A regular reader informed me about an amazing charter
school teacher in North Carolina. Chris Weaver was selected as
“The Best Teacher” by Mountain XPress, a local newspaper,
and he rejected the honor. Read here to learn why he rejected it.
He is committed to the common good, not to self-interest. He
understands that educators must work together towards common goals,
not compete. Congratulations, Chris. You have joined the honor roll
of the blog. Please do not reject this honor. You deserve it for
your courage, your integrity, and your dedication to your
profession and children!
The real Best Teacher
Weaver on 08/13/2013 01:00
PM
While I
appreciate the community value of the Best Of WNC and the shout-out
from the Xpress readers in my school community, I am
writing to relinquish the title of Best Teacher, because I know who
the real Best Teacher is. I teach at a public
charter school. While my school grapples with the low per-student
allotment and the dismal state teacher salary scale, I know that it
is our children and teachers in our district public schools who are
taking the biggest hit from the budget passed by the extremists in
the North Carolina General Assembly and the governor’s
office. I want district public school teachers
to know that public charter school teachers are standing with you.
Your students are our students. Teaching assistants are a
necessity. Small class sizes are a necessity. Compensation for a
hard-earned master’s degree is essential. A state government that
offers underpaid teachers $500 of taxpayer money to sign away their
due process rights is an aberration.
Xpress readers, the Best Teacher in WNC and
elsewhere in our great state in 2013-2014 is the teacher in your
local public school who will not be demoralized and who does
everything he or she can to meet the needs of every child, with
less help, less money and more demands than ever before.
The Best School is the public school down the street or
up the road. Our Best Administrators are struggling with being
required to implement misguided decisions in the least-damaging way
they can find while striving to sustain morale in their
schools. I know that [Mountain Moral Monday
speaker] Rev. William Barber is right about the temporary nature of
the current state political ideology, because we will go forward
together and the power of our unity will be self-evident. But right
now, as school opens this year, I encourage people of all
persuasions to go to our city and county public schools and say,
“Thank goodness you are here. What do you need? How can I
help?” — Chris Weaver
Asheville
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is brilliant. Made me cry.
Extraordinarily moving.
As one who has taught in a very challenging public school environment, I believe that there are millions of public school teachers of the year who should be heros in a broader culture that has given up on public schools. The fact that many of our students idolize Bill Gates and other plutocrats reflects the moral decay of our culture as it continues to devalue authentic and humane “islands of decency.”
They are ignorant of his true goals and motives.
Really love his decision. Solidarity!
Well now you’ve done it! Just about to walk into the LA School Board meeting and I am in tears after reading this.
Thank goodness you are here. What do you need? How can I help?
This is the attitude that parents whose CHOICE is public school have when we walk through the school yard gate. We all know we are here not to put our own child first but to do what we can for all the children. This is a beautiful reminder.
Like Karen above me Diane, I welled up with tears reading this post. Wonderful!
He should be careful, after all he does teach in a charter school.
Got tenure?
Hats off to Mr. Chris Weaver!
“The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.” [Jim Hightower]
Thank you, Chris Weaver, for not going with the flow.
🙂
Mr. Weaver’s heart is clearly in the right place, but he is misinformed: charters are not public schools, but private entities receiving public funds. From a budgetary and institutional perspective, not only are they unable to “stand beside” public schools, they are a vehicle for their destruction.
Is there ANY organizational structure which would nullify your analysis?
Ah Chris, you made my day, possibly my week. Thank you.
OK, because I am in WNC I want to say: congrats to Chris and kudos for not wanting to be mixed in with a retail popularity contest, which is what WNC Best Of is. Most businesses who get it put a sign up on their kiosk or window saying “voted WNC’s Best of!” and you get emails and FB plugs the whole month leading up to it that say “vote for ______ for WNC’s Best of!” and then you get thank yous for “thanks for making us WNC’s Best _____________again for the third year in the row.” So I am glad he used the opportunity to educate quality-retail-minded folk about some very real recognition that takes teachers out of the contest that retailers and restaurants, businesses and car washes use to feel proud and increase business.
I hear even young elementary children using retail-like judgement comments about their classroom teachers at school. It makes me very uncomfortable.
I hope we really don’t have a generation of consumer-minded students. Whatever a previous generation of teachers did to make an entire generation want to treat teachers that way, can we please forgive it and move on? Really. I am not a waitress (I have been a waitress—but I spent three plus years getting a teaching certificate and Masters and many hours beyond to be a highly qualified teacher). A popularity contest among businesses is not fit for me. And neither is it for this guy.
