welcome to the "2008 edition" of our blog "The Challenge to Care in Charm City."