To set the stage for charter school growth in Virginia in 2012, Governor Bob McDonnell hosted a meeting of state “charter school leaders” and “representatives from high-performing charter programs around the country.” While not highly attended by legislators, the number of charter management organizations (CMOs) represented at the meeting sent a clear message: it’s the governor’s intent to establish a beachhead of “high-performing” charter schools in Virginia run by CMOs that can provide a quick return on his political investment in the form of high pass rates on standardized tests.

The governor’s intent is to bring CMOs into Virginia to create a politically viable network of charter schools that will bear up under immediate scrutiny and clearly demonstrate a correlation between the money invested in the schools and their test scores.

This is a new turn in the reality of Virginia charter schools because the state’s four existing charter schools – while beholden to the SOL – didn’t open to increase student achievement as measured by standardized tests. (The following excerpts from school mission statements are taken from the state department of education website.)

The mission of Murray High School, which converted to charter status in 2001, “is to facilitate intensive, experiential learning opportunities in order to provide academic and personal success for students who are at-risk to leave school or to graduate below potential.”

York River Academy, opened in 2002, aims to provide “an academic, social, and career preparatory education in computer and web-based technology for students who may not graduate or graduate below potential.”

The Community Public Charter School, opened in 2008, is an “alternative and innovative learning environment using the arts to help children learn in ways that match their learning styles” with an “emphasis…on individual learning styles and developing the whole child, intellectually, emotionally, physically, and socially” because “it is the belief of the school that the arts are essential to human development, empowering people and enhancing learning.”

Virginia’s newest charter school, the Patrick Henry School of Science and Arts – which opened in 2010 – seeks “to establish a school based on parent, educator, and community involvement” that offers “the children of the ethnically and socio-economically diverse Richmond community with an academically rigorous science and liberal arts curriculum that emphasizes environmental awareness and social responsibility.”

Despite the schools’ disparate and student-centric (rather than achievement-centric) missions, they survive.

The start-up difficulties experienced by both Murray High School and the Community Public Charter are well known in Albemarle County, but their successes – both immediate and eventual – are testament to the division’s determination to incubate and safeguard programs that meet students’ needs without undue consideration for bureaucracy.

York River Academy continues operation and recently moved into new facilities shared with the Boys & Girls Club.

Patrick Henry perseveres despite fiscal growing pains and the apparent hostility of the school board that approved it.

These schools matter to their students and communities and serve as examples of grass roots start-up efforts in Virginia schools. Because of their local origins and capacities to address local needs, these schools might not “scale up”, but the community-based processes used in their development are definitely replicable.

In fact, Virginia could have spent the last dozen years building a thriving network of locally-accountable charter schools, especially if the state had begun doing so before No Child Left Behind. Instead, the state’s schooling apparatus – including its state department of education, its state school board, its state teachers’ organization (the VEA), and most local school boards – has made the charter movement into a boogey man.

This strategy has completely backfired.

Charter opponents in Virginia had the chance to open dozens of Murray High Schools and York River Academies and Community Public Charter Schools and Patrick Henry Schools for Science and the Arts. Charter opponents could have called these places magnet schools or speciality centers or schools within schools. However, charter opponents did nothing to support school choice in Virginia – they did nothing to diversify the educational opportunities open to Virginia students growing up in a new, information-rich, innovation-hungry world.

Instead they opposed charter schools. They insisted that school remain a monoculture.

And now it’s time to reap what our fractious institutions have sown – school choice as a kill event for traditional public schools, rather than school choice as an evolution of them.

Because Virginia did not embrace local control of diverse charter schools when it could, Virginia’s public schools – including its charter schools – now face a cataclysm of lost opportunity.

Here we are with a Republican governor, a Republican legislature, and charter school legislation that will let a coalition of the willing open new CMO-operated charter schools with or without approval of any single local school board. These schools will be focused on student achievement – which means they will focus on high pass rates on standardized tests. They will be schools controlled by extra-local organizations pursuing state performance goals in a state that hasn’t signed on to the Common Core standards or pursued federal Race to the Top funding. The state and the CMOs will be financially beholden to one another without being accountable to parents, children, or federal oversight, however dubious its current value.

What does that mean?

