Civil Rights don't end at the classroom

Rod Paige, the former United States Secretary of Education and a leader behind the No Child Left Behind Act, recently published a book called The Black-White Achievement Gap: Why Closing It Is the Greatest Civil Rights Issue of Our Time. Paige details the achievement gap we all see play out in our classroom—for example, that African-American students perform on average below 75% of their peers—and bemoans the corresponding social and economic disenfranchisement many students face. Drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, and crime all correspond to grave educational disparities. Paige is not alone in upholding the achievement gap as a key battleground in the fight for full civil rights, but his voice stands out for insisting that education alone will not close the gap.

Today in education, programs like Teach For America, leaders like Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee, the expansion of charters, the introduction of pay for performance, and other reform measures have greatly expanded the discussion around the achievement gap and introduced a series of accountability measures. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which called for high stakes testing and a series of rewards and punishments, has gotten a bad rap to say the least in the current reform game. Paige argues, however, that NCLB was a necessary step on the road towards accountability. It paved the way where before there was nothing, and today’s reforms reflect its revolutionary implications that all students should achieve.

Paige argues, however, that we need to address ALL the aspects of the achievement gap—not just the work of the classroom. Education, he says, is one of three legs of a stool. The other legs—family and community—are equally necessary to support historically underperforming students and schools. Without reform in those areas, the achievement gap will not close.

Paige does not shy from discussion of high standards across the board—superintendents, principals, and classroom teachers should all be held accountable to the utmost. We must acknowledge, however, that they are not alone in supporting the child and we must include the entire family in the process of reform. We need to invest in reading workshops for parents, tutoring, and community programs that will support the whole child and family. We need to engage and encourage leaders in the African-American community to call for reform. We need to empower parents with the skills and knowledge to demand more of schools. The ideas themselves may not be new, but I can’t help but believe that there is not enough application happening today. More and more attention is focused on teachers and administrators, but Paige is right in his assessment that teachers alone cannot combat all aspects of the current gap in student achievement.

Herein lies a tie to Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone. While Canada’s conveyer belt of services is too resource-intensive to be presently feasible, I think great opportunity lies in beginning to move towards a similar continuum of services in our school systems. Current reforms are aimed at improving schools, but we need to be equally serious about changing homes and changing communities.

100% of Students in a Chicago Public School Are College-Bound

In a Chicago Tribune article published on March 5^th entitled, “Every Urban Prep senior is college-bound”, Duaa Eldeib reports that Chicago’s only public all-male, all-African-American high school, Englewood Academy, fulfilled its mission of having 100% of its first senior class accepted to four-year colleges. What makes this accomplishment even more incredible is the fact that only 4 percent of those same students read at grade level as freshmen in high school.

To promote student achievement in lieu of the ills of poverty, crime, and gang violence that surrounds the immediate neighborhood where Englewood Academy resides, the school provides extended school days hours, double the number of English credits than the rest of city of Chicago requires, and personal college counselors for each student from day one of school. With fewer than 10 students of the entering class expelled or listed as drop outs, 107 seniors at Englewood Academy gained acceptance to a total of 72 different colleges and universities.

Although college acceptance was the immediate goal for each student, school officials still want to make sure that students actually attend and eventually graduate from college. To help students through this transition, the staff made sure that every student completed his/her Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). Moreover, school officials also hope to stay in touch with the college freshmen through the summer and into their first year of school.

While there is much to be celebrated in transforming this group of disadvantaged students into college-bound graduates, the question still remains as to whether these students will have the tools, both academically and financially, to graduate from college. I hope to revisit these students in four years and find out!

Obama Calls for Major Change in NCLB

In a New York Times article published on March 13th entitled, “Obama Calls for Major Change in Education Law”, Sam Dillon reports that the Obama administration is calling for a “broad” overhaul of the No Child Left Behind law that encouraged teachers to teach to tests and hue to a narrowed curriculum for their students. While advocating to retain requirements for annual reading and math tests that were passed down by No Child Left Behind Law, the administration would like to replace the pass-fail grading system with one that would measure a school’s performance by a combination of test scores, pupil attendance, graduation rates, and school climate. While the Federal government would call for more vigorous interventions in failing schools, it would also choose to lessen federal interference in well-run schools.

