No one will give those children back their missing educations, that’s for sure.

The articles on Detroit schools talk about buckled floors, missing toilet seats and mystery mold. They don’t talk about Carlotta’s attempt to teach in the classroom with the odd smell and the black patches. I know Carlotta*. I listened sympathetically as she laid out daily life in the dank, subbasement.

Her room’s wiring did not work. She could not buzz security. She could not call security either, at least at first, although I believe the administration finally fixed her phone. When fights occurred — I remember two — Carlotta had to send a student running down the hall and up the stairs to administration. Other fights may have occurred that I did not know about, since Carlotta was far from me and far from almost everyone else in the school. She was by herself in an isolated corner of the school, teaching in a room that had been abandoned due to funky smells and poor location, a room that was reopened in response to an alleged need for more classroom space. The kids complained fiercely about that room. They hated going into that empty hallway and Carlotta’s first challenge was to manage the understandable whining. No one could identify the room’s strange smell, and that smell made Carlotta and the students uneasy.

Kids don’t learn well in a situation like the one I watched unfolding in the basement that year.  The best teachers don’t stay in a situation like that. They find another, more comfortable district where the water can be trusted, and the rooms don’t smell funny or have black patches in spots. Administration responded to Carlotta’s problems and moved her mid-year, but those administrators in Detroit may have no options. You can’t find a better room for a teacher if that room does not exist.

Eduhonesty: To add to an underlying thread, school funding reform has become overdue. Dank, moldy rooms matter. The students in Detroit need America’s help.

*I’ve changed her name and she taught in another moldy room in another scary place.

P.S. She retired early after that year.

Found this in my Facebook crawl, courtesy of a friend who liked it. I messaged the source and snagged his picture. These words take me straight back to my second year of teaching. I was talking with a likable, smiling young man who was in my alternative high school math class, trying to get him to focus on academics. I don’t know how we got to talking, but I’d guess his eyes were bloodshot. A lot of eyes were bloodshot in that school on any given day. That chat woke me up to realities I’d never even thought about.

Ms. Q: What would your parents think?

Student: They don’t care. We get high together. I go home and smoke with them after school.”

Oh.

I imagine he enjoyed derailing my lecture, which he did manage to stop cold. I believed him. He was an honest, likable kid. The alternative high school had a number of kids like him. They had great dispositions and a scary lack of mathematical understanding. Unfortunately, zero tolerance policies had gotten them thrown out of high schools when baggies of alleged oregano fell out of their lockers. Oregano was kind of a joke that year. “I had some oregano, Ms. Q. and they found it.”

I don’t remember exactly how that conversation ended. I am sure I defaulted to something like, “we have a lot of math to learn and it will be easier if you don’t smoke before you come to school.”

But that was one of the moments when I realized just what I was up against in my attempts to help my students. It’s hard to learn high school math when you are high. For some kids, I suspect it’s impossible.

I don’t know how many of the parents meant to see this Facebook post are reading my blog, but probably not too many, if any.  If you are out there, stop that! Don’t smoke with the kid before school and don’t smoke with the kid before the homework’s done. In fact, don’t smoke. This last line might be one of the silliest things I’ve ever written. I know and I’m sure readers know I can hardly begin to manage or control this problem, although I have been known to step into the gap and at least try.

Eduhonesty: I present this post as one more reason why we have to stop “grading” teachers on student performance and behavior. Those rubrics that grade teachers based on their students’ test scores and behaviors will lead some teachers to move into more upscale, easier schools with more dedicated students. I loved that kid in the above post. But he would have been nothing but trouble on a Charlotte Danielson rubric day. Too many kids like my boy — I have had many of them by now — and a smart teacher has to think about filling out the common application for a district where most of the students are college-bound.  If you are going to grade me on my students behavior and mathematical prowess, my best move will be to pick the best-behaved, highest-scoring kids around, and those kids are not usually found in urban and academically-disadvantaged schools.

For more on Charlotte Danielson, see my April 30, 2015 post.

Yes, I am against unsupervised bail-outs for dysfunctional school districts. Yes, I know that charters sometimes work very well. Charters may be the best local option for education. Yes, I know my state is … financially challenged, maybe even broke.

I would like to make one observation, though. I don’t trust privatization. When op-ed pieces tell me I need to be freed from the union taking my money, I flash to a thought: The only people I know with decent pensions at this point are union members. The affordability of that pension for the state may be debatable. But my corporate friends are on their own. They invest their money or they don’t. Those who don’t save enough money find themselves in a world of hurt. Awhile back, my brother and I had a conversation revolving around fifty-some-year olds who have realized they can’t retire in the near future — or, indeed, in any future. He talked about the scared look in their eyes, the higher-pitch in their voices as they discuss numbers that don’t add up, numbers that will lock them into the workforce long after they desire to leave.

Thanks to the union, I retired with health care and a pension. I did not work long enough to get a big pension, but I can afford to sit at this computer right now in my Star Wars t-shirt and pajamas. O.K., I’ll admit without my husband’s contribution, I’d have to work another 10 years probably to sit where I am, but I did not quit with no recognition for my time and effort. Every year I worked, my pension got a little bigger.

We are breaking the unions in this country. For readers who are not in unions or who are beginning to believe the prevailing propaganda out there, I would like to say this: Unions are not tools of top secret communist cabals. They are bargaining organizations that support rank-and-file workers. In the corporate world, the world that many government leaders now want for education, who will bargain for the workers? Who will protect those workers?

Eduhonesty: I don’t know that I trust unions to always have my interests at heart, but I’d have to be batshit crazy to trust corporations to put my interests ahead of their profits. That’s the bottom-line to this discussion. I have seen unions represent workers, known workers who recovered jobs or pay because of the union.  I have never seen a corporation do the same unless threatened with legal action.

That’s the critical fact that our op-ed pieces tend to leave out.

From Education Week:

Amid Controversy, Detroit Schools Emergency Manager to Resign

As I relax out here, I thought I’d offer the following paragraphs, taken from the book that I am trying to write, because it feeds into an area of aggravation I thought worth blogging. This is not a sweeping where-is-the-money post– except in the sense that I think my small substitute teaching issue should be considered part of a larger and by now absurd picture.

I could not even bring myself to write during June of 2012. I was honestly feeling too clobbered. I don’t know if I felt guilty exactly. I had done what I was supposed to do. I had communicated with other teachers in my professional learning community (PLC) to create common lesson plans. I had taught what the others taught when they taught it. I had adapted what I could. I had worked extremely hard to fulfill my many responsibilities. I had attended endless meetings. I was out of the school for more than 10% of the school year, being “professionally developed” in obligatory seminars that were part of Illinois’s attempt to raise the scores of its failing schools. In short, I had done everything the way I was supposed to do it and I had worked nonstop.

But my students ended up no readier for college than they were when I started. In effect, they were less ready. They should have been learning a great deal more grammar and vocabulary this year. Instead, they learned about women’s roles in the original thirteen colonies. They learned about slavery and the cotton gin. They read stories and teased out main ideas, a useful skill, but only if a student can then express those ideas clearly and cogently. They learned some new grammar and vocabulary, thanks to language-oriented lesson planning, but not nearly as much as they ought to have learned.

My professional development absences added to their learning losses. All those subs — or worse, no-subs, when no one on the sub rolls wanted to work in the middle school — contributed to the problem. At times, six teachers in my school were out of the school for obligatory, state professional development meetings without a single sub in sight. That almost always meant students doubling up classes with some poor teacher on-site, sometimes not even a teacher in the same subject area as the teacher being “developed” outside the building.

True fact. I spent over 18 days out of the classroom that year, many of them due to Illinois’s Rising Star program to improve schools failing under NCLB. That sub issue was real. At times, the Building Leadership teams from all district schools were out being professionally developed. On those days, sometimes our buildings had no subs. The subs for our district went to the easier elementary schools or the high school, ducking the more problematic middle school.

Here’s why I find this thought a little funny right now. I filled out the sub application for my old district in early December, having finally gotten a bit bored with retirement. I called a few weeks later. The head of Human Resources said she was going to get around to sub applications after the new year. I still have heard no word. Maybe I was too much of a pain during my last year. I was not terribly complimentary about a number of issues on my exit form. But I know my old building still struggles for dedicated subs. In the meantime, two districts are waiting for my fingerprints to come back. The Regional Office of Education takes fingerprints, but mine were a fail somehow, so the office is doing a name check with the FBI, a process that I am told can take a month or two. I have hopes for results from a police station I visited as back-up. As part of teaching, I have probably had my fingerprints taken five times already, but no central database seems to exist. So I wait. I cannot work until my prints or name check come back. I will finish another application today.

Eduhonesty: So often we hear cries for the government to fix America’s schools. Before we hand too many responsibilities over to our government leaders, though, I’d like to point to those Rising Star absences and my missing fingerprints. I might throw in the paperwork that one district sent through the snail mail. That snail must have slept for most of the week. Government bureaucracies have not been impressing me lately.

Readers, we have here one experienced teacher who is willing to work. In fact, she is wanting to work, she is waiting to work. She has been waiting since December. This is getting silly.

Here is a link well worth reading: http://hechingerreport.org/much-of-white-america-is-perfectly-happy-with-segregated-schools-says-one-teacher-of-the-year/

Eduhonesty: I agree with Nathan Bowling, the Teacher of the Year and teacher leader who wrote the above article. We have the schools our leaders want us to have. Oh, our leaders would be perfectly happy if those children in Detroit had toilet seat covers and level floors. They don’t exactly want to discriminate.

But they live in comfortable suburbs and their children go to schools with the latest technology, small class sizes and active, after-school programs. Their children probably have activity busses to take them home after the middle-school clubs and activities finish. The kids in those suburban high schools may have cars that cost more than a year’s rent for some Detroit families.

The old saw says, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” For America’s political leaders, it ain’t broke. And I am afraid Nathan’s right.  They ain’t gonna fix it.

I also like his focus. Great teachers are what our academically-disadvantaged districts need most. When many of our best teachers gravitate towards wealthy suburbs because those burbs offer higher pay and better working conditions, we have a disconnect that favors our most privileged students.

That disconnect has become the biggest issue facing education today.