Academia Cuauhtli: A Partnership-Based, Community-Anchored Saturday School with District-Wide Impacts in Austin, Texas

Academia Cuauhtli:  A Partnership-Based, Community-Anchored Saturday School with District-Wide Impacts in Austin, Texas

by

Angela Valenzuela

October 16, 2016

We are so blessed to have the ESB-MACC as the home for Academia Cuauhtli (a Nahuatl word that means "Eagle Academy"). To learn more about us, check out on YouTube our KLRU/PBS video: “Academia Cuauhtli Works to Bridge History with Language,” May 1, 2015 (view below).

Academia Cuauhtli logo

Founded by "Nuestro Grupo" (meaning "Our Group"), our community-based organization of which I am one of the founders, we serve 34 fourth-grade, Title I, Austin Independent School District (AISD) students that attend Sanchez, Metz, Zavala, and Houston elementary schools located in east Austin. We have just begun our third year as a partnership- and community-based Saturday academy.

Conceptualized as a cultural arts and literacy project that seeks to revitalize young children’s heritage language and culture, Academia Cuauhtli offers a highly collaborative, research-based, co-constructed Mexican American Studies curriculum in the areas of migration history, civil rights, cultural arts, Indigenous heritage, and local history—including the Tejano Monument located on capitol grounds, Mexi-Carte, La Peña, Alma de Mujer at Lake Travis, and the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas.

This is not a charter school, but rather a formal, three-way partnership between the City of Austin’s Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center (ESB-MACC), AISD, and Nuestro Grupo (see complete list of individual and organizational partners and sponsors below).  

Whereas we "only" serve  34 students in grades 4 and 5, up to 45 percent of our curriculum is available district wide in grades 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 11 in both English and Spanish.  We intend, of course, to develop more curriculum in other areas, as well as to prepare more district—especially bilingual and dual language—teachers to teach it, but we need resources to do this.  We are embarked this year in exactly these conversations with potential funders that can help us accomplish this and more.  We envision, for example, a bilingual dual language teacher professional development laboratory for teachers district wide at the ESB-MACC.

As researchers, we've further created a research space that we ourselves can study and develop scholarly articles that speak to the positive impacts, as well as the challenges we face, in developing a commuity-based, culturally-relevant curriculum.

I cannot exaggerate how rewarding it is for us to do the work that we do in and with our community and district, and most especially, our children, whose faces are lit with the kind of curiosity and satisfaction that comes with a curriculum and pedagogy that honors their experiences, cultures, and identities where the Spanish language itself is honored.  We don't "teach the language,"  Rather, we teach in the language with highly prepared veteran and novice teachers that know exactly how to offer pedagogy to children with diverse linguistic capacities in both English and Spanish.

Thanks to everyone in Nuestro Grupo for staying the course, as well as to all the individuals and organizations that contribute—or have contributed—their time to this over the years. On behalf of Nuestro Grupo, I am happy to say that this is a dream come true.

Angela Valenzuela
c/s

Like us on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/AcademiaCuauhtli/ and enjoy the video!

Additional Readings:   

• Valenzuela, A. & Riojas, C. No time to waste: We must advocate for books for our children

• Valenzuela, A., Zamora, E. & Rubio, B.  "Academia Cuauhtli and the Eagle: Danza Mexica and the Epistemology of the Circle" 

• Valenzuela, A. (2016) Growing Critically Conscious Teachers: A Social Justice Curriculum for Educators of Latino/a Youth. NY: Teachers College Press.
  

Partners:

Austin Independent School District

Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center 

Austin Parks and Recreation Center

National Latino Education Research and Policy Project, Inc. (NLERAP)

Individual Sponsors:

Oralia Garza de Cortés

Manuel Zuñiga

 

Organizational Sponsors for different events and functions over the past three years:

Austin Area Association of Bilingual Education (AAABE)

Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas (CMAS)

Division of Diversity and Community Engagement

Education Austin

Grupo Xochipilli

Las Comadres

MindPop 

Multicultural Engagement Center at UT

REFORMA, the National Association to Promote Library and Information Service  

Tejano Monument Curriculum Initiative

Teresa Latino Long Institute of Latin American Studies at UT

Texas Center for Education Policy at UT (TCEP)

 Sinceramente,

Angela Valenzuela
c/s

#AcademiaCuauhtli #MASforTexas #LibroTraficante #EthnicStudiesNow

Growing critically conscious teachers by A. Valenzuela (Ed.) is out!

