EduShyster joined the thousands of students who were protesting the budget cuts. She wanted to know what they were thinking. She got an earful.
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Who do you think is really powerful? I will tell you: students and parents. When either group gets organized, they have real power. Consider the parents who opted out in New York: they made Governor Cuomo beat a fast retreat. No one knows how to stop them. No one can stop them.
And now there are the high school students in Boston. They organized a protest against massive budget cuts. They planned meticulously. And thousands of students walked out, ready with signs of protest. The students are fighting for what they need and deserve: a well-resourced education. This should be their right. They should have to fight for it. But they are fighting, and their voices are powerful.
Hours before more than 3,500 of their peers would march out of their classrooms toward Boston Common, a small group of high schoolers was glued to a group chat on their phones. It was 3 a.m., and they needed to make sure everything was ready for the district-wide protest they’d spent the past week organizing.
Were the posters finished? Yes. Was the meeting place finalized? Yes. Did they all promise that, no matter what, they would leave their classrooms at 11:30 a.m.?
Duh.
“There’s this stereotype that young kids don’t know what we’re doing and should let adults handle things because it’s their fight more than ours,” said Jahi Spaloss, a senior at Boston Green Academy. “But we’re the ones in school. This fight is ours.”
Elected officials were sure that adults were behind the protest. Wrong. The students organized it and carried it out. It was their idea.
The notion of a walk-out was hatched on Feb. 27, when three sophomores at Snowden International High School attended a leadership conference at Harvard University and felt inspired after they learned about successful college protests against racism and sexism.
“We knew that all the schools in the district would be impacted by the budget cuts,” said Jailyn Lopez, a sophomore at Snowden who helped organize the protest. “We knew at our school that we might lose foreign language programs and teachers we liked. We decided to do something about it.”
Their first step was writing a letter explaining the budget cuts, which they posted to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram on Feb. 29. In the letter, they warned: “Your school will have less extra-curricular activities, if any at all. If students are engaged in school, there would be less cracks for our youth to even look towards violence. We have lost too many young lives already.”
The students used social media to communicate, plan and reach other students.
Over the weekend, the district sent out a series of robocalls and texts to inform parents that students would be marked absent if they walked out of class. But that only increased the students’ determination.
“It gave us more motivation,” Lopez said. “This was something we organized and we felt like people were trying to discourage us from standing up for what we believed in. And after all the calls, we felt like even more people knew about it and wanted to stand up for their schools too….”
At 11:30 Monday morning, the mobilization began.
Students from grades 6 through 12 stood up and walked out of their classrooms, chanting: “They say cut back, we say fight back,” and “What do we want? Education!”
In the end, more than 3,600 students flooded the streets, a number that amazed even the organizers themselves.
Afterward, Mayor Walsh said he’d like to find out who organized the protest and hoped the adults behind it “start to feed the young students in our city with accurate information.”
The mayor’s office tried to mollify the students by saying that there would not be $50 million, as first reported, but only $30 million.
A student leader responded.
But [Brian] Foster said the students don’t feel as if that’s true—which is why they decided to take a stand.
“It’s kind of like they’re saying, ‘Don’t worry it’s not $50 million, it’s $30 million,’” he said. “That doesn’t answer anything. Even if it’s a $1 deficit, it’s the idea that you’re taking away from students’ futures.”
Students said this was not a one-time event. If the city goes through with cuts, they will be back on the streets again.
Last week, NPR had a story about how “dumb” our students are, compared to those in other countries. The story title said that our high school graduates are on par with high school dropouts elsewhere on international tests.
For myself, I always wonder how critics can say in one breath that we live in the greatest nation in the world, and in the next breath say that we have the worst schools and dumbest students in the world. This bizarre logic then leads to the rephormer claim that we must cut the budget for public schools and push for the transfer of funds to religious schools (not known for teaching STEM simubjects) or to brand-new charters run by corporations or amateurs. You might think that only a knucklehead could believe in such truly foolish ideas but our major foundations–Gates, Walton, Broad, Arnold, Helmsley, and others–relentlessly push this line of baloney.
