Relentless Pursuit

About a week ago, I received a comment from Knopf’s publicity people offering a free copy of a soon-to-be released book, Relentless Pursuit : A Year in the Trenches with Teach For America, by Donna Foote. Seeing as it was Spring Break, I took them up on it. I’m so glad I did! Even as I tried to take a week to not focus on teaching, I found the book absolutely worth reading and now worth recommending.

More than anything else, Ms. Foote deserves tremendous credit for her candid and unbiased writing. If for no other reason, I would buy, read and recommend this book to support good journalism. In our polarized edu-world, it was wonderfully refreshing to read anything that seemed written with a purpose of information rather than persuasion. Her book is neither critique nor praise of TFA; it is a chronicle revealing the program and its participants in their moments of both excellence and failure.

Throughout most of the text, Foote follows four first year corps members, a TFA program director, and an alum-cum-assistant principal, all working at L.A.’s Locke High School. Mainly, we walk with the CMs through their legendary First Year Phases, deep into the lows of disillusionment and up through the clouds as they finally make tangible progress with their students. Foote tracks the PD’s struggles to connect with and support his charges and provides a human face for the often uber-professional cadre of TFA staff. In the story I found most deeply moving, she records the AP’s descent into a deep dissatisfaction that leads him to abandon Locke for a charter school.

The absence of idolizing or demonizing allows Foote to really capture the personal details that so memorably mark most first-year TFA experiences, from the sudden and shocking transition to adulthood to the disconnection with former friends and fellow recent graduates now lost in the corporate or grad-school world. Professionally, teachers are as varied as their students, but Foote has managed to isolate four educators whose diverse teaching traits will allow TFA alums to happily impose the faces of their colleagues, from the math-minded super-star to the supremely suffering special educator.

Though dealing with a profession where two-minute drop-ins often pass for observation, Foote clearly spent hours and hours with her teachers and their students. It shows as she relays the whole gamut of moments we teachers experience. Relentless Pursuit contains both the ugly moments that any teacher faces, usually thanking God there is no one there to see, as well as the great triumphs that validate our work, and are also often utterly unobserved. Day in and out, teaching is a lonely art. Many educators will find it encouraging to read of the experiences they share with Foote’s four and so many others.

At times, I found Foote’s account of the personal and professional agonies of the first-year CMs to be a little too accurate, as it led to my recalling memories of the anxiety and misery of those times that I still would rather let alone. My fiancée, another TFA alum, refused to even pick up the book for this reason. In this vein, however, I would earnestly recommend the book to any pending TFA applicants, as it is a far truer distillation of the first year experience than they will get at any official recruitment event. It is hard to imagine that despite all of TFA’s best efforts, its cachet as, quoting the book’s website, “the hottest post-graduate experience” will not lead to an increase in enrollment by high-achieving young people not prepared to live out their challenging commitment to their kids and schools. This book could be a great asset in the vital work of dissuading such inadequately dedicated resume builders from matriculating.

Unfortunately, the engaging stories are interspersed with runs of pages spent on Locke’s, LAUSD’s and TFA’s organizational history and operations. Rather than ceding over whole chapters, Foote attempts to weave the background into the narrative, but the real effect is to draw us out of the compelling chronicle of the lives of the educators and back into the abstract world of “educational reform.” While not worth the literary sacrifice, I think many professional readers will enjoy the knowledge and it furthers the text’s credibility as an objective and informational source.

Those who live with, work with, or hope to be TFA corps members will find this book a great resource for understanding an experience that is both terrifically difficult and utterly defining. Those in The Trenches will enjoy knowing that their tribulations and triumphs are shared. (Or they may say, “My God! I live this every day! Why would I possibly want to read about it?” Present it to a teacher with caution.) Those with no TFA connection at all should still pick up the book and read what all the fuss is about!

