Parents for Educating Texas

What do public school parents want?

"We're stuck in a mode where we're using old systems of understanding learning to try to understand these new forms, and part of the disjoint means that we're missing some really important and valuable data." ~ Douglas Thomas, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change

It's a confusing time to be a public school parent. Politicians and interest groups are under the impression that we're desperately looking to place blame, and are waving their hands at us like we're driving past a bad car accident, trying to get us to pull off the road and survey the damage. The distrct blames the state, the state blames the federal government, and the federal government, as it appears to me, blames the teachers. Most parents I know don't feel this way, we love (most of) our teachers and, at the end of the day, don't really care if it's charter schools, paying teachers more, top-down corporate-style reform, private money, or a combo of all the above that will do the trick. Let me say this again: most parents don't care which answer is correct, they just want their schools to improve. Maybe that's because deep down, we know that none of these quasi-"solutions" will do the trick. Deep down, parents who care already understand we know what will, but are afraid to say it. We are afraid to sound like we're asking too much; maybe we are.

We parents want to bring our public school kids into the 21st Century. What we desperately want is not a scapegoat, but public school 2.0, and this doesn't necessarily mean in the realm of technology - although it could certainly be a component. In order to create public school 2.0, we must have a tsunami of innovation in curriculum and instruction. I say tsunami because the innovation has to be vast and has to level a lot of what has been erected in the past. We are now living in a mix-all, mash-up society that blends information and knowledge better than a Cuisinart, and our kids can get this high-intensity blend of information, culture and entertainment anywhere - absolutely anywhere in the whole world - but inside a classroom. Our kids must have a curriculum that looks like the Common Core but feels like Facebook. The modes and methods used now in many of our classrooms are like using a record player to surf the internet; they no longer fit the times in which we live.

We want our kids to have fun. Scientific studies show that children do better in school when they get to have recess.  When I was a second-grader, the age my oldest son is now, I had two recesses a day, gym five days a week, and playtime before school. Due to the increased pressure put on children to succeed and move forward at all times, no matter what, so much of the social playtime that makes school fun has gone away. My son doesn't even eat lunch many days, because it cuts into his precious 15-minute recess time. As soon as school is out, he opens his lunch in the car and devours his wilted sandwich and carrots.

The system we've got has diabolically morphed from making sure all children get an equal opportunity to insisting all their outcomes be identical. We parents realize this is doing all children a grave disservice. The reformers' strong desire that all children have exactly the same outcomes each year of schooling, with no wiggle room, makes learning a terrific chore. Children are tracked from the moment they enter school, not having a chance to make mistakes, fail, and have the opportunity to try again. Teachers are required to teach the test, not what they know. If teachers were allowed to experiment with methods and subjects that will help the children achieve knowledge and fluency, perhaps outcomes would be different. Work being done at experimental schools like Habla: The Center for Language and Culture show that when teachers get to be creative and use their instincts, students learn - like the nine-year-old girl who could not read or write well in English or Spanish who was taught to read fluently in both by a teacher creative enough to teach the girl literacy through the her own artistic talent.

It is these three things - a tsunami of innovation in curriculum and instruction, built-in fun time, and a more creative environment for both teachers and students - that might have a shot at bringing us the public school 2.0 that we desperately need. But until we parents stand up for these very specific changes, the politicians and unions and reformers will continue the blame game. 

How can we make them stop?

We need to take a look at ourselves. We cannot have it both ways; for far too long, we've wanted high quality education in the public system, but are not willing to pay for it with our time, our effort, or our tax dollars. In order to bring the kind of thoughtful, highly complex instruction that must exist in public school 2.0, we must be willing to pay. Lisa Belkin of The New York Times points out that parental involvement is a key factor in successful schools, but instead of allowing our legislatures to punish parents who aren't involved enough, we parents need to think of ways to get more parents involved. Whether it's holding PTA meetings on Saturday morning instead of during the week, or successful PTAs mentoring weak/nonexistent PTAs, surely we can encourage parent involvement instead of punishing its lack. (I'd love to hear any thoughts or ideas on the subject, so let me know.)

In order to have the system we want, we must demand that schools be properly funded and class sizes stay small. Without the money for good teachers and a proper learning environment, even the best curriculum and innovation will lose its power. We must stand up to our legislatures and demand that they stop talking and start doing. 

You are a public school parent. What do you want? 