One reader referred to the story and blamed “bad” teachers. Another reader who is both teacher and parent, responded here:
“Let me give you a different perspective, assuming you are willing to listen.
“All schools are not “failing.” I worked years in industry (high tech) and can assure you, on a aggregate level, America’s graduates far exceed the capability of most other countries. I can’t count the number of H1bs I hired that, while good employees, lacked the adaptability and critical thinking required to solve problems. In those countries that ARE on par with us, they support their schools, respect and value teachers, and believe in both a strong college OR vocational pathway. Are some schools “failing”? Sure, but the reasons rarely have to do with teacher competence.
“Now I teach math. So you are free to blame us evil math teachers for your child’s struggle. I’ve heard it all before. Here’s the reality. I teach students who are “high risk” in math. Often, I battle a accumulation of years of external issues – poverty, health problems, learning challenges, disinterested parents, violence, drugs, mental health – the list goes on. I have never abandoned a student, but many parents have. Politicians blame teachers, but then cut social programs, employment opportunities, and health programs. Business complains, but then wiggles out of financially supporting schools, ships good jobs overseas, and pushes job training onto schools. Keep in mind, too, that k-12 works to retain and teach ALL students. Post secondary operates by screening out and eliminating students. Very different missions.
“The students do lack various math skills. I see seniors unable to add fractions trying to solve trig problems. One common thread in math illiteracy is these students are reluctant learners and avoid math. Math is not sesame street. It takes careful study and practice. I can make it “entertaining” and I’ll try my best with a 150+ student roster to “differentiate” and individually reach out to each student, but America does not want great teachers, only inexpensive ones.
“I am also a parent of a struggling student. Unlike you, I took responsibility from kindergarten for his learning. I followed his progress and alphabet soup of diagnoses. I didn’t just sit back and blame teachers, I actively worked with teachers. I learned about new subjects to help him through school. I reached out and showed interest. I even lost a job focusing on my kids’ well being. Were all teachers perfect? No, they are human. But I made it work. My kid is going to college. He still struggles, but the journey doesn’t end with some kids when they become adults. Think before unfairly indicting a profession.
Hundreds of students walked out of school in Boston this week to protest budget cuts that are pending.
Costs are rising faster than funding, and the schools may sustain $50 million in cuts to programs and services.
A day of protests by Boston students over potential education cuts — with hundreds walking out of their classes and three arrests — was capped by a demonstration at a School Committee budget meeting in Jamaica Plain last night, where hundreds of pupils demanded the board not slash funding.
Sera Tapia, a freshman at Boston Latin Academy, urged the committee to fully fund the schools at current levels.
“I have three more years at BLA. If they cut the budget next year, my education and learning will be undermined,” Tapia said. “It is not right for schools not to be fully funded at all levels: elementary, middle and high school.”
Nathaniel Coronado, also a freshman, called the next year’s budget proposal “unacceptable.”
“People stress they want the younger generation to be leaders in the 21st century, but if our schools aren’t properly funded, we can’t become the people we aspire to be,” he said. “It is wrong for our schools not to be fully funded at all levels.”
John Thompson, historian and teacher, read David Denby’s tribute to the importance of teachers on Valentine’s Day and was inspired to write a Valentine to his students.
He writes:
Thank you David Denby for your “Valentine for Teachers.” https://dianeravitch.net/2016/02/14/david-denby-a-valentine-for-teachers/ You wrote the unvarnished truth that explains the teacher-bashing of the last generation. “This rage” is due to a dilemma “that’s hard to talk about, and so it’s often avoided: the dismaying truth that we don’t know how to educate poor inner-city and rural kids in this country. In particular, we don’t know how to educate African-American boys.”
We know how to educate poor children of color but our segregated society doesn’t know how to scale up systems that treat all of our kids with the respect they deserve. My book, A Teacher’s Tale, is a valentine to my students. They taught me how to teach to “the Heart,” not just “the Head.” Its subtitle, Learning, Loving, and Listening to Our Kids, previews doable solutions. (Other than the obvious exceptions, the names below are pseudonyms.)