Pay-Per-Do Teaching

At the beginning of my second year, a very generous and committed educator sent me $75 to help fund my 1,000 Words a Year campaign. It’s been two years and I don’t think a week goes by where I don’t think about it. This money quickly sprouted benefits in two directions. First, it was immediately and unconsciously matched by my own money. I didn’t think twice about shelling out $75 more for prizes (books) to reward the top Vocab Masters. If someone I’d never met cared that much about my classroom, how could I not? Second, the fact that someone else confirmed that this effort was worth my time and energy enlarged my enthusiasm and effort by factors of ten. I fought for the instructional time and materials, I read the professional literature, and I taught the hell out of words. Then I did it again this year, even without the seed money.

Let’s agree for a moment that better teachers and better teaching are the keys to closing the achievement gap. Let’s agree that The Trenches, the low-income neighborhood school classrooms, hemorrhage good people like a ruptured water main. Finally, let’s agree that the policy people will spend the next century arguing about what really works in our profession, when any active teacher or administrator can tell you that the real question is “How do we get anything good done?”

My modest proposal: Pay-per-do teaching. Inspire mediocre teachers to use best practices and encourage the good ones to stay in the classroom, all in one fell swoop. Side-step the iron-maiden union contracts, idiot administrators, curriculum wars, and the irrelevant teacher prep programs by simply connecting the donors to the teachers. Think Marzano, Donor’s Choose, and the X-Prize rolled up into one.

Donor A believes in home-school involvement. Skip the arduous process of school- or district-wide grants and applications, where results are dissipated across various levels of overhead and faithful implementation. Simply offer $1,000 to any teacher willing to visit all their students at home and submit to appropriate methods of verification. Are we really so narrow-sighted that we’re unwilling to help students unless they all live in the same neighborhood? Wouldn’t any donor want to help 1,000 classrooms in 1,000 cities where 1,000 teachers were committed to doing what she thought important, over one district where one administrator wrote one persuasive grant?

Foundation B wants to see standards-based, objective-by-objective tracking in math. This is an arduous but highly effective task that many teachers are reluctant to do. It should be made easy by our math texts, but it isn’t. A stipend of $100 per monthly spreadsheet makes the hours spent pouring over tests and Excel more of a professional service and less of a personal sacrifice. Want to make sure it’s done well? Make them watch a web video, read a chapter, and fill out a few reflective forms. When it’s between them and their school, such things “happen,” but when it’s between them and their money, it will get done.

Company C wants to see poor kids going to visit colleges. Sure, teachers can get a donor off Donor’s Choose to pay for it, but that assumes teachers have the hours to write the proposal, secure district approval, arrange a tour, get the forms and the chaperones, and reschedule their instruction. We have the hours, but we also have lives and families. $300 acknowledges that for us, as with all professionals, time taken deserves compensation.

The highly effective best practices that could be fostered this way are myriad, from extra tutoring to tailored assessment to vertical collaboration. Because of the mile-wide disconnect between our contracts and reality, these are vital parts of work that are not part of our job descriptions and compensation. As long as they remain so informal, most districts are unwilling to pay for them and many teachers are unwilling to do them. Certainly, the real issue here is that the contracts and compensation need to be changed, but how many children’s education are we willing to sacrifice while we wait for that distant day to come? Undoubtedly, many great teachers are doing these things already and that’s the point. They have shown us in their attrition rates that they won’t do them for free, for ever. This isn’t about adding to great teachers’ workload, it’s about sustaining their good work and encouraging the rest of the profession to join them.

The Words

“But we just don’t know the words!” This was C---‘s protestation on Wednesday, as we went over yet another round of benchmark testing.

Perceptive as always, C--- recognized that he had missed a slew of problems not because he didn’t understand the concept but because he didn’t know “the words,” the specific language of the specific questions of this test. I know and C--- knows, and he knows that he knows, the big ideas of figurative language, synonyms and antonyms, roots and affixes. But he didn’t know what “steeples” are, he didn’t know that “immense” is more akin to “huge” than to “empty,” and he didn’t know that the root word “mobil” in “immobilize” meant “moving” rather than “starting.” So we tell C--- that he gets an F. Among the many things C--- knows, he also knows that he deserves better.

C--- is a brilliant and hard-working kid. Last year, he arrived in February and struggled with our expectations that he would complete his homework and focus on lessons. Summer was inexplicably good to him and he came to school a new student. I call him C--- 2.0, a nickname he enjoys when he doesn’t stop to remember that he has to be cool. In September, seeing the change in C---, I told The Man that this would be the Year of C---. It has been. Beyond just attending, his hand is incessantly in the air. A newcomer four years ago, he is now reading voraciously, at a fourth grade level. He is bringing in homework and doing it well.

C--- is the kind of school-loving, inquisitive and hubristic kid who would drive me crazy, if he didn’t remind me so much of myself. But where tests and grades validated and reinforced my efforts, they invalidate and undermine C---‘s. I tell my kids when test questions are “bad” or “unfair” and I explain how the test-makers try to trick them, but I know that is not enough to truly reassure them.

We subscribe to the well-known mantra at our school: Work hard, get smart. We chant it at weekly rallies and emblazon it on our sweatshirts, but we let our tests belie that simple contract. They work hard, but still we fail them. Our kids hold up their end of the bargain and we don’t. So I guess it should be no surprise to me when, a day after the test, C--- is caught making “Kick me” stickers under the supervision of a sub.

I pulled him aside after-school and lay into him. With his eyes tearing up, I told him how disappointed I was. He chokingly tried to explain that P--- had convinced him to do it. I tried to explain to him how there would always be people there to lead him into trouble and that he had to choose better. At the end of the conversation, I rhetorically asked C--- if it was going to happen again. He replied honestly, “Maybe.” I was stunned by his candor and asked why. He said, “P--- will be there, and maybe I’ll be able to say no and maybe I won’t.” Now it was my turn to suffer for the words. I had the concept, bad friends and bad decisions equal a bad life. But how to persuasively articulate that to a ten-year old? I failed over the words, just like C---.

Reflecting on it now, I realize that there’s nothing I could have said. More than anything else, C--- is going to listen to my actions over my words. My actions showed C--- that his hard work was rewarded with a big fat F. P---‘s showed him that no work was met with the guaranteed esteem of his friends. How many times is any kid going to choose the F?

We all want validation, kids most of all. They’d rather it came from us, but they’ll take it from anywhere they can. We can beat out the bullies and brats, but not by handing out unwarranted and inaccurate Fs. I’m all for high academic standards and utterly opposed to effort grades, but we must stop penalizing students who are still learning the language. There’s one word for tests that don’t recognize when students actually do understand the material being assessed: failure. So it’s a question of words: Are our students failing their tests or are our tests failing their students?

Educational Miracle!

Somewhere in the last month, after five years of trying, M--- finally cracked the code and learned to read.

For you and I, reading is not so much an act of decoding as it is recognition. Educated adult readers don’t sound words out. Most words have become what literacy teachers call “sight words,” words known at first glance by their contours and context. For a little refresher of the difference, try and find a word that you still need to sound out, ---usually the back of a horrifically unnatural food product will do. Truly, try it! Articulating “bicarbodemiphosphoethylate” might help you remember what it was like to learn to read.

At this point in the year, most of my fifth graders are somewhere between totally fluent (230 words per minute) and the beginnings of real automaticity. (90 words per minute) There is still a back of the pack, reading in the 60s, but even they are starting to make some progress.

Not M---. As of early February, M--- was reading about 24 words per minute, taking an average of two seconds per word. Even worse, most of these 24 words were sight words that he had memorized. He couldn’t break the code of new words. Reading a 2nd to 5th grade text, M--- would produce a stream of “the,” “and,” “of” etc. M--- was a “non-decoder.”

He had been reading at this pace, struggling to remember even the most common and basic of phonic patterns for years. I worked with him intensively every morning throughout all of last year. He had been receiving small group support in special education for over a year. There has been no lack of effort from him, either. He is without question among the five most respectful, focused and hardest working students of the 200 to cross my path. He had been at school, in the United States, for nearly five years and he had not learned to read.

