education reform

Urban Schools And Slavery

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 1 Comment

Who knew they had many of the same racial ideals embedded in their systemic structure–keeping people in their appropriate place.

Now before you start getting mad at me, education and urban education are my passion and my daily work.  All of my teaching has happened in urban schools with a majority black population.  My kids are black.  But Jada Williams has said what I have been saying, so honestly, that it breaks my heart to be right.  I cried as I heard her speak of how “teachers actions speak volumes”

I am tired of the achievement gap being about the students.  I am tired of teachers who don’t teach kids.  I am tired of administrators who don’t know what teachers are doing in their classrooms.  I will always be a teacher at heart.  I believe teaching is the most noble and most important profession. I also know it is one of the hardest (it comes in a close second to parenting toddles and teenagers). I am disheartened when I hear the first year teachers I teach (TFA teachers) talk about how students can’t do x or y or z.  I ask “What gives you the right or authority to decide what a student can and cannot do?”

I am not looking to bash teachers.  I love and respect teachers.  I am tired of teachers (some not all–but too many) so clearly not doing their jobs (especially in urban schools). I am tired of administrators who allow teachers to not do their jobs.  Jada’s teacher was offended by her essay and made it impossible for Jada to stay at her school and at her next school. You can read the rest of the story here and here.  Go Read It (then come back…also, just a note–I do not share the same political views that the Frederick Douglass Foundation of NY does–but they have the story).

This story makes me sick. This story epitomizes everything that is wrong with our educational system and our society.  It also highlights that the issues are systemic.  Jada should be applauded for her voice and apologized to for 8 years of being failed by the adults in her schools.  She and every student in America deserves better.  Every. Student. Yes even the poor and minority ones.  EVERY. STUDENT.

It is the little things that we do that send the loudest messages. Messages our students internalize about us and themselves.   Jada (and generations of other minority students) has taken in the rhetoric that she and all black students are deemed “unteachable.”  That just floors me. That makes me sad.  Skin color has no link to IQ or academic potential. Kids are smart and intuitive.  Just listen to Jada read her essay–how can you argue that she can’t learn or is unteachable?  Kids who are called unteachable are usually called that by teachers who can’t and don’t teach.

Students will internalize whatever message gets sent.

Teachers who show movies every day send the message “I don’t think you deserve an education or my time.”  Administrators who allow students to slack off send the message “I don’t think you will amount to anything.”  Student who misbehave in class are sending the message “Your lessons are boring and you aren’t teaching or engaging me.”

Students want to learn.  Students want to be successful.  But students know when teachers don’t want them to be or even worse, don’t care if they are successful.  If you are a teacher–what message do you send to your students?  All of your students.  Think about it.  A teacher is the most important indicator of student success.  So, do everyone a favor–TEACH or get out.  Because Jada and every (especially minority) child in this country, mine included, deserve more.  They deserve everything.

 

Choice Matters

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / Leave a comment

I have long espoused that one of the problems I see with our current education system is that it operates as a one size fits all ideology.  This is also the problem with many teacher education programs.  One size fits all is a fallacy.  We all aren’t the same.  Our kids aren’t all the same.  If we were doing our job right–our test scores and students performance would fit perfectly on the bell-curve.  Well, guess what it doesn’t.  We have a huge proportion of our kids who are in the bottom–more than should be.  Will there always be kids at the bottom?  Yes.  Just as there will always be kids at the top and the rest happily spread out in the middle.

Our educational system is bottom heavy in terms performance on a bell-curve.  Especially in our urban schools.  But even in our suburban schools–the system we have doesn’t work for everyone.  We talk about choice and how charters are about choice–I agree they should be about choice and they should be about different.  Schools that try the same thing that other schools have failed at are not offering a choice.  They are offering the idea of a choice.

