Another concern in the reshuffling and unshuffling of schools post-Floods is special education. When schools can pick and choose their students and are judged on test scores and attendance, why not limit the number of students who need the most resources? “Independent charter school” means the school needs its own social worker, special education teacher or teachers, etc., and when a school is not sharing or cannot share essential staff like that, someone or a group has to decide where the scant resources will go. LA schools are not well financed. Charter schools hypothetically can raise the extra money they need through grants, parents, fundraising, etc. But that brings us right back to the those-with-most v. those-with-less problem that has not been changed by the fracturing of the public school system.
Yes, the schools had deep problems. But the changes made were not based on the problems themselves. The reform wasn’t classroom-based but administration-based. We’ve all been told in a sense to keep our fingers crossed that changing who runs a school, from a school board to a private board or the state, will change what happens in the classroom. Sounds a little trickle-down-ish to me.
The Monday 11-9 article’s theme:
But even a family of educators struggled to navigate New Orleans’ dramatically altered school landscape.*
It’s hard to say that “the systems” is just fine and that it only fails because of parents’ laziness and lack of concern when two former teachers and a loving father with typical post-Flood issues struggle.
Last spring, [his aunt, Marlo Solomon, a former school teacher] scoured the Internet late at night, looking at the online Parents’ Guide to Public Schools, sending e-mail messages to anyone and everyone she could think of for advice.
Trajoan’s grandmother, Verdell Solomon, another retired school teacher and the family’s matriarch, reached out to longtime contacts about which schools might best care for him.
Meanwhile, Trajoan’s father, Thames Solomon, fought a legal battle in Texas, where he lived with Trajoan, trying to gain permission from a judge to bring Trajoan home to New Orleans in time for the start of school.
I know the system before was not good but is this really better? I thought the point of privatization and reform was to make good education available for more students and families? These people love this child. [My heart nearly broke when his aunt said,"He does not need to go through any more hurt."] Or is this part of the not-working-100%-yet that Ms. Roemer Shirley referred to in the intro article? So we just wait? On paper, when your kid isn‘t involved, it may make sense. But.
They liked Abramson Science & Technology Charter School, close to where Trajoan, an incoming sixth-grader, would live with his father and grandmother in eastern New Orleans. They thought an independently run charter school would be safer than a traditional one, and that a technology-rich curriculum would appeal to their computer-loving nephew.
The school required Trajoan’s birth certificate and other paperwork the aunts did not have, however. Abramson staff also wanted to interview potential families in person, an impossibility with the boy in Texas. “I think that’s how they sort out the good kids from the bad kids,” said his grandmother.
Hasan Sazci, the principal of Abramson, said the meeting is not an interview, but an opportunity for families to ask questions about the school. He said the school used to require only a one-page application form, but found that many families signed up, and then didn’t actually show up on the first day.
The it’s-not-an-interview doesn’t work here either. Parents can ask questions at a meeting or series of meetings. This principal admits that the process to apply was made more complex to assure students actually showed up—you’re less likely to bail if you’ve filled out paperwork, attended mandatory meetings, an interview or put down a deposit or “materials fee.” It’s like the same old schools but amplified—if you have the time, the cash, the contacts, the school you want is yours, but only If.
And Abramson is an open enrollment school, “no academic entrance requirements” (NO Parents’ Guide 1).
Reality also is that people apply to multiple schools in a competitive system, their first choices and backups and last resorts, just like you are supposed to do for college. Local private schools know how this works. The former magnet schools often worked like this—if you waited, your child could get a slot someone was sitting on waiting for an opening at ___. I can’t blame parents for multiple applications. Does making it more complex change that or change the family/parent applying?
After their first choice fell through, another choice seemed impossible to get into, and another just didn’t look like it would be good for Trajoan,
Verdell Solomon [Trajoan's grandmother...another retired school teacher and the family's matriarch] went back to her contacts, former colleagues who still worked in education. They told her several schools refused to take children with special needs. One suggested Craig Elementary, however, a Recovery District school with lackluster test scores but, they said, caring special education teachers.
Not sure he’s in or not, they wait then wait then stop waiting:
Thames Solomon crammed into Soul Train Fashions that day to buy his son khaki pants for his school uniform, joining hundreds of other parents and grandparents out for last-minute back-to-school shopping. But he held off on buying a colored shirt for Trajoan until the family heard from Craig.
Trajoan was simply excited to be back in New Orleans for good. He had missed snow-balls, Rally’s, Slidell, even the familiar sight of public housing buildings.
On Friday, with no word still, Solomon drove his son over to Craig’s temporary campus in eastern New Orleans. He needed an answer.
Craig officials seemed baffled about why the family hadn’t shown up on the first day, the result of a misunderstanding. Trajoan was in. He spent that first day separated from his classmates, but joined them on Monday.
And the plotting for Abramson next year begins:
The family began plotting to get him into Abramson for the fall of 2010.
“With his special education needs, Abramson just couldn’t take him” this year, Verdell Solomon said.