 

 

THE LANGUAGE POLICE and the lack of epic meaning for students, part II

My sons don't like a lot of contemporary children's stories - I can tell by their eyerolling they find the milquetoast conflicts and not-so-subtle happy resolutions of suburban animals dressed in American clothes both boring and patronizing (oh, look, two turtles in cardigans learning how to share!). The stories that they love are the big, messy, magical ones - their favorite stories are ones like Shrek! by William Steig (the real, original Shrek, not the watered-down, sugary movie version) and anything from the original, unabridged Grimm's Fairy Tales. These stories are not for the weak of heart; they involve bodily fluids, parents who don't like their children, magical high-stakes situations and conflicts, men and women with super powers and super mutations, half-animal-half-humans, even death. That is not to say that the stories are crude, or poorly executed, because they are not - they're beautiful, full of rich language and imagery that have my sons riveted. They beg me to read them over and over.

But, according to Diane Ravitch's 2003 book The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, none of these stories would make it into contemporary curriculum, nor would excerpts be featured on a standardized test or in a textbook. Why? They contain material that has become objectionable, for one reason or another, so they are replaced by the suburban animals having petty domestic conflicts. Cue eyerolls.

Did you watch the Jane McGonigal video from yesterday's post? Because ideas in her TED talk - mainly the concepts of an "epic win" and the journey with "epic meaning" found in video games - are central to today's topic, which concerns why we parents should be concerned with what our children are learning in school. Or, more directly, what they're not learning.

In the first chapters of The Language Police, the educational historian and former US Assistant Secretary of Education details explicitly how special interest groups from both the left and right seek to restrict and even censor language, ideas, historical events and scientific facts from tests and textbooks. Since she served on committees that created national tests during the '90s, and retrieved "bias and sensitivity" guidelines from all the major textbook publishers, we can be assured that she is not guessing or assuming; she copies these documents, word for word, directly into the book. In her deft analysis, what began as an honest attempt at trying to remove racist and stereotyping language from tests and textbooks has become a monster, eating up every kind of interesting piece of learning available to our young people. Politicians, along with the multi-billion dollar book publishing industry, have assumed complete control of the texts that our children read, and they are terrified of children reading material that is not already familiar to them, or contains an idea, an image, a location, or a word that might upset them. As Ravitch handily points out, this leaves out nearly every single piece of literature written before 1970.

The topics and language found objectionable by bias and sensitivity panels range from bizarre to hilarious. Excluded are the history of peanuts (because some children are allergic to peanuts), pioneer women and patchwork quilting (this is gender bias, since women should not be seen doing domestic tasks - even though it's a historical fact), a blind mountain climber (blind people should not be perceived as being different from anyone else); stories about mountains, deserts and beaches are forbidden (because a child may have never been to the mountains, a desert, or a beach), and so are all stories about owls (the reasons for this are too ridiculous to list), stories about class distinction in ancient Egypt (panels don't want to draw attention to income disparity, even in ancient times), and the list goes on and on. 

"But that is not all," Ravitch writes in chapter two, "The New Meaning of Bias." "Religious and political issues must be avoided. Reading passages must not contain even an "incidental reference" to anyone's religion. There must not be any mention of birthdays or religious holidays (including Thanksgiving), because some children do not have birthday parties and do not share the same religion." She continues. "There must be no reference in any test passage to evolution or the origins of the universe. Writers must avoid any mention of fossils or dinosaurs. Their very existence suggests the forbidden topic of evolution. However, it is acceptable to refer to 'animals of long ago' if there is no mention of how old they are and no suggestion that the existence of these animals implies evolution."

I find this ridiculous and alarming for many reasons. (In future posts we will talk about the Texas SBOE, and how they ignored the advice of prominent historians and scientists and rewrote our textbooks to include topics that are important to their religious and political convictions - we will cover how destructive this kind of political censorship is to our students and to democracy in general.) But, for now, let's just talk about it from our students' point of view. Could it be somehow connected that American children are doing poorly in school because they find nothing worth learning? If we take away dinosaurs, fairy tales, ancient Egypt, inspiring stories of people with disabilities doing impossible things, stories on mountains, deserts or beaches, stories with conflict and resolution, stories with magic and holidays and mean people, what do we have left?

Turtles in sweater vests arguing over a toy.