My kids are in private school.  That is a choice I made.  I looked long and hard for a school that fit my kids and fit what I believe is important as a parent and as an educator.  My kids school is small and we pay a lot of money for their education.  But if you look at per pupil expenditure–they don’t spend much more than the local urban district.  One thing that is different is that my kids school has a mission.  A clear mission and everyone in the building has bought into that mission.  The students are at the center of the mission.

At many public schools, there is no mission.  They are the defacto choice and don’t need a mission to help hold the school together.  I would argue that they do.  There is no reason why every district school has to look like the every other one.  Why can’t districts create schools the have a mission. A mission that guides instruction and choice.  A mission that puts students first.  A mission that parents can understand and use to determine which school to enroll their child.

We have to think outside of the box.  We need to think about how our education can be redesigned to serve our constantly changing population.  Just because I live on x street shouldn’t dictate where my kid goes to school. As a parent, I should get to look at all schools in my district and determine the best fit for my child.  I know that this would pose a problem with transportation, etc.  I get that–but then maybe we don’t need to offer transportation any more.  Maybe we need to think about transportation and other ways to do this effectively so that where someone lives doesn’t dictate the school they have to go to.

I know that in some districts Magnet schools were meant to do this–but many of them are only innovative on the surface and still teach and design coursework the same way as the district does.

This is why I support choice.  I think that when something gets too big the only way to manage it is to streamline and make everything uniform.  So each school and each class is taught the same thing in often the same way and at the same time.  This makes it easy for those who manage the system, but does nothing to develop learning in the staff nor the students.

School districts are too big.  Sure it’s nice to have a central office to handle all the paperwork, etc.  But is the trade off really worth it?  Does it make sense to create huge conglomerate districts. The larger something gets that harder it is to change and who loses out? The little guy.  The little guy in this case is the students.  They are the 99% in education.

This is why charter schools have caught on so greatly.  They are little “districts” and they give parents an option.  They give parents a choice of what type of school they want their kids to attend.  Larger districts could revision their schools and create the autonomy needed to allow for such free-thinking.  Allow each school to determine what is best based on the population who has chosen their school.

We need to not only think outside the box–we need to revision why we have a box in the first place.  Students don’t fit in any box I’ve seen.

Time For A Revolution

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 2 Comments

There has been a lot of attention given to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.  And I think it is great that we are finally standing up to the big corporations that have gotten us into the current economic crisis.  The companies that have decided that profit at the cost of the citizenry of the US is more important.  But one thing that has been ignored in the conversation, Education. Corporate America needs to be reformed, but so does Education.  I would argue that the real reform of our educational system is a more dire need.  A generation of students (if not more) have already lost their chance–have already lost their future.

Education is a huge part of our countries current issues.  We are graduating more students over all (even though my city currently only graduates 48% of students), but fewer of them can read, write and think critically.  Yet in the name of reform, we turn a blind eye.  I have written a lot about education.  This is certainly not all inclusive of everything I have written about education, but it is a big part of it.  I read this op-ed this morning and it resounded with the what Kelly (aka mochamomma) wrote and Nancy Letts wrote recently.  We know what is needed in education.  We know how important early childhood education is.  We know that students, especially young students learn best through curiosity and inquiry.  We know that students learn by teaching each other and that inquiry leads to increased critical thinking.  We know that writing is a tool for thinking and that students should be writing in every class and reading in every class.  We know that homework should be relevant and not just filler.  We know homework should be meaningful.  We know that standardized test play a role, but aren’t a complete measurement of what students know.  We know that problem solving and collaboration are two of the most important skills students need to be ready for college and the workforce, yet our schools focus on skill and drill activities that students do alone for the purpose of filling in a bubble on a test.