I am happy to report that Growing critically conscious teachers: A social justice curriculum for educators of Latino/a Youth is out!

This was a collective effort, a labor of love that draws on the actual work that so many of us are doing in the area of teacher preparation, participatory action research (PAR), and  social justice. 

We hope that this book will inspire better and deeper thinking on how best to educate not only Latino/a youth—and youth of color, generally—but also future teachers of Latino/a youth since that's where the education for a linguistically and culturally diverse demographic should optimally begin.
 
You can order the book here: http://store.tcpress.com/0807756830.shtml

All royalties will go to our national organization, the National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project (NLERAP) in support of our grow your own Latin@ Teacher Education Institutes Initiative in 5 cities in 5 states at present. Contributors: Carmen Mercado Barbosa​Adele Arellano, Jennifer Ayala, Margarita Margie Ines Berta-Avila​, Julio Cammarota​, José Cintrón, Barbara Flores, Melissa Rivera, and Louie Rodriguez​. Thanks to Sonia Nieto​, Christine Sleeter​, and Antonia Darder for the foreword, afterword, and blurb, respectively.

Thanks to all the great folks at Teachers College Press at Colombia University, beginning with Marie Ellen Larcada who has since retired but who encouraged this work at the beginning and also to Sarah Biondello who has been superb throughout the volume's many stages.  

Thanks, as well, to gifted artist Tanya Torres​, for the book's beautiful cover that captures the spirit and intent of the whole book, namely, to not only create a pathway for teachers into the teaching profession, but to also grow their critical consciousness--together with our own--through the rooted, organic, community-based curriculum and model that we collectively devised. This book represents literally years of work and hundreds of years of wisdom.  You'll see....

Angela Valenzuela
c/s

This newly created high school (school within a school) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts deserves a close read and I also recommend listening to the 14-minute, student-developed video below.

It's called the "Independent Project," which is somewhat misleading because while appropriately focused on students' motivations, passions, and cultivating their talents and developing new ones, it is also very oriented to the collective—important and germane to 21st century work environments, as well as to a humanitarian, critical, democratic, and social justice framework.

While this "experiment" may seem and feel new, radical, and totally organic—especially to the students, faculty, and leadership—it is actually recasting a research-based approach that already exists—most notably, among the New York Performance Standards Consortium (NYPSC) schools. Although they do administer a standardized test beginning in the 11th grade that the students must pass to graduate (i.e., most typically the English Language Arts Regents exam), the NYPSC schools otherwise get an annual waiver from New York's regimen of standardized tests—an affordance that is not available anywhere else in the country, at present, under NCLB.

I am personally familiar with three of these schools and find them to be nurturing, rigorous, intellectually challenging places, and "high stakes" in ways that map on well to the Independent Project discussed herein. In these environments, students are held accountable for their learning and their ideas and they must be publicly defensible. For more information, check out "New York Performance Standards Consortium Fact Sheet" (January 28, 2014). Also check out this earlier, related blog post In Kentucky, Moving Beyond Dependence On Tests.

Far from anything close to "educational anarchy," this school is engaged in serious project-based learning (PBL) that consists of both authentic learning opportunities for youth and authentic assessment which I fully support and again, is research based. Assuming that this school in Massachusetts actually has no connection to NYPSC schools or literature, what is really encouraging and pleasing is that the very model of schooling that these students "independently derived," already exists and with great success. Most positively, this approach suggests what could be a new, valid direction in public school reform.

Incidentally, Texas, State Rep. Mary Gonzalez actually had a bill along these lines (HB 406) in the last legislative session that would have created a pilot program of select high schools in select districts to develop and implement schools like these. Unfortunately, however, the bill did not come out of committee so we'll have to continue pursuing this for the next legislative session in 2017.

In any case, PBL and authentic learning and assessment have served NYPSC high school students quite well, resulting in dramatically better outcomes for all students, despite the greater presence of special needs children than in the general population. To wit, these schools evidence higher attendance, graduation, and college attendance rates than the general school population in New York City.

As a reform measure in what is also called, "inquiry-based learning," it must get coupled with smaller class sizes, individualized instruction, teacher planning time, and professional development opportunities. (There's a lot more to this, but this give you an idea of just how involved a move in this direction is.) In NYPSC schools, it's hard to get lost and fail. It practically creates a system where student failure is mythic. It's not so much whether you graduate, but when. In short, making schools learning friendly, curriculum friendly, teacher friendly, and student friendly holds tremendous promise for all the outcomes that we care about in education.

I can see how this idea could get hijacked by those wanting to eliminate public education (extreme homeschooling?) or who rhetorically misrepresent this as either "lacking in accountability" or as schools no longer needing teachers, justifying less investment in teachers or teaching. Actually, the opposite is true: A whole lot more is expected of teachers; they're just needed differently—more as facilitators, coaches, and guides—together with an enhanced capacity to truly evaluate youth where the latter is not an event—as it is under the current system—but rather an everyday affair. Particularly with the amount of time that it will take to make a shift like this in a way that is valid from a research-based perspective, is actually not a call for less, but rather more teacher work and involvement and as a corollary, greater district investment in teachers' professional development.

There is no reason why our entire state or country could not move in this direction. We have been so ensconced in our high-stakes testing and accountability systems that we have a lot of un-learning and new learning to do. We also know that this will not happen overnight. That's why a pilot study that is time delimited, transparent, with an evaluation, up for state review, and so on is a good first step for Texas. In fact, we should begin right now organizing learning communities on assessment that are inclusive of district leaders, teachers, community members (the key stakeholders of the reform), and our universities where much of this knowledge and memory of inquiry-based education exists.

We need state leaders like Representative Gonzalez in the legislature and in our school districts and communities far and wide to say, "Yes, we want to be accountable...yes, we seek equitable educational outcomes and better schools, but we need to make a fundamental shift in how our students are assessed." These inquiry-based approaches to education are definite signposts to not only a brighter—but also an immensely do-able, future.

-Angela Valenzuela

This Is What a Student-Designed School Looks Like

by Luba Vangelova /July 14, 2014

The Independent Project/ image from Charles Tsai’s movie

When Sam Levin was a junior at Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington, Mass., he realized that two things were in short supply at his school: engagement and mastery. He also noticed that he and his peers were learning plenty of information, but not much about how to gather or create their own data. And he noticed that students were unhappy. So he took it upon himself to design a school where students would feel fully engaged, have an opportunity to develop expertise in something, and learn how to learn.

“He came up with a plan where the core areas could still be studied, but in a way where students were more of the driving force,” explains guidance counselor Mike Powell. The administration decided to take a chance on a semester-long pilot project, and The Independent Project debuted in the fall of 2010.
The pilot involved eight students — sophomores, juniors and seniors — chosen on the basis of written applications and interviews. “The idea was that it was for students who could manage their time well, were looking for something more than the traditional program, and had a passion for learning,” says Powell, who served as the group’s primary adviser. Academic performance didn’t matter — the group included straight-A students as well as students who were failing many of their classes. The group was fairly diverse in other ways, too, with the students hailing from a range of blue-collar and white-collar family backgrounds.

“It really establishes an idea of what self-motivation is. There is critiquing, but it all comes back to you. That’s really valuable.”

Their time, other than daily group meetings, was theirs to manage. “This was pretty unheard of — teens being alone most of the day,” Powell notes.
They explored math, science, social science and literature topics that interested them, choosing one question each week, researching it, and presenting their findings to the group. They also chose books to read, discuss and write about in some form; worked on a semester-long individual project on a subject that excited them (the only requirement was that the project require effort, learning and mastery); and collaborated on a three-week-long group endeavor (they decided to make a video about education and their project). They were responsible for giving a final presentation about their project, which helped to give them a specific goal to work toward.

Sam Levin, creator of the Independent Project.

 

 

As the adviser, Powell checked in with the group every morning; he also offered logistical support and helped the students locate resources. Three other faculty members — a science teacher, a math teacher and a social science teacher — served as an advisory committee, meeting with the students for one period a day to help them in whatever way was needed, such as to talk through some of the more complex ideas presented in a research book. The students also consulted other teachers and outside experts as needed. When members of the community were asked to share their knowledge, “the vast majority of the time, they came running,” Powell says.

