The Treasure Hunter

Although it took me more time and thought to write this piece than usual — and I am still not sure that everything I suggested is reasonable– I felt that it was necessary to give a tribute to all the students who lost their lives in school gun attacks, and those young people who stood up for them all over the country last month. 

While students, their families, and friends were busy marching, speaking, and pressing for action against the use of dangerous guns and the right of dangerous people to have them, the NRA was mostly silent. Were they ashamed to defend their beliefs and actions about guns? Not in the least. They were just waiting for the public protests to end and the protesters to go back to their homes, jobs, and schools. Then things would return to normal, and the guns that had been identified as “extremely dangerous” and “must be removed” would sell more briskly than before.

Somehow, I doubt that things will happen as the NRA expects. Adults may return to their normal lives, but I don’t see students just going back to school and settling into their classes and homework assignments like before. A new way of life has been opened to them, and I suspect they feel that’s where they belong.

The problem for students who marched, spoke out on television, made contact with state and national officials, and lived in the real world for a while, is that now they have to devote themselves to required school programs that are not all that meaningful. In their classrooms they are chained to the traditional routine of classes in English, Math, Science, Social studies, Physical education, a Foreign language and the Arts. With that routine five days a week, ten months a year, I just see school absenteeism rates rising.

Although I don’t think high schools should throw the current classes down the drain, I hope that teachers will make an effort to reflect the real world as it is today in their classes. It is certainly possible for students to use math in making a chart of how many people who didn’t receive Flu shots died of viruses last year. In an English class students can write persuasive pieces about the importance of voting in all elections.  And students in an art class can paint pictures of families that are homeless. If teachers make a strong effort to bring the problems and realities of the outside world into their classrooms, along with the usual topics, education will become more meaningful for all students–and their teachers, too.

On a regular basis students should read newspapers, news magazines and other materials in class in order to keep themselves up to date on the issues that are most interesting to them. Then, they can discuss what is happening and decide whether or not to take action. If a topic is right for them to handle, they will make plans for what to do about it at school and in their communities.

One definite student action should be to move outside the high school classroom by writing or speaking to local audiences and making videos for groups that are hard to reach.  Whether or not students can do those things on school time is a question their school must answer–and I hope it will be yes.

In addition, I think it is also important for students to have a special day every year for protest marches against guns, like the ones held after the school killing in Florida. Although we can’t assure that they will be as large and dedicated as those that were held throughout our country last month, they will still be reminders to the NRA and local gun lovers that gun protests will not cease.  I hope marches will also persuade many citizens that owning several large guns and hanging them on their wall are not symbols of beauty and power but of vanity and ignorance.

A few days ago I received a message from a non-profit organization named “FairTest” which has been working for several years to help public schools give their best teaching to students and true information to parents. Below I will try to explain the important project the organization is working on now. I will respond to their request and I hope many readers will do that too.

Although the Federal government passed a law allowing parents in all states to opt-out their children from the yearly school testing, many parents are not aware of their rights and states do not want them to know. They are afraid that schools with many well-educated parents would opt-out their children if they knew that they had that option. A large number of op-outs from any school would make it impossible for the Federal government to judge the quality of education there.

As a result, many school districts in some states, which have to inform parents of their rights, make that information hard to find or hard to understand, and consequently, there are very few student opt-outs there.

“FairTest”, a non-profit organization devoted to the welfare of all students, works hard to let parents know of their rights, but it is difficult for it to obtain the information it needs For that reason it has reached out to knowledgeable people in various states, asking them about the formal policies and hidden practices for opting-out students in their state. I will respond with what I know about Oregon’s information to parents, and I hope that readers in other states will do the same.

To give you an idea of what many states are now doing, I will repeat the information provided by the state of California below, which is similar to that of other states.

California has a school-distributed letter with one sentence on the right to opt-out           buried deep in the text of a memorandum to parents about testing. We do not know what is on the state website or if opt-out forms are readily available. There is no link to an Opt-out form on the school’s letter.

FairTest is assembling material from all states with opt out laws. I hope that many readers will send them whatever information they have, including links. Their Email address is: fairtest@fairtest.org.