It means that Virginia will be largely alone in American public education, pursuing high pass rates on standards unique to the state through the cooperation of a superintendent who likes the tests and CMOs that like to profit of test results. Traditional public schools will face increasing pressure to match the results of the CMO charter schools by adopting test-aligned teaching strategies that have already gutted arts programs and made learning a cut-and-dry matter of memorizing old facts rather than a vital process of discovering and applying new concepts and ideas.

The public schools our children attend will become isolated outposts on an island of academic grind. Virginia will ask its children to take test after test – and these tests will be aligned with standards written by Virginia policy makers according to Virginia politics. Our tests won’t speak to the Common Core standards adopted by dozens of other states. Thus our educational system will have little in common with those of other states, and that disparity could eventually impact our kids’ chances of admission to the colleges and careers they desire if admissions decisions come down to the quality and utility of standards underlying any two candidates’ educations.

How can we stand up to this onslaught of standardization? How can we save Virginia’s schools from the faint praise of having good test scores on Virginia tests?

We can look to our four charter schools. These schools have demonstrated a willingness to correct mistakes and to stay the course in fulfilling their missions. They have done so by serving their students before the state. They have put the whole child before a dissection of facts. They have undertaken new teaching and learning in a new world. They have taken care of the children entrusted to them.

We don’t need to recreate these schools, but we need to recapture the will to update local schools to address local needs in preparing kids for their future.

To make CMOs stakeholders in this uprising of community-based schooling, I propose the inclusion of charter school covenants in any deal made with a CMO looking to operate a nationally branded charter school in Virginia.

1. First, any CMO opening a new charter school in Virginia should build and operate its own facility and agree to transfer the facility’s deed to the surrounding school division in case the CMO-run school closes.
2. Furthermore, any CMO opening a new charter school in Virginia should fund the work of a local committee – made up of educators, students, parents, and community members – to develop a new, grass-roots charter school, magnet school, specialty center, or school within a school to serve the surrounding division.
3. Finally, any CMO opening a new charter school in Virginia should be required to adopt and enact a mission that goes bend promoting student achievement on standardized tests and calls for some kind of juried portfolio or presentation of student work that demonstrates engagement with this mission as an exit requirement from the charter school. CMOs should retain students whose portfolios don’t demonstrate such engagement and absorb the cost of offering them an optional “post-graduate” year of studies in the area of the school’s mission.

CMOs are coming to Virginia, but we can’t confuse their work with the work of our grass-roots charter schools or let the CMOs overshadow the work our charter schools have done to serve their students and spur innovation in Virginia public education.

CMOs coming to Virginia should face a clear obligation to improve our kids’ quality of life, our kids’ quality of learning, and our communities’ futures – not just test scores. An outstanding education is an asset of human capital; SOL scores are not.

If CMOs aren’t willing to strike those deals and abide by those covenants, well, then, we should develop more schools of our own that will. We already know what to do.

An audience member said “curriculum needs to drive technology.” I asked what should drive curriculum. Dan Fink responded in good humor.

Dan’s response evoked some energy for me, so I want to paste my reply to him here; I think it’s a statement worth taking accountability for, and I don’t want to give the impression that I’m willing to let it sit on Mary Beth’s blog, but not my own.

I hear you, and I’m grinning, but I’m not convinced we can’t get away with greater flexibility and student choice. I think we self-limit here.

There are compromises we can make in how we choose to use class time. Google time is a possibility (say 20%). Negotiating state curriculum with students is a possibility (you give me three standards, and we’ll get you a blog and a trip/Skype call to the aquarium for or action research). Subverting the state curriculum is a possibility (A People’s Textbook of Algebra, anyone?). Ignoring the state curriculum is a possibility (gulp).

I feel keenly the conflict between my vocation as an educator to help others learn and my occupation as a public school teacher to cover state curriculum in such a manner that students recall it for an end of course test. I have positive evaluations, but my test scores have dropped since I stopped obsessively teaching to the state test. People walk through my classroom a few times a year and offer me a few complimentary generalities about what they see. Then, at the end of the year, people talk to me about all kinds of numbers in great specificity. I am confused in so many ways by this, but remain convinced that leaving public education to escape this confusion is self-serving. I recognize why I get talked to about numbers and I acknowledge the effective job people do in working with them – I value their efforts on our kids’ behalf and their work with me to push my teaching. I am lucky to be so supported in my work by my division.