CHALLENGES ALONG THE WAY
The program encountered some bumps. “We struggled with how to do peer-to-peer constructive criticism,” Powell says. “It’s a bit different in a classroom, where there’s a teacher setting boundaries and helping create structure. They found doing that with peers challenging. But that was a big part of the program—they had to be accountable for what they were doing. … They’re teens, so to think that at that age they will always make good choices and manage their time well is not realistic. Even adults aren’t like that.”
It was also difficult for some other faculty members to accept that students were earning credit for such an amorphous undertaking. So the group tried to be transparent and made their final presentations — which ran the gamut from performances to cooking a large meal — open to the public.
At the end of the semester, “everyone was satisfied – the parents, the students, and the school,” Powell says. The project’s “White Paper” notes that parents “were very aware of what was going on in the program because the kids were talking about school at home much more than they ever had in the past.”
“There were so many moments where you could see students being inspired,” Powell says. “And they learned that with that much control comes a great deal of responsibility, to manage time and be accountable.”
The school chose to continue the program, which runs for one semester each year and involves nine to 12 students who receive credit and a pass/fail. “It was really risky, because we didn’t know how colleges would interpret this on a transcript,” Powell says. “But so far we’ve had only an overwhelmingly positive response,” including from highly selective colleges, such as Oxford and Williams, that have accepted graduates.
Nevertheless, not a lot of students apply to participate in the project. “They know it involves more work [than taking regular classes] and that they have to push themselves to do it,” says science teacher Daniel Gray, who served as the group’s primary adviser this year. (He also had prior experience with this type of model—he had studied democratic education and then helped introduce some of those principles to a public middle school.)
Most high school students are neither interested nor ready for such an experience, he says. But he adds: “I think that if they had been given progressively more responsibility over the years, they would be ready. My seventh- and eighth-graders, after a year or two, they got it, and they were more mature than you would expect them to be at that age.”
APPLYING LESSONS LEARNED
Although some teachers at Monument Mountain remain skeptical, the majority of them now support the program. Some have even copied elements of it, for example letting English students choose which books to read. It has also spawned “positive” discussions about the most appropriate role for teachers, Powell says.
There have been a number of refinements over the years. One has been to hold the program in the spring, to avoid a sudden and tough transition back to taking regular classes where students can no longer control what they’re learning. And the number of faculty assigned to the project was reduced to three and then (for scheduling reasons) two. Each group has also introduced its own twist — this year the students had even more leeway and no subject-area requirements. The constants have been the weekly research question, the books component, and the individual endeavor, which has ranged from vocational pursuits such as building a kayak, to artistic tasks such as writing a novel, to scientific explorations such as examining how Western and Eastern medicine deal differently with Lyme disease.
Securing assistance from teachers sometimes proved challenging. “It’s something most students aren’t used to doing,” says Logan Malik, a just-graduated senior who organized the program this year. “Instead of a teacher telling you what to do, you’re telling the teacher what you’re learning, what you want information on, and when you want to meet. And then they would have to do some prep.” Nevertheless, “teachers were very willing to help us, even if it was on their own time.” (The students also served as “a first-grade support group for each other,” Gray says.)
Although he’s heading to college to study pre-med, Logan’s individual endeavor this spring was to learn classical guitar. He watched a YouTube tutorial to learn the proper fingering and then practiced about four hours a day. He says he would never have been able to dive into the activity like this if he’d continued with his rigorous course load, and learning it over a summer wouldn’t have been as productive without a group and some structure. The Independent Project work kept him busy, he says, “but the busy-ness was easier to get through, compared to slaving through something you don’t want to be doing and don’t value as much.”
The stress was also less, because the evaluations (other than the final pass/fail) were formative rather than summative — intended not to judge, but to help students improve their work.
It was challenging sometimes to stay on task to meet deadlines that were not enforced by authorities, Malik says, “but we did well overall.” The students tried to be flexible and fair, and to account for the natural ebb and flow in people’s attention and motivation levels, as well as unexpected complications. Extensions were granted to students who asked for more time to research a question. “Once the person was given an extra week, they felt they needed to do more, and they worked hard,” Malik notes. Other times individuals were given a pass to give them a chance to get back on track. In the past, when tensions have arisen or the group’s energy has seemed particularly low, the group has literally taken a hike, while discussing their goals and potential improvements to the program.
Malik enjoyed many of his regular classes and sees this program as a complement rather than a complete replacement for them. “For a lot of subjects, like chemistry, it’s good to be taught by someone, so the structure of the class helps. And in social science, it’s good to be introduced to ideas by someone who understands those ideas really well.” But The Independent Project offers benefits that aren’t available in an adult-led classroom, he adds. “It really establishes an idea of what self-motivation is. There is critiquing, but it all comes back to you. That’s really valuable.”

CHANGES IN STUDENTS
Students who have gone through the program ask more questions and have a greater awareness of how to answer them; construct their questions more carefully; became more thoughtful in the way they consider ideas and evaluate sources; and became better at managing their time.
The “White Paper” also notes that the project instills a “sense of ownership of their education has stayed with the students long after the program ended. Although some students have continued to struggle academically, feedback from parents has suggested that they are pursuing more interests outside of school than they were before The Independent Project.”

