No Matter How Hard You Try, No One Will Listen

What follows is a mostly verbatim text from a student in our Bachelors program. This was written for a timed exam for students seeking prior professional experience credits, so she did not have much time to revise it. I think it gives it an immediacy lacking in most of the texts we read in academia.

For me, this student's story captures better than almost anything else I have read the tragic position of working-class parents of color in inner-city public schools.

I was the parent advocate for my own son. I had to advocate for his ADD disability. The origin of the advocacy initiative was the school saying if my son doesn�t take his medicine he cannot come to the school any more. I had a problem with this because when he was on the medicine he became a zombie and no learning was taking place. He was suspended more than he was at school. So my journey began with me being a parent who needed to advocate for my son who could not speak for himself.

First I had to deal with real emotions from the teachers who were tired of dealing with my son on a day to day situation. He was extremely out of order in class every day.

I was called to come to the school every day. Which made me lose two jobs. Taking care of my son�s educational needs ending up being my fulltime job. I had to advocate for my son�s education because the school district had decided if he didn�t take his medicine then you might as well keep him at home. I would come to the school in the mornings to calm him and help him get the morning classes out he way, and hopefully I could leave but normally that was not the case.

I knew I had to find a teacher my son liked in the school so that we could get the process of learning started. Once I found the teacher that could deal with him, the school said no that he was to stay put in the class he was in. I don�t take no very well, and I had to figure out how to get this principal to change her mind on his placement. The first thing I did was go directly to the principal and appeal to her that my son needed to be with a teacher that he respected and enjoyed being with. She still said no.

The next step I had to come up with is to get his IEPs scheduled more frequently, like once a week until we get a handle on his behavior. The IEPs helped a little, I could tell the principal had an attitude problem and the teacher was just staring into space. The only person who seemed interested was the school psychologist. The meetings were supposed to benefit my child but they always turned into me being a bad parent by not giving my son his medicine. I knew I had to find a way to ask the right questions, because I felt the school perceived me in a bad light. Possibly a parent from the ghetto who was using the school as a baby sitter. In the beginning I didn�t know how to ask the right questions because the staff was always on defensive and that made me go on defensive with them.

I knew I had to understand the playing field better. Who could I trust? They needed to know what my expectations were for my child.

I got extremely frustrated at one point because the only thing the school was saying to me was force the medicine in him. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I defiantly was on the wrong side of the playing field with these educators who were smarter than me. I learned to write down everything , keep a journal so when stuff changes I would not have to remember by memory. I had 3 years of journals to refer back to.

The next step was how to deal with a hostile environment in the school. The staff, to me, was taking this too personal. Sometimes even yelling at my son telling him he was bad and going to be stupid. This type of environment was not conducive for learning for any one.

The next approach was to find ways of boosting my child s ego before he got to school. I would tell him that he was going to be the best kid today. And that if he could make it to lunch with no outbursts, tantrums, or attacking some one I would reward him with going to the park to play. I know he had a lot of energy and needed to get the steam off. If my son woke up in a bad mood it had to do with something he went through the night before, and I would have to solve this before I would take him to school. It would take till he got to the 6th grade before the outburst would stop. Because soothing him before he got to school did not work.

When my son got in the 6th grade I realized he still could not read or write, he was at a 3rd grade level so I had to hire him a tutor to get him up to par. The IEPs did not address his education they were only addressing his behavior. So not only was the school failing him I was failing him. So myself and the tutor took upon ourselves to have school every day and teach him his abc�s how to write and his math was below par too.

At this point I had to find a job to support us. My advocacy turned to letter writing first to the school district, then to a lawyer. I wrote so many letters my fingers were numb. I needed to find some one to help me with my case. My son�s education was suffering because the only thing the school was concentrating on was his behavior. He was being shipped from one alternative school to another. And he was not learning a thing. I became an assertive parent advocate so that I could be a effective parent in helping my child get educated. I talked to whoever would listen to me. I was at the school board more than I was at work. . . .

I finally found an educational advocate for my son, someone to speak for him at his IEP meetings. This worked because the staff listened to her she was one of their peers and could not say some of the dumb stuff they had said to me over the years. I found too that I had to keep up with the documents that labeled him mentally retarded. My son was not mental he had a severe behavior problem and I knew this was going to hinder him from learning because if everyday he was acting out he was not learning. I knew the resources were limited and I did not care, I asked for whatever the school district had in the budget to use for my son. I asked the school to hire him a mentor to walk with him to every class so he could stay focused on going to class and actually entering the class room and not walking the hallways. This worked perfectly until the school received budget cuts and the first person to go was my son mentor. I knew I had to walk in the schools shoes and I needed them to help want to help my child. This was a hard task, because once you start asking for things for your child you get labeled as the enemy.