During my first semester teaching in a neighborhood school, I learned that our kids’ emotional and moral consciousness is the first rock on which great education systems must be built. Davina did not ask permission to get up and walk across the room. As I kept teaching, I wondered what was in Davina’s mind as she went to the far back corner. She acted as if she owned the place, but then again, there are worse things than students taking over their own classroom. She took a seat next to the only white kid in the room, a new transfer. Davina put her hand on the girl’s hand and said, “Honey, you look scared. Don’t worry. You will be alright.”
Yes! If we build on our kids’ decency, our democracy will be alright. And, we must stop this ceaseless focus on remediating children’s weaknesses and build on their strengths.
Teaching a challenging and authentic curriculum is one way to demonstrate respect for our kids. Some will recoil at reading aloud New Yorker articles, such as Marshall Frady’s “Children of Malcolm” and Connie Bruck’s “The Takedown of Tupac,” in classes where most of the kids carried felony raps, and reading comprehension ranged from 2nd grade to college level (with most being around 5th or 6th grade in comprehension.) But my kids had the background knowledge required to understand the stories’ deepest themes and how they fit into the Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois traditions (which were in the Standards of Instruction that I was required to teach.) For instance, to place the story of the hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur in its proper context, a reader had to, “Listen while I take you back and lay this rap … About a snitch named Haitian Jack.” If the New Yorker told the story of Tupac, “Shug” Knight, and “Biggy” Smalls so that middle-aged whites could understand, then it was comprehensible to these kids who knew these rappers’ stories.
At the beginning of his freshmen year, my Black Nationalist, Akili, challenged me daily. During his senior year, he borrowed every issue of my New York Review of Books. One evening we were shocked to learn that it was past 6:00 and we had been talking for hours. He had wanted to discuss Herbert Gutman’s theory about the black family. Akili said, “You are the coolest white man I’ve known. Here we are having an intellectual discussion. You respect my brain.”
The first rule of teaching should be: Listen to the students and they will teach you how to teach them. Above all, teaching is an act of love. A transfer student asked whether I had black kids, imitating my Okie accent and saying that I always talk about “ma kids.” From all across the room came shouts, “D.T. has hundreds of black kids!” One announced, “Yeah, D.T. is a playa!” High fives were shared throughout the room.
The way to scale up high-quality instruction is invite the full diversity of our society to participate in the team sport that is teaching and learning. Nothing could be more exhilarating than the cross-generational sharing of what we love. For me, it was daily pick-up basketball games and as many interactions as possible where my students and the city’s movers and shakers schooled each other. But, our kids all have different personalities and they need a diverse range of mentors.
The following passage, which starts in 1999, is just one example of why teaching in the inner city is the greatest calling that I can imagine but, I’ll admit, it’s my personal favorite:
By that time, my relationship with a former student, Brandy Clark, had grown especially intense. Brandy was a survivor of some of the worst generational poverty and abuse in Oklahoma’s “Little Dixie.” A turning point in our relationship occurred during a camping trip to the Grand Canyon. Our other traveling companion was Abbas, a black Muslim student. The road trip debates were endless. Being part Mexican, Filipino, and Chickasaw Indian, Brandy defined herself as both black and “multi-generational, multi-cultural,” and that upset Abbas, who defined himself only as “black,” saying he was “just keeping it real.”
My travel partners also sought clues about the secret lives of white people, and that gave me the opportunity to tell, with a straight face, why my people refuse to bring an extra change of underwear on extended camping trips. The punch line, “you all on the right, change with you all on the left” brought howls of derision, giving me a chance to reply, “just keeping it real!”
Hiking out of the Grand Canyon, Brandy introduced me to the hikers as “grandpa.” “He’s old,” she added, “I’m looking for a place to dump his body when he dies.” At the same time, Abbas reclaimed his “Indian roots” that explained his ability to scoot back and forth, discovering one new world after another. Abbas would rush up breathlessly, “I just met some Sikhs! Sikhs are monotheists in the Punjab who believe in …” Or, “this Polish family taught me …!”
The thin air and the hiking were tougher on Brandy. During a break when we were close enough to the top to see that victory was assured, she blurted out, “Nobody has ever done that before!” Nobody in her family, Brandy clarified, had ever encouraged her as I had when she struggled up the canyon. She had been warned against the trip because hiking was “just something that white people did,” and she wouldn’t be able to keep up.
Brandy was supposed to be preparing for her university scholarship audition, but she slacked off on that task. Procrastination was unlike Brandy, and her answers were unsatisfactory so I made her schedule an appointment at the Drama Department. As we pulled out of the school parking lot, Brandy said “D.T., you are going to yell. I missed my audition. … I can’t compete with those white girls from the rich schools with years of experience.” “You’re damned right I’m going to yell and yell,” I replied, “But by the time we pass 63rd Street, I’ll calm down, we’ll get it together, and you will win that scholarship!” Sure enough, Brandy swept them off their feet.
… In 2006, on the eve of taking her certification examination in preparation for moving to New York, I mentioned how I always said that I loved her “like a daughter,” and I wished that I did not have to put the qualifying phrase on the end. The next morning when driving Brandy to the testing center, we stopped for breakfast. Brandy then introduced me as, “my dad.”
During the next four years, Brandy and I shared our days’ school experiences during nightly phone conversations. Brandy’s observations about her middle school in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn were so similar to mine. Brandy said that the poverty in the projects of New York City and Oklahoma City was comparable. It was only a matter of degrees: violence and racial conflict in Oklahoma City were worse. Our state was first in incarcerating women and third in locking up men, so children brought gang loyalties with them to first grade.
Brandy now teaches in California and I’m even more convinced that she’s a genius who embodies what it really takes to provide the education that all of our kids deserve. And, guess what? This Christmas, my Jewish in-laws were visiting when Muhammad, the real “Abbas,” knocked on the door. The resulting conversation drew on close textual analyses of the Quran, the Torah, the New Testament, and contemporary politics. It was like we were back in school, sharing the joy of “teaching with an open door, an open mind, and an open heart.”
A group called the “Concerned Parents Association” won the right to obtain millions of personally identifiable student records. The group says it wants to verify that students with special needs are getting the services to which they are entitled. Corporations have been eager to get access to those records for commercial purposes.
Parents have the right to opt out but no one is informing them.
“The nonprofit said it needs the information to see if California schools are violating the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and other related laws. The database it will have access to includes all information on children, kindergarten through high school, who are attending or have attended a California school at any time since Jan. 1, 2008.
“The database contain students’ names, social security numbers, home addresses, course information, behavior and discipline information, progress reports, mental health and medical information, along with suspensions, expulsions and more.”
Privacy groups worry about hackers and identity theft. And well they should.
If you live in California, alert PTAs and parent groups about this. And contact privacy organizations to learn how to opt out.
Julie Vassilatos, a parent of children in the Chicago public schools, writes about how she explains the Chicago public schools to her children.
“No, kids, this school district isn’t normal.”
She writes:
But it isn’t so much CPS I feel I need to explain. It isn’t so much the dictatorial leadership, the robotic degree of testing that’s required, the number of librarians who are fired, the unimaginable inequities among schools from neighborhood to neighborhood, a food contract that is so bad students all over the district are boycotting meals.
It’s not the way arts and music have disappeared from curricula, or the constant looming threat of hundreds, or thousands, of teachers being fired. It isn’t the revolving door of leadership and the chaos that ensues, or the dark insinuations from Springfield that our already untenably undemocratic situation could get a lot more North Korea on us.
It isn’t so much the methods we parents must use to communicate to this district, this mayor, and his puppet board–like hunger strikes for weeks and weeks, and occupying libraries so they can’t be demolished, and declaring sit-ins so somebody somewhere will talk to us because they will have to step over us, or sitting in the middle of the road in order to get arrested, or staging press conference after press conference after press conference because maybe the media will listen even if the CEO doesn’t.
I don’t so much feel any of this needs explaining. It is, after all, all my kids have ever known.
Rather, what I sometimes wonder about is just that. I wonder if they know that this isn’t normal.
Oh, I know it’s their normal. I just don’t know how to explain that it isn’t everyone’s normal.
And it shouldn’t be anyone’s normal.