It continues: “That is not to say no one will fail; any program or system will contain failure. In fact, in the pilot of the Independent Project one student struggled to complete the work, and did not receive full credit for the program … The goal, then, is to not make The Independent Project so that no one fails, but to make it so fewer people fail than in the current system, and to make success in The Independent Project carry more intellectual meaning than success often does in the current system.”
The program doesn’t require a lot of additional resources, and other public schools have visited Monument Valley to find out how to replicate it. (A professional filmmaker has also produced a video about it.) Powell says it requires administrators who are open to focusing education on students, rather than teachers or a curriculum. But he offers a caution: “Because the focus is on the student, that’s where you need to start. This came from a student and was pushed by him, through all the red tape. A program like this probably won’t be terribly successful if it’s teacher-driven. If a group of adults want to replicate this, … I would have conversations with the students about it, and see how they respond and where they take it. If students are interested in the concept, it will guide itself.”
Meet some of the students in this video created by Charles Tsai.

Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige Commencement Address - Temple University - College of Education Philadelphia

Actor Matt Damon's mom, Dr. Carlsson-Paige  is one of my sheroes.  Here is her recent 2015 commencement address at Temple University, speaking on the art of good teaching and a quote from within:

We have to keep our eyes on an expansive vision of education. So wherever we are, we find ways to move toward it. When I look around I see so many teachers, parents, administrators, and students—even a couple of politicians– taking steps toward a more holistic and human vision of education. And I feel sure that we—individually and together—are going to move that big needle.

 We moved the needle on assessment this session in the state of Texas, but more needs to be done.  In any case, Carlsson-Paige's address is uplifting, particularly for teachers.

-Angela

Monday, June 01, 2015

Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige is a child development expert and author, and professor emerita in the Graduate School of Education. She delivered the following keynote address at the 2015 commencement for the Temple University College of Education in Philadelphia.

Good Evening, Everyone!

I am truly honored to have this opportunity to speak to you today. This is a big day for you, graduates, and for your families. It’s a celebration of your accomplishments, all your hard work—I know it wasn’t always easy getting here. And this is a day also to appreciate those many people who have helped you, supported you, and loved you on your path to this graduation.

Nancy Carlsson-Paige addresses Temple
University graduates.

I’m so glad that education is the field you have chosen! It is a rewarding and meaningful profession. It is through education that our minds expand, we get wiser, and better able to improve the human condition. Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

This moment in time that you have chosen to enter education is a rocky and uncertain one. In recent years, the meaning and purpose of education has narrowed. In the eyes of many today, education is seen as a delivery system to transmit units of knowledge and specific skills to our young people that are then tested to ensure they’ve been learned. It’s a one-dimensional, restrictive view of education that has led increasingly to the disappearance of engaging, holistic curriculum, the arts, recess, teacher innovation, teacher collaboration, and education for citizenship.

Classrooms for our young children have seen a dramatic disappearance of play. But we know play is the way young kids learn. And it is also how they build inner security and resilience. I learned this lesson when my own two sons, who are now grown, were very young.

It was a winter day, after my teaching and the boys’ day at school. The three of us were together in the living room of our rented apartment. An accidental fire started from the fireplace—accidental in the sense that I wasn’t trying to burn down the house, but tired after work, I’d made a sloppy fire. I do wonder as I look back now how overwhelmed I might have been as a young, single working mom. So the flames were leaping out of the fireplace, lapping the wooden mantle. I began trying to suffocate them with a heavy blanket. My older son Kyle was trying to help. But my younger son Matt, who was then five years old, ran out of the room.

I started having success suppressing the flames but then I was wondering: Where is Matt? And then after some moments, he ran into the room. He was dressed in his red corduroy bathrobe, his fire fighter’s hat, his black galoshes and a sea divers mask. He had a little piece of rubber tubing in his hand, it wasn’t connected to anything, but he was spraying it in the direction of the fireplace.

The outfit Matt had on was the one he wore for his rescue hero play.
–He had it on now because wearing it was what he could do to put out the fire.

A young child in a rescue hero outfit IS a hero in that moment—and he can fully believe that by wearing firefighter clothes and with his rubber tube, he can put out a fire.

When kids pretend to be Superheroes and other Rescue fantasy characters, it helps them feel safe and in control. Life presents so many challenges to young children, this kind of play helps them develop a sense of security and inner resilience.

