The Jose Vilson

Short Notes: What Fathers Watch

2013-06-16T15:33:06-07:00

A few notes:

Chris Lehmann wants people to get the difference between authoritative and authoritarian. Here’s a primer. [Practical Theory]
John Spencer has five things he never wants to say. Maybe you’ll rethink about the things you say, too. [Education Rethink]
Jeb Bush thinks immigration is a good idea … because immigrants are “more fertile.” Ay dios mio. [FOX Latino]
Is the fastest-growing job market in empathy? George Anders seems to think so. Teachers could be in this for a while after all. [LinkedIn]
Workers simply don’t need tips if they get paid well enough. A sushi restaurant attempts to do just that. [ThinkProgress]

Quotables:

@TheJLV If I have musically gifted kids I'm putting them in a rocketship and letting them zoom around the world alone

— Akil Bello (@akilbello) June 16, 2013

re: Little Einsteins and parentless cartoons …

Jose, who wishes all the fathers out there a great day ….

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Having A Voice Isn’t Free, Either (Inspiring Teacher Voice)

2013-06-13T19:07:50-07:00

Today, it was brought to my attention just how costly teacher voice can be.

The top-down management style of most schools lends itself to an undemocratic collective of adults and children in the building, all exacerbated by internal and external factors like poverty, personalities, and Charlotte Danielson. Autonomy is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder is often fresh out of college and / or hasn’t been in the classroom longer than I have.

That’s why teacher voice is a reform in and of itself. The idea that teachers and students have a say as to the direction of the school runs contrary to what policy tells us over and again, no matter if you’re in a rural town with one elementary, middle, and high school or if you’re an urban teacher trying to dodge the bullets of an ed-deform mayor.

The status quo tells us that teachers should only speak when spoken to, help reform only when it’s close to the finish line, and smile only when it’s an appreciation day or on their own time. By the time teachers are given (!) the chance to speak up, it already went through a bunch of heads who want to educate without educating, or make a difference without much understanding or interactions with real people.

Teacher voice should look less like the anonymous focus groups and telephone surveys assessing customer satisfaction and more like boards of directors and action committees. When we assume on-the-ground educators shouldn’t have an equal stake in what happens in the classroom, we beg for two things to happen. Either a) teachers leave or b) teachers rebel.

I’m hoping for the latter.

Freedom isn’t free. Having a voice isn’t free, either. This is no coincidence. The ability to break free from the yeses – where “yes” is really a masked “OK, let’s just get on with it” – comes at a cost. Checklists, bulletin board inspections, browbeating, hurt feelings, and incidental layoffs soon follow. Our collective voice has to come from understanding the risks involved, unpopular as our opinions may be.

A teacher voice demands an eye on progress, a heart for students, and a voice for waking lions.

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A Memo on Teacher Voice

2013-06-10T18:32:44-07:00

Why do people always feel the need to limit the potential of teacher voice?

Last year, I expounded on redefining teacher voice, and what that means for true education reform:

Teacher voice is the collective and individual expression of meaningful, professional opinion based on classroom experience and expertise.

What developed shortly thereafter were a plethora of discussions of what that looks like, and how we employ that in different settings. I came to realize a few things:

People aren’t always ready to change the paradigm to make decisions more democratically.
Teachers don’t always have the time or energy besides doing the best job possible in the classroom.
The education debate as a whole hasn’t evolved from just picking one side and one group of people to side with.

These points make for a lack of teachers activating their voices. For those of us who do this selflessly (sans incentives, rewards, titles, and permission), it often feels like punching a wall with your bare knuckles, or breaking down a cement building with an ice pick. On one end, you have a well-versed, well-funded machine that has a set of coherent talking points on one end, and a passionate and divergent cluster of people on the other end.

These ends aren’t equal by any measure, in wealth, in numbers, or in self-actualization.

Here’s a few things we can do to build up our voices individually and collectively:

Educators can change the narrative by pushing for our stories to come to the fore with the right research and best practices to back them up.
Educators can support each other (within reason) as often as possible, linking articles, blogs, and tweets of people they like and …
Educators can highlight the things education deformers a lot less.

Coming up with solutions ourselves, finding the right people willing to push those ideas, and building alliances takes a lot of hard work, but, as we deconstruct others’ arguments, we can build together. How do we get all those people to our table?

