Particularly like the Suspect Device summary of the education panel for RT3.

allow me to stand up for my flawed little institution

After RT3 yesterday, I was inspired to catch up on the blogs of panelists that I either had never read or only scanned briefly a long time ago.

Still trying to process a lot of this Dirty South Bureau post, especially the references to TAP and Algiers. But my brain is snotted up and it's way too early for a Sunday so pardon me if I'm incoherent and too brief.

First of all TAP and the incentive-based pay. I can't speak for the pay, as last year was my school's "practice" year with TAP. This year it really kicks in. While there are things about TAP I find annoying, my master teacher was a huge help to me. It has been hard to find help with my content (math - and now science) but when it comes to teaching more effectively and managing my kids more effectively TAP, at least for me, did a helluva lot of good. I was a crap teacher at the beginning of last year but I was lucky to have good advice. Am I a fluke? Am I being duped?

I've been feeling uncomfortable about this sort of attitude I got yesterday that bringing these new teachers in is bad and all our old, experienced teachers must be good. There will always be new teachers, a need for new blood. And, yeah, they will probably always suck in the beginning. I did. I'm still a work in progress. And I hardly want to insinuate that all the old New Orleans public school teachers who got fired were horrible and needed to go, however, in my experience with some of the "old guard" I've seen a resistance to change, a resistance to learning and continued education, that I find disturbing. When given the opportunity (multiple times) to go to conferences, expand their knowledge, participate in meaningful professional development, there were many of our more experienced teachers who resisted. They didn't care to go. I can't see passing that opportunity up.

I'm seeing experienced teachers who are opposed to the nationwide movement toward inclusion in the classroom. Special Education is something that should happen in an isolated environment as far as some people are concerned, because that's the way they've done it for decades. Because children with special needs are a hassle, a problem to be pushed aside. And I'm getting their kids and finding out how poorly socialized they are, ill-prepared to function in a classroom, and lulled into this idea that because they have been labeled "special ed" that they don't have to work to pass because they're too dumb to do what they other kids do. Because teachers don't want these kids. It's fucking appalling.

Yes, there are some long-term vets I know who I look up to as great teachers. But there are also some veteran teachers that make my skin crawl, that make me fear for the kids they teach. And it's because of those teachers that I don't have a problem with my lack of job security, my one-year contract. If I'm not doing my job well, they should damn well find somebody else who can. Because we can't afford to have mediocre teachers for our kids. We can't afford to have teachers who sit back and believe that just getting by is good enough. We have something to fucking prove and we have classrooms full of kids who have a shit future if we don't. Am I crazy to believe that teaching should be high-stakes and competitive because if its not then we're doing our kids a disservice?

I'm actually surprised that the fellow second-year teacher on the panel didn't stand up to defend his position as one of us TFA/alternative certification/fast-track smartass-kids-who-want-to-change-the-world better. I found that I spent a lot of the panel yesterday actually feeling vaguely offended (maybe I'm more conservative/neoliberal/reactionary/whatever than I know) and the more I read and the more I write the more that feeling solidifies.

I need to shower and ruminate on this some more.

more rising tide mental purging

Rising Tide III was worth skipping derby, if only to give me things to chew on in my blog. While everything else was interesting in its own right, I'm still mentally stuck on all the things said during the education panel because that's really the only area under discussion where I feel like I can have any sort of informed opinion (and even then, huge gaps in my knowledge). As I said before, this really needed a whole other conference to really get at the heart of the matter and cover everything that ought to be covered. I was physically shaking half-way through just through sheer frustration/inspiration/information overload.

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around a thought that hasn't quite made all its connections yet. All sorts of information that I have just been too busy or sheltered to stumble across yet, new perspectives. But let me say that Cliff was a valuable addition to the panel and I wanted to hear more from him. After a lot of discussion today about those who are working to undermine and privatize public schools and some pretty direct negativity about the state of charters in the city, what I felt was lacking was a sense of what's going right (if anything) and what parents want for their kids. Cliff brought that, I think, but we need more.

When I was at the CEC conference in Boston this spring, I attended a presentation about a program that was aimed at helping families who had to deal with multiple government agencies (schools, social workers, probation officers, etc), consolidating their needs. And what the organizers found to be the most effective way to get the parents to "buy in" was not to try and tell them what to do or dictate what they should have to run their families or their kids' lives. It was simply to ask them what they needed and then to provide that. It made the biggest difference in the long run as far as improvement for students with special needs in inner city schools and their acheivement levels.

This comes to mind now because of what was brought up in the panel about charters being created or schools being converted without community imput. It is desparately needed, however, I don't believe that New Orleans has the mechanism to really reach out to the parents. And, as great as the blogger community is here, I don't know that this is even an effective medium to really get to some of the most isolated and marginalized people in the city. The people who really need someone to just ask them what they need. Not to tell them what help they are going to get (which is what our school systems are doing in large part) but to really get out there and ask people what help they really want.

More is brewing in the synapses, but I'll take an interwebs breather for now.

the past, present, and future of elementary and secondary education in new orleans

Edit: Hit up Maitri for a good outline of the panel discussion.

Can't think fast enough, can't type fast enough, can't make connections fast enough. I've got a couple pages of frantic handwritten notes that I'm trying to compile into something coherent as this panel wraps up and it's just entirely too much. I'm going to be blogging about this for days (or, at my post rate, probably a couple months).

Bullet points that I needneedneed to talk about:

- confusion for teachers/parents/everyone in our fractured lack of cohesive school system
- need for community involvement / vote in the system
- charters roll dismantling the public schools? / privatization
- price of our current state of "individual choice" any worse than flight to the suburbs?
- unions?
- what about incentive-based pay? continued teacher education? contracts?
- perceptions tainted by past bitter experiences / need for outreach
- public school is still a dirty word
- charter PR machines / are charters keeping their promises?
- when are charters good? bad?

There's more but wait. I am torn by the feeling that there are serious problems with many of the charters / privately run schools / and the fractured system that New Orleans Schools is currently working with - but also there is a lot of hostility toward the charter movement here and I work for a large charter association in the city. Personally, professionally I LOVE my school. I see charters working, building community, reaching out to parents, educating the kids who live right down the block from me. It kills me to hear the negative that's dominated and I'm trying desparately to put my thoughts together to counter that, to put out that there is something working with this new, weird, fucked-up way that we are dealing with now. Am I lucky? Are my kids just lucky to have a charter association in their neighborhood that seems to be working overall? Am I biased? Yeah, in a big way. The last thing I want to hear is how charters here are not working because I see them working. I see mine working. Yes, there are bad charters in this city. Yes, they are terribly imperfect and inconsistent in quality and intent.

Charter schools must be prepared to deliver upon the promises that they are making to people. I understand that that is not happening city-wide but I believe that it is beginning to happen at my school, in my neighborhood, in Algiers in general. The skeptics are right to be skeptical of what's going on but I'm still waiting to hear a viable plan to reconstitute a coherent system that works. Fine, the system is still broken in its own way - but if you are out there yelling about it, please someone tell me and point me in the direction of someone somewhere who has a concrete plan to fucking do something about it.

Parents have an insane amount of choices right now and I think that is great. I don't think that it is necessarily a bad thing, although it does create new issues to deal with. Those choices are not always good or easy to make; parents don't have all the information they need to be informed about their childrens' education, nor is that information easy to obtain. Schools make promises that perhaps they are not ready or prepared to keep and that's doing a disservice to kids and parents who are trying to make something better of New Orleans and their lives. But I can't help but think of the way public education works throughout our nation, the struggle to move to more affluent neighborhoods so that your kids can go to the good public schools, the flight to suburbia because schools in the city are screwed up. If I ever have children I don't want to have to choose between paying for private school or moving out of a neighborhood I love for the sake of their education. If I ever have kids I want them to live in New Orleans, not out in suburban wasteland (sorry suburbanites, but it is not for me). I guess what I'm getting at is: is the way we have now so much worse than the old way?

We've got to be doing something right even a little because people have faith that public school can work again.

More later. Must eats.

teh geek

Blogging the Rising Tide III - wifi is a marvelous invention.

Actually just sitting here drinking coffee and being totally weirded out by seeing so much of the N.O. blogger community in person for the first time last night and today.

Edit for 11:01 - and so begins the education panel. This is why I'm here.

playing hooky?

So I think I'm gonna hit the Rising Tide conference on Saturday morning. It's derby bootcamp this weekend but I can't really afford to drive to Houma and spend that much time when I need to be focused on school right now. No, that's just my excuse to go rub elbows.

I'm tired. I'm losing my voice. The attitudes are starting to show. But it's a good challenge and I'm not burned out yet.