I failed as an educator advocate for my child he is now 16 in and out of jail, he still can't read or write that good and if you ask him if he wants to go to school he will tell you no. My child has turned down any help we have offered him and at this point I hope he graduates, I don�t see this happening because he is 16 and still in the 9th grade. Nothing worked after he got old enough to say no to the forced medicine at school. . . .

Nothing happened because the school district fought me tooth and nail. They did not care if my son got educated, he was passed to the 9th grade and that is where he probably will be when he turns 18. My efforts went unnoticed because I was only advocating for my son, I did not meet any other parents that had children with type of disorder.

I learned that the school district has a long way to go on compassion for children that have problems. I was beat down so many times because I didn�t know the right questions to ask. Anybody who met my kid either hated or loved him. I fought a long and hard fight for my son but he has now chosen the thug life and school is on the bottom of his agenda. I have not given up. I do pray for him and call and encourage him. But when teens have their mind made up that they are already grown and can make their own decisions there is basically not much you can do. I have learned that you can only do so much with little support from educators who are supposed to be on your side. Yes I probably should have given my son the drugs but I still feel today that they should open schools for children like my son so that they can get the education they deserve and not focus solely on his behavior.

More Poor People are in Suburbs than Cities

"A new image of urban America is in the making," said William H. Frey, a demographer at Brookings who co-wrote the report. "What used to be white flight to the suburbs is turning into 'bright flight' [sic] to cities that have become magnets for aspiring young adults who see access to knowledge-based jobs, public transportation and a new city ambiance as an attraction."

"This will not be the future for all cities, but this pattern in front runners like Atlanta, Portland, Ore., Raleigh, N.C., and Austin, Texas, shows that the old urban stereotypes no longer apply," he said.

The suburbs now have the largest poor population in the country. According to the analysis, between 1999 and 2008, the suburban poor grew by 25 percent; five times the growth rate of the poor in cities. During that same time period, the median household income in the U.S. declined by $2,241.

As I have noted before, this shift in population will have significant implications for schools, although the "losing whites" title and "bright flight" framing certainly have racist overtones at least.

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The Argument Itself is Dated

Almost 11 months in to raising our first child, I am finally getting back to doing some blogging.

...and regretting not doing better spell checking...

I am child-myopic these days, and the influence on my thought, actions, and writing will undoubtedly focus on how he, to borrow from Gert. J. J. Biesta, comes into the world as a unique singular being despite the forces that would shape and construct him otherwise.

As this is a policy blog, and an educational policy blog in particular, I will do my best to relate our son�s unfolding to schools, schooling, policy, and policy implementation. If I drift too much into �raising baby,� I trust my colleagues will reel me in.

I woke up this morning thinking about schools as a type of technology, one created to serve a specific function: to educate.

What that means is obviously debatable.

If it�s a public school and you�re asking the current, or previous administration for a definition, to educate is to ram facts into a child�s head and then test the child to see how much fact has stuck.

School is a hammer; knowledge the nail; the teacher is a carpenter and a child the entity under construction. Said differently, school is a needle; the teacher a nurse; history, English, math, beauty, and Truth are the medicines administered in various doses according to the doctor making the rounds.

This is a simplistic way to �educate� as we live in a world where appropriation of fact is a quickly satisfied task for anyone with access to a laptop (or a phone, but not MY phone) can find and appropriate almost any fact desired without having someone nail or inject it into one�s psyche.

Applying that fact is an entirely different matter, as is bringing new facts to bear (sp?) on those committed to memory, evaluating both sets of facts (old and new) and then acting to make a change in one�s life, family, or community in light of reflection on what�s been tried, what�s worked, and what has not.

As a space for achieving all of the above (imagining, testing, critiquing, reflecting, resisting, creating, and attempting) I believe schools as we know them now, the schools I�ll be sending my child to perhaps, are ill suited technologies for encouraging the higher order thinking and intelligent behavior that I want my son, and indeed all children, to engage in.

This brings me back to my phone...which also happens to be our son�s favorite new �toy.� My phone is 4 years old, a veritable dinosaur in a world of eagles. Texting is impractical, as I have to hit the same button several times to scroll through choices before finding the letter or symbol I desire. I cannot access the net from my phone, and if I could, I imagine surfing it would be akin to realtime-surfing on crutches.

I am limited by my 4 year old phone as to how I can interact, learn from, and change my world. Imagine if it was 40 years old. Imagine carrying a 40 year old cell phone around in your pocket.

How about a computer?

This laptop is 5 years old and cannot keep up with my wife�s new machine, which cost us half the old one and has quadruple the power (but it�s a Window�s device and I make myself feel better by noting I have a much cooler marketing apparatus behind my aging iBook�).

Imagine using a 50 year old laptop...you�d need a much bigger lap, one the size of a bedroom. Now imagine using a 100 year old computer. Harder to do because they weren�t around. 100 years ago few people could imagine the processing power we�d eventually have quite literally at our fingertips.

To finally make my school-related point...A 4 year old phone and a 5 year old machine help me function in the world and make life livable and workable, but they have their limits. I�d buy a new phone and new computer if I wasn�t thinking more about my child�s education.

In 5 years there�s a good chance I�ll be sending my son into schools still wedded to designs over 100 years old, technologies that use the basic hardware and operating systems from the 19th Century. Yes they help people get by, and yes they can train children to function in particular ways, but the walls, the bells, the goals, the end of the day desires held by most of the people constructing "schools" will not work in an era that demands more advanced operating systems.

So I�m sitting here thinking to myself:

"Self, are you going to leave your child�s education up to people employing dated technologies, and if so are you prepared to reap the cosmic consequences of reducing Asher�s opportunities for robust exploration and growth as part of an organic-democratic-whole in the name of standards and accountability, themselves dated artifacts?"

I have to answer NO.

Advanced operating systems to be discussed below or outlined next week...

drpk

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The Hard Problems in Education

A conference was held last week at Harvard seeking to trace out the "hard problems" in the social sciences, following after David Hilbert's famous ranking of the hard problems in mathematics.

I thought it might be interesting to talk about what we think the hard problems in education are. Note that many of the problems Hilbert came up with eventually proved to be unsolvable.

I have two, that will surprise no one who has been reading.

1. How can schooling contribute significantly to the democratic empowerment of marginalized students?

2. How can we eliminate the relationship between the efficacy of schools and the socioeconomic status of the communities they serve?

Note that I refer to "schooling" not "education." Many of our key problems are less "educational" than institutional, related to a particular kind of institutional structure that produces particular effects and limitations.

Of course, each question contains assumptions about what the "real" problem is. (E.g., if we could change the socioeconomic status of communities, the coupling problem would disappear.)

I know many of us are off to AERA (I'm not going) or otherwise buried by the end of the semester, so I listed this as the "monthly forum" to allow people to easily return to it if they are interested.

This could be a very sad day - I choose differently

this is not policy per se, but it explains about me as a teacher. For those who do not know, Leaves on the Current is the screen name of my spouse. This was originally posted at Daily Kos

1889 the birth of Adolph Hilter
1999 the shootings at Columbine High School

Either could be an occasion to look back - in horror or in sadness.

Instead I look ahead. To the words of a man born around this time - we do not know for sure when, only that he was baptized on April 26.

And for this day, one set of his words seems appropriate, at least in my mind:

When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon my self and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least,
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate,
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

The rest of this diary will be a meditation on this, one of my most cherished poems.


When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon my self and curse my fate,


I have, since early adolescence, been prone to depression. I can be very much of a pessimist, seeing all my failures, and how the future may bring events that will dwarf even these. It is easy to look back and weep at the mistakes I keep making, to find myself wondering why I should keep going. When I was younger I had frequent thoughts of suicide, pondering the different methods of disposing of myself. In early adulthood I often felt so alone I wondered that if I died in the small apartments or rented rooms in which I lived if anyone would even notice until my body began to stink.


Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least,


I was jealous of others. I was never all that popular. I did not have a single date in my first two years of high school. While later I might be able to start relationships, I could not sustain them. Intuitively I knew that if I wanted friends I had to be a friend, but I did not seem to know how to accomplish that. There were things at which I could excel, and there certainly were things I enjoyed but from which I fled, because they seemed to mark me as different, thereby increasing my sense of isolation.


Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate,

I did seek a magic solution. I imagined that I would encounter the one person, the one relationship, that would make everything perfect. Sometimes when I lived in Brooklyn Heights I would take a cab from the upper East Side bars at which I spent too much time and money and have it drop me off on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge and walk across, somehow imagining that in the hours well after midnight I would encounter that person and all would be well - it was rare that I encountered anyone else walking.

And this seeking of a magic solution in one person was in large part why so many of my attempts at relationships failed.

But I said that I choose differently. That is true today. It became true decades ago. I began to accept myself, in part because I allowed myself to feel vulnerable.

The last six lines of the poem could apply to my relationship with Leaves on the Current, begun on September 21, 1974, when she was 17 and I was 28, eventually leading to our marriage on December 29, 1985. She is my best friend, my most trusted adviser, my truest love. And the words would be true, but they would be an incomplete expression of my understanding of them.


Incomplete, not wrong. Because without that relationship, her love, I would never have had the courage to completely change the direction of my life, to follow what my heart had often called me to, but which i feared doing, despite having enjoyed the occasions where I had tried it. Without Leaves, I would not have left a career that paid decently but left me unsatisfied, and become a teacher.

The four lines before the final two apply as well to my teaching - certainly in my writing about teaching my state sings hymns at heaven's gate.

Many reading this know that I have been honored for my teaching by being my school system's selectee for the Washington Post's Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teaching Award. As news of that has gone around people have gotten in touch with me to tell me how happy they are, to assure me it is well deserved. Some have been parents of current and former students. Some are student with whom I have had little contact since I last taught them. Yesterday I receive emails from two students from years ago. One I taught as an 8th grader in 1996-97, the other as a freshman my first year at Eleanor Roosevelt, in 1998-99. Each message is brief. Each is relevant to my meditation on this poem:

I don't know if you remember me, but I'd like to wish you congratulations on your award. I attended Kettering Middle School in 1996-1997 and remember fondly your history class. I remember how you were always willing to be silly to prove a point. Thanks to teachers like you students like me are inspired to become teachers ourselves.

You may not remember me, but I was a freshman in your LSN Government class for the 1998-1999 school year at Eleanor Roosevelt High School. I am now a 4th grade teacher at Perrywood Elementary School. When I was a student in your class, I enjoyed it immensely! I appreciated your humor and animated teaching style. Being as though history/government have never been my favorite subjects, I always regard your class as my favorite class and you as my favorite grade school teacher. I had a college professor who displayed very similar teaching styles to you at UMCP and because of this, I became his intern for 2 years. Teachers liks you are hard to find, but so easy to appreciate. I am thankful to have had the chance to enjoy your expertise and congratulations again on your recent award! You deserve it among many others! =)

Both young ladies now teach elementary school in our district. I have to admit I cannot picture either one in my mind, although even if I could, I am sure as adult women they would appear very different. I remember both names. I could go to my old computer files and look up their grades, but that does not matter. I do know that I was not especially close to either one, and this is the first contact with either since I taught them.

Perhaps the expression of these two letters might not seem to connect with the final two lines of the poem, but for me they do. Think of the latin caritas which is a caring for the best for the other person, as Paul uses it in 1st Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 13 (and coincidentally I am a triskadekaphile): And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity

If you prefer, you can use the word love instead of charity and then perhaps my application of the final words of the sonnet will begin to make more sense.

Teaching is an exercise in faith - that the young people entrusted to my care will have a future in which they can participate and from which they draw sustenance and in which they can be productive to the society in which they will find themselves, perhaps themselves helping to shape it in a fashion more conducive to love and warmth and leaving the world a better place.

Teaching depends on hope - we as teachers can never know the full impact we have upon those in our care. I know that I make mistakes, but hope that these are outweighed by my intentions and care for those before me, not merely that they may do well in my course, but that they may from having experienced be richer in soul, more believing in their own potential, more willing to be giving of themselves, and perhaps somewhat forgiving to me for the errors I may have committed.

Charity or love - teaching should be full of this. I love the subject I teach because it gives me a window with which to connect with my students. I loved teaching American History - as I did at Kettering Middle - because I could help my students make sense of it, see how it affected them, empower them to make new connections with their own world and lives. Of greater importance, teaching must always include the care of the students before me, wanting to see possibilities for them, so that they can choose who they will be, what they will become.

We can look back at Hitler and see the horrors he inflicted upon the world. As one of Jewish background born in the immediate aftermath of the great war he engendered, living as I did among some who had survived the Shoah of European Jewry, I can never forget nor be unaware at the signs of similar hatred and oppression, in other nations and in my own. As a teacher I can look back 11 years to Littleton Colorado and remember that bullying among adolescents can have tragic consequences, that as a teacher I can not allow a single incident of bullying to go unchallenged.

But I can also reflect upon Shakespeare's Sonnet XXIX, the last two lines of which read

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Certainly I am enriched by my relationship with Leaves on the Current, approaching its 36th anniversary in September, bound for eternity on December 29, 1985. Those words apply to her.

They also apply to all the students who pass through my care. I am richer than any kind because I have the opportunity to affect lives.

And when I receive, out of the blue, communications such as the two I have quoted, I feel richer than Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. I wish both men well, and hope they will use their riches wisely.

I am rich, I am honored, I am grateful, I am overwhelmed. And if I begin again to look upon myself and curse my fate I can stop. I can return to these messages, and similar ones I am receiving face to face from students currently in the building, from parents I encounter in a Starbucks or a Safeway, from my peers in the building - but of course, most of all always from the students, remember the final two lines of the sonnet, and find myself energized for another day, another year in the classroom.

So I choose differently on this day which could be tinged with sadness. I choose faith, hope and charity. And if Will will allow me, I borrow those final two lines of Sonnet XXIX and offer them to all my students, former, present and hopefully for a future with many years yet to come:


For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Peace.