Jose, who thanks Sabrina Stevens for helping me hash out these thoughts …

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Short Notes: A Cautionary Tale for Edubloggers

2013-06-09T09:23:58-07:00

Arundhati Roy

A few notes:

The New York Daily News wants you to nominate teachers for their Hometown Heroes award. Start your engines, ladies and gentlemen. [NY Daily News]
If you’re sick of the “disruption” talk surrounding technology, specifically education, then read this paper by Audrey Watters. Another hit. [Hack Education]
Peter DeWitt writes an interview, and the press secretary for the New York State Education Department called up his school to intimidate him. This is an important read for sure, especially for edubloggers. [Finding Common Ground]
Some math: 75% of kids in Chicago’s school-to-prison pipeline are Black. Seriously. [ThinkProgress]
Speaking of which, does math actually exist? This video uses Adventure Time and James Bond to explore math. It’s freakin’ awesome. [Gizmodo / PBS Ideas]

Quotable:

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simply what is complicated and never complicated what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.”

- Arundhati Roy

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Learning To Fly (Reminding Ourselves That Students Are People)

2013-06-06T17:50:21-07:00

Kingda Ka, Six Flags Great Adventure

Confession: I had the best time yesterday hanging with my students at Six Flags Great Adventure for their senior trip.

From discovering that Adventure Time is my new favorite show (and I ain’t even know it) to testing out my intestinal fortitude (just fine for now, thank you very much), I got to see a side of my students I rarely get to see. The heights of the Kingda Ka and twists of Batman The Ride shook their false bravado and nonchalance they put on at school. In one instance, a couple of my more nervous girls went immediately to the Kingda Ka while most of my boys stayed behind.

Right then, I wish we had this roller coaster all along.

Having a rapport with students often demands that we pull back our actual selves, focusing instead on our roles as “warm demanders.” Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but every so often, we need spaces where we can interact aside from academics. In no way do I advocate for lower expectations for students. Rather, I’m suggesting that I’m still trying to find the balance between high expectations for them as students and high expectations for all of us as people.

Yesterday, when a few of my students feared getting up this green giant, I took my usual technique with math and said, “Guys, this is light work.” They didn’t find it so easy. Some hyperventilated. Others tried to back out until their friends pulled them back in. One of them said she needed me to sit next to her on the ride and not move too much. I tell them it’s 30 seconds for the entire ride. They’re doubting it, but they’ve counted every ride before them and each of them hit 30 seconds until they return.

When it’s our turn, they’re super-quiet. I try to keep a straight face, but the G-force pushed my face back and I looked like a villain out of Dick Tracy. A meme would ensue shortly thereafter. When we finished the ride, I cracked a wry smile at the survivors. They waited half an hour, but thanked me.

Shortly thereafter, I tweeted:

Fun had at Six Flags. Taught students to soar, to fly above, to look past their fear of heights. Lessons to carry into high school.

— Jose Vilson (@TheJLV) June 6, 2013

As much as I’ve taught them, my only regret is that I didn’t remind myself that I’m learning from them too.

Best,

Jose

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Don’t Ask Me If You’re Going To Summer School

2013-06-04T18:11:42-07:00

My new post at The Collaborateurs explains a situation that happens too frequently to us during this time of year:

Their absences weren’t insignificant, the lack of work is made more obvious by everyone else’s full portfolios, the same trends happen across their subjects, and just getting them into class almost doesn’t feel worth it. That hurts. We have an ideal for trying to get every child to graduate and succeed in high school with an eye on college.

Situations with our students only happens because our schools aren’t structured to handle the ones who slip through the fault lines through which earthquakes form.

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A Note On Teacher Evaluations [A Memo For Sanity]

2013-06-03T18:42:26-07:00

UFT Prez Michael Mulgrew, NYS Education Commissioner John King, and NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo

Remember a few years ago when I told you that trying to create equations for the intangibles is calamitous for any profession, especially education? If think tanks prognosticate that the 21st century needs ideals like collaboration and transparency, then we’re doing a poor job of exemplifying that in schools.

On Saturday, for example, Commissioner John King released New York State’s mandated teacher – and principal – evaluation system because the United Federation of Teachers and NYC Department of Education couldn’t come to an agreement on their own. (N.B.: Mayor Mike Bloomberg came at the last minute and put a stop to the almost-finished negotiations, but that’s another story completely.) In his press release, King waxes poetic about students, saying “they’ve waited too long” for these reports to come out, an empty statement since students probably won’t read too many of these. To be fair, he also rebutted Bloomberg by saying we “can’t fire our way” towards improving the teaching profession, though one has to wonder how due process comes into play in this evaluation.

Then, he revealed the plan. The presser is here for your perusal, and follows the pattern set across the country: 60% is based on observations – decreased to 55% if we include the 5% for student surveys – and 40% on state and local assessments. Unless they’re rated as ineffective in the 40% – making the 40% equal to 100% – and the teacher is automatically rated as ineffective overall.

From that alone, we can reasonably conclude that teacher evaluations aren’t about the improvement and professionalization of teaching, but about the politics at play in distant office buildings, back rooms of city halls, and government floors. How “assessment” takes precedent over anything else in the school year is beyond me. While the United Federation of Teachers, NYC Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, and Bloomberg called the evaluation deal a win for each of their constituents (the jury’s still out on this), we can all agree that each of the percentages are so unstable, we can’t rely on anything we read in these documents.