My point: if we’re willing to dwell in ambiguity and take year-end commentary on our tests scores as feedback from adults with different priorities rather than as judgment from our betters – our approvers, our gatekeepers, even our mentors – then during the year we have a lot of wiggle room in covering “the” curriculum.

I worry that the easy answer is an easy target for our complaints and thus helps us be complacent in sitting in judgment without acting in accordance with what we know about learning, child development, and human motivation.

Yours,
C

I would add that there are fantastic administrators out there ready to partner with teachers and students in negotiating curriculum and establishing more targeted power standards embedded in powerful project- and service-based learning. I won’t name anyone in particular as I don’t want to suggest that this post speaks for him or her, but such administrators know who they are, and so do their teachers.

Anyway, I have two stories today from a nearly democratic classroom.

This morning a student saw me carrying around a copy of Guerilla Learning, by Grace Llewellyn and Amy Silver. He immediately ditched his Google Sketch Up skate-board design project, grabbed the book from me, and Googled The Teenage Liberation Handbook, also by Llewellyn. Then he showed his friends. Then they had a big dust up over homeschooling and whether it was sick and pro or fail and noob. They were greatly confused. They wanted to be home, but not necessarily alone. They wanted to learn something new each day, but not necessarily on their own. They had ascribed in their minds some worth to being at school even though they often resist it greatly. They ended up agreeing that they would like to learn what they want to learn, but that leaving school didn’t seem okay – it was “hobo.” I kept quiet, let go of their self-directed learning goals for the day, and felt a little heartbroken that these marvelous boys still trusted school even though it has wounded them so much and so clearly failed to meet their needs and wants as people and learners.

This afternoon, while researching the civil rights movement through some resources I’d gathered, another student edited the Wikipedia page for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I watched him add a bunch of periods to the top of the entry. I kept quiet. I watched him save the entry. I watched him open the entry again to delete the periods. I asked him afterwards why he undid his edit. He said, “I didn’t want to get in trouble.” I asked him what he thought would happen to him. He didn’t know. We talked about how other editors would have undone his work and why. He added, “I didn’t want to be mean.” He smiled the whole time we talked, kind of amazed at his own power and proud, I think, of his decision to be responsible when given the chance to make amends for an impulsive act of Web 2.0 learning.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

Margo Figgins, an associate professor with the university’s Curry School of Education, directs the workshop. I especially like the program’s goals, writing widgets, and clear educational philosophy:

Our program is dedicated to developing the work of young writers in the range of rising freshman to seniors in high school. The desire to write is what counts. We encourage inexperienced as well as practiced writers to apply. You will receive feedback, personal attention, and the level of instruction you need in order to grow. You will also receive written commentaries from your instructor specific to your progress and suggestions toward eventual publication.

One of the program’s long-term goals is the creation of a full-time school, which could be a charter school housed in the surrounding community or at UVA itself if Virginia ever legislates multiple charter authorizers. This ambition got me thinking about post-test school scheduling.

If our current norm is to teach for the test before the test, why teach for the test after the test? We should – by all means and at all times – get students the support they need in literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, creativity, curiosity, compassion, and self-expression regardless of our testing schedules. However, if the only time we’re systematically allowed to stop teaching to the test is after the test, then let’s not keep teaching to the test. Let’s not insist on business as usual when the business of testing is done. Let’s not talk about how we’re going to maintain control over kids when – well, not ever. Let’s not put all the responsibility for enriching learning and entertaining students on individual teachers.

Instead, let’s think systematically about using the time after testing to create school-wide new schedules and structures built on authentic, interdisciplinary learning. Bobbi Snow, one of our school’s co-founders, has started me thinking on this. Let’s try what we seldom try during the year. Let’s go out into the community and learn about our neighbors, their needs, and ourselves. Let’s bring our communities into our schools. Let’s experiment and find out what works in authentic engagement so we can infuse all of next year’s lessons with more choice and meaning for kids.

I’d love to hear what Margo and her collaborators think about helping struggling writers succeed at school. I’d love to see how they would adapt their schedule to ours. I’d love to see how they further foster choice and meaning inside our school.

So, I’ve got an email to write.