Studies are now showing that play is rapidly disappearing from classrooms for young children, increasingly replaced by more teacher-directed instruction.

This test-driven education climate we have today, reinforced with accountability measures and high stakes, has made teachers fearful and discouraged. Currently 40 to 50 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first five years. I don’t want you to be included in that percentage of educators who become too demoralized to continue.

It is ironic that at this very moment in history when we need an expanded vision of education, the blinders come on. We are teaching as if we think that what our youth will need to know in the future is already known.

Our young people are going to have to exceed our limitations. They’ll need to develop wide-ranging competencies to be able to live well in the world they are inheriting. They’ll need to think in new ways, initiate, create, explore and solve problems, collaborate with others, make ethical decisions. They will have to grapple with all the problems we are handing them–climate change, income inequality, mass incarceration, nuclear weapons, war and terrorism.

These critical competencies that our young people will need are not quantifiable. How could you test for creativity on a computer-based exam? Or measure original thinking on a fill in the bubbles standardized test? (Let’s hope no one tries.) What passes for education today—all the facts and skills that can be defined, pinned down and tested– is a very small part of what education truly is and should be.

When I was a new teacher about forty years ago, I came across a letter that a principal had written to the teachers in his school. The words had a profound impact on me, and they have stayed with me all these years—as a reminder of the true purpose of education.

This is the letter:

         Dear Teacher,

         I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness:

         Gas chambers built by learned engineers.

         Children poisoned by educated physicians.

         Infants killed by trained nurses.

         Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.

         So I am suspicious of education.

         My request is: Help your students become human.

This letter was written in 1971. And it is so relevant for us now.

It calls on us to understand education as a human and moral endeavor. In school we learn knowledge and skills and the moral and ethical awareness to choose how we use them. We educate whole people—their minds and hearts—so they will become citizens who can think for themselves and make choices for the good of others as well as themselves.

John Dewey believed that the aim of education was democracy and citizenship.

And that each generation had to learn citizenship anew– learn it by living it. Ideally from their first days in school.

I was in a kindergarten classroom one day early in the school year when the teacher was sitting with the children in a circle. She was asking them, “How do we want to be with each other in this class?” The children were raising their hands and saying things like: “We should share! No hitting! If you hurt someone, say you’re sorry.” The teacher was writing down the children’s words on chart paper. She told me that each morning she reads this list with the children. As the children have more experience with each other, they add more ideas to their list. Soon they start coming into the classroom and reading the list by themselves. The words are their words and the children want to learn how to read them.

In another kindergarten I visited more recently– during this era of high stakes testing—all of the children were sitting silently at tables. The teacher was testing one little boy at a computer. The other children were copying words from the chalk board. The words were: “No talking. Sit in your seat. Hands to Yourself.” These were the teacher’s rules.

Most of the children looked scared or disengaged, and one little boy was crying. For them, learning to write was something required; someone else’s words–disconnected from their ideas and passions.

This teacher was required to complete mandated testing of each child in her class—one by one at the computer– 3 times a year. She had no classroom aid. The program’s funding depended on the test scores. It would have been hard for any teacher in this situation to give children engaging, play-based curriculum, and community building experiences.

In the narrowed education climate of today, some people think of teachers as technicians. But good teaching can’t be pinned down to a recipe. Good teaching is a form of art.

Of course our work is grounded in science. But it isn’t enough to know only the science. In education, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Being a good teacher means knowing how to apply what we know, when and how to use it, and how to innovate upon it—and that takes talent.

There was an incident that happened in a high school in East Harlem, that taught me a lot about the art of good teaching. It was at a time when there’d been two incidents in NY City—within a couple of weeks, two teens had been shot and their coats stolen. In this school in East Harlem, there was a conflict resolution program, and the teacher had been talking with her students about these shooting incidents, and the kids were practicing ways to deescalate conflict.

Raymond went to this high school and he had recently bought a new coat.

On this day, Raymond arrived at school without his coat and profoundly upset. At the subway stop near school, he’d been surrounded by three guys who demanded he give up his new jacket.

The teacher called a class meeting immediately, with Raymond’s permission, so he could share his story and express his rage.

Teacher: Raymond I know you are very upset. Could you tell us what happened?

Raymond: I was getting off the subway stop right here in East Harlem and all of a sudden I was surrounded by three guys who told me that I better give them my coat. One of the guys had his hand in his pocket and I thought maybe he had a knife.

Teacher: Go on Raymond. We’re right here listening to you and all of us care a lot about you and what happened.