Today’s post is very different from anything I’ve written before, yet still relevant to the job of a “treasure hunter” in the field of education. In yesterday’s Oregonian I read  a piece  I couldn’t ignore that included a letter from a mother who was very concerned about her child’s school behavior and wanted some advice. It also included a response from the newspaper’s “expert”, who also writes for “The Washington Post” specifically.  She proposed several possible reasons for the child’s behavior and also some cures.  Since I did not agree with either one, I decided to give my own response. Whether you agree with me or not, I would love to receive your version of some good advice to the mother.

The Mother’s Letter:

My second-grader (almost eight years old) says he hates school. He cries every Sunday night. When he’s asked about his day he says that the only parts he liked were lunch and recess. and that the rest of the time he was bored. I have talked to his teacher several times, and it sounds as though he and six or seven other boys in his class are very chatty, distracting one another throughout the day. When we ask him to stay focused and avoid distraction, he says he can’t focus because he’s so bored. Despite all of this, his academic progress is on track or ahead, and his teacher says he frequently participates in class. Two other key points: He gets anxious about getting in trouble, and it sounds as if classroom management is a challenge this year. He only gets 20 minutes of recess a day—a real pet peeve for me. Is there anything we can say or do to help him feel more positive about school?

My Response:

After visiting your son’s teacher many times you must have a good idea about how helpful she can be in solving the problems facing him. If she seems cooperative, go again and emphasize the things your son has told you, such as the distractions from boys sitting near him and his need for more exercise. Then, ask if she could change his seat to a quieter part of the room. You should also mention the unusually brief recess time and ask if there is any chance of extending it. If not, what about a short break or two inside the classroom for student games or marching around the room?

If the teacher says she can’t help with more recess time, you might try the school principal, showing him/her how much time is allocated at other schools locally or in nearby school districts.

Finally, if all your suggestions for change are met with opposition, point out to the teacher that your son is doing well with his learning, and finishing early most of the time. TelI her that if he was allowed to read a book of his choice after he completed his assigned work that would solve his “chatting” problem. Maybe it would also work for the other students who are misbehaving.

All the actions I have suggested above are appropriate for you as a concerned and cooperative parent. Your son is doing his best to learn and rightfully feels bad about his misbehavior. Now it is the time for you to summon all your courage (and perhaps also the courage of other parents) to stand strong for student’ needs

Over the past week I’ve been trying to write about some teaching practices that are popular in many schools around the country today. The first one I tackled was”Growth Mindset, which claims to help students become smarter by exerting greater effort, and the second was using “coaches” to help classroom teachers become better at their job. Unfortunately, the task defeated me because I disagreed with the theories that generated both programs and mistrusted the reported positive results. In the end, I decided to spare my readers–and myself–and erased all I had written on those topics.

The good news is that I found something to publish today; a piece I wrote and posted more than a year ago about helping teachers to grow in their profession, and their ability to take on new responsibilities and create new programs. In addition, as I copied the old piece I remembered more events from the past and added them to my original essay.

Recently, there has been a lot of support for teacher collaboration as a way to develop better teaching and better learning.  Although I agree, I recognize that it is not easy to make collaboration happen. Today’s teachers have more than enough work to do in their planning, teaching and paperwork, plus adapting to new responsibilities fostered  by changes in national policies. There is little or no time for them to meet with their colleagues or teachers from other schools. I think that school administrators should be facilitators of teacher collaboration by scheduling teachers at the same level to have common planning time at least twice a week. But even they don’t have much freedom to enact change.

Back in “the good old days”, when I served as a principal at two very different elementary schools, one for twelve years and the other for sixteen years, I was able to construct daily schedules that gave same grade teachers common planning periods every day. Sometimes,I would join teachers in their planning time, but mostly I left them on their own to solve classroom problems, write new units, and even create new ways to work with struggling students.

At times, and with parents permission, same grade teachers were also able to exchange students who were not fitting well in their assigned classrooms, socially or academically. Teachers might also switch classes for a while when there was a topic in which one of them was exceptionally strong. But the best results I saw at both schools were improved teaching–especially by young teachers–less stress for all teachers, and the emergence of leadership through opportunities to create new classroom practices and teach others how to use them.

The idea of joint planning times had come to me a few years earlier when I was theEnglish Department Chair at a new high school.  There the principal gave me the freedom to set daily schedules for my teachers.  I made sure that those teaching at the same grade level had the same planing time every day, and that sometimes they were able to meet with teachers from other grades to assure coordination throughout our program.

Aside from teacher collaboration and growth, what I would like to see in schools today is teacher autonomy in all classrooms, plus leadership throughout a school.  What I never dreamed of when I set up grade level common planning times, was the emergence of leadership and creativity in so many teachers and their willingness to give extra time to the school without any pressure from me.