Here is where Jane McGonigal's "epic meaning" comes in. In video games, gamers are not asked to take out the trash or learn to share; they are asked no less than to save the world. It's risky, and full of danger and excitement, but to a gamer, it's worth it. This may be the exact same reason my sons love Grimm's Fairy Tales - Hansel and Gretel are small children, but they are fighting for their lives. By not allowing children to use their imaginations in any way, and by stripping bare anything controversial or interesting from stories, are our well-intentioned curriculum writers and book publishers annihilating everything that's interesting about life? Could this be a contributing factor to why each day 7,000 American kids decide to drop out of school? 

Go into your child's classroom and take a look at how many real books are there. You will see textbooks and "stories" - tracts or pamphlets written by the textbook company - but what about real books, untampered by committies? 

 

THE LANGUAGE POLICE and the lack of epic meaning for students, part I

 

I am now reading Diane Ravitch's book from 2003, The Language Police, about how interest groups from both left and right seek to censor what our kids are reading in the most insidious ways. (Language Police will be an upcoming Book Club pick, in case you're interested.) These groups seek to tease out pieces of great works of science, literature and history for different reasons, many of them purely political and baldly ideological - and we know plenty about this here in Texas, where the ideological argument over what goes into our science and history textbooks has made the national stage. Curriculum understanding and reform is a top priority here at PFET; Texas is highly influential when it comes to what's included in national textbooks due to our burgeoning student population.

But, before we get into why it's deplorable to allow appointed politicians to edit and, in some cases, create student curriculum, I want you to watch Jane McGonigal's TED Talk (above) on how video gaming can make a better world. Pay special attention to why she believes young people are so hooked on gaming. Although I am unsure whether or not I agree completely that video games could solve problems like hunger and climate change, she makes an excellent point about why kids faze out on modern education -how boring it is, how lacking in meaning for students.

If you have time, watch the entire video, then we'll discuss how The Language Police and the concept of a curriculum lacking in epic meaning correlate in tomorrow's post, part II.

 

Teacher as artist: "My only standard is for students to love biology."

This is the second of three posts on my weekend in Merida, Mexico, at the Habla Center of Language and Culture Forum, called Beauty in Failure: Experimentation and Risk in Education. I soaked in big ideas from some great minds in education. You can go back and read the first post here.

Part Two

It's been a long time since I spent an afternoon drawing ants; after lunch at the Forum I quickly choose to attend a workshop led by Dan Bisaccio, a former high school science teacher school reform guru Ted Sizer called "the best biology teacher in the United States." Bisaccio is now in the education department at Brown University, teaching teachers how to teach biology. While I am excited to hear what he has to say, I have never liked biology. I'm also sleepy and full from lunch - exactly, I suddenly realize, like I was in my sixth period freshman high school biology class. The slightly tangy, sweaty air and the dusty overhead projector (okay, it's a PowerPoint digitally projected onto a screen) take me right back there. I feel the need to resist drawing ants and put my head down on my desk.

Yet his first words wake me up: "My only standard is for students to love biology."

I am overwhelmed by cognitive dissonance - education "standards," as we think of them now, don't have love in them. Or do they?

I have never heard a teacher say this about any subject, especially any teacher of mine, especially so forthrightly, other than my father. My dad taught seventh and eighth grade social studies for forty years, and also loved history and maps so much he couldn't not share it with his students, and want them to get excited about it, too.

"Sometimes we don't realize the value of the visual arts in any subject," he continues. "You don't really know something until you can draw it. So, draw an ant." I pull out my pen and a scrap sheet of paper and stop. "Do you know what an ant looks like? What it really looks like?" When several of us hesitate to commit what we think might be an ant to paper, Bisaccio smiles. "It's okay to make mistakes right away. It's all about the doing. Doing and process are better than knowing." And with that, I scrawl three small dots connected to each other and know there are six legs somewhere - where do the legs go? - and decide to put a set on each dot. There, an ant.

Bisaccio has a fatherly way about him, and gleams and sparkles around the face when he begins talking about science. He's the kind of teacher who, when talking about a particularly exciting lesson plan, might rub his hands together the way evil geniuses do when they formulate a particularly awful revenge. Except his awful revenge is bringing high school students to love science. His energy - that sparkliness - is totally contagious. He says, "Follow your inquisitiveness and wonder. Don't judge your mistakes as final. If it's messy, then it's alive and well." This is the essence of learning, the essence of childhood itself! I think, yes, that's exactly what we know to be true. Yet are our kids getting that message?