In the end, instead of requiring every child to reach proficiency in both math and reading, the Obama Administration is setting a new national target: that all students will graduate from high school college and career ready by 2020. By taking away the current focus on using standardized test scores to judge school performance, Arne Duncan and President Obama hope that teachers will no longer be concerned with having to dumb down the curriculum and focus instruction on test preparation in order to make Annual Yearly Progress (AYP).

While I can see the logic behind how the Obama Administration wishes to take away the severe pressures on schools for having to meet AYP each year, I am still not certain how the federal and state governments will be able to specify, objectively, how schools have achieved “college-readiness” for each student. In order to measure whether schools are graduating students who are “college ready”, it seems to me that there necessarily must be some kind of testing or data collecting involved in objectively assessing school performance. At first glance, its seems what the Obama administration is doing is giving another name, “college readiness”, to the current goal of leaving “no child left behind”, and in the end simply pushing back the date of completion from 2013 to 2020.

Keeping Good Teachers in the Classroom

Getting and keeping good teachers in the classroom is essential for improving the instruction that our students receive. However, without adequate support, great teachers are likely to head out the door of failing schools and off to better schools or more lucrative and less stressful careers.

In my own school I watched this past Friday as a fellow teacher and friend announced that she is leaving our school and our students in the middle of the school year. Like many of us in the school she is a new teacher, and like many of us, she often ends her day exhausted and frustrated from the many battles that she has to fight to get her students to learn.

This teacher joined the Baltimore City Teaching Residency this year in the hopes of showing low income high school students that math could be fun. She was not only knowledgeable in her content area, but she was also an innovative and passionate teacher who spent late hours and weekends at the school developing games and engaging lessons for her students. She had high behavioral and academic expectations for her students, and she accepted nothing less, which often put her at odds with the administration at our school when students inevitably tried to push the boundaries and expose any weaknesses in our school protocols.

Of course teaching in an urban school is challenging, to say the least, and new teachers quit all the time. However, this teacher had thirteen years of experience of working in Baltimore City schools, and so despite the fact that she had never been a teacher, she was by no means new to the urban education scene.

On Monday students will have a substitute teacher until our school finds a replacement. Several students have already expressed legitimate worry that they will not be able to do well on the HSAs without this teacher there to instruct them. How her loss will affect our students’ learning experience is yet to be seen, but I can’t imagine anything positive coming from this experience.

What I do know is that things did not have to end this way. She needed support and never received it. She constantly expressed that she didn't feel like she was challenging the students, and she was unsure of her teaching abilities, especially when students acted out and refused to do the work. She sent e-mails to the administration asking for help, and after calling off work several times in a course of 3 months, it was obvious that something was not right. Knowing that this teacher had great potential and truly loved working with students, I even reached out to the administration in the hopes that they could at least come into her classroom to see what was going on. Could things have been improved by shortening the amount of time she spent lecturing students? Maybe, starting off her class each day with positive praise could have helped her build a more positive relationship with the students. Whatever the issue was, nothing was done, and now she is gone, leaving our team and our students in a very hard place.

Of course she is not the only one who feels frustrated and ineffective, and I would be surprised to see any of the 9th grade teachers on my team return next year – myself included. I work in a brand new transformation school that sadly seems doomed for failure if things do not change fast. Although some of the problems of a being a new school are inevitable, it seems that there are many aspects of our school that have no excuse to be failing so miserably. In a school where there is a ratio of 1 teacher to every 15 students, how is it that students roam the halls, come out of uniform, and disrespect teachers without it ever being addressed. Teachers call homes, assign detentions, and write referrals, but there are no meaningful consequences for students, and no expectations set by the administration, and so the chaos continues.

Of course teaching isn’t for everyone, but how can such a small school have such big problems? Furthermore, could greater administrative support or mentoring have saved this struggling teacher?