EDUCATORS @ WORK

Daniel Ginsberg, "Teachers Who Quit," Gotham Gazette, 4/4/2003

When I used to tell people in New York that I was a teacher, they responded as if I did volunteer work. If I had made more than $30,000 I might have argued with them.

My first year I made $29,800. I started late in October and was already the fifth science teacher my students had had that year. I did not teach a violent population -- they weren't bringing knives into the school or anything -- but they were tough, neighborhood kids who had grown up in New York City in the height of the crack epidemic. Some of their mothers were addicts; some had lived in homeless shelters. I had kids who were living in domestic abuse shelters. It was a tough population.

The kids I taught, as I saw it, were products of a broken educational system, and they were not prepared for classroom work. I felt like I had walked into a situation where I had to do eight years worth of teaching in one semester. It was a daunting task. The feeling I got was, "Do the best that you can with these kids," rather than, "Make these kids excel."

But that was the reality. You can't teach eighth grade kids about molecules when they read at a third grade level. You can't teach chemical equations if they don't know how to add. I was constantly getting to a point in my lessons, walking three miles back and then slowly returning to the starting point.

In my first year, I spent nearly $1,000 out of my own pocket. The science class had no supplies, not even the basic tools of measurement. I would buy magnifying glasses at dime stores, posters for the walls, clay to build things. We raised a lizard in the classroom, so every week there was lizard food to buy.

Also, I scavenged. Anything that I found, I brought to my classroom. I had closets full of junk. When kids got into trouble, I would have them organize it. In my physics class we were studying electricity, and out of soda bottles, wood, electric tape, nuts, bolts, miniature engines that I pulled out of things in the street, we made cars and boats that worked, with chopped up compact disks as propellers. Out of soda bottles, cotton puffs and balloons, we made molecules. [...]

"A Really Great Gig," Teacher Magazine, 9/2003

Brendan Halpin living in Boston makes perfect sense. For visitors, people who've never been to the city, have never tried to navigate its highways or its clusters of neighborhoods, where roads jog and twist and turn in on themselves, it's like being trapped in an M.C. Escher drawing. The locals need maps, and even with one handy, they tend to give directions in cryptic terms— e.g., "I'm pretty sure it's the, ah, second left, yeah, the second, after you've passed the grocery store with the funny sign out front. Then you head to the rotary, go to about three o'clock, and ... "

Halpin lives with his wife, Kirsten, and their 6-year-old daughter, Rowen, in the 3rd floor apartment of the house they own in Jamaica Plain, a cultural, ethnic, and economic mishmash of a neighborhood that borders the upper-middle-class suburb of Brookline, where he teaches English. As much as Halpin likes to paint himself as a "regular guy," he isn't. This past June, while finishing up his first year at Brookline High School, his 10th year of teaching, he was preparing for the August publication of his second memoir. The first, It Takes a Worried Man, about coping with the diagnosis and treatment of Kirsten's stage IV breast cancer, landed him on the Rosie O'Donnell and Today shows in 2002 and garnered respectable reviews and sales in the United States and abroad. Writing about the experience from a spouse's point of view was novel, of course, and Halpin's warts-and-all approach is a lively mix of crankiness, hilarity, emotion, and brutal honesty.[...]

[...]Most of the accolades come for work Smith did in North Carolina, where he spent six years leading Charlotte-Mecklenburg's 109,000-student system. During that time, he quadrupled black enrollment in college-level Advanced Placement courses and boosted test scores overall by 20 percentage points. He started an ambitious prekindergarten program called Bright Beginnings that has, he says, "eliminated the gap" between rich and poor kindergartners when they start school.

"What we did in Charlotte," he likes to say, "is prove that public education works. Regardless of its setting."

Now he's come to Annapolis to do it all again, in a school system 30 miles east of the White House and the U.S. Department of Education, at the nexus of one of the most significant federal school reform efforts in recent years, the No Child Left Behind Act. For the privilege of Smith's expertise, the board of education is paying him $300,000 a year--a sum that stunned the county, even as it served notice that Anne Arundel wanted to compete with bigger, better-funded school systems in Montgomery and Fairfax counties.

"Smith is going to be like a bomb going off in that county," one area educator predicted.

Already, all eyes are on him, this 52-year-old, tall, lanky guy with the floppy boy's haircut and a remarkably large head whose size seems proportionate to his ego. Everyone is wondering: Did he create a model in North Carolina that can be followed anywhere? Or is what he achieved in Charlotte a fluke?

Smith sits back in his chair and glances at the Anne Arundel test scores again. Starting today, he vows, black kids, Hispanic kids, poor kids and kids who can't speak English will not be written off as hopeless cases. By the time he finishes here, he says, there will be no good and bad schools--no places where some children learn and others don't. There will be no "You don't understand where these children come from." There will be no "We're lucky just to get them to school." There will be no excuses.[...]

"English Teacher of the Year questions technology emphasis," Associated Press, 10/30/2002

Idaho's English Teacher of the Year is alarmed by what he sees as technology-obsessed, test-driven public education.

Scott Balsai, who has been teaching in the Pocatello School District for 20 years, has questioned the district's new policy of requiring all teachers to become technology certified when the state only requires 90 percent compliance.

"I started work toward a Ph.D. in education at Utah State and left the program," he said. "I was being force-fed the idea that technology would revolutionize education and I wasn't encouraged to explore alternatives."

He was alarmed by indications that "these computer and software companies are intent on making public education irrelevant. Home-schooling parents can buy the computers and software, and their kids aren't out in the halls selling drugs. It gives parents more control."

Balsai, who has refused to take the required test even though it puts his job at risk, believes teachers offer students much more than they can get from computer programs.

He sees computers as nothing more than tools. The value of hands-on arts and music and dialogue about literature cannot be measured mathematically or underestimated, he contends. [...]

"EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE: Running Schools Like Business," by Paul Houston, American Association of School Administrators, 10/2002

Because I give speeches often, I am always looking for a good laugh line to loosen up the audience. Lately I have found one: “Why don’t we make schools more like business?”

For years as a superintendent, I had to eat and sleep negative comparisons between schools and businesses. All I heard was that we should run schools like a business. If schools were ever to improve, we needed to watch and learn from business how they did things. We had the problems; they had the answers.
What a difference a few months can make. After months of hearing the “scandal de jour” from insider trading to shredded documents to doctored accounting and audits to phantom partnerships to lavish stock options and the like, I haven’t heard anyone suggesting lately that schools need to pattern themselves after business. Gee, even Martha Stewart, that paragon of propriety, allegedly has been putting more than green lettuce in her salads. Now that Enron, WorldCom and Adelphia have become fodder for late-night comics, few are suggesting we operate like these folks. [...]