I don't think so. From what I have observed in public schools, they're actually receiving the opposite message: there's no time to mess around, to experiment. Every step you take is final.

My mind then wanders to teachers' sparkliness, totally aware that I'm on unsteady footing. For a parent, teachers can be a prickly subject - who doesn't want their child to have a Dan Bisaccio every year of their school lives? Yet we know these teachers - the ones who make us learn in spite of ourselves, for the love of doing it - can be few and far between. While many exist in this category, there are many more that fall in the range between mediocre at best to downright unqualified. I am embarrassed to think these thoughts, even though they're true, in a room full of teachers.

Bisaccio seems to read my mind. "Do national standards for curriculum make education equitable while driving our best teachers away from teaching? How do we attract 'artists in teaching' to this profession who can engage kids in an era where we seem to attract/want teachers to measure insignificant but easy ways to measure student 'understandings'?"

By testing and teaching the test, year after year, by slowly narrowing all the interestingness - the messiness - out of the curriculum, are we driving away the best teachers, the ones who can't be bound by all the rules, the regulations, the 'standards'? Are our halls full of teachers who were once excited and full of ideas, now phoning it in to the tune of the latest testing? I've never thought about it like this before. Are we driving away the teachers who possess the skills of an artist, leaving our kids with nothing but technicians?

Dan Bisaccio clicks his mouse and a drawing of an ant appears on the screen. "Did anybody get it right? Look here, there are three parts: the head, the thorax, and the abdomen. And where do the legs go? Did anybody get it right? All three legs go right here, on the thorax!" He beams. "I use this exercise sometimes when kids first walk in the room. Getting them drawing right away gets them quiet and focused and ready to learn."

"Now let's learn about the Scientific Method." Bisaccio, red-faced, rubs his hands together and lets out a cackle. My post-lunch sleepiness has evaporated, and I am all ears, leaning forward, wanting to learn more.

In addition to the idea forum, Habla offers classes in Spanish, English, and teacher/educator development of all kinds. Photo courtesy of Habla website. 

 

Are the answers to school reform in Mexico?

In response to parent requests, this the first of three posts about my whirlwind three-day visit to the Habla school down in Merida, Mexico. I participated in an idea forum called Beauty in Failure: Experimentation and Risk in Education, where I was shown The Big Idea - that while we need to oppose budget cuts and save our programs, the question ‘why are our schools failing us?’ is much larger.

Part One

"If a nine-year-old is doodling pictures of birds during class, what do we see? Do we see the seeds of artistic genius, or do we see a child who is off-task? Possibility? Or punishment?" Kurt Wootton, co-founder of Habla: The Center for Language and Culture, makes a wide gesture with his hands. We are artists, journalists, teachers, educational leaders and parents, packed into a large conference room and seated in two concentric circles - almost as if The Big Idea was hanging right there in the air before us, and we wait at its feet.

 

"Flor has obvious artistic talent, but what I want to talk about is her literacy level. She struggles at reading and writing in both English and Spanish. How can we engage Flor in the classroom?" Wootton's specialty and interest is in using the arts to teach literacy; before moving to Mexico three years ago, he directed Brown University's ArtsLiteracy Project and integrated both performance and visual arts into reading programs throughout Providence's public schools.

He turns to Flor's birds. Because she should be doing her spelling words when she's doodling her beautiful birds, does this means she’s failing at the task at hand? Is she bored? What is failure, anyway? Is it possible to take the drawings of the birds – her scribbles, really - and learn from them? Can Flor learn literacy from her magical birds?

Wootton goes on to explain how Flor’s teacher takes Flor’s doodles of birds and turns them into a project for the whole classroom. They are blown up, and the children color them, then create characters based on their birds – and a performance arises out of these characters. With costumes. The children show the performance to their parents. They write colorful stories about their birds, incorporating vocabulary words they are working on in class. Flor’s birds, once doodles in the margins of her “real” assignment, are now the centerpiece of learning – the project is complex and involves critical layers of reading, writing, vocabulary usage, organization and observation (not to mention all the artwork). At the end of the project, Flor’s literacy improves dramatically: where she was once using one-word utterances in her writing, she is now attempting full sentences. They’re beautiful.