Let’s look at them bit by bit:

State Growth: 20%

As I’ve discussed here, the most viable research on this stuff shows that the equations central offices have used to put a number on teachers have largely shown that we actually can’t put a real number on what teachers do with assessments. Our classes and the tests they’ve taken in the last decade vary from year to year in a way that has us comparing apples to oranges to cantaloupes to watermelons. By the time researchers get a stable number, the margin of error gets down to a still-hefty 11%, something we wouldn’t accept in our local or national elections but seem to be OK with in our classrooms.

Local Assessments: 20%

School committees will have the choice to go with their own assessments or an assessment chosen by the city (most likely Acuity). Based on my understanding, if they go with the former, they’ll have to get their assessments approved by central offices anyways. If they go with the latter, that’s two to three more standardized tests they have to take throughout the year. While I prefer the former, I also have to consider that this 20% will look different for every school throughout the city, but let me get to that.

Principal Observations: 60% (maybe)

This is where things get tricky because principals have to look at all the dimensions of the Danielson framework, something I’m not opposed to. As UFT President Michael Mulgrew has said before, the framework has elements that speak to a more holistic evaluation of teachers instead of specific dimensions that must be mastered. What gets tricky is how people perceive those dimensions. Currently, we have Danielson experts helping schools to calibrate, as, from what I’ve heard, principals usually rated their teachers higher than the experts did.

With this new vision for how to conduct observations, too many administrators are still in the “gotcha” mindset, perilous for any teacher who hasn’t done their homework on the framework. Also, a handful of administrators might be tempted to rate teachers lower on the framework and intentionally rate them higher as the year goes by so they can look like they’re the ones making the change in the teacher.

Any number of possibilities can occur with the new observations, which was the case with the old observations. This points to a need for a cultural change on how we perceive teacher evaluations. Again.

Student Surveys: 5% (maybe)

This part really brought out the rancor of some people on Twitter. Frankly, it made some of my colleagues look like the job-thirsty authoritarians we can’t risk looking like. I questioned openly why some of our colleagues felt like they were above student feedback. First, we should understand that, unlike state and local assessments, student surveys don’t do very much for our teacher evaluation scores. Also, putting a number on how students feel about our performance feels odd.

Generally, I’ve found that students can provide awesome feedback about the types of teachers that work for them and whether teachers actually do a good job or not, even if they can’t totally completely elaborate on the details. Yet, giving this feedback a number may alter the way students give feedback or, worse, how the student surveys get administered.

To summarize …

I see lots of potential for good discussion around teacher evaluation, and how we as teachers can get better feedback to improve our practice. I also don’t think putting a number to any of these pieces actually solves anything. Quantifying anything makes that thing susceptible to corruption. I’m not OK with the overemphasis on standardized testing, though it’s nice to see how my kids did sometimes. I’d like to have a master principal – a teacher of teachers in the truest sense – support my continual learning as a teacher. I’m also in favor of schools creating assessments if those assessments are better aligned to their curriculum than the city-sponsored ones are.

Overall, I’m suspicious about how these numbers get interpreted, especially when our media would love to grab these numbers and try to tell the world just how “bad” we are in their pages. We ought to consider the fact that putting numbers on anything puts us on a path where principals get tempted to rank their teachers and make assumptions about them without warrant. It picks apart school districts by assuring that top schools don’t share their secrets with anyone, and the “bottom” schools get one more label, and perhaps one more reason why they “must” be shut down instead of rehabilitated.

Perhaps if teacher evaluations meant, “We’re just getting a general sense of what this teacher is doing” instead of “We’re out to get rid of the ‘worst’ ones by using numbers,” then I’d render unto King what’s his. I just hope that people who get to see these reports come in with the understanding that teaching is hard, and the successes we have in our classroom, no matter how hard, are innumerable.

Jose, who’s back to writing for real …

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Emphasize The TEACHER In Teacher Leadership

2013-05-30T19:09:42-07:00

I wrote a little something here as a thought on teacher leadership. Check it at the Collaborateurs:

That’s why I ought to start capitalizing the word “teacher” in the phrase “teacher leader.” The term “teacher leader” is so ubiquitous, you can’t help but wonder if people even know what it actually means, or at least have characteristics in mind when they think of TEACHER leadership.

We can knock out a few instances of what’s not teacher leadership. It’s not hiring a person at a teacher’s salary and giving them a position or a name. It’s not giving a person only a couple of years to teach before they’re walking around telling teachers what to do. It’s definitely not seeking to get famous for a few opinions.

For more, read here. Share. Comment, too. Thanks!

