Not Waiting for Superman (II)

Like the editors of Re-thinking Schools, I am “not waiting for Superman.”  Last fall when the documentary “Waiting for Superman” made its debut, public school teachers across the nation imagined a bulls-eye on their backs, as the film portrayed charter schools and their exceptional teachers as the solution to mediocre public education. As Stan Karp, on the web site “Not Waiting for Superman,” indignantly commented,

Despite a lot of empty rhetoric about the importance of “great teachers,” the disrespect the film displays to real teachers working on the ground in public schools today is stunning. Not one has a voice in the film. There are no public school parents working together to improve the schools their children attend. There are no engaged communities. There is no serious discussion of funding, poverty, race, testing or the long and sorry history of top-down bureaucratic reform failure. [http://www.notwaitingforsuperman.org/Articles/20100920-RSEditorsNotWaiting]

I am “not waiting for Superman,” because I have spent twenty days listening to, and delighting in,  twelve amazing teachers of writing, who gave up four weeks of their summer to become better teachers of writing. And I know, from experience, that there are 200 more sites of the National Writing Project completing very similar summer institutes as I write this.  That makes about 3,000 teachers of writing becoming better writers and teachers by concentrating on their craft for six hours a day, while many of their detractors assume they are traveling or lying by the pool.

What they are doing is writing relentlessly, listening to demonstrations on teaching writing, offering feedback on the demonstrations, and setting a research agenda to investigate writing in their own classrooms.

Participants of the 2012 Summer Institute

They labored over their teaching and writing portfolios, which they have shared with each other, as they have shared all the products of their labor. And they appreciated each others’ work and worth and celebrated their personal and shared accomplishments. When I read their writing and witness their teaching, I wish the “Superman” film-makers were here to celebrate, too.

When these teachers return to their classrooms in the fall, they will be full of hope for their students and their schools, because nothing is so energizing as dedicated teachers working together. What will they find? Admiration? Respect? Curiosity? Structural or material support? Maybe not. As we often warn them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country.”

Because their colleagues and principals are also “not waiting for Superman.” They don’t need heroes. They are a little out of patience with “born again” teachers and apostles of the “next great thing.”  But they do want help. They know teaching is a collaborative sport, even though schools treat it as a competitive one. They know they are stretched beyond what a single teacher can accomplish.  However, they will not do “better with less,” as Education Secretary Arne Duncan has exhorted them.

Do Writing Project teachers know anything that could benefit their colleagues? Yes, they know that teachers CAN collaborate with immense success and rejuvenation, given time and the inclination to listen to each other.  These teachers have listened and reflected and offered words of encouragement that made them each feel like Superman,  even if for a moment.  Every time a teacher shared a practice or a successful lesson, eleven others were taking notes furiously, sorting the best from the valuable from the problematic.  They not only offered each teacher collegial feedback, they learned from the shape and impact of each demonstration how their demonstration could be improved.  The demonstrations gathered new elements as the summer proceeded and the kinds of response and interaction multiplied.  A group understanding of excellent teaching practice grew .

They will return to their schools in the fall, because 97% of Institute participants stay in their classrooms for over seventeen years (Inverness Associates).  They will not arrive as Superman, but as a colleague with a new excitement about teaching. My prayer is that the three thousand schools that receive them will respect them as equals with the same hopes and goals for the success of their students.  They will remember that teachers need each other and provide every opportunity for teachers to work together, to share professional experience and to give desperately-needed encouragement.

Superman will not be gracing our schools in September. But I know 3,000 teachers who will reach out to their colleagues and share their dreams and practices for better instruction.  There could be collegiality, instead of superstars and rivalries.  There could be a teaching community.  We are not waiting for Superman.

 

 

Over the Bluff

When President Obama shelved the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles Commission, he made the biggest mistake of his first term.

He had commissioned this bi-partisan group to solve the problem of the federal deficit and assigned two statesmen of a bygone era, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, to chair it. They proposed a blend of cuts and revenue increases, which would have been the last reasonable suggestion for balancing the budget Congress considered in the present administration.

Why did the President back away their proposals? Perhaps the cuts were too severe for liberal Democrats or endangered the implementation of the Affordable Health Care Act. Regardless, they represented the last true compromise, the last stab at a “Grand Bargain,” which could have separated the sheep from the goats in Congress.

Now both the sheep and the goats are headed toward the “fiscal cliff,” the automatic expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the draconian budget cuts scheduled for 2013. Writing in the New York Times on Sunday, Bill Keller suggested that the President should dare the squabbling herd to stampede off the fiscal cliff and let the consequences be damned. Apparently Erskine Bowles, co-framer of the last Grand Bargain, has recommended this course to press Congress to action.

This sounds like the right tactic for a Congress so tied up in its principles that it can’t move north, south, east or west.  Call their bluff and see if they’ll let their financial principles carry them over the fiscal bluff.  I’d buy a ticket to that show.

An even better show would be to make the Grand Bargain a campaign issue.  Make the candidates show their hands and threaten to take Congress to the brink. No more finger wagging about what should happen with the federal budget, but honest proposals about what could happen if Congress took its job seriously.

Put the Erskine-Bowles Commission’s recommendations on the table, as a symbol of compromise, and let the candidates explain their resistance. This is President Obama’s final chance to show economic leadership with a recalcitrant Congress.  Dare those posers to do nothing, to say nothing. Make this presidential campaign about the virtues of compromise and action, instead of posturing and resistance.

Tell Congress to get over the bluffing or head over the bluff with banners held high.

Products or Patients?

The New York Times’ Sunday Dialogue this week raises the question: Will a new set of standards and more tests help students?

The Common Core Standards have been praised, maligned and scrutinized, but mostly they have been mythologized as the solution to academic mediocrity. This comes from a business-model of product control. If you raise the quality standards, the product will improve.

The dangerous inference of this model is that testing controls the quality of students graduating from our schools.  To anyone confounded by the problem of mediocrity in the public schools, this is a seductive model, and it has driven school reform for at least fifteen years.

Rather than treating students as products, we should treat them as patients, not because they are sick, but because the decisions we make regarding their education are as complex as medical care, not as simplistic as product control.

The standardized test is the equivalent of taking a patient’s temperature: it can tell us if something is wrong, but not what. It is a crude instrument of screening. What does the doctor do with raw information? She checks it against other observations such as case history, other vital signs, and the patient’s reports.  The doctor makes a diagnosis and says, “Call me in a week, if the condition doesn’t improve.”  She does not use the body temperature to diagnose anything and the actual diagnosis is tentative.

We trust doctors because they are cautious, but methodical, in their diagnoses and, if we are good patients, we try to participate and make suggestions to be sure we are regaining our health. We understand that medicine has side-effects and diagnoses are tentative. Why do we assume testing of our minds is definitive and students are malleable products we can improve based on a single test score?

Cost. It costs a lot more to keep a patient healthy than to improve a product for the market.  Yet if we were asked if our children are more like products or patients, would any of us say they were “products”?

So we take the cheap way out: we test and fail and make our students better test-takers to improve their performance.  Or we use the tests to drive the curriculum by posting the standards on the board each day and focus our students’ attention on the product, instead of the process. That process is called “learning-how-to-learn.”

If we expect anything but the usual frustration with testing and failure, we have to invest more in our students. We need smaller classes, more collaboration of the professionals within the school, more professional development about how to use test results, more support of family literacy, and more collaboration between pre-service education and the schools.

The cost will be the hiring of more teachers, more hours in the school day for collaboration, more hours after school for professional development and family literacy, and more time devoted to training novice teachers in the schools.  Schools will become more like hospitals, where multiple measurements, collaboration across specialties, and a continuum of professional education from internship to residency has been the norm for decades.

Why would we ignore this superb model of professional practice operating right under our noses? Money. It’s cheaper to treat students like products than patients. We already spend too much medical care.

Yet, while the medical profession is learning to economize, education could be learning to assess and collaborate with the care and precision of medicine.  Eventually we will learn to control medical costs and to treat students with the dignity of primary care patients.

Unless we continue to treat students as products and their improvement as product control.

 

Book Review: “Wrinkles Wallace: Knights of Night School”

Ever since the Tortoise beat the Hare, storytellers have delighted to defy the expectations of their readers.  Yet some young readers defy authors to surprise them. Like Wrinkles Wallace, the ageless, unflappable fifth grader, they’ll always say, “I figured it would be like that.”

But Marquin Parks amazes his readers with a night school class for fifth graders, in which the teacher is a ruthless ten-year-old bent on failing his class and the students are social misfits no younger than eighteen and as old as seventy. Similar to the mischievous turns of Lewis Carroll, Marquin delights to upset all expectations in the story of Wrinkles Wallace and his motley classmates at Old Endings Preparatory School.

Wrinkles is a 28-year-old fifth grader who aims to reverse the reversals of his school life and graduate, bringing his dysfunctional classmates with him. This is a feat no less remarkable than Alice negotiating her path out of Wonderland.  He has to outwit his confident and relentless teacher, Sittin’ B. Quiet.  Mr. Quiet’s rules are as changeable as they are arbitrary, while the incorrigible students appear hopelessly resistant to self-improvement.

Lenny, the wheelchair-bound senior citizen, delights in verbal dissection of his classmates, even slashing the self-absorbed Urhiness (“Your Highness”), who is fatally attached to her mirror.  Spork aspires to be a world class chef, but her confections cross the border of revolting. Snooze earns his name by not waking up till Chapter 38, yet manages to retort with an articulate and well-timed snore on a few occasions.

If you are not tripped up by the role reversals, the earthy concoctions alleged to be food might be your downfall.  Few writers have stimulated the gag reflex with the skill of Marquin. Until the finale, nothing served up in this book could be considered appetizing. The class chef, Spork, composes a “Shark Knuckle Omelet” in an unforgettable paragraph in Chapter 8:

Spork’s only problem (besides not being able to cook) was finding the tofu to substitute for the actual shark knuckle.  So, like any cook would do, she improvised. Spork took off her shoes and removed her socks. She grabbed a bowl and a small cheese grater from the cabinet under the sink.  She began grating the dry skin off the bottom of her feet. She used a grapefruit spoon to get all the toe jam from between her toes. Then she clipped her toenails and put them in the bowl. Voila! She had homemade toe-food. (25)

While adult readers may be gagging, nothing could be more charming to the ten-year-old imagination.  Wrinkles Wallace receives three fingers down the throat for truly sickening imagery.

In casual conversation, Marquin sports a mischievous grin and twinkling eyes of one who knows the secret of making kids laugh. He manages a genial reserve among adults, but you know the impetuous Wrinkles is lurking just beneath the surface.  He has a firm grasp of the pre-adolescent psyche. The joy of halitosis, the charm of incompatible foods, the fascination of the drainage of various orifices, the delight in the explosion of a bag of fermenting “gunk.” All of it stokes the embers of highly flammable imaginations. Marquin Parks knows the ignition points.

More significantly, Marquin is a father and a fifth grade teacher, so he is rooting for the dauntless hero, Wrinkles.  He hopes he will reverse the balance of power that grips the “Knights of Night School” in chronic failure. He hopes they will learn the secrets of resolve and collaboration that transform the grotesque into the beautiful.  So the epic struggle rises above the sight gags and the stomach turns as it reaches the climax.

Some delightful puns (e.g. toe-food) are sprinkled throughout the book, giving a nod to subtle humor, but more often it celebrates the Muses of Gag and Farce, the gods of the belly-laugh. May you laugh and cry with your dinner in secure repose.
Wrinkles Wallace: Knights of Night School
Marquin Parks
Meridia Publishers, 2012
162 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9832330-5-3

Bill Tucker has spent twenty years teaching high school English and almost twenty years warning preservice teachers about all the mistakes he made in the first twenty years.  The Writing Project connects these two epochs of his professional life. Since 2000 he has directed the Eastern Michigan Writing Project, delighting in the many colleagues he can call friends, among them the author Marquin Parks, featured here. He lives in Ypsilanti Township, MI with his wife, Kathy, and his canine sidekick, Wysiwyg.