At this point, I have a fleeting thought: I remember walking by my oldest son’s kindergarten classroom two years ago and watching all the children, identically uniformed and quietly wiggling in their chairs, heads down, struggling to complete large stacks of black-and-white photocopied worksheets.

Draw an a... A, a, a... A is for apple. 

I look up at his PowerPoint, slides full of children holding up gorgeous pictures of colorful birds on sticks, holding up their books, filled with description and action.

After Wootton finishes speaking for a crisp fifteen minutes, he opens up to the room and asks questions meant to provoke conversation: How do we create space where kids can fail and try again, and they feel comfortable failing? How do we lead them on a search for meaning in their assignments? How do we help students develop an ethic of excellence?

These are big questions about education, much bigger than I was planning on thinking about when I started this blog. I started this blog to be a source for Texas parents confused about the public education debacle going on right now – where’s all the money going, why are we rewriting the textbooks, how do we organize, how do we save our teachers, this sort of thing. I still think each one of these items is a high priority, for sure. When I signed up to attend this conference, mostly looking for stories to sell to magazines, I really didn’t know what to expect. Now the room vibrates with the spirit of ideas.

Questions from the group begin with, “I wonder…?” Incomplete thoughts worthy of becoming instant aphorisms (or even better Tweets) float. Opinions from some of the most prominent education thinkers are phrased as jokes. I think of that Eleanor Roosevelt quote:

"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." 

These are some great minds; I’m just trying to keep up and not say something stupid.

The discussion breaks into smaller groups, where we hash out both the large and the small points - wanting to expose children to passionate people; a teacher should have a light touch, be a guide; students should know why they’re learning what they’re learning. And of course, the depth of the learning going on with Flor's birds. 

By the end of the first day of the Habla forum, I’m exhausted from so much high-energy thinking (and notetaking). But in my head, I’m sure that my accidental activism – I’m nothing more than an angry parent who started a blog, really – has exploded, turned inside out. It’s more than the budget, I keep thinking, as I speed back to my beautiful Spanish inn in the heart of Merida, it’s more than the budget. We have bigger issues to address in our public schools. And Habla is going to help me find out how.

 

In addition to the idea forum, Habla offers classes in Spanish, English, and teacher/educator development of all kinds. Photo courtesy of Habla website.  

  

The Beauty in Failure: Are we missing an opportunity?

I have never spent so much time looking at the upside of failure as I did this past weekend. I try not to think about failure too much. And in households and schools across this country, we avoid the 'f' word with a superstitious chill down the spine, as if merely uttering it will cause our child to turn inside out and move to Mars. In most school systems, they've eradicated the word completely, replaced it with a less stinging "unsatisfactory" or the agnostic "not meeting expectations." Yet are we hurting our children - not to mention teachers, principals and parents - in not allowing them and us to revel in - yes, revel in - and learn from their (and our) failures?

Failure and risk were the topics at this weekend's Habla Forum in Merida, Mexico, calledBeauty in Failure: Experimentation and Risk in Education, which I attended to get ideas and learn more about ways to improve our Texas public schools. I learned a lot. Habla: The Center for Language and Culture is an international school and progressive education center created by two educators, Kurt Wootton and Maria del Mar Patron Vasquez, and supported by a board of accomplished educators who also happen to be innovators in the field. The lively two-day talk took place in one wonderfully air-conditioned conference room, filled with artists, educators and parents all interested in how to make learning better. And riskier. Because, as I found out, a well-calculated risk can have amazing outcomes.

In these uncertain times, I know it's difficult to think about the positive - about ways to improve upon what we've been given, while budgets and favorite programs are being slashed, schools closed, and class sizes pushed to their limits. But are we willing to drag out the dreaded 'f' word - failure - if we are able to see that trying and failing is better than not trying at all? And that learning from these failures may bring us a glimpse of a more successful future?

What I took away from this weekend, from an activist parent perspective, is: It's about more than the budget. In order to truly improve education in Texas, we have to look beyond the dollar amount. That's not to say the state budget for funding education doesn't have what Alan Weeks has called a "structural deficit" and shouldn't be fixed: it most certainly should, and we should keep on pushing the state house until both the structural deficit and the short-term deficit are resolved so our children don't suffer. But after a weekend learning from some of the great minds in American progressive education, I think that it might be more than the budget that's the problem. Over the course of the next few weeks, I will go into greater detail about what I learned at the forum and how we might use some of these ideas to improve our schools.