For instance, one teacher at my first elementary school volunteered to create and run a school store during the noon hour one day a week. Using more of her own time, she trained and supervised student store workers, and met with those who wanted help to plan for products they could make and sell.  Other teachers donated time for new projects over the years, especially our “Gifted program”, which was voluntary for all students to join.

At my second school one teacher offered to manage a middle school “Jobs Program” by interviewing and advising students who wanted to participate, keeping track of their work time, checking the quality and reliability of their performance, and planning end-of-the-year raffles to reward  students for the amount of time they had worked. Another teacher volunteered to manage students in our “Adopt-a-Road” cleanups.  But, perhaps the most active contributor was our school custodian, who helped by supervising student workers, and later created a school re-cycaling program that won an award for us.

Unfortunately, my memory is not good enough to honor all the teachers and school workers who donated so much time and bright ideas to make our schools better places for all of us and the students who participated in extra activities wholeheartedly because they liked being at our school.  I only wish today’s schools had the freedom for teachers, staff members, students, and principals to do what is needed to make learning a wonderful experience, instead of the drudgery it has become under state and national control today.

Like many other people who have already spoken up, I am against the belief that teachers should carry guns and be ready to use them if the need arises. In this country too many times children have picked up guns that were carelessly left lying around the house thinking they were just toys. And angry or frightened adults have shot someone they cared about when they only meant to get his or her attention. I think those are pretty good reasons why children should not be introduced to guns in schools as if they were ordinary tools.

Can you imagine what a teacher with thirty students in her classroom would feel like if she just got a message from the school office telling her that a man with a rifle had stormed into the school and was on his way upstairs where her classroom was? Of course her students would have heard the message too, so most of them were up from their seats yelling to each other and trying to figure out if it would be better to hide in the classroom closet or make a break for the library down the hall, which was much bigger and had several closets.

The teacher called for everybody to be quiet and sit down as she fumbled with the desk drawer where her gun was stored for safety. Unfortunately, most of the students didn’t even look at her or listen to a word she was saying. About seven of them scrambled out the classroom door and headed for the library, while the others tried to hide under their  desks. Two boys who knew a lot about guns from hunting with their fathers stayed with the teacher and tried to help her open the desk drawer. They had seen her do it before in  practice sessions and felt that they knew the process better than she did.

Just then the classroom door swung open and a tall skinny boy with a large gun stepped in. “I thought you guys were in here” he said. “Remember me? You used to grab my lunch box in the cafeteria and eat all the good stuff. Have a taste of my bullets now”. Then he lifted his gun and swept it around the room letting the bullets fly everywhere. The teacher was the first to be hit because she was still standing at her desk. Several kids who were also standing fell to the floor. The shooter looked around the room, but no one else was standing or moving. “Goodbye kids and Miss Teacher. I’ve got more to do.” he yelled as he left the room and slammed the door behind him.

I imagined this gruesome scene because I was a teacher in several different schools. I think I know how I would have acted–and my students too– in a situation like the one I described.  I would have been so nervous that I couldn’t control my students or remember the combination to my desk drawer. Even if I had finally got the gun out, I can’t imagine holding it still and actually pulling the trigger.

Putting aside the discussion of the bad things that might happen in a school under attack and how best to handle them, I think it is more important for teachers, school officials, and parents to focus on making all schools safe all the time. Although the schools I have worked at or visited looked clean and neat, none of them had any supervision to keep outsiders from entering the building and walking around freely. If a person happened to be well dressed and act confident, he or she could roam the halls and peek in the classrooms for as long as he wanted without being questioned.

Moreover, the technology needed in schools’ main offices is old and unreliable or missing altogether. Not one school I’ve been in had a camera at the main entrance or a switch to lock its door automatically. In addition, systems to send messages to classrooms were often old and their messages were hard to understand. Worst of all, there were times, especially during the lunch hour, when the office was left open with no one inside to manage it.

What we Americans still believe, almost universally, is that local schools are a part of our  community and we are part of them.  After all, we pay taxes, vote, attend school meetings, contribute our time and money, and put our children under their care for several years.  What we have not yet figured out is that those schools and our children may be the targets of some very sick and angry person who wants to punish us for not treating him right. We have the same responsibility to protect our schools as we have for our homes and families.