What programs exist in your community and offer kids authentic learning experiences outside school? What insights and expertise can they offer you, your students, your school, and your system? How can you partner with them this Spring to better infuse the entirety of next year with more choice and meaning for students? What relationships can you develop from your classroom to bring in visiting experts and community educators as volunteers?

One way to get every kid into a camp is to bring camp to school. One way to transform school is to make it more camp-like. If you can’t convince your school to restructure its day for more authentic learning after testing is done, think about how you can transform your classroom over the last few weeks of school and ask yourself who can help you do it.

If you’re outside the classroom, can you find one to support in authentic learning?

Can we make room in curriculum maps for partnerships like these throughout the year? Can we recruit and join with pre-service teachers to run opportunities like these on Saturdays for our students and offer them field-experience credit in conjunction with ed schools? Can we showcase our schools to students, families, and communities in enough ways to get ourselves thinking of schools as something else?

in the red #25 by clickykbd

“All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism – it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere.”
-Conan O’Brien

“The tension between what I’m actually doing in my classroom and what I think I should be doing in my classroom has gotten to be almost unbearable. I don’t believe that I’m preparing my students to be successful in a world driven by innovation and creativity, but the ONLY tangible indicator of my performance—standardized test scores—says that my students are not as “accomplished” as students in other classrooms in our school and district.”
-Bill Ferriter

What I read most in Ferriter’s (@plugusin) quote is his determination not to be cynical, but rather to hold on to his beliefs about teaching and learning despite the compromises we are asked to make daily in the name of student “achievement.”  I don’t know an American public school colleague who doesn’t feel this tension.

What can we do? How can we resist cynicism? How can we go somewhere else?

In response to these quotes, I suggest we lobby for the creation of a red team per school or division made up of

• Teachers of all sorts.
• Students – especially those who struggle and/or feel disengaged.
• Parents – including home-schoolers, private-schoolers, and virtual-schoolers who will rejoin the division provisionally to champion and monitor change.
• Community partners who will invest human and/or financial resources in the team’s initiatives.
• Building-level and central office administrators who get carte blanche from the school board to speak according to the dictates of their consciences.

Each team would ask two questions:

• What’s our objective?
• What’s in the way?

The red team would report to the principal or to the superintendent and the board.  The school or school system would own the objective and dedicate itself to achieving it and eliminating the obstacles to it through a project-based, balanced scorecard approach.

Or we could hang out here for a while longer and risk Coco’s ire.

Teachers: could you do this with students and/or parents in your classroom?  Frankly, the idea scares me, which is probably a clear indication that I should do it.  I’ve asked for feedback before, but not in a way that invites such honesty about my role in presenting obstacles to individual students’ learning.  Stay tuned.

Windows by robynejay

Last week during a bout of insomnia, I watched The Remains of the Day twice in a row. I had never seen it before or read the book, though I dearly love and frequently sniffle while reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The Remains of the Day follows Mr. Stevens, a butler, who serves Lord Darlington, an appeaser, before World War II, and a retired American lawmaker, Mr. Lewis, after the war. Mr. Stevens lives inside several cages of propriety. He’s serving an English Lord. Lord Darlington’s new housekeeper, Ms Kenton, challenges him because while she’s great at her job, she also allows herself to be human in the service of Lord Darlington, which Mr. Stevens does not allow himself to do the same. Mr. Stevens and Miss Kenton circumscribe romance as their relationship deepens over time, but Mr. Stevens can’t return Ms Kenton’s affection when she expresses it. Ms Kenton leaves and marries a former colleague. After World War II, Mr. Stevens searches out Ms Kenton to invite her back to work for Mr. Lewis. Ms Kenton agrees to a meeting and seems ready to rejoin Mr. Stevens – her marriage is breaking – but then Ms Kenton’s estranged husband shows up to reconcile with her bearing news of their daughter’s pregnancy. On the appointed day of Mr. Stevens’s vacation, Ms Kenton meets him and explains that she plans now to stay with her husband, near her daughter and grandchild. Mr. Stevens barely lets his dismay show, which is the end of any hope he has of winning Ms Kenton back or being able to share his feelings. Even after crossing the country on holiday to find Ms Kenton, Mr. Stevens can’t ask her to return for him. At the end of the day, Mr. Stevens walks Ms Kenton to her bus, wears his half-smile shield, and waves good-bye as Ms Kenton looks back at him, weeping for Mr. Stevens. He can’t, or won’t, find the person she sees.

What resonates for me in this film is Mr. Stevens’s inability to pursue his passion for fear of losing his intertwined job, identity, and self-control. He cannot find a way to reconcile a life of service with self-affirming and self-serving actions and emotions, so he chooses self-abnegation both in losing Ms Kenton and preventing himself from becoming who he might be apart from his role in his lords’ household.

I think of myself teaching between the world of policy and the world I want. I worry that I will always teach in a limbo of well-intentioned starts and fits towards something new without ever making the leap to fundamentally change how I teach or who I am as a teacher. I can see myself waving goodbye to scary and amazing chances to reinvent what a school is and what a school does. I don’t know that I can reconcile the job of teaching with my passion for it.

To wit, now I’m thinking about testing windows. In Virginia, middle-school students take Standards of Learning (SOL) tests at the end of a course – either at the semester or at the end of the year. Many middle schools therefore schedule semester-long science and social studies courses. Students take either science or social studies first semester; take an SOL test in January, and then switch subjects and test again in May. The idea here is that students have a better chance to retrieve content shortly after learning it than they do later. If a test item asks a student to recall a piece of content from September, the student has a better chance to do so in January than in May. Dedicated educators invested in students and learning find ways to embed this content in meaningful work so that students hold on to their learning regardless of the testing schedule’s emphasis on short-term retention.

No middle school in Virginia that I know of runs semester-long language arts or math courses because of AYP. Educators want students to have the most time possible to master spiraling skills in advance of taking tests that determine schools’ fates. It makes sense given the current national agenda and testing systems. It’s not that science and social studies don’t have rich traditions of investigation, interpretation, and discovery; it’s just AYP.

I wonder if we could free up middle schools’ scheduling and management of human capital if we risked differentiating testing windows.

What if incoming 6th graders all took reading and math tests in September as pre-assessments for grouping?

What if students who passed the test took the rest of the year for project-based, inquiry-driven local and global learning partnerships?

What if any 6th grade student who passed the first test could elect to take the 7th grade test at the semester, and the 8th grade test at the end of the year? Why not give that student the opportunity to earn 2 test-free years of learning without built-in limits?

What if 6th grade students who did not pass the test were given the same chance to re-test in January, or again at the end of the year? If the stakes are so high for schools, why not generate some student buy-in through choice and self-determination in attacking standardized tests?

What if we took the hit on a 6th grade entrance SOL and then didn’t test students who “failed” again until the end of 7th grade, or until the student and his or her teachers felt he or she was ready at the semester, end of 6th grade, or beginning of 7th grade after a summer school experience acting as proxy for year-round schooling? What if we traded off 6th grade testing for more prep time for – and success with – 7th and 8th grade tests? Would teachers under pressure to cut out everything but the tested curriculum find ways to enrich learning for student sentenced to remediation if they had more time to prepare for tests? Would federal and state governments bless a system of curriculum and assessment that recognizes schools’ strides in student growth by weighing 7th or 8th grade AYP over 6th?

Differentiating scheduling by differentiating testing windows would take a significant investment of student, teacher, counselor, and administrator time at the beginning of the school year, but the strategic scheduling, teaching, and learning made possible by such differentiation might reward the risk. Certainly the approach would help justify larger class sizes of students already exited from testing and smaller class sizes for those still working to demonstrate their learning on standardized measures.

Differentiating scheduling by testing windows and early passes might also allow an administrator to assign personnel to areas of instruction in which they excel, which carries its pros and cons in terms of teacher efficacy versus an over-specialized work force. It might be too daunting a change, it might be made moot by policy, or it might turn out that the number of student exiting testing requirements would be too small to justify a differentiates testing scheme. Nevertheless, I struggle with holding students who have surpassed a curriculum captive to it, and I struggle with asking students to face three tests in three years per assessed subject area if differentiation by testing and time could provide the desired results from one test.

I’m not a big fan of these questions I’ve been asking. I would rather ask questions like, “How can we become co-learners with students in the cloud-classrooms of School 3.0?,” but how can our testing system provide more opportunity than limits? What core standards have a chance of making schools more relevant to students who aren’t participating in their creation? What national agendas mired in the spent oil of an industrial educational system have a chance of changing our country today?

