As the school year winded down for the 240 middle school students and 20+ staff at my school, there was a lot of carnage.

In the last week, two of the students who I had thought made a great deal of progress were expelled because of a fight involving a thrown garbage can and a brandished fire extinguisher. This would have been the most notable occurence of the day, except that earlier in the day the 8th grade math teacher finally called it quits. He had shown remarkable resolve by staying in the classroom despite not getting along with the students or much of the administration for most of the year. But twenty minutes before the fire extinguisher fight, the math teacher stormed out of the building and quit after he was pelted in the face by a group of several students who used fruit cup, oranges, and other foods as ammunition.

But the end of the school year was actually less bloody for the students and teachers than it was for the administration. My principal had been fired a month before the end of the year and replaced with a new principal who had a stronger background in urban education. The last month of the school year was thus filled with a great deal of stress for the other two administrators (a dean of students and a director of curriculum and instruction), along with the few teachers who were hoping to return. In theory at least, the new principal would be evaluating those who hoped to return to decide who would make the cut and return next year.

Well on the day after school let out, we found out that both the dean of students and the director of curriculum & instruction were fired. Which means that not a single administrator will be carried over from the school's first year into year two.

What are the implications of this? For the students, I have to say that it is a good thing. Sometimes when an organization fails at its mission, there is something to be said about sticking with the people who made up the organization so that they can improve based on lessons learned. Other times, institutional memory can be a bad thing if unsuccessful practices become ingrained. In the case of our school, we needed a brand new fresh start.

But there are broader implications as well. Our school is far from the only one in the nation where administrators and teachers are being fired (or deciding not to return) left and right. In a profession where half of the employees quit their jobs within five years there are a whole host of problems that arise. Indeed, any serious policy response to teacher quality problems has to address problems with retention as urgently as it addresses recruitment.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve spent the past two days at a conference hosted by the National Access Network, an alliance of organizations that works to support state-level legal efforts to increase educational opportunity.

The fact that such an organization exists, servicing a growing body of lawyers who have tried state-level education lawsuits in nearly all of the 50 states, may seem something of an anomaly to casual observers of civil rights in America. After all, we are barely more than a half-century removed from one of the most well-known lawsuits in American history, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which established as a matter of national jurisprudence that schools could no longer discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. So the concept of equal educational opportunity has long been at the very heart of the battle for civil rights.

The anomaly is that even as civil rights have become increasingly a matter of federal court action—from Miranda rights to free speech rights to other matters of equal protection—the progress of lawsuits on the federal level to further education as a civil right has long since ground to a halt. Whether it was the 1973 Rodriguez US Supreme Court decision which ruled that children do not have any kind of a right to education in the federal government, or the 2007 Seattle / Louisville decisions which effectively ended the legacy of Brown-initiated desegregation efforts, the federal courts have been a place where education advocates have gone only to get bad news over the past three decades.

In the wake of these negative rulings at the federal court level, a quietly impressive—and at times, heroic—group of lawyers have risen up to fight on behalf of children in the states instead. The basic nature of the challenges that these lawyers have brought is to question whether states, all of which have some limited clause requiring the provision of public education, have met a certain standard to provide educational opportunity to their children. Some of the lawsuits have fought for more equitable distribution of resources between wealthy and poor districts; others have argued instead for an adequate level of resources in every school district within a state, equity notwithstanding. The trial record is a mixed one, but the adequacy lawsuits have been particularly successful, winning 20 out of 28 state cases at the state Supreme Court level.

The recognition among lawyers that these state lawsuits are the “only game in town” has grown into a truism, with any discussion of raising a new federal level claim scorned upon as unrealistic. The problem with foregoing action at the federal level, be it legal or political action, is that it impels an end game where we have 50 different sets of standards, resources, and ultimately educational opportunities—and children will win or lose depending on what state they are born in. That might have been okay two hundred years ago or even a half century ago when youth in different states faced unique economic challenges, but that is no longer the case today.

All of this made my participation at the conference, representing Our Education’s 20,000+ students who believe that quality education ought to be a federal right guaranteed to all American children no matter what state they live in, something of an oddity. In a roomful of brilliant lawyers who have spent thousands upon thousands of hours fighting to force statehouses to do better by children but who have generally looked at the federal government without much hope, the idea of a constitutional amendment is at best naïvely optimistic, and at worst, a detraction of resources and energy away from more winnable strategies.