Many urban and under-performing schools purchase canned curriculum that tests students every six weeks and offers pacing guides that tell teachers where they need to be–taking the art out of teaching; taking the choice out of teaching.  I would have withered as a public school teacher under these circumstances.  I left the classroom after NCLB, but before the huge accountability push of testing.  I was a great teacher.  I was the kind of teacher I want my students to have.  I knew other great teachers, who knew their students, who knew what their students needed and how students learned.  I worked hard to make sure that my students were getting what they needed and were learning. I didn’t do test prep with my students and mine always scored highest on their standardized tests.  But I can’t take the credit for than anymore than I can take the blame.  A student’s performance on a standardized test is a snapshot of their schooling not one teachers classroom.  I also believe that if we are teaching the way we as trained teachers know we should, then test score are moot.  The problem has become that teachers have lost their autonomy.  Teachers have lost their ability to teach and are not often expected to just deliver the information and move students through the pacing guide decided for them from an outside corporation who doesn’t know the students are even the school.  This is a huge issue.

Teachers need to push back.  Teachers need to take back education.  Teachers need to take back the curriculum and make it theirs and their students’.

Parents need to demand funding for early childhood education.  Parents need to demand early childhood education that isn’t about worksheets and tests.  Parents need to demand that schools do better.  We need to demand that schools do better.  Our students deserve the best education possible.  I want to be able to send my kids to public school in my urban district and know they are getting the best education.  A quality education.  An education that will push them to grow and learn.  An education that will challenge them.  An education that demands that they think and problem solve.  An education that demands they investigate and ask questions.  Right now…I can only buy this type of education for my kids and that isn’t fair to the kids whose parents can’t pay.

We have a hierarchical educational system, as a teacher and educational researcher, I have always believed this.  We have schools that create and educate leaders and schools that create and educate workers.  That isn’t right.  We should have one system that educates everyone to their potential.

I think about an article I read about those is power who were poor students and got poor grades in school.  Yet they are leaders because of where they went to school, not because of what they learned.  Students who go to urban public schools shouldn’t be relegated to the second class.  Yet they are.  It’s wrong and it’s time we took a stand.

Why can’t Bill Gates and the other corporate philanthropists look at what works?  They could easily fund early childhood education for all with the money they are spending on charter schools and other reform initiatives that are really just about testing.   If they really wanted to make a difference they would invest money in colleges of education to allow for more teacher residency programs (programs the mirror the residency programs for doctors).  If they really wanted to make a difference they would ask educators what works.

It’s time for a revolution.  It’s time for change.  Our children deserve it.  Our children need it.

Only Looking At The Suface Leads To A Titanic Failure

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / Leave a comment

Just to warn you–this is a post about education.

The debate about public education is infuriating. Not just because the only voices being heard or those of big corporate money, but because the emphasis is on the “magic bullet,” the “quick fix,” “the answer.”  Education is not something that can be fixed over night–even though it appears that we have totally screwed it up in record time.  There has been a steady decline in the quality of public educations since the passage of NCLB and the flood gates were open to create a free-for-all for textbook and testing companies.

I work in the charter school sector and I see the same problems in this sector that plague our traditional public schools.  There is a great deal of talk, focus, energy and money being thrown at replication of successful models.  This idea of replication screams “corporate” to me.  It screams outputs.  It operates based on the idea that teachers, students and communities are interchangeable.  It looks only at the structure and not at the substance.  No one asks the why or how something works–just what is it that works and lets do that.

That doesn’t work.

I was listening to NPR this morning and on Radio Times they were having a discussion or debate around single-sex schools and classrooms.  And there are some who feel this is beneficial because girls learn different than boys.  But what about the research that supports heterogeneous is better than homogenous.  Yes, the catholic high schools are almost entirely single-sex schools and their students do well–often extremely well.  But what are we missing in this simplification of examining only structure and what we can see?  We miss the how it works and the why it works.  Having a good idea is not enough.  Trying to copy someone else’s success often does not work.    It’s not enough to know the results.  It’s not enough to know the structure or even the culture.  Just because an all girls high school works for some students doesn’t mean it works for all female students.

This is one of the problems with the scale of our educational system and our own countries lack of imagination and innovation.  There is innovation.  But most aren’t willing to take the risk.  Corporate philanthropists aren’t willing to fund innovation.  They want to fund something that has produced results, with little consideration to how those results are achieved.

It is much the same with the rhetoric around teacher training, etc.  We look at outputs.  We look at results with very little consideration as to how the results are achieved.  We look at number and not at what happens in the classroom.  This problem is evident when education reformers cannot list the qualities of a good teacher.  The qualities of a good teacher are as varied as teachers themselves.

There isn’t cookie cutter answer to this problem and as long as we keep looking for one, students lose.  We must stop looking at the surface–we can only see 10% that way.  We need to look under the surface at the other 90%–because that is what really matters.  Until we do that–we’ll keep crashing and sinking.

Rich Kids Get Taught, Poor Kids Get Tested

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 3 Comments

This idea has been rumbling around my head for years.  As I continue the preliminary work on my dissertation, mentor urban high school teachers and work with charter schools, I find this to be more and more true.  Testing has become the new “reform” movement in urban education.  And not just annual testing–but every 6 week testing.  As a researcher, I can appreciate the need/desire for data.  As a teacher, I appreciate the need for data.  It is the means by which we gauge how our students are doing.  But it has to be contextualized.  When we test just to test there is no context for the student and without context and prior knowledge, the test and its questions are meaningless.

Tests and assessments of where students are and how they are doing, should be formative and not standardized.  This isn’t to say that standardized tests don’t have a place at the table, but they should be the only guests invited.  Too often they are the only guests in urban schools, leaving our poor and too often minority kids being tested instead of taught.  This focus on testing also limits the type of education they are exposed to and leads to a curriculum that is grounded in test prep benchmarks and not grounded in what is good for kids.  There are so many reasons why this irritates me and one of them is that it prevents me from sending my kids to public schools in the city where I live.  There are no options available, charter or traditional, that do not have a central focus on testing and measuring, that I can send my kids to.  This isn’t to say that some of these schools whose central standard of evaluation is testing, do not offer a decent education for kids, but the level of education is dictated and restricted by the testing and doesn’t fit with my kids needs or my philosophy of education.

I hate that there aren’t public school options that mirror my own educational philosophy in my city.  The suburban schools are better on so many levels–because the tests are just part of what happens and most only use the state standardized test and that test doesn’t dictate content or experience.  I also am irritated that almost every new school that opens follows this testing model as though it is the only urban reform that works. It is the easiest urban reform, but not the only one.  I long for a new public school to open that actually thinks about how kids learn and not how to best test kids. If there was a public school option that actually put kids learning first and testing at the end of the line, I would stop paying $14k a year per kid for private school.

Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that students need to be assessed.  We must know where our students are strong and where they are weak, but there are many other ways to assess a student beyond a nationally normed standardized test.  My son is assessed regularly and both of his teachers can tell me at any time where he is excelling and where he is struggling and his school does not use standardized tests and doesn’t have textbooks–aside from Math starting in 5th grade.  The school produces National Merit Scholars (5 this year).  Yes the school is made up of middle-class and upper-middle class families.  But I argue that I want the exact same things for my kids that all parents want for their kids–a great education.  I want the same thing for my kids that I believe every kids deserves.

The education I have chosen for my kids is not for every child.  I think that is why choice is so important.  Sure as new schools open, they are giving parents a choice but not the level of choice that parents needs.  Some kids need more hands on learning, some kids need more freedom, some kids need strict structure.  We have to have choices, but choice for choice sake isn’t enough.  We need real choices.  We need philosophical choices.  We need pedagogical choices.  We need to work with parents to allow them to pick the best environment for their children.

We need a revolution in education lead by educators and parents.  Not by master marketers,  businessmen and politicians.  Choice must be part of it, but it has to be real choice that offers something different.  Something better.  Something that puts kids first.  We can argue that the good models are the restrictive, extended day charter schools that focus on testing.  But where is the something different to compare them too?  One size does not fit all and if this is the only road we are going to explore, we will end up exactly where we are now, wondering what the answer is and how we fix our educational system.

Crap–I’m going to have to start my own flippin school.