Read this disturbing article by Maggie Terry, who teaches at Locke High School in the Watts section of Los Angeles, and stop and think.
She describes the day that the tenth grade students were scheduled to take the math portion of the state’s exit exams.
The morning was disrupted by gunfire outside, and the school went into lockdown. The teachers immediately sheltered their students:
“When my colleagues and I began ushering kids into our school’s main hall, away from the outdoor lunch tables where they’d been chatting and eating their breakfasts, we held our arms wide like wings, like we knew exactly what was going on and that there was nothing to be scared or worried about.”
As if their arms were shields that were bullet-proof.
One commenter wrote that teachers like to whine about testing, but he missed the point.
I saw a different point altogether.
I see a snapshot of a society where the powers that be ignore the poverty and violence in children’s lives and think they are helping students if they take away any job protections for their teachers. The Vergara trial is about the claim that any due process rights for children violates the civil rights of their students. Garden-variety millionaires and billionaires agree with this assertion.
Maggie Terry, sheltering her children with her outstretched arms, understands the challenges these children face. Suppose they get a low score on their math test because of what they experienced that morning. Should Maggie Terry be fired? Is she a bad teacher?
Or should those millionaires and billionaires address the poverty, segregation, and violence that mar the lobes of the students?
I think they should. But it is easier to fire teachers. And cheaper.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Isn’t that what “grit” and “tenacity” and “perseverance” are all about?
Only in America!
I have just started reading Matt Taibbi’s new book “The Divide” about how growing income disparity has led to a growing justice disparity. That and Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” are required reading for those of us who are trying to understand how poverty and violence are very real problems in the lives of our students and their families.
Locke High School is located in Watts, the southernmost portion of L.A. It is a low SES community almost all black and brown. It is run by the Green Dot charter school chain although the teachers are unionized through the California Teachers Assn. The students and adults have a tough situation to deal with.
There is no site like Perdaily.com that chronicles the corruption and take-over of LAUSD. The link below is to the Vergara debacle, but
http://www.perdaily.com/2014/04/lausds-treacherous-road-from-reed-to-vergara–its-never-been-about-students-just-money.html
But a typical post by Isenberg who runs the site, offers a look at the day to day corruption that is the way it is done TO TEACHERS in LA… a model for all the other districts the billionaires are eyeing.
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/03/lausd-and-office-of-administrative-hear—just-us-without-justice.html
A few years ago, as this VAM nonsense was coming into vogue, I served on my union’s negotiation team for a successor contract. I was already peeved at the fact that the city had hired an outside lawyer to conduct negotiations, because as a taxpayer I was paying for her services. On our side of the table, we had much more skin in the game, as among us we had 21 kids and grandkids who were students or graduates.
When the VAM question came up, management’s team brought in a mathematician who, we were told, was writing the algorithm that would be used to measure our “added value”. After the mathematician’s presentation, my colleague asked: “One of my 8th students was killed last year, four days before the state tests. Can you account for that variable with your algorithm? ”
The lawyer put out her arms as if to prevent the man from responding to the question, but he answered, “No, of course not.” The lawyer rose, indignant, charging that we were making a “mockery” of the proceedings, because “such a thing would never happen! Those students wouldn’t have had to take the test.”
All of us knew who the child was (a completely innocent bystander), and understood what it cost those 27 kids to have to take those exams in the classroom with the empty seat of their as yet unburied classmate.
People who don’t teach just have no idea.
One year, at the end of the first day of state testing, an announcement over our intercom system informed staff and students three of our boys were involved in a shooting. Family members had reported to our office staff that one boy died at the hospital. It turned out to be premature; he lived, but was gravely wounded. Most of my students had gone to school with all three of these boys from kindergarten onward. As they took their tests that year, one student sat in Juvenile Hall in shock, and would not speak and we did not know if the other boy would live. I had to bring in several extra boxes of tissue (as did many of the teachers), the students were crying so hard.
No excuses?
Another year, one of my students who forgot his homework went running back home just in time to hear a gun go off. He discovered his beloved older brother dead from a wound to the head; he’d committed suicide. My student was so depressed during testing he never raised his head up from his desk. It affected all the students in the room being tested with him. To say these situations do not impact learning or testing results is completely out of touch.
The so-called “reformer” crowd live in a very insolated world and appear to suffer from an empathy deficit. Teachers do not have that luxury.
I get it laMissy. Last year over 100 people were shot and killed in the streets of the city where I teach. Most of those killed were young. My students tell me that they do not go out at night. No, this is not an excuse. This is reality in many American urban centers.
I am reminded of Diane’s March 6, 2013 post, “Newtown Students Will Not Take State Tests,” & all the comments following. No further comments needed from me–this speaks for itself.
When the millionaire and billionaire ed-reformers start hearing the inevitable gunfire outside their townhouses and mansions, maybe they’ll start rethinking the income inequality and poverty problems this country and the world is experiencing because of their greed for commodifying and making a profit off everything under the sun.
Good to see a post praising a charter school, but I can not help feeling it was an accident.
I’m the teacher and I am not praising the charter school or the organization. I wrote this hours after the shooting to try and describe what it feels like to teach in a community plagued by gun violence. I’m a 12 year educator, 2 years Catholic schools, 8 years traditional public, and 2 years charter. I’ve chosen to work in charter to try and understand different systems and develop credibility as an ardent critic of the privatization movement. But this post isn’t about charter vs. traditional. It’s about the intersection of the trauma our kids sustain and become immune to and the rigidity of our testing system that chooses to ignore the significance of out of school factors on cognition.
Saying anything at all positive about any aspect of any charter school is highly unusual as a posting on this blog even if the post is not about charter vs magnet vs private vs traditional public.