It remains up to teachers and the leaders who support them to make learning relevant to students. It remains up to teachers and the leaders who support them to favor innovation over replication. It remains up to teachers and the leaders who support them to push back against the system, to play with schedules that provide access to learning, not just to curriculum.

Maybe this can be teachers’ new role; maybe this can be the purpose of teachers’ social networking and professional development; maybe this can be teachers’ legacy after standardized tests are gone: in partnership with students we create relevance from the nothing that exists without it. Let the Fed and the SEAs and LEAs own the sound and fury of curriculum and testing. We create relevance. We celebrate discovery. We connect context and identity. We learn together.

I think what I’m going to do is this: take time over break to see what’s left to teach. Pick the content I least look forward to teaching. Push aside my anxieties and biases against it. Imagine each one of my students learning about it joyfully. Take notes on what students are learning and how they’re learning it. Build a resource or unit from those visions of engaging, inspiring work. Gather materials. Call in favors. Make it work. Try it and see. Find out where it goes. Not be afraid.

B&S Fans by acb

But what about teachers? Who is our authentic audience, and does our behavior reflect its primacy in our professional lives? For whom do we perform teaching? Recent #edchat about standardized testing and the nation’s discourse about President Obama’s speech to students have turned on the house lights. From the stage we can look out and see our students, but also their parents and our leaders, law-makers, and tax-payers.

Our act requires many types of improvisation. When we see a great idea, we have to adapt it to our circumstances. When we see a students’ needs, we have to differentiate instruction to meet them. When we hear our parent’s and policy-makers’ and public’s shouts, we have to decide what we stand for and how we stand for it.

In this light, in so many ways, neither Obama’s speech (see: Reagan) nor the talk about it are new. Our students, parents, and leaders call for us to act in conflicting ways all the time. The sound and fury of public discourse is really a repeated call to us in our moments of history to decide for ourselves what we value in our work and to act in accordance with our decisions instead of in compromise away from them. At the very least, our moment asks us to push teaching and learning past the tests and to make them personally meaningful for our students. No generation, president, or political party has gotten this right. We won’t get it right unless we face up to our own responsibility to reform classroom practice.

A dear principal of mine began every year encouraging us to work smarter because he believed we couldn’t work any harder. I hear him every time I read a blog post celebrating a teacher’s sense of accomplishment at getting all the students lined up and silent in the hall.

Rules will not eliminate the achievement gap. Orderly lines of complacent children will not improve graduation rates. Standardized tests will not stand the test of time. Our best measure of success will be our students’ lives, not their scores, and the lives of their children. If we don’t find ways to make learning matter to students now, the next generation will have the same views of school and the same mistrust of teachers.

Democratic nominee Barack Obama by Wa-J

Whether we watch Obama’s speech during school on Tuesday or not, our real task is to make what we do as authentically engaging to students as this debate has been to us. We need to switch places with the students and let them perform work inspired by their talents and passions. We need to broaden students’ sense of audience and introduce them to mentors and coaches who have better ideas than we do about how schoolwork connects to the professional lives students want to lead. We need to teach in a way that seems authentic to students who are no longer the audience, but the performers.

The purpose of school shouldn’t be to teach kids how to live inside or outside the lines of a police state. If a school’s grounds and halls need to be patrolled for safety’s sake, then by all means patrol them, but in any school classrooms should be oases. Learning should be a refuge. It should take work to learn, but the work should be joyous and different from the fear-coerced compromises too many students have to make to survive physically, mentally, and emotionally. Teachers: we can’t meet every kid’s every need, but I remain convinced we can do more individually to change the way we teach to address students’ needs for safety, belonging, liberty power, and, yes, fun in the classroom. If we believe in the American Dream, if we believe in rugged individualism, and if we believe in a future where government is smaller because it is truthfully needed less, then it’s time to stop looking for students and parents and tax-payers and policy-makers to change the world. It’s time to change our classrooms, aquí mero, and to prove right the trust we want to teach and learn joyfully with our students in the brief time we have with them. Do right by today’s students, and their parents and children will thank you for it. Decide, teach authentically, and don’t be afraid.