“They could have taken him,” replied a skeptical Thames Solomon. The school says it serves 21 students with special needs this year.
“You’ve got to start talking to them now for next year,” said his mother.
Side note: Carr writes that Abramson “says it serves 21 students with special needs this year.” Abramson’s 2008-2009 enrollment was 351 (NO Parents’ Guide 1).
All this complaining adds up to this: I think this being about education and futures and minors that the reform process and short-term effects could have and should have been taken into account, mitigated or even prevented. If the schools aren’t working for former educators and loving, engaged parents, what’s being offered? And to what end?
Yes, I have 3 more in the pipeline.
_______
*I link to the online version but am reading and commenting on the print version, which may have slight present or future variations.
“A family searches for a nurturing environment for their son.” Sarah Carr. (New Orleans) Times-Picayune, 11/9/2009. Web.
New Orleans Parent Organizing Network. The New Orleans Parents’ Guide to Public Schools, 3d ed. Oct. 2009. Web/PDF.
The more time you spend in school, the more you see the influence of business practices. … The corporate bible Good to Great sits on the bookshelf of nearly every principal, and a lot of Stephen Covey gets quoted at education conferences (98).
Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, published a monograph after learning that so many educators and other social service providers were relying on his book. In Good to Great and the Social Sectors: Why Business Thinking Is Not the Answer, he clarified that while the fundamentals of leadership success translate throughout fields, people like principals not only are measured by standards other than profit, they also are restricted in decision-making in ways no corporate executives are. In 2002, an ice cream company chief named Jamie Robert Vollmer explained how he learned to stop criticizing schools for unbusinesslike behavior. Once he paid attention, he said, he learned that “schools are unable to control the quality of their raw material, they are dependent upon the vagaries of politics for a reliable revenue stream, and they are constantly mauled by a howling horde of disparate, competing customer groups that would send the best CEO screaming into the night” (104-105).
Profit is easy and relatively simple. Education is harder, messy, imprecise, different every year or room or day. It’s like the difference between conception and parenthood.
______
Perlstein, Linda. Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. NY: Henry Holt, 2007.
When I was teaching, I thought that many of my students’ ideas about and impressions of teachers came from childhood and had that veneer of invisibility parenting has when you’re on the receiving end–clean clothes appear in drawers, cooked food put on the table, empty ice trays filled, glasses and plates suddenly clean and stacked in the cabinets. Students do not see class preparation, the number of books or articles you read, the notes you take and throw away just like The Girl rarely sees me totally sweating the details of motherhood. (Well, mostly rarely.) So my students were baffled, some even offended, when I was busy or couldn’t (or wouldn’t) grade their 2-weeks-late paper right away or they had to wait 2 weeks for me to fill out a recommendation form. They thought I was just dissing them, that I sat in my office looking out of my ivy-framed window arranging for maid service and ordering cases of champagne and Prada (or whatever the hell they talked about and carried) bags from Neiman Marcus. Their ideas of being a professor were insultingly simple-minded and student-obsessed, like children who cannot conceive of their parents as anything but parents and are shocked to find they like, for example, Justin Timberlake or Twinkies or crashed a few cars in their day. Parenting is hard. Teaching is also hard. And much of that hard work is done out of the presence of the recipients. If it looks like you’re working too hard, you lose face and effectiveness. Like some of the best writers look like they could never make a mistake, typo or bad sentence. We do not see the 500 discarded pages, only the 200-or-so that end up published. If it looks like you’re working or trying too hard, you’ve failed.
I heard Matt Roberts’ commentary on Morning Edition after dropping off The Girl. Like many new teacher recruits before and after him, he quit. His principal told him not to see it as a failure but it is hard, he says, for him not to. He wanted to be part of the change and recovery, he wanted to “make a difference,” he wanted to be part of the healing and rebuilding of local schools and, by extension, the lives of our (yes, our) children. But something didn’t click, couldn’t work long term. Matt was being too hard on himself by listing the on-the-ground, day-to-day problems of life here as “excuses,” even though it did make a nice frame for his commentary and gave a nice little chime at the end. Unremediated schools, blocks upon blocks of unremediated houses, rents and insurance rates that have doubled or tripled or more, what money the metro area has coming to it unfairly distributed or just held up in squabbling–these aren’t “excuses,” like you don’t feel like going to the store with your mother, but realities, harsh ones that do have negative effects and pretending they don’t or aren’t supposed to or attributing it all to personal failure is counterproductive enough to drive people mad (as in insanity), distortingly angry and/or out of the region entirely. We do no one a favor by asking for superhuman tolerance, work, faith, turning of cheeks or eyes. Matt says New Orleanians are “sick of…excuses.” We are sick in general. And looking around, there are blocks and blocks of reasons to be and remain so for quite some time.
graphic: nola.com/Times-Picayune
Teaching is hard. Only students, the recipients, think it’s easy. And in a “system” with this many challenges, even more, amazingly, than before The Floods, teaching is even harder. No amount of youthful or mid-career-change enthusiasm mutes that. And in challenging school systems (much less a “system” like this one), turnover is high. Like others, I am quite happy about the influx of the young and energetic, the dedicated and devoted but I do not believe that this influx will somehow be immune to turnover (and that turnover can take 3 days or 2-3 years) or will somehow solve it.