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Moments Like This [Soul Of A Man]

2013-05-27T17:52:55-07:00

Marvin Gaye

A blackened tooth from a decade-old basketball injury.

An average of four hours of sleep a night.

A tumultuous set of faculty meetings, in meetings, out meetings, and every other type of meeting in between.

An early bus I missed, followed by a late train that took 15 minutes off my preparation time.

A snide remark by colleagues.

A set of bills ankle-deep tightening the noose ’round my neck.

A few uncompleted projects.

And a sense that perhaps I didn’t teach every child in my class the best I possibly could.

Friday gave me a plethora of reasons to not want to smile. Earning my Fridays with a full schedule of getting kids to work, adults to listen to more than the sounds of their own voices, and the world to give me a 15-minute break just didn’t seem worth it, really.

Yet, when the last bell sounded, my skin still glowed from another set of lessons for the week, a glossy grunge only visible to those who do this teaching thing the way we do. When passion emanates from our pores and after negotiating our professional duties and personal dedication to social justice, I crank up the music just loud enough to hear from a five-classroom radius.

I could have scurried along with everyone else at 2:20pm, but I sat in this glow, coming to a few realizations:

It’s OK for me to smile every once in a while, even when this going gets too tough.
It’s OK to shock if it makes people readjust their chairs.
(As a corollary to #2) It’s OK for me to be more honest, especially when I no longer have a title.

We trust that life will continue to teach us these lessons, punching away at our contradictions, reminding us of things we thought we’d conquered before. Yet, if there’s anything I learned, it’s that the glow I acquired the previous Friday becomes the alloy in my bones for the week after. It keeps us invigorated when we can only contemplate growing broader shoulders for our burdens.

When it’s said we don’t have a leg to stand on, we show them four. When they say our resolutions are baseless, we show them a concrete foundation. When it’s said they can’t understand what we’re getting at, we wait until they get it. We have every right to be who we are, and be a better person for withering the torments that want us to be otherwise.

Jose

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Honesty In The Time Of Professionalism

2013-05-20T19:08:38-07:00

Arne Duncan

In this economy, everyone’s scared to lose their jobs.

Leaders often say they want feedback and honesty, but only if it fits their beliefs about the reality they’ve interpreted. For instance, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently tweeted this:

59 years since Brown v. Board of Ed- We still have so far to go to live up to the American dream of equal educational opportunity for all.

— Arne Duncan (@arneduncan) May 17, 2013

I laughed and replied:

Right. So @arneduncan, do you think the current national agenda sets the conditions for equitable education?

— Jose Vilson (@TheJLV) May 17, 2013

Perhaps he does. Perhaps he believes that the schools his administration created in Chicago mattered a lot for the most impoverished kids. Perhaps he thinks charter schools offer a way to circumvent obtrusive localities that want to stall innovation. Perhaps he thinks Race To The Top shakes districts into following an agenda. He could have the best intentions in mind, and could see himself as helping continue the legacy of Brown vs. Board of Education. Perhaps he read my tweet, too, and decided to rethink how he approaches this thing he calls “listening to teachers.”

I doubt it. All of it.

Sadly, I have little (read: no) faith in our current administration’s policies, irrespective of how much they say they appreciate educators, and want for the children. The reform path offers little solutions that interest me and the thousands of American educators trying to make a difference in our children’s lives. I have a few more anti-reform pro-child things to tell you, most of them documented here.

What often separates the message, however, is the source. By source, I mean, when people come out for or against a position, do they do it from a place of love and care or hate and derision? Do they say things because they have an honest belief in making things better or do they have an ulterior motive in their positions?

We have people like Michelle Rhee who takes shots at National Education Association, The American Federation of Teachers, and Occupy The DOE and other education activists without actually talking about what her organization, StudentsLast, does against the public good. Dr. Steve Perry, another person who sees himself as the solution and not a part of it, thinks a huge lit review is the same as a dissertation for his doctorate. The mainstream media, book publishers, celebrities, and venture capitalists treat them as darlings, but people on the ground have grown more skeptical as the days go by.

Sometimes, though, I fear that people on “my” side of things have similar ambitions. Some questions to ask:

Do we emphasize the word “teacher” or “leader” in teacher-leader?
Do we talk down to teachers and tell them how they should approach their jobs when they haven’t done it themselves?
Do we believe the way to have a bigger voice is to get a doctorate?

In no way do I seek purity in ideology, but I do take issue when people see their positions solely as a means for self-advancement. The honesty I often seek comes from a source of love, a source of restoration, and getting to a place where all children have equitable conditions for academic (and personal) success. College and career readiness sounds hollow in light of creating conditions for better people.

The challenge for us is, really, how do we continue to do this without feeling like we could lose our jobs for this? Or vex our colleagues with this?

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