Then, somewhere between early February and now, M--- started reading.

I will remember the moment forever. We were in our after-school “Super Science School” and we were writing down important details from a silently read page on tornadoes in a concept map.

M--- raised his hand. I called on him. M--- paraphrased the text to me, talking about the high wind speed of tornadoes. I asked him where he got the information, he pointed to the paragraph and read it to me. M--- has learned to deal with his inability to read by bringing terrific focus and effort to bear on all oral reading and discussion, so I didn’t believe he was reading until I saw his finger, under the word and the word coming out of his mouth. I still doubted him though and thought that maybe he had heard someone read it and memorized it. So I had him keep going. He did.

He didn’t read the sentences completely or even competently, but he cracked the code. Instead of a smattering of side words, there was, sound-by-sound a sentence being read.

I cheered. I cheered so loud that the kids stared at me. I wondered why they weren’t sharing my joy and surprise, then I remembered that M--- has been out of our class for reading all year, so they don’t know much about his difficulties. I recomposed myself and we moved on, but every time I looked at M--- I couldn’t stop smiling.

We had a meeting for him on Friday morning. His mother said that she had noticed the improvement as well, as suddenly M--- could now read simple books to his little brothers.
I congratulated his special education teacher and she congratulated me, but neither of us have any idea when, or why, or how, it really happened. While perhaps there is a neurological explanation, it surely seems to be an educational miracle and we are truly grateful for it.

Urgency and Community

Dy-dan and TMAO, two of my favorite Bay Area teacher-bloggers, have been writing about classroom management of late. I’ll chime in.

My classroom management centers around the yin and yang of urgency and community. Urgency is fairly well understood and I have little to add to the notion of “Teach Like Your Hair is On Fire.” We all have an urgency mantra, mine comes from my Salinas-born fiancée who articulated it best, from personal experience, “Education is do or die for these students.”

Even, or perhaps especially, in the “achievement first” and best practice-driven world of the “No Excuses” educator, community is too rarely discussed. I have come to understand it as the foundation required to enable the urgent teaching our students so desperately need.

Community begins simply and easily, by greeting my students at the door with a handshake, a good morning, and the requirement they look me in the eye. It continues by not starting the day with a “Do Now” and instead with a class meeting. I post an agenda on the board and I run through it with them, then I give them the opportunity to ask questions about the schedule or other school matters. This means that they know when Picture Day is coming and don’t spend all morning wondering.

After that we share about our lives. I make it clear that the purpose of class meeting is to hear about what is on our minds, what we are excited or upset about. At first my students are reluctant to share personal matters, but I am perennially surprised how quickly the candidness arrives. They want to share and knowing that there is an appropriate time and protected place to do it is really all it takes.

This takes up my first 10 minutes, every day, about 30 hours across the school year. Why is this worth the time? I have long accepted that my students are not able to leave their outside lives at the door and that I am not able to push it out of their minds with even my most spectacular Daily Bite. The one power I have over the outside world is to offer it a space in our class. If it is shared, it will be a degree less urgent in their minds, and that’s the best I can hope for. Further, I need to know what is going on in my students’ heads and if there are problems that I haven’t picked up on. Just during last week, G---‘s beloved cat was taken away because his father is dying of cancer and they can’t take care of it, V---‘s sister/care-taker was arrested in front of her for reasons she doesn’t understand, and T---‘s mother is due any day with a baby fathered by her step-dad. I have very high expectations for my students’ behavior, and they don’t change with the horrific traumas of life, but I also know that depressed, angry or anxious children need a different sort of redirection than those who are fooling around because someone farted.