You have to wonder who put the category of teacher in the contest. That is so not Asheville. We are usually cooler than that.
What’s next?
Diane, please come to Asheville and do a book signing.
Bravo Chris! congratulations, and thank you for your honesty!
Thank you for honoring a wonderful teacher who teaches in a charter school!
Dear Diane & Readers,
Terry Kalb, my NY friend who sent my newspaper letter to Diane, sent me the link, and it’s the first time I’ve visited the blog (but not the last). Thank you Diane for the “honor roll” honor, and no, I surely don’t reject it. Thanks also for the most enheartening comments from readers. Here are a few follow-up thoughts:
For Joanna Best: I am with you 100% on the “best teacher” category in the “retail popularity contest” Best-Of issue of our news weekly. It does more harm than good, and I hope my letter helped folks to think a little more deeply.
For Michael Fiorillo: I appreciate your comment as well. As a teacher who has taught for eight years in district public schools in two states and for seven years in my current charter school, here is my take on the issue you raise, and some of my questions (I have many as-yet-unanswered questions–as all critical thinkers do):
I am opposed to any charter schools being managed by for-profit corporations.
I know that charter school legislation is used for political purposes as a “stepping stone” toward the privatization and dismantling of public education, and I am opposed to all such purposes.
I do consider the charter school where I work to be a public school. (I am open to different views.) We serve any student and family who enters our doors. We abide by strict fair-lottery rules. We are governed by a board elected by our public community. All board meetings are open and all financial and policy decisions are transparent. We do not serve an economically privileged student body.
I will share some of the ways that our school falls short as a public school. One of the “arguments” in favor of public charter schools is that they can serve as laboratories of innovation, which can develop and share best practices with the public school community. My school IS a laboratory of innovation, but we have, as of yet, been inadequate in our efforts to share best practices. The idea of sharing best practices is an ineffective idea if there are no structures in place to facilitate that sharing. I am working on developing structures for this in my own school and hopefully beyond, but my sense is that on the whole, charter schools focus on the needs of their own school communities (like independent schools do) and do not engage in all kinds of essential possible actions that could place them in true solidarity with the public school community (where I want to be). My school also, like most charter schools, does not offer breakfasts, lunches, or transportation to our students, rendering us inaccessible to many of the families in our city in the greatest need.
So why do I teach in a charter school? At the moment, I choose this setting because I believe in school self-governance. I believe in local school control of curriculum and staffing decisions. At heart, more important than any other factor in my teaching life, I am committed to child-centered education, which to me is holistic, hands-on, community-centered, and honoring of teacher autonomy, creativity, innovation, and academic freedom. Public charter schools CAN be, and SOMETIMES are, places where teachers are free to develop curriculum that is highly responsive to the gifts and needs of our students. District public school CAN be, and SOMETIMES are, the same.
When I taught in district schools, I did not teach any differently than I do now, but I was out on the experiential lunatic fringe among teachers, and I found myself bending and breaking more rules in order to meet my students’ (and my own) needs than I do in my current position. My school is full of innovative teachers, and if a rule or requirement is not right or does not make sense, we can take our ideas and concerns to our own administrators or board of directors and propose a change, and these folks have the authority to make many of these changes, and they listen to us (and when they don’t, we can become very persuasive)..
A specific example is that here in NC, the new state budget basically mandates the firing of all assistant teachers in 2nd and 3rd grades in public elementary schools statewide. The tragedy is two-fold. The decision itself is criminal in its destructive impact, but the structural centralization that allows such a thing to happen is equally a part of the problem. In my school, we take the hit of the budget cuts, but we will never remove the second teacher that we have in our primary grades, because the students need these teachers and we have the local autonomy to preserve the positions and make our cuts elsewhere.
I am interested in the movements in public schools and districts that are moving public education more in this direction of local autonomy.
At this point in my career, as I am about to turn 50, I am raising my head and looking around. In many ways I have been teaching in a “utopian bubble,” and I am satisfied and excited to break the bubble from the inside and not to be so self-centered and school-centered. To me, the most important best practices right now are process innovations and structural innovations that allow large organizations to be more decentralized and self-organizing. There is a lot of critical excellent work to be done in this arena. I have more thoughts about that of course, but I’ll save it for another time.