Raymond: Well, before I could even think, I started to unzip my coat, and I said to the guy who I thought had the knife, “This is incredible. I was just getting ready to give you my coat.” I said, “Who should I give it to?” One of the guys snatched the coat and all of them started to run off as fast as they could. Then, of course, I wanted to pick up some rocks and throw them at them, but I didn’t.

Maria said: I can’t believe you did that, Raymond. I think you saved your life. How come you didn’t try to say “no” or fight back? I think that’s what I would have done.

Raymond: I don’t know. It just came to me, but now I feel so angry and humiliated and I can’t believe I don’t have my coat. It’s 20 degrees out there today and I walked three blocks without a coat.

Teacher: Raymond, how do you think you were able to respond in this way and–I would agree with Maria–probably save your life? Remember just last week this same thing happened in Queens and the young man didn’t give up his coat and was shot to death.

Raymond: Well, I was actually thinking of what we were talking about last week of what makes violence even worse and that’s more violence. I also remember when we were talking about what happened to the kid in Queens, you said, “Remember, you are not your coat”. So I guess I decided to do something that would de-escalate the conflict and not give back more violence, and that’s what I did.

Manuel: Raymond, I think it was more courageous to not fight back and use your skills, but I don’t know if I would have been able to do that.

Teacher: So Raymond, it looks as though you really put your skills to use in a horrible situation. And when you asked who you should give the jacket to you were also de-escalating the conflict by staying neutral.

Anthony: How much was that jacket?

Raymond: Well, it was $119.00.

Tanya: There are 92 seniors in this school—that is a little over a dollar each.

Teacher: What are you thinking here, Tanya?

Tanya: I’m thinking that if I had help I would be willing to collect this money for Raymond to buy another jacket.

James: I would be willing to help. I can’t believe you were able to do what you did Raymond.

Teacher: Well, this sounds like a wonderful plan. Do we need to do anything else to make it happen? How do you feel about that Raymond?

Raymond: Wow. I can’t believe you would all do that. But I know my mother wouldn’t be able to buy another coat. Maybe don’t ask everybody or say, “Only if you can afford the dollar.” That would make me feel better.

This high school teacher had the skill, compassion, and the artful ability to respond to her students in the moment and to build community from their experiences and ideas. And she had enough autonomy as a teacher to be able to create a teaching moment from what happened to Raymond.

Too many external requirements stifle a teacher’s ability to practice her craft.

Teaching is so much more than transmissin of information, test prep, and data collection. It’s why you can’t be replaced by a computer. Or by someone who had a 5-week summer program in how to teach.

But teaching like the teacher in East Harlem is a lot harder today. Many teachers say there isn’t room anymore for conflict resolution programs, community building, and student-centered projects when so many mandates fill the day. But teachers also know what good education looks like–and they hear its beating heart. They keep on finding creative ways to teach even in this climate.

The singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote: “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

You are holding that light now. You, with all of your energy, your fresh ideas, your idealism (I hope you have it and hold onto it), your knowledge and talent. You’ll shine that light where you can—in whatever situations you find yourselves.

We have to keep our eyes on an expansive vision of education. So wherever we are, we find ways to move toward it. When I look around I see so many teachers, parents, administrators, and students—even a couple of politicians– taking steps toward a more holistic and human vision of education. And I feel sure that we—individually and together—are going to move that big needle.

Margaret Mead’s words, uttered decades ago, are timeless and history has proven them over and over to be true: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

