Parents for Educating Texas

The Homework Revolt: Is homework good or bad for the youngest students?

My oldest son H., who just completed second grade, had homework every single school night of this past school year - he also has homework over winter break, and once a week over the summer vacation. Homework is a big part of his life, and we make sure that he always completes it. His teacher openly admits that she is mandated by the state to give nightly homework, otherwise she wouldn't; my son hates it.

He’s a child, and it’s fully understandable for him to dislike homework. But, as a parent, should I? A recent article in The New York Times indiciates that principals are hearing the cries of angry parents, like the ones portrayed in the documentary “Race to Nowhere,” and adjusting what can be grueling homework schedules, especially for the youngest students. School districts in New Jersey and Georgia are cutting way back on homework district-wide for elementary-aged children. 

How much homework is enough for a first or second grader? Should it be banned altogether? Kurt Wootton, Director of Habla: The Center for Language and Culture, a progressive school that teaches young children, says children should focus on play, not worksheets: "Already we ask our youngest children to be in a formal educational setting for several hours a day. Why extend this setting into the home? There is significant evidence that indicates the critical factor of play in the lives of young children. Rather than forcing children to sit at a desk working through worksheets, we need to encourage them to explore interests that are natural to them and help them to develop peer networks where they can set their own rules for play and for building imaginative worlds."

But is homework necessary to learning retention, a way for struggling students to revisit subjects covered during the school day? A 1989 study performed by Harris Cooper at the University of Missouri suggests a homework duality: the results suggest both postive and negative effects of homework. On the postive side, he lists "Better retention of factual knowledge" as well as "Better understanding." Negative aspects include "Loss of interest in academic material" and "Denial of access to leisure time and community activities." 

It is these negative aspects - access to leisure time for the already stressed-out Twenty-First Century family - that parents in the article stress as most important. According to the Times, "After Donna Cushlanis's son kept bursting into tears midway through his second-grade math problems, which one night took over an hour, she told him not to finish his homework." They quote Ms. Cushlanis as saying, "'I have no problem doing homework, but that just put us over the edge.'"

The homework that my son H. responds best to is the Reader Response Log, a weekly 15-question assignment used to make sure students understand what they've read (and for the assignment they can read anything they choose). The questions include "which character would you like to be?" and "which words were new to you?"  - questions which, if you are H. and are reading Harry Potter, can actually be fun to answer. Wootton points out that this is the way homework should be. "Homework, at all levels, needs to be intrinsically motivated -- a natural extension of experiential projects in the classroom. Work might be taken home because the students want to work further in revising or refining a particular project. Most homework we see takes the form of busy work which doesn't reinforce any skills at all. Rather it asks students to numbingly conform to the requirements of the system in order to make it through. If we seek a creative citizenry who can think critically and solve problems, we must move from homework as busy work to homework as a natural part of the learning process."

Where does homework for the very youngest students fit? Is it necessary, or should children be given some precious (and infrequent) time to play, goof around, lie on the couch? I clearly see both sides of the picture, both for stressed-out families, and for teachers.

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.

 

PFET Book Club: Would your favorite teacher be considered effective today?