This school district, Chicago Public Schools, fills me with horror and astonishment every day. No–I certainly don’t mean the schools. They do an admirable job of shielding the students from the unending stream of harm and nonsense that comes from central office. Most of our schools are strong communities where so much learning and growth happen. Kids are mostly protected from the drama, the galling contracts, the high stakes chess games that characterize central office.
Jimmy Qin, a junior at Seminole High School in Sanford, Florida, received a perfect score on the AP Physics examination. He was one of only two students to earn a perfect score. Nearly 23,000 students took the test.
Seminole is not a magnet school or a charter school. It is a regular public school.
Jimmy is in the International Baccalaureate program at Seminole.
Beyond physics, Jimmy’s interests include politics and economics. His favorite magazines are “The New Yorker”and “The Economist,” while his favorite newspaper is “The New York Times.”
Jimmy also plays the piano and cello. He’s a member of the Florida Young Artists Orchestra, where he is the principal cellist and has performed as a soloist four times.
If it were up to the “reformers” in Florida’s legislature, Seminole High School would not exist anymore. It would have been given away to for-profit charter entrepreneurs and turned into a lucrative real estate deal.
Call Davis Guggenheim! Time for a new movie about a remarkable public school in Los Angeles!
Cedrick Argueta, the son of immigrant parents, received a perfect score on the AP Calculus exam, one of only 12 students in the world to do so. Some 302,000 students took the exam.
Cedrick is a student at Lincoln High School, which has 1200 students. His teacher is Anthony Yom. Lincoln is a regular neighborhood public school, not a magnet or a charter.
“As far as math whizzes go, Cedrick is unassuming. He likes to play basketball with his buddies, and his favorite reading of late was the Harry Potter series. Knowing he was going to do television interviews this week, he donned a blue LHS hoodie and sneakers.
“Math has always just made sense to him, he said. He appreciates the creativity of it, the different methods you can take to solve a problem.
“There’s also some beauty in it being absolute,” Cedrick said. “There’s always a right answer.”
“When asked about his perfect exam score, Cedrick just thanked everybody else in his life.
“It just sort of blew up,” he said. “It feels kind of good to be in the spotlight for a little bit, but I want to give credit to everybody else that helped me along the way.”
“Cedrick is the son of Lilian and Marcos Argueta, both of whom came to the United States as young adults – she from the Philippines, he from El Salvador. Lilian, a licensed vocational nurse, works two jobs at nursing homes. Marcos is a maintenance worker at one of those nursing homes. He never went to high school.
“Lilian Argueta, pausing during one of her shifts this week, said her son’s accomplishment is still sinking in. He texted her when he found out, and she told him it was great but, she said, she didn’t understand the magnitude until reporters started calling.
“Argueta said that she always told Cedrick and his younger sister to finish their homework and to “read, read, read,” but that they knew she’d be proud of them whether or not they got straight A’s.
Cedrick’s teacher was very proud too, although he is accustomed to good results.
“All 21 of Yom’s AP Calculus students who took the exam last year passed; 17 got the highest score of 5. It was the third year in a row that all of Yom’s kids passed the test.
“Yom, 35, said he treats his students like a sports team. They’d stay after school, practicing problem solving for three or four extra hours, and they’d come on weekends. On test day, they wore matching blue T-shirts sporting their names, “like they’re wearing jerseys to the game,” Yom said.”
Chicago students are threatening a one-day walkout on December 17 to protest the terrible school lunches they receive.
The fruit is bruised and moldy; the pizza looks as it was cooked three days ago. The kids are poor, but they don’t deserve to be fed food that is damaged goods. For some of these children, lunch may be the only meal they get. Why not serve them nutritious food? Mayor Emanuel runs the schools. He should be held accountable.
The food is prepared by Aramark, a private company that also supplies food to prisons and has a contract to clean the Chicago schools. Ever since Aramark won the custodial contracts, leading to the layoffs of experienced custodians, principals have complained about dirty buildings.
A modest proposal: Why not invite the Chicago Board of Education–all of them–to eat lunch in a public school every day for a week? Do you think they would show up?
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