Nevertheless, there was a thoughtful discussion among the lawyers and a few organizers present about what might be wrought from a long-term campaign to amend the constitution to make quality education a federally guaranteed right. First and foremost was the understanding that a federal amendment campaign can create space for more moderate state level arguments and even some federal policy changes. Second is the recognition that one of the missing ingredients in today’s efforts to improve schools is a widespread, sustained level of organizing on the part of parents, students, educators, and other concerned citizens in support of change. A federal amendment can create energy and mobilize people in a way that other, more nuanced policy changes may be too complex to do. Lastly was some level of consensus that there does need to be a federal-level end game in mind, even among lawyers who have spent so much time fighting in the states. After all, if one accepts that we cannot afford to have dramatic inequality of educational opportunity in America along racial, socioeconomic, or gender lines, isn’t it equally evident and urgent that we fight to eradicate inequality based on geographic happenstance?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 09:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nine minutes and forty-five seconds into his speech, Barack Obama gets it.

"... From the moment our children step into a classroom, the single most important factor in determining their achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from. It's not who their parents are or how much money they have. It's who their teacher is."

In the longest single-issue, education-only speech any of the candidates have given for the public record thus far, Barack Obama did not disappoint earlier this week. Speaking in front of an audience of students, educators, and parents outside Denver, CO (a notable location, and location, of course, is everything), Senator Obama outlined a serious of key principles and policy ideas that would guide his legislative leadership on education were he to be elected president (full text of the speech here).

If you can get past the relatively slight amount of political pandering, where the Senator criticizes NCLB with the standard throw-away sentiment that NCLB left the funding behind, he actually makes some fair points. To begin with, he takes the bold and even slightly controversial position among liberal educators that NCLB itself is a good law with good goals. The problems, he correctly points out, have to do with the implementation. So far so good.

He then goes on to tell the truth about another straw-man argument that liberal educators wrongly bash the federal law for, the idea that NCLB has turned schools into factories where teachers no longer innovate in the classroom but only "teach to the test". And he did it in a way that garnered applause from an audience that I believe didn't quite catch his deft pivot. Stating, "we need to realize that we can meet high standards without forcing teachers and students to spend most of the year for a single, high stakes test," the Senator then changes gears to say that, "if we want our children to be great... our schools shouldn't stifle innovation, they should let it thrive." In doing so, I believe the Senator is pointing the blame for the "teaching to the test argument" at the correct party: not the federal government, but rather the schools and school districts who over-react to the concept of accountability by turning to rote memorization and test prep! As he goes on to say, the idea of school accountability for learning is important, and a standardized test is a necessary thing. But standardized tests and critical thinking skills, art, music and the like are not either / or propositions, they are both / and propositions.

Most importantly, the Senator sees the crucial issue threatening the quality of education in America: teacher quality. He recognizes that our children--particularly those in low-income urban and rural schools--will only go so far as their teachers can teach them, and that right now, our teachers are far from good enough. So he suggests a number of promising teacher recruitment programs and financial incentives that will help bring much needed talent into the field.

Unfortunately, the only place where I'm afraid he falls short is in a lack of candor over the other side of the teacher quality coin. Carrots are great to bring more people into the profession, but sticks are needed too--in fact the carrots won't do much without the sticks when all is said and done.

After all, we don't really have a shortage of nice people who come to school to teach every day. Plenty of low-quality candidates come to interview at my low-performing school each month, after all. The problem we have is that schools, by and large, are too slow to get rid of the worst teachers. More pointedly, schools are also too reluctant to pay good teachers what they deserve and bad teachers what they deserve as well. I hope the reason why Senator Obama did not come out and say this is because he understands that he can only make these kinds of changes if he doesn't go on a public anti-teacher union crusade, and not that he is unwilling to broach the issue. It won't be pretty if he tries, but if he can bring unions, students, and parents to the same table, crazier deals have been struck in the name of what's best for the future.

Lastly, I've heard Senator Obama use this refrain about needing parents who are willing to turn the T.V. off if we are going to really give our children the education they deserve--this idea of shared sacrifice and responsibility. It's a brilliant political line, and a popular part of his education passages in speeches. It accomplishes two things: (1) it gives him the appearance of "street cred" as a truth-talker, unafraid to confront delinquent parents, and (2) it seems to make sense. The real beauty of the line, though, is that it accomplishes both tasks without any political cost! Why? Because the parents he is talking about, by and large, do not recognize that they are the ones at fault! Parents as a whole are quick to point out when other parents are doing a bad job, but rare to admit that they are failing their children (and if you need to know more, just ask me to tell you about a student who's mom enrolled him in the wrong grade at the start of this school year because she forgot what grade he was supposed to be in!).

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)