Mrs. Cynthia Holtzman was my freshman US History teacher, and my favorite. Just like Ms. Ravitch's favorite teacher, Mrs. Ruby Ratliff, whom she describes at the top of chapter nine of The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Mrs. Holtzman was also quite gruff and demanding - we were expected to use proper grammar and syntax on every assignment and wrote only essays for tests (to be sure we grasped the depth of the material). She did not hand out very many As. She had lots of rules - no gum chewing, no looking out the window - and like Mrs. Ratliff, "did nothing for our self-esteem." To both women, "Accuracy mattered." Yet she was respected as one of our school's greatest teachers; I couldn't wait to get to Mrs. Holtzman's class. Instead of reading from the textbook or, like many of my other high school teachers, sitting at her desk while we read from the textbook - she would stand at the front of the class and teach us history like it was a long and complicated story, one with interesting characters and events that did not stand alone, but were forced upon humanity by a complex combination of reasons and causes, leading to "watershed moments." I remember the day I heard that term for the very first time, and how much it meant to me to understand something so powerful. American history had never felt so real, nor had I ever before understood how complicated and diverse every historic event actually was. Each morning, I would sit down in her class - not chewing gum, of course - and be mesmerized for 55 minutes.
Ravitch wonders, would her Mrs. Ratliff (or my Mrs. Holtzman) be considered an "effective" teacher by today's standards? How would your favorite teacher hold up? How would we measure what they taught us?
Her point has to do with how we are evaluating teachers in today's NCLB, corporate management-style school climate - one that equates teacher effectiveness with student performance. Like Ms. Ravitch, I am beginning to see that chaining student achievement to the teacher alone may not be good for anyone.
"Clearly she (Mrs. Ratliff) had multiple goals for her students, beyond teaching literature and grammar. She was also teaching about character and personal responsibility. These are not the sorts of things that appear on any standardized test." Ravitch worries that we have narrowed the scope of too many teachers, and they've become resentful. I have to say I agree with her. My own father - a public school teacher who ran into students around town constantly who exclaimed, "You were my favorite teacher!" - took early retirement because he resented the way teacher evaluations were changing. "If she (Mrs. Ratliff) had been evaluated by the grades she gave," Ravitch writes, "she would have been in deep trouble, because she did not award many A grades." My father was also "talked to" about giving too many failing grades. This drove him nuts, because he had the points in his grade book to prove that each student had earned her grade! This seems ludicrous, but we're doing the exact same thing to teachers by making them solely responsible for the constant improvement of student test scores.
This week's chapters - Choice, The Trouble with Accountability and What Would Mrs. Ratliff Do?, had me both alarmed and disappointed with present school reform. Are we missing the entire point of education? Ravitch puts it better than I: "We even forget to reflect on what we mean when we speak of a good education. Surely we have more in mind than just bare literacy and numeracy. And when we use the results of tests, with all their limitations, as a routine means to fire educators, hand out bonuses, and close schools, then we distort the purpose of schooling altogether."
There is so much to chew on in these three chapters, I became confused at some points - did you? I have no idea if the unions are good or bad (Southern states with weak or no unions have consistently performed the worst in the nation - is this the lack of unions or general lack of wealth? Or could it be the lack of unions is somehow tied to lack of prosperity? Unsure.). I don't know whether having unlimited choice to which school you can attend makes any difference in how students fare (the results of the studies are murky and seem to vary from state to state). Accountability-style testing and the practice of firing teachers based on what their students do seems utterly nonsensical - shouldn't teachers be judged by some sort of teacher standard instead?
All we know now is that what we have is not working. Our students are receiving a base, watered-down version of history, science, art, music, and only the most basic reading and math in order to ensure passage on state tests - or else. Teachers like Mrs. Ratliff or Mrs. Holtzman may not pass muster by today's standards, which require each teacher to show that their students are highly successful in order to keep their jobs - no matter how low the standards might be, or taking into account the effort put in by students - or else. Both union and non-union teachers feel they are under the gun, told by management-style reformers that they will comply with the new rules - or else. Entire school districts (including DISD, as reported by the Dallas Morning News, see p. 155) have encouraged cheating and shortcuts in order to inflate scores, because scores must constantly improve - or else.
If Mrs. Holtzman were here, she would point out that it's not just one reason causing the failure of the American school system, but many, just as slavery was not the only reason for the Civil War. What we need to identify is our own watershed moment - the critical turning point that will change our thinking and force us to act, to take our children into a deeper, richer, more successful future.
"If we fail to attract and retain teachers like Ruby Ratliff, will we produce a better-educated citizenry? Will our schools encourage the innovative thinkers who advance society? It's not likely."
What's our watershed moment going to be?

"Revolutions don't happen on Facebook; revolutions happen in the street."

If you are a mom-activist-blogger, this is one of those quotes that hits you like a medicine ball to the ribcage. Credit goes to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tina Rosenberg, a featured guest on Krys Boyd's amazing KERA program Think. Yesterday, as I drove through the drizzle into the preschool carpool line, she was on to discuss Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World, a book about how social groups can make dramatic changes in people's lives. (The talk was so inspiring, I wonder if Join the Club might be a future PFET Book Club pick.)

Oddly coincidentally (or not, depending on how you think), yesterday was also the day the Texas Senate Finance Committee released their budget proposal for the next biennium, adding $12 billion more to what the House had proposed a month ago. "We don't have to fire teachers," said Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa of McAllen, according to the Dallas Morning News. "We don't have to close down nursing homes."

In other words, thank you for all that you have done and will continue to do to save our schools. Yes, a smaller budget shortfall will impact us even still, but if the Senate budget passes, our situation will be much improved. The full Senate has not yet voted on the proposed budget, but House Appropriations Committee Chair Jim Pitts of Waxahachie has said that the Senate's proposed budget will be a tough sell in the House due to the large freshman class - many elected by strong tea party support. We are not out of the woods yet, but perhaps we could begin putting pressure on our House members to vote the Senate budget.

Don't stop here - let's keep going. If you haven't done so already, go up to your school and see if you can help out; volunteer to clean up that garden, stuff folders, organize an after-school program. Get to know the people who run your school. And let's continue our it's-more-than-the-budget conversation regarding school reform here - because no matter how many dollars our schools get, we're still falling off the map in reading and math and SAT scores, lower than almost all the other states. Of course, I want you to continue to read blogs like this one and tweet your findings and leave comments all over our alternative world out here in cyberland - just don't forget, once you've posted your likes and your comments and passed the best info along, to take action.

Don't forget to take it to the street. 

 

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.  

  

Radical compliance: Parent activism in a cynical age

"How do you balance the bureaucratic structures to break out of these roles? Pretend the naysayers don't exist." Arnold Aprill, Founding Director, Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education

One of the greatest challenges I believe we parents are up against in the fight to improve our public schools is that we view the failure of some students or some schools as a failure of the entire system. (Diane Ravitch chews this notion in the first chapter of her book - how public school reform fads have a long history in this country - we'll get to this on Monday.)  This belief, which is not entirely without merit, plays out in public on a regular basis: whichever party is in power is entirely responsible for the dismal state of the schools, the media blames all the problems on them, therefore no matter who we voted for we are up against the entire system and there is no way to surmount the mountain. It's impossible. And it's the system's fault.

This past weekend, at the Habla Forum Beauty in Failure: Experimentation and Risk in Education down in Merida, Mexico, I got a glimpse into some new (for me) and exciting insights on how to beat the system - that is, how to improve public education for all students - the most surprising of which was to join the system. Upon hearing this suggestion, made by CAPE Founding Director Arnold Aprill, my chest constricted and my nostrils flared - wait a minute, are you saying if you can't beat them, join them? Join the unending standardized testing, the budget stranglehold, the lack of all progressive thought concerning education? Just accept it and move on?

Not exactly. Radical compliance, as Aprill coined the term in what felt like an extemporaneous riff during a discussion on how to budge an ossified bureaucracy, is more like if you can't beat them, join them - and show them how to do it better than they ever imagined. Instantly, my chest muscles relaxed. I like the term radical compliance; is this the answer to everything? I found myself smiling and wondering why I was viewing Them (you know Them who are in charge of the public schools) and Us (parents) as embroiled in a battle. Doesn't seem healthy at all. And after spending the past few days mulling the idea of radical compliance, I think both parts - both theradical and the compliance - have profound implications for the involved public school parent.

To fully participate in radical compliance, though, there are some issues that the involved parent must address immediately (which is the whole idea of this blog, now that I think about it!). Let's take a look.

• Dump our tunnel vision. We know the failures of the system: the structural deficit in the budget, the money tied to the outcome of the standardized test, the glaring Texas achievement gap. But is our focus on the failures of the system actually preventing us from examining our own failures? What have we done as parents to enable the failure of our schools? I can think of a couple offhand, and they both have to do with our children and the fear of the dreaded 'f' word. (Thank you, Dr. Gail Burnaford, Professor of Education at Florida Atlantic University, for pointing all this out to me.)
• Decisions made closest to the children are the most important. This is bright and enthusiastic news, isn't it? All we need to do to make change is to look to our children, because the decisions that directly affect them are the ones that take top priority. For example, if the arts programs are being cut at my school, can the PTA raise money to keep the programs? Can the parents bring in a community partner to aid during the budget shortfall? We can't always beat the system, but we can affect change right under our noses. (Thanks again to Dr. Burnaford for this insight.)
• Bring in the community. Parents need to partner with their schools and look to all aspects of the community - from arts organizations to business leaders and city council members - for help. Whether that's cold hard cash, donations, or time spent with children doesn't matter, for it takes a village to educate a child, and the benefits of building a strong community around your school will last well beyond this budget biennium.

Now, how do we do it? How do we bring radical compliance to our schools, to our children? Ask yourself, How can we use the nothing they're giving us? How can we spread the word?

I'd love to hear from you! Click on the comments link below to let your voice be heard!

 

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.

 

Where do teachers come from?

Recently, I read a blog post by Adam Golub on Forbes.com that more than accurately described the three main archetypes into which our minds classify all teachers: the schoolmarm, the bumbling pedagogue or the lone hero. While he was using the types to talk about teachers' unions and the recent developments in Wisconsin, I found myself thinking about his assessment in a different way: I have an assumption, a certain kind of person in mind when I think the word "teacher" - my father, in fact, was a public school teacher for 40 years, and probably fits most clearly into the 'lone hero' type - but I really don't know much about where my school district's teachers are coming from. I don't know their credentials, how they got certified, where they were educated, or how much enrichment/extra classes they take along the way. Basically, I trust that they know what they are doing when it comes to my children.

I think we can all agree that today's teachers are in a very tough position: vilified in one breath, praised as nation's saviors in another, they are looked upon as both selfless martyrs who work tirelessly for low pay and appreciation and as worthless, lazy, tenured drones phoning it in until they can retire. As a friend said to me yesterday, in response to the battle over public ed across Texas right now, "I feel so sorry for the teachers. I wouldn't want to be a teacher. Would you? The pay is terrible, everyone blames you for everything, you can't teach what you want because of all the standardized tests, people expect you to solve all the kids' problems with no money... I mean, really, who takes this job?"

I thought this was an excellent question. Which - if any - archetype is the correct one? Are our teachers heroes, villains, drones, the bottom of the heap or the top banana? Or is it a mix of both? So I wanted to take this week to look at Texas teachers - for example, the ubiquitous billboards advertising how easy it is to become a teacher using quick, cheap alternative certification programs. I'd like to investigate teachers who are making it work despite the odds. And I'd like to take a look at charter school teachers in the state of Texas and how their lives differ from our teachers in the public schools.

In the movie Waiting for Superman, Davis Guggenheim takes a hard line against the teachers' unions as stumbling blocks that do little more than impede reform. He poses the unions as unwilling to change in any way how they currently do things in order to meet the 21st demands education requires. In his most persuasive example, former Washington, DC, school chancellor Michelle Rhee gives DC teachers two choices: they can continue the tenured pay negotiated under their contracts, or give up tenure and earn up to double their current salary based on merit pay. The unions were so offended, they wouldn't even bring the offer to a vote.

On the other end of the spectrum, I read cries from real teachers like Erika Saunders onEdutopia, who is so frustrated by the current system of teaching straight from a script only for testing purposes, she titles her post "I'm mad as **** and I'm not going to take it anymore!" (Read this one if you get the chance.)

We all know teachers who are doing their job incredibly well, who are engaging the kids and the results are wonderful. What are they doing so right? Why are they doing it? It's hard to imagine that the best teachers are doing it for the money – my dad always said teaching was a calling, not a job – but would pay incentives increase the talent pool?

What can we do as parents to help our teachers? How can we change the current system? This is, after all, the purpose of this blog. I want to hear from you - what do you want me to investigate? How do you like your childrens' teachers? Please join me this week as I take a look at the way we teach.