Concentrated poverty poured challenges on the Waverly community [a struggling Hartford, CT school] but spared Marlborough [a more successful suburban CT school]. Semisaints like Lois Luddy [3rd grade teacher at Waverly] and James Thompson [principal of Waverly] bore it brilliantly. More ordinary people stumbled, tripped, fell, and quit (Eaton 275).
We cannot assume or unwisely hope that this influx is full of semisaints. Some people will stumble, some sooner than others, some later than others, and some of those who stumble later will take some folks with them in one way or another. That’s not an excuse but a reality. You can prepare for reality but not excuses.
Also see:
Teacher Attrition: A Costly Loss to the Nation and to the States, August 2005 (PDF)
Among teachers who transferred schools, lack of planning time (65 percent), too heavy a workload (60 percent), problematic student behavior (53 percent), and a lack of influence over school policy (52 percent) were cited as common sources of dissatisfaction.Many teachers who see no hope for change leave the profession altogether. While it is true that teachers of all ages and in all kinds of schools leave the profession each year, it is also true that
- the rate of attrition is roughly 50 percent higher in poor schools than in wealthier ones;
- and teachers new to the profession are far more likely to leave than are their more experienced counterparts.
Teacher Turnover Leaves Void in US Schools, August 27, 2007
Some educators say it is the confluence of such retirements with the departure of disillusioned young teachers that is creating the challenge. In addition, higher salaries in the business world and more opportunities for women are drawing away from the field recruits who might in another era have proved to be talented teachers with strong academic backgrounds.
“The problem is not mainly with retirement,” said Thomas Carroll, the president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. “Our teacher preparation system can accommodate the retirement rate. The problem is that our schools are like a bucket with holes in the bottom, and we keep pouring in teachers.”
The commission has calculated that these days nearly a third of all new teachers leave the profession after just three years, and that after five years almost half are gone – a higher turnover rate than in the past.
Eaton, Susan. The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin. 2007.
I was “lucky” enough, much of my life, to go to school with rich/privileged kids, mostly white kids, in magnet schools and a just-a-block-from-the-Ivy-League college. It wasn’t given to me. I was no charity case or bottom of the bell curve admitted for flavoring. I was smart, quick, sharp, all that and more and without the “best” of preschools, tutors, trips to Europe, music lessons, dance classes, speech training, test-prep courses, etc. So I knew what The Girl was feeling at La Schmantzy Private School and in the car one day, I told her something like this about my experiences going to school with that category of kid: they were admitted, classified as “gifted” or “accelerated” or admitted to magnet schools or rigorous academic programs because they were prepped, tutored, pushed, crammed full from day one with as much as possible to emulate the upper echelon, the top 5 or so percent—typing lessons in 1st grade, senior year theses, occupational therapists for handwriting, college-application-padding multiple clubs and varsity teams and class trips—that I rightfully belonged to without being prepped beyond the gills. Like The Girl, I could read it once and get a B (and go read something else or wander library shelves and really learn some shit) without being tutored, without aiming for the highest A to have the highest A, without feeling a rabid bull of You’d Better breathing on me. I learned not because it was what I was told to do and expected to master in order to go to law/medical/graduate school and get a job as good as or better than my parents to maintain a lifestyle but because I loved it, because I wanted to know, because I cared, because I was insatiable. And that was the difference between me and them. I craved it. I sucked it up like air and never felt like I was trying to get through it to get to my life or fun or my new stuff. It was my food and sleep and nurture. I needed it, too, my ticket away from SMother and New Orleans and boredom and frustration and drug use just to have something to do with my mind. I deserved it. It wasn’t bought for me. I wasn’t preschooled and tested and tutored so I’d test high average (big fucking whoop) on the WPPSI and get into the pushy school with “high standards for our kids.”
And this is one of the fuels against gifted education—that it’s just for rich folks/the elite, for their kids to be separated and somehow made or seen as better and get more resources—and you end up with “magnet” schools that aren’t for the gifted but for those who can afford to, or can hustle up the resources or apply enough sheer willpower to, get their kids in one way or another, through neighborhood or private preschools or Sylvan or weekend classes or typing 35 wpm by age 8. Bright not-rich children are crowded out or never found and wither. Or apply their skills to “the streets.” “Gifted” is not the same as “academically prepared.” Gifted kids are not the dull automatons I went to Magnet High School or Expensive College with. Not all gifted kids get straight As. Some are so fucking bored they become dropouts. Though academically bright kids may be similar, there’s a huge range of giftedness and talent, some of which is not at all served in traditional classrooms and sometimes not even in so-called progressive classrooms.
I’m not (yet) calling for all-out class warfare. I want the idea that money buys intelligence squashed. Or at least seen for what it is—consumerism, not education.
End of part/rant 1.
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photo © daniel jaeger for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike
