An Open Letter to Senator Bob Casey

 education, reform, SDP  No Responses »
Jan 162017
 

Dear Senator Casey,

As you gear up for the confirmation hearing of Department of Education nominee Betsy DeVos, I ask you to consider the deep implications of what her vision for education entails.

I recently read a piece by Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal, touting the ways in which DeVos has worked to improve education for all children in the states and cities where she has placed her money, influence and efforts. Unfortunately, Governor Jindal is oversimplifying the concept of “school choice” to vilify anyone against the idea of a great education for all students and to paint those who question the idea as trying to maintain a broken system.

In my over 10 years of teaching in Philadelphia, I have worked in schools inside the School District of Philadelphia and in the charter system. I have collaborated with educators across the country, including other parts of Pennsylvania, who work in public, charter and independent schools. I say this to say that I am not biased toward one kind of school. I think that having options is a good thing.

However, I also work at a public, district-run high school here in Philadelphia that draws kids in from all over the city. I have 16 year old students who travel almost 2 hours each way to get to school and home every day. During the winter, they leave their house in the dark and they get home in the dark. Part of what school choice has done in Detroit is create a system where parents are forced to travel for miles to take their children to school. I can’t imagine a parent traveling almost 2 hours every morning to get their 1st grader to school and then making it to work. This is what happens when school choice causes the neighborhood school, the school down the street, to close.

Here in Philadelphia, we are the poster child for “school reform.” We have turnaround schools, consolidated schools, charter school networks, cyber charter schools, independent schools, special admit public schools, and, of course, neighborhood public schools. We have had school choice for a very long time. I have watched as families have had more and more options where to enroll their child through the charter system, and I have witnessed the District innovating and creating new schools to meet the needs of families, as well as individual District schools innovating to provide unique programs to their families. All of this with fewer and fewer resources available. I have also watched as families moved their children from District-run schools into charters, some that do not perform much better, and I have watched corruption scandal after corruption scandal as people try to make a profit off the price tag attached to each kid’s head as they are enrolled in a charter school. Money in Philadelphia’s charter system already follows the student and it has left the District schools in a position where they are tasked with educating an increasingly challenging population with fewer resources.

In a voucher system, who is regulating how these funds are spent? How do we prevent the opportunistic company who comes in and tries to get into the education game with all of the free flowing money now pouring into the system? Who will educate the students with special needs or the students who do not meet admission criteria for these schools? Independent schools are not required to take everyone, whether they have an IEP or not, and, in my experience, a charter school can also tell a parent that they do not have the capacity to meet the IEP goals of a child, and thereby refuse them entry (I’m not sure if it’s legal or not, but I have seen it happen). In addition, who will regulate the cyber charter schools, who receive the same funding per student as brick and mortar schools, but have half the overhead? How will we know that students are being well educated if many of these schools are not required to track data on student progress and achievement? How do we know if they are meeting the needs of ALL students if that data is not required to be tracked? While I am not a proponent of high-stakes testing, data is important to know whether we are reaching all of our kids in the classroom, and schools can collect and report this kind of data in a number of ways. As you know, our state legislature has no interest in regulating charter schools, and it has been to Philadelphia’s detriment. How will the state, then regulate the performance and creation of new schools under a voucher system?

These concerns are just one piece of the concerns I have about DeVos’ nomination. It is hard for me to imagine putting someone in charge of the Department of Education who has never sent her children to public school, attended public school and whose philanthropic efforts to reform and overhaul public education in Michigan have created a “wild west” education system for families in Detroit.

As a parent of a 2 1/2 year old, these conversations are not just about my views as an educator here in Pennsylvania, but also as a parent of a future student here in the city. This is a subject that directly affects me and my family. As a homeowner and tax payer in the city, I am also wary of how my tax dollars are being spent (and am open to different ways of funding schools-hint, hint) and I do not want private corporations vying for my money as they try to get in on the education game.

Please consider these things as you prepare to vote tomorrow. A vote for Betsy DeVos is a vote for a system that sounds good on the surface, but is not a magic bullet. There are many places where the education system is broken and the Department of Education is not perfect, but putting a person with a blinders-on view of public education and political connections to push through a frightening agenda for state public education systems is not the answer.

Thank you for your time,

Mary Beth Hertz
Educator
School District of Philadelphia
Mother of a 2 1/2 year future student in Philadelphia

My Lesson in "Us vs. Them"

 School District of Philadelpia, SDP  Comments Off on My Lesson in "Us vs. Them"
Dec 012009
 

It was 9pm on Thanksgiving night.  My belly was bursting and my eyelids were heavy.  I was sitting on an Amtrak train back to Philadelphia after a wonderful evening in NYC with my family.  I sat in the window seat, and was joined shortly by a man with a laptop bag.

The train began moving, and he opened up his laptop.  Immediately, I noticed the School District of Philadelphia desktop background and I looked up from my book and said, “School District of Philadelphia?”  He said, “Yes.”  I offered, “I teach at Bluford Elementary in West Philadelphia.”  He replied, “How’s the move going?”  I was immediately taken aback.  I rarely meet someone who has heard of my school, and no one ever knows anything about our temporary relocation.  He followed with, “I helped plan that move.”  I was intrigued.

It turned out that the man sitting next to me was none other than the Chief Business Officer for the School District.  We proceeded to spend the next hour and a half discussing the School District’s history over the last 8 years, starting with the State takeover, dissolution of the School Board and the leadership of Paul Vallas.  We discussed pay for performance and teacher pay in general. Stemming from my statement that in any other neighborhood with any other parents, our old building would have been a lawsuit waiting to happen, he even showed me a graph on his laptop showing how much the district spent on its facilities up until the last few years (let me tell you, it was pretty measly!).  He explained that the district had decided to pump more money into its buildings in the last few years since the money was there.  (For more on our former building, you can read my posts here and here.)

As the conversation unfolded, I began to realize that this man with an all-important job, who had worked for the Rendell and Street administrations in Philadelphia as well as in Harrisburg was acting with the students and teachers in mind along with protecting the fiscal health of the District.  Why wouldn’t he?  Why is it that ‘us’ teachers in the classroom look to blame the leadership ‘downtown’ at the School District (‘them’) for all of our problems?  We teachers always talk about how ‘they’ forget the children, that decisions are never made with the students and teachers in mind.  We talk about initiatives that are poorly thought out and even more poorly executed by ‘them.’  Why should we believe that ‘they’ don’t want teachers to succeed or that they don’t want children to learn?  Similarly, why should  the top of the administration chain (‘us’) look at the teachers (‘them’) as being incompetent in the classroom or in need of more supervision and mandatory support due to dropping test scores.

Most people don’t get into education without good intentions.  What is it about this convoluted, huge and disorganized system that turns us against each other?  Even those who work in the upper echelons understand that disorganization reaches down the rungs and affects the teachers and students in the classrooms.  It’s kind of like a hugely expensive and paramount game of telephone.

This brought up more questions.  Why does the state still run our school district?  Why don’t the taxpayers and parents seem to have a say?  Why are my union negotiations behind closed doors while issues are negotiated for my best interest without my interests being voiced to anyone?  Are teachers and parents’ voices being heard when it comes to budgetary concerns?

When Ackerman came in as Superintendent, she started an initiative called “Imagine 2014.” I attended one of the community meetings to discuss and give input into the new initiative.  We were shown a PowerPoint explaining the initiative and then broke out into discussion rooms based around parts of the initiative.  When the final initiative came out, it was as if they used the fact that these ‘listening sessions’ occurred as a reason that the initiative was supported and created by Philadelphia constituents.  The intentions were good, but the result lackluster.  This feeds into the “Us v. Them” mentality, which I have been guilty of harboring for years.  I felt that my input into the meeting was wasted breath.

In addition, as an ‘Empowerment School‘ (aka failing school) my school has completely lost control over all of its academic functions.  We teach scripted programs over 45 minutes to an hour a day, 5 days a week and we are told what we are to teach, when we are to teach it, and how to teach it.  We are told what needs to be hanging on our walls, outside our classroom as well as what page we’re supposed to be on in our Teachers’ Guides.  Talk about feeding the ‘Us v. Them’ mentality.  However, when looked at through the eyes of the implementers, they are helping us meet our students’ needs since we have been failing to do so for so many years (disclaimer: we have made AYP once, so at some point we were heading down the right road without all of these ‘supports’).  No one has bad intentions, but initiatives that come down from above get caught in that game of telephone and end up a garbled mess.