Are you ready to fall on your face for our kids? I promise it will be worth it. Here are a few beautiful risks you can take today:

1. Join the 50, 500 and 5,000 campaign going on right now at Save Texas Schools. We need volunteers to create community events, write legislators and more while HB1 is still being negotiated. How about we create a Parents for Texas event here in Dallas? More on this later this week.

2. Join the PFET book club - get Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System today and gear up for the discussion of the first fifty pages, which has been moved to this coming Monday!

3. Get active at your child's school. Join the PTA, or talk to your child's teacher or principal about actions you can take right now.

4. Read this blog, participate, pass it along. I'd love to know what you're thinking. Do you have ideas about how to make schools better? Would you like to volunteer for an event? Please let me know if you'd like me to write on any specific topics - or if you'd like to write about specific topics - and I'll do my best to accommodate!

 

What's a Mom to do about public education? Or, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. And don't you forget it.

Late last evening, I received a phone call from a friend who had just left the Save Booker T. Washington School of the Performing Arts rally in downtown Dallas. I was working hard on my piece(s) regarding the low standards for Texas teachers that I've been promising, but I stopped.

"Hearing these kids talk about how much they love their school brought me to tears," said my friend, whose children are not quite school age. "I had no idea things were this bad."

Yes, they are that bad. What has been a slow downhill slide for public schooling in general has screeched to crisis mode with the looming multimillion dollar budget cuts that threaten our teachers and classroom sizes. My friend also said that someone at the rally mentioned that legislators had heard from lots of teachers but not from many parents (anecdotal but important information).

 At that point, I put down my notebook, and figured we'll get back to the teacher issues soon. They are important, I think, in understanding how we can help our schools get better - but, for now, they have to wait.

First, we need to talk. You and me.

You may not see yourself as an activist. Neither do I. I sit by myself in my small, sunny office (er, laundry room) and type on my little blog and hope that I can reach some other parents and get them interested in changing their schools - well, okay, changing the school, the school district, the State Board of Ed, and yes, the whole Texas culture and views toward education.

But that's too overwhelming. For now, let's just start with your school.

Or better yet, let's start with your child.

I read a startling article in the New York Times this morning about City University of New York's big problem - nearly 75% of incoming freshman must take remedial courses before they are ready for the actual college courses. At LaGuardia Community College in Queens, where 40% of math classes are remedial, faculty members feel they're nothing more than high school teachers. "'Most students have serious challenges remembering the basic rules of arithmetic,” Dr. Ianni said of his remedial math class. “The course is really a refresher, but they aren’t ready for a refresher. They need to learn how to learn.'”

I realize that that is New York, and this is Texas, but as a state ranked 49th in verbal SAT scores, can your imagination make the leap?

How about this one? Two days ago, the Texas State Legislature passed SB 79, a bill that had to clarify a previous bill prohibiting teachers from setting minimum grades on assignments - evidently teachers and administrators still wanted to be able to inflate students' grades so it appeared they weren't failing. The original bill, SB 2033, prohibited policies that disallowed teachers from scoring students below 50, 60 or sometimes 70%. Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott was quoted, when testifying before the Senate Nominations Committee, as saying "I recently asked teachers attending a conference how many were barred from giving low grades. I was stunned when half of the hands went up," he said.

And finally, I'd like you to take a look at this piece by first-year teacher Pamela Kripke,How Urban Public Schools Have It All Wrong, written about Marsh Middle School in Dallas ISD.

Your child needs you. How can we possibly expect to compete in a global economy when a majority of children graduate from high school not knowing how to read? Or do basic math? What are we doing?

You can save your school. You can save your child. If you get that done, and you want to move on to other schools, and other children, then do that. Your voice can be heard; mixed with mine, and hers, and his over here, we can begin to chip away at what may seem to be massive problems, but to keep from getting too disheartened and depressed, for now let's see them as a massive opportunity.

You may be sitting in your office or laundry room and saying to yourself, but, what do I do? Where do I start? How can I help? Well, I found this nifty little webpage for you. You can start here.

And you can start here:

Texas PTA

Keep Texas Smart - Save Texas Schools

Texas Tribune Public Ed page

Dallas Friends of Public Education

We've waited long enough; let's get together and change this, one child/school/school district/Board of Ed/culture at a time.