For now, I send my gratitude out to Diane and to the readers of this blog. I call on my fellow public school teachers to take heart, and keep our attention fully on the present needs of our students (holistically, not just academically), while simultaneously mobilizing to defuse the wave of misguided political stupidity as it crashes through our communities. This ignorance, like all ignorance, is not as mighty as it appears. We know about teaching and learning, a knowledge that is true, ancient, and unshakable. Now is the time to speak up, act as collectives, and, as I wrote in my letter to the paper, allow our unity and our wisdom to be self-evident. Every small step matters.
With Respect,
Chris Weaver, Asheville, NC
Given the current climate and the structure of your school, I can understand why you choose to teach there. I still struggle with funding issues and the services you do not provide that limit your accessibility, especially to the neediest of students. Nevertheless, I appreciate your speaking out in support of fellow teachers who are struggling under the onus of “misguided political stupidity.”
Thoughtful statement.
It would be great to hear more on this blog from teachers in charter schools–about how their institutions do and do not serve the public good, and what could be done to make them genuinely “public.” Thanks for your reflections, Mr. Weaver. Your students are lucky to have you. I hope you & others can put pressure on your school to provide services that would make the school accessible to the least-advantaged students in your community. This is a huge problem with charters, where I live; it is one of the central issues that led my family to reject charter options (along with the lack of community control or even input regarding them–no boards elected by the taxpaying community govern our charters, just boards of charter parents & biz leaders!).
Your definitions preclude any of us from wanting to post, not because we do not have good schools to work for, but because you have already judged us if we are selective.
Which definitions–“public?”
Not wanting to engage with likely critics seems a bit cowardly. But suit yourselves. There may be a few others like Weaver out there.
There are plenty, DE Citizen. Some prefer not to be told to “go to hell.” or be called “idiots.” (two of the things I’ve heard in the last week). Some of us are ok with such comments. Others pass.
I agree with you, DE Citizen, about the importance of charter school teachers publicly discussing how our schools do, do not, and could better serve the public good. The issue you raise about community control & input is very important and something that I want to educate myself about more deeply. (One aspect of this is also evaluating the effectiveness of community control and input as currently structured in public school districts as well ~ there is probably some progress to be made there too). Reading the exchange here between you, Harlan Underhill, and Joe Nathan is interesting to me. When we react defensively & critically to the comments of others we reveal, perhaps, a sense of feeling threatened and not understood. I wonder: How deep is the rift between district public school and charter school teachers (and administrators, parents, advocates)? I would suggest that the work of looking for common ground is very important in unifying the voice and the force of educators in the larger cultural arena right now. Stated as “guiding questions”:
What can charter school teachers learn from district public school teachers?
What can district public school teachers learn from charter school teachers?
I have recently become aware of what looks like an excellent organization called Public Schools First NC. They present a very useful and thoughtful perspective on charter schools on this page: http://www.publicschoolsfirstnc.org/charter-schools/. As a charter school teacher, I believe that information like this is essential reading for us to think about how to better serve the public good.
Mr. Weaver, here are an article and editorial that describe district and charter public schools working with and learning from each other. The editorial is the last in the series of short editorials in the second link:
http://www.twincities.com/education/ci_23076316/homeroom-collaborative-effort-gives-high-school-students-better
Here’s a link to an editorial appearing comments on this:
http://www.twincities.com/opinion/ci_23108307/friday-opinuendo-st-paul-legacy-sequestration-manipulation-and
Our organization has worked to promote collaboration between district and charter educators for more than a decade. There are a variety of publications on our website that describe outstanding district & charter public schools, and how
a. These schools share space with other organizations
b. Assess student progress in various ways
c. Encourage high school students to take challenging college level classes
(this includes 18 you-tube videos in the Dual Credit area of the website)
This can be found at http://www.centerforschoolchange.org
Kudos to you, Chris Weaver.
Thanks Mr. Nathan, much appreciated.
My school is heading into a participatory strategic planning process. One of my personal commitments is to be sure that a well-informed and enlightened approach to our relationships with other public schools in our area is built into the plan as a strategic goal with actions steps and accountability measures. Your resources will help us.
Part of our approach has been that each participating school, district or charter, has ideas worth sharing. So info transfer is not one one. That’s also how we work with k-12 and college faculty. Both k-12 and college faculty have things to teach eachother.