Save Our Schools weekend

In case you missed it, the same weekend Congress tortured us with an eleventh-hour default standoff, thousands of parents, teachers, and education leaders gathered for a call to action on educational policy. Organizers of the Save Our Schools weekend met over four days for events that included workshops, a congress, and a march of about 5000 people. We came to address not just an education crisis, but current government policy that shows a profound lack of judgment about and respect for the field of education.

No one argues that public schools are fine the way they are. What's being protested is how policies like "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top" are attracting privatization monies that systematically demonize teacher unions and shut out parent and teacher voices in tackling what should be our shared goal of improving schools. (Read about the co-location sagas playing out in New York City schools under mayoral control. Watch the newly released film "The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman" that is a response to the "Waiting for ‘Superman'" film that recently swept the country.) As David Cohen, a teacher from California, writes: "Would you force reforms on the military and ignore the opinions of career officers? Would you try to change practices in hospitals but ignore the input of nurses and doctors?" Taxpayers beware: educational policy must be smarter than this.

"Race Over the Cliff" threatens our public schools by using high-stakes testing to aim shrinking resources toward corporate charters, whose testing results are just as variable as those of public schools. Current reforms invite educational profiteering and such simplistic actions as replacing staff with cheaper, barely trained Teach for America young people. If what we want are highly qualified teachers, we won't get this by dismissing experienced teachers for new ones whose training consists of five-week crash courses before being placed in their first jobs. Would you want your children - especially if they had learning challenges - to serve as guinea pigs for well-meaning but highly inexperienced and unqualified teachers?

These reform examples are hypocritical "solutions" to problems that deserve deeper, more sustained kinds of work than that.

On that sweltering weekend in Washington, parents, teachers, and educational leaders came together to remind policy makers that quick-fix reforms are no substitute for quality change. If Americans want to get serious about improving schools, then we must recognize that there are no shortcuts. It takes time to build a quality teaching force and time to cultivate deep student learning. Let's work together to make all schools great and available to all.

To get a taste of the weekend, sample this link: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/07/save_our_schools_rocks_the_cap.html?cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS2

A version of this op-ed appeared in Rochester City Newspaper, August 23, 2011

Let’s Talk about Race, Class, Arts, and Equity

A sound adequate education means that children receive the tools they need to be productive members of society. Equitable education means that we work to minimize the ways some children are more disadvantaged than others. What are some tools that children need for the 21st century and how do those needs relate to growing school inequities?

The public expectation that students focus primarily on basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills has led most urban school districts to focus on improving test results in mathematics and English language arts. Rather than narrowing the gap between richer and poorer students however, these assessment goals actually increase inequities between them. Let’s look at why.

While no one would suggest we get rid of teaching standard basic skills to students, we can certainly argue that in today’s world, the means by which ideas are communicated reach far beyond text-based literacy and math proficiency. This has always been true as evidenced by works of art that have had great influence over history (think of Lange’s Migrant Mother, Kaufman’s Laramie Project, Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, Park’s American Gothic, D.C., Robbin’s Dead Man Walking, Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a few examples in visual, performing, and literary arts).

The ability to write persuasive argument may call for one set of skills, but the ability to create image-&-sound-rich media stories, advertisements, and powerful non-verbal or non-narrative statements calls for other skills at least as important as the first. An adequate education today requires a fourth ‘R’, the arts, where students receive grounding in the language of image, sound, gesture, space, and character. Such learning is neither fluff nor necessarily a career path, but becomes a tool for helping students develop voice beyond the text, beyond the test.

What’s happening in our schools? A new study released by the NEA shows that less than half of 18-year old high school graduates have received any arts education at all. Further data unpacking reveals a shocking inequity between races/cultural groups. Across the last 25 years, white children's access to arts education has remained steady at about 60% while Hispanic children have experienced a 40% decline, and African-American children have experienced a 49% decline. Only a fourth of these children receive arts in schools.

This is happening in Rochester right now, with questionable decisions being made about what will not be protected in a shrinking budget. While middle class families can always buy access to arts lessons privately, poor families cannot so the loss of arts teachers in public schools leads to widening gaps between what educational tools are accessible to the Haves and Have Nots. Future generations of children will be shaped by these shortsighted curricular decisions... are we willing to allow these inequities to grow in our community?  

An edited version of this essay appeared as a Speaking Out article in the April 10, 2011 issue of  Democrat and Chronicle.