During the rest of the day, my community translates to what I call the “atmosphere of exceptionality.” Activating this is the domain of extreme excellence that KIPP, Esquith, TMAO, Jaime Escalante and Joe Clark all have in common. We all want to feel like we are part of something special and when we believe we are part of the extraordinary, we rise to meet the occasion. We’ve all seen the movies, so don’t lie, you know that if you could, you’d live that rock-ballad-scored training montage that leads you to total victory in the finals. The only difference between adults and kids here is that ten-year olds have a sufficiently non-cynical world-view that “special” can be consciously created by a single teacher in a single classroom.

Implicitly, my students know they are part of something special because I offer them the best class they have ever seen. (I know I do, by the way, because when I lapse, I hear about it, ---a pitfall of candid community.) By the time my students get to 5th grade, many have had no consistent expectations for behavior or achievement, ever. I am not perfect and I am not the greatest, but I am obvious about my hard work and my passion for the material. My students are tired of teachers who yell and stumble. On Day One, they desperately want me to be good. All I have to do is meet that expectation, sustain it with a goodly serving of praise, and they feel like they’re on the Dream Team.

Explicitly, I tell my students that now they are 5th graders, which means they are “leaders of the school,” explaining my different expectations than teachers of years’ past, and they need to work so very hard this year to “be ready for middle school,” explaining why I extend the day and milk learning from every minute. I bring my rhetoric back to these two elements constantly, a dozen times each day at the beginning of the year. The habits of years past do not die easily, even if the kids want to be rid of them, but the knowledge that this year is truly different is the most potent weapon possible.

When this daily foundation is finished, my students have had their questions about the inside answered, their traumas from the outside recognized, and their frustrations from the past eased. More largely, they know they are in a place where they should work hard and they understand why they are going to do so. Now, and only now, can the teaching and learning begin.

Apples and Zebras in Reporting on Ed

I hate to rant, and I really wanted to post on something else, but reading this article comparing scores from students in the U.S. and Finland, published in the Wall Street Journal, and then reading about it even more in the edu-blogosphere has me so frustrated that I can't focus on anything else.

For those of you who don't have time to read the whole article, let me condense it for you:

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Finnish students perennially score at the top of internationally standardized tests, while the U.S. is squarely in the middle of the pack. The WSJ, as well as educators in the U.S. are not sure what causes that difference, but its likely because Finnish kids are more independent from a younger age, their teachers have their master's degrees, and their schools have a back-to-basics approach.

The article goes on to comment, rather casually, that another factor may be that the Finns place a tremendous social value on literacy and even attach libraries to their malls. The reporter also notes, mid-article, that Finland has one of the world's most homogeneous, affluent, and happy societies, where college is free for everyone. A small comment is made that the Finns also equitably fund their schools.

These mind-bogglingly tremendous differences aren't seen as causative of the achievement disparities but merely unfortunate obstacles to replicating the Finnish system.

So putting all those silly details and demographics aside, the WSJ closes by reaffirming that the reason the Finnish kids are scoring so well is that the teachers and parents give their kids more independence and time to be kids. One observer of Finnish schools recalled a teacher letting a kid sleep through class, saying, "He's learning how to live."

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I'm dumbfounded and angry. The article is terrible on so many levels. The problem in our schools today is hardly teachers demanding too much of their kids. No one, not even the most utterly disconnected policy maker, would hazard that guess. But more basically, we're once again comparing Apples to Zebras, now in the Wall Street Journal not just Useless News and World Distort.

I'm sure there are lessons a plenty to be learned from abroad, but let's focus on countries that are at least mildly comparable to our own. The entire school age population (<16) of Finland could fit in the NYC system alone. Few countries can match our size, but can we at least write about one with a smidgen of pluralism and an ounce of strife? Maybe even a lower class, or two?

Dear reporters of international educational comparisons: The next time you want to write a stirring piece about how Singapore has once again blown us away in math, or how Japanese fourth graders know more science than our eighth graders, please resist. Try answering some more useful questions: How do England and France deal with educating their L2/low-SES populations? How does Germany tackle teacher tenure and performance pay? What's New Zealand been doing to close their achievement gap lately?

We've got plenty of reasons to criticize our schools, but not measuring up to Finland isn't one of them.