#teacherquality #putkidsfirst #edleadership #eduleaders #edpolicy

The Mismeasure of Teaching Time

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Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education    How Bad Data Produced an International Myth about U.S. Teachers and Misguided Debate about Education Policy The Mismeasure of Teaching Time Few matters of international education policy have achieved as much consensus as the claim that teachers in U.S. public schools spend nearly twice as much time leading classes as their counterparts in such high-performing nations as Finland, Japan, and other nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).   Yet this claim is far from true, Samuel E. Abrams explains in a new CBCSE study entitled The Mismeasure of Teaching Time. Teachers in U.S. public schools work hard, for relatively low pay, and under increasingly stressful conditions because of federally mandated high-stakes tests.  But they do not, as reported annually since 2000 by the OECD in its compendium of educational statistics, Education at a Glance, spend so much more time instructing students than teachers in other OECD nations. Through repetition by journalists and scholars, this misinformation has become conventional wisdom.  In the process, a myth has evolved misguiding comparative analysis of staffing practices. This myth has moreover obscured telling differences between the structure of the school day in the United States and other OECD nations.  Finally, this myth has overshadowed the critical issue of inferior pay of U.S. teachers in comparison to that of their OECD counterparts.  Abrams deconstructs the myth by exposing contradictions about teaching time within Education at a Glance; by revealing an error in data collection by the U.S. Department of Education that is behind the figures in Education at a Glance; and by providing detailed documentation of teaching time in the United States from a sample of rural, suburban, and urban school districts. This study provides readers with a clearer understanding of the workload and challenges of U.S. teachers and refocuses debate about education policy.  Click here to read the full text of this study.  About CBCSE CBCSE's mission is to improve the efficiency with which public and private resources are employed in education. We conduct research to determine the costs of educational programs as well as the economic value of program impacts in order to encourage educators, evaluators and policymakers to consider these factors in conjunction with program effectiveness in addressing educational goals. General Information CBCSE (212) 678-3259 cbcse@tc.columbia.edu

CBCSE | Box 181, 525 West 120th Street | New York | NY | 10027

Important read.

Johnson suggested that earlier efforts to find a a connection between school spending and results were simply confounded by the range of factors that affect the kinds of adults that kids become. Lawmakers send additional money to poor districts, but just because their students don't do as well as those in affluent districts doesn't mean that the money was wasted.

...and in fact, this money can be lifesaving.  I take all of this to mean that equitable school funding does indeed matter. 
 
-Angela

When public schools get more money, students do better

By Max Ehrenfreund January 20

Students listen to a substitute teacher, Deborah Pattin, in a temporary classroom in Olympia, Wash. (Ted S. Warren/AP)

Beginning 40 years ago, a series of court rulings forced states to reallocate money for education, giving more to schools in poor neighborhoods with less in the way of local resources. Critics such as Eric Hanushek, an economist at the Hoover Institution, argued these decisions were simply "throwing money at schools."  His research found that there was little correlation between how much schools spent and how well their students performed on tests.
It's a view still held by many politicians today, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.). "We spend more than any other state in the country," he said a year ago. "It ain't about the money. It's about how you spend it — and the results."
More recent research, however, has found that when schools have more money, they are able to give their students a better education. A new study on those who went to school during the school-finance cases a few decades ago found that those who attended districts that were affected by the rulings were more likely to stay in school through high school and college and are making more money today.
The authors, Kirabo Jackson and Claudia Persico of Northwestern University and Rucker Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley, released a revised draft of their as-yet-unpublished paper this week. The benefits were most obvious for students from poor families. They found that a 10 percent increase in the money available for each low-income student resulted in a 9.5 percent increase in students' earnings as adults. A public investment in schools, they wrote, returned 8.9 percent annually for a typical pupil who started kindergarten in 1980.
The findings are evidence that public schooling can be a way for children who grow up in poverty to overcome their circumstances, Johnson argued.
"Those increases in instructional expenditures proved to have large dividends, significant economic returns, in the lives of these children," he said. "We're always searching for what can break that cycle of poverty from one generation to the next."
The study used data on incomes for 15,353 people. The oldest subjects will turn 60 this year.
"What I like about this study is that the authors didn't shy away from proving what many of us consider the obvious," wrote Bruce Baker, a professor at Rutgers University and an expert on school funding, in an email. "If you have it, you can spend it, and if you don't you can't."
As for why his group came to a different conclusion than the one reached by Hanushek and other skeptics, Johnson suggested that earlier efforts to find a a connection between school spending and results were simply confounded by the range of factors that affect the kinds of adults that kids become. Lawmakers send additional money to poor districts, but just because their students don't do as well as those in affluent districts doesn't mean that the money was wasted.
The group used the series court rulings to compare students from otherwise similar circumstances in different places around the country, some of whom attended schools where funding was increased, and others who did not.
Another explanation could be that the benefits of a better education might not become apparent for decades. Johnson said that the difference in earnings was more pronounced for adults in their prime, not for younger adults.
Still, the authors don't advocate simply throwing money at the problem of education, either. "Money matters, but it matters how it's spent," said Jackson of Northwestern.
The group found that the increased funding had the greatest effect if it was used to raise teachers' salaries, reduce class sizes or lengthen the school year. That conclusion accords with other research finding that better teachers can have profound effects on how much students learn, since the schools with the smallest classes and the highest salaries can attract the most talented instructors.

Max Ehrenfreund is a blogger on the Financial desk and writes for Know More and Wonkblog.