All of this has made me rethink the ‘Us v. Them’ mentality.  It gets us nowhere.  The problem is not in the intentions, but rather in how people (don’t) work together to achieve a common goal.  And yes, in the end, it is the people we serve (the children of Philadelphia and their families) who lose out.  I can no longer blame only the individuals, but I must blame the system in which we are all caught.

The first step in fixing this systemic problem is making the system smaller.  In Philadelphia, we used to have SLCs (Small Learning Communities) made up of regional schools to put more power back in the hands of schools, who know best what their students and communities need.  Of course, these were part of the previous initiative, Children Achieving (see Part III), which went out when Paul Vallas came in.  While new initiatives are hard to avoid, the idea of a smaller system in place to handle such initiatives can help appease the ‘Us vs. Them’ mentality.

What are your experiences and thoughts?

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This post is part of the MAT@USC Hope for the holidays event. Did you have an experience or witness something in 2009 which gave you hope for the future of American education? If so, please see this post for more information on how to share it.

The War Against Filtering: Is there a real solution?

 "Voice Thread", filtering, glogster, SDP  10 Responses »
Nov 022009
 
I had a meeting today ‘downtown’ at our District’s main offices.  There were about 40 TTLs (Technology Teacher Leaders) from different schools across the city all crammed into a small lab all eager to hear why they were there.



What ensued was an overview of resources and procedures that we, as TTLs, should know.  Links to directions on how to access public folders, links to how to order new hardware, dispose of old hardware, etc….  All stuff I’ve known about for years now.  Siiighhh…I patiently sat through the overview while I set up my email on the new iPod Touch we had all received at the beginning of the meeting (more on that later).

At the part of the agenda when we were talking about filtering, I heard my name float across the room from the main speaker, who happened to be standing in the doorway.  I looked up in surprise.  I had no idea who he was, but he addressed me by my first name….hmm….  He was discussing the district’s new system for attending to requests to unblock sites.  I’ve been, well to put in nicely, hounding the filtering team about unblocking GlogsterEDU and VoiceThread since August to no avail.   Apparently I am (in)famous ‘downtown’ for my persistence and big mouth.  He said something to the effect of, “We were hoping to bribe you, Mary Beth, with the iPod to appease your filtering requests.” I smiled.  I liked the guy already.

What the gentleman (who, it turned out is head of Technology Services for the district) began to explain made my heart go ‘pitter-patter.’  He understood.  He explained how they are changing the system by which sites get reviewed.  “We need to have more input on the instructional side.  Right now we have IT guys reviewing sites, and they don’t always get the educational value of a site.”  He explained that the new committee would be made up of members of the Educational Technology Group (ETG), Information Technology and the highest-ups in the district when it comes to technology.

Starting in a few weeks, rather than sending an email to ‘filtering,’ we will fill out an online form stating what the site is and why we want it blocked or unblocked and then the form must be approved by our principal.  That form is then sent out to all 7 members of the committee for review.  He also explained that they are working closely with the company the district hired to do the filtering to get some sites reclassified.  As of now, sites are blocked by software that classifies websites and blocks them according to classification.  By changing the classification, they will be able to unblock those sites.

After the meeting I discovered that filtering is something that even the heads of departments ‘downtown’ have limited control over.  For all of the complaining we do, it is not the people in IT or the people at ETG’s fault.  It is (surprise, surprise) the lawyers who scare the district into such strict filtering that has little human input.  Hopefully, with this committee reviewing sites monthly, there will be more rhyme and reason into what we see filtered in our network.  I also found that I had friends down at 440 (the main district offices) who knew of my efforts and had my back.

The battle is far from over, and who knows if we will ever win, but I feel that this news today was a tiny victory along the way.  I still can’t help but think of that old saying about the squeaky wheel.  Apparently my voice hasn’t gone unheard (for better or for worse).

Battle photo courtesy of eisenbahner on Flickr
Filter photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons