Promoting Public Schools: Clearing the Trail for Those Who Will Follow

It’s popular for people to beat up public schools these days. I’ve gone through my own rate of response to this litigious tenor. I started off by ignoring it presuming that if we keep plugging away, doing the hard work, truth would prevail and the rancor would settle. I was wrong.

So I started paying attention to the arguments, and who was making them. I suppose you could call that my “leery” stage. I’m open to criticism of public schools but I’m leery about the validity of what’s being said, who’s saying it, and why. Some of it is well placed by reasonable people. And much more of it is baseless, irresponsible misuse of data and only serves to profit particular special interests.

I have some special interests at heart too. All day long I’m responsible for almost 900 adolescents, and when I go home, I’m responsible for my own four kids, who are being served by the public school system.

I learned several years ago that you always have to take the high road no matter how wrong your opposition is. But taking the high road doesn’t mean laying down in silence. Sometimes you have to speak up and call out your detractors. I don’t spend my time cutting away at every annoying weed that grows up through the cracks in the road, but when a tree falls across your path, you have a responsibility to clear some trail. There are too many people behind you that also need to get through.

So now I’ve committed to clearing more trail in the path of advocating for public schools. That means speaking up and telling our stories. Like the story of one of my colleagues who recently worked with others to save a child’s life.

My associate is a middle school administrator. His school is the home to a special program that serves the entire school district. That means any time a kid who meets the criteria of this program is identified, he or she is bussed into that school. One of the students recently enrolled in the program had some special needs beyond what the program was intended to serve.

In addition to his learning and behavior problems, this child was homeless, living out of a car with his mother. The car wasn’t going anywhere. There was no gas and no money to buy any. So they bivouacked in the woods until they could figure out what the next step was. No heat, no water, no electricity, and little to eat.

My associate has a colleague who is heavily involved in supporting the local food bank. We’ll call him Skip. Skip learned of the boy’s plight and made a “home” visit. He saw how bad it was and went into action. He gathered the director of the local food bank, and accompanied by a sheriff’s deputy, they went back to encampment, gathered everything the boy and his mother owned in a van, and drove them to a shelter. They stored the belongings until housing could get worked out, arranged temporary housing, provided groceries from the food bank, and personally drove the boy back and forth to school. When the boy got to school his teacher made sure he got breakfast and lunch each day, supplied him with basic, materials like paper and pencils, and rallied to provide some additional supplies.

Once all of those details were arranged they could start on the primary business of schools, teaching and learning. But the other level of care and support had to be provided first. There couldn’t be any teaching and learning until the boy knew he would be safe, have a place to live and not go hungry.

And this is just one example of what schools do right, and what they do all the time. This child will likely reflect an academic failure statistically. He is unlikely to meet the standards of “Adequate Yearly Progress” as measured by state and federal government. Subsequently, the school will have one more mark against it, ultimately being designated a “failing” school because there are many, many other children like this boy.

We’re not making excuses. We don’t need sympathy. But we need people to understand that these kids aren’t numbers. They don’t always show up prepared to learn. They come from families who are buried beneath the signs of our times. And we need people to understand that we are public schools, and we readily accept all the kids who walk through the door. Some are doing okay, and some aren’t. And we stand behind them.

It’s time for more people to stand behind us.

Is there a story about what your school is doing to serve all students? Is there a success to be found amidst all the so-called failures being quantified by our bureaucracy? Do you know about an adolescent who’s succeeding in spite of the odds, a teacher who’s changing a tweener’s life, a counselor who’s charting a child’s future, a principal who’s pushing hard to make things better?

Take a minute and tell us, and your colleagues about it. If you don’t, no one else will.

What Makes Middle Schoolers Awesome

There are a lot of reasons to love working with middle school kids and at the top of my list is their quirky, funky energy. They straddle an imperfect line between assimilating the posture and identity they see in the celebrities and sports starts they admire; and abandoning all inhibition and consideration of what anyone else thinks.

It’s the moments of abandonment, those quixotic times when they act on their impulses without a first, second or third thought that I enjoy the most.

A few weeks ago I was working in the office and my eye was drawn to the window by the sight of snowflakes falling. The mere whisper of snow makes children gasp with delight and completely steals their attention from everything happening around them. I tend to be the same, although as the principal, I have to at least make an effort to mask my commiseration with their wonder.

So I sat their staring out the window and concealing my excitement when I saw him, a gangly boy about 13 years old. He was standing outside waiting for a parent to pick him up early from school, likely for an orthodontic appointment or a trip to the doctor. I guess he assumed that since 900 other kids and a hundred adults were all in their classes that no one could see him even though he was standing in front of the school, flanked by several classroom windows. He must have assumed no one was watching because I question if what he did next would have occurred had he known he had an audience.

He started strutting back and forth in random patters with his head thrown back in some sort of spasmic dance. He lurched forward, skittered back a few steps, and bobbed from side to side, all the while with his head thrown back and his face angled to the sky. I wondered what prompted his odd, tribal-looking dance when I caught sight of the telling detail; his tongue was hanging out like a dog panting on a warm day. He was catching snowflakes on his tongue.

I smiled, inside and out, watching this boy that I know dedicates major portions of his thinking to how look cool enough to carry sway with his peers, only to shuck the veneer of a cool image for the taste of a cool snowflake. I watched quietly from the window hoping not to be noticed lest I interrupt his winter reverie, and I took a picture. I took a picture to share with you, and to remind all of us how cool it is to spend every day with adolescents, so awesome in their adolescence.

WAMLE Goes to Olympia

Recently a contingent of the executive board of the Washington Association for Middle Level Education went to Olympia to spend the day with people of influence at the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and the State Board of Education, speaking up for the needs of middle level education in Washington State. Our group consisted of Dr. Debbie Haskell, WAMLE President and CWU Professor of Middle Level Education; Stephanie Strow, President-Elect of WAMLE, Regional Trustee for the National Middle School Association and Bellingham Social Studies Teacher; Cindy Knisely, WAMLE Board Member and Secondary Reading Specialist at OSPI; and Ben Talbert, Advocacy and Outreach Coordinator for WAMLE, and Auburn Middle School Principal.

It was a very good day and if the people we met with act on what we asked them to do, it bodes well for a better future for adolescent learning in Washington.

We asked to meet with Superintendent Randy Dorn. We did better than that. Superintendent Dorn brought Jessica Vavrus, OSPI Director of Teaching and Learning; Dan Newell, OSPI Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Education; and of course, Alan Burke, Deputy Superintendent of OSPI. If you didn’t know it already, middle level educators have a friend at OSPI with Deputy Superintendent Burke. Dr. Burke was one of the original founders of the Washington’s state middle school association and continues to carry the torch for adolescent learning today.

We appreciate Alan Burke’s commitment to the middle level and we think he was pivotal in ensuring such a broad and influential spectrum of OSPI coming to the table.

WAMLE had three primary objectives in going to Olympia: to make education leaders in Olympia aware of WAMLE; to establish an ongoing dialogue with them about the needs of middle level education, and to call them to action on four specific items:

• Prioritize middle-level appropriate instruction by supporting non-overlapping licensure of middle level educators.
• Provide professional development opportunities addressing the specific needs of middle level educators.
• Designating a qualified middle level liaison to help develop state middle level policy and professional development for teachers and administrators.
• Join us in declaring the month of October of each year the Month of the Young Adolescent to raise public awareness about the importance of improving education, health, and well-being of young adolescents.

 

(For a more detailed outline of these points click here to see the full document at WAMLE’s website.)

These are actionable items that OSPI can act on even in the face of a crushing budget deficit. We know as well as anyone else that there isn’t money to support initiatives that have a price tag. These don’t.

Aligning certification to ensure that teachers of adolescents understand the developmental needs of their students can be accomplished within the current auspices of the Professional education Standards Board. We’ve heard that they’ve been considering it but we’re looking forward to seeing specifics.

There are numerous groups, including WAMLE that can help provide appropriate professional development for middle school teachers.

It will take only the stroke of a pen to endorse the Month of the Young Adolescent.

As to a liaison at OSPI, Superintendent Dorn’s response was that in the face of budget deficits there won’t be any new positions at OSPI for years. We understand that. We aren’t asking for a new position. But we do want someone there who is specifically responsible for being the central point of contact on middle school-specific questions.

There is a person in charge of secondary programs, Assistant Superintendent Newell, but WAMLE maintains that the needs of adolescents and middle schoolers are more specific and intensive than just being lumped in with high schools, which is what people mean when they say “secondary.”

Later in the morning we met with Kathe Taylor, Policy Analyst for the State Board of Education. Look forward to another post about that meeting.

WAMLE appreciates the time and attention that OSPI gave us. Truly. Superintendent Dorn and his staff, like all of us, are trying to overcome significant challenges to doing the jobs we signed on to do. And we look forward to commending our state education leaders as they take action on serving the needs of middle schools.

We’ll keep you posted.

Who’s Speaking Up for You?

If you are a part of the middle school education community in Washington State, you probably feel like no one is really speaking up specifically for you. Well, we are. We’re the Washington Association for Middle Level Education and we are your voice in the middle.

If the deafening sound of silence of people advocating on your behalf isn’t enough to convince you that when it comes to adolescent learners in Washington, try this. Check out the web sites for any education association in Washington and see what they have listed around middle schools…. no one. Call the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and ask for the middle level liaison…. Dial tone.

Associations representing content areas such as math and science have projects and activities supporting middle school instruction like math olympiads and links to other organizations that have done curriculum alignment to Washington’s middle level learning standards.

OSPI has a secondary education liaison but that’s mostly high school, and let’s face it, how common are the needs of the kid who’s still deciding whether or not it’s cool to carry a lunch box compared to the just-about-to-graduate senior who can grow a better beard than his PE teacher?

There is a national group looking out for middle school folks; the National Middle School Association. That’s good. But who’s looking out for the needs of the middle schooler in the inner city of Seattle, or the 7th grade social studies teacher in the Yakima valley?

That’s where WAMLE, the Washington Association for Middle Level Education comes in. We are the organization that loves and labors for middle school students, and the hearty souls who are just crazy enough to work with adolescent learners in Washington State.

This blog is the voice of advocacy for Washingtonian’s most underrepresented population in education. This is where you’ll find the stories of children and their teachers that keep us coming back to work each day. This is where you will learn about what’s shaping up in policy, and what needs to be shipped out. And this is where you’ll hear the call to action when it’s time to make something happen for you, for the children you serve, and for the brightest future we can possibly fashion.