Teacher quality is something no one can really argue with. I mean the idea that supremely excellent teachers will do a better job at educating our nation’s kids than weak, apathetic teachers is self-evident.

And the Gates Foundation just spent a heck of a lot of money to verify this.

But don’t fantastic doctors save more lives, exceptional lawyers win more court cases, and phenomenal police detectives crack more crimes? Of course they do.

So the question really is, how do we create more great teachers?

And they are created, not born. In the spirit of the book OUTLIERS, I’d suggest that we are looking at great teachers as if they were simply born that way. Sure, they went to school, did their requisite reading and had a bit of knack for working with kids, but the fact is, if we want more great teachers we, as a nation, are going to have to make them.

And how do we do this?

Professional development.
Conferences.
Planning time.

The objective? The sharing of best practices.

The fact is, the world of teaching has changed spectacularly in the past few years. To wit, 5 years ago I don’t think I even knew what Google was; now it’s an active verb in my teaching life and I do things like take Google Lit Trips — a term that might as well have been spoken to me in Russian but a very short time ago… and still might appear like something in Russian to many, many teachers out there today.

And the fact that I am blogging this on a ning is not lost on me. This is an entirely new vocabulary in the lexicon of education and without me having had these things shown to me, explained to me, taught to me by other educators, I simply would not have these methodological tools in my teacher’s toolbelt.

Then again, I go to teacher conferences.

Sure, I am often invited to speak at them which makes getting to them much, much easier (like my district is off the hook for the funding of this stuff) but look at the arsenal I have available to me as a teacher as a result of being in attendance at national conferences like NCTE. Does this time at the conferences pay off for my district in terms of what I can offer to my students and/or illuminate to other teachers on our staff?

It’s not even a question.

Of course, people ask me to come do professional development for their districts all the time but in so many ways, I am just standing on the shoulders of those who illuminated different tools, ideas, strategies and so forth for me once upon a time. Yes, like any chef, I will often play with the recipe in order to make the meal my own, but first I needed someone to inspire me as to the meal I could cook.

My career is now dedicated to being more of a share-er. (It truly is a place where I find great personal and professional satisfaction.) I try to share through the posts I author, through the material I post on the web at my website, and through the curriculum I write for authentically engaging reluctant readers and writers. But if our nation is serious about great-en-ing our country’s teachers, we are going to have to put teachers in a position where they can be learners, where they can work on improving their craft.

We need to make a commitment to those who work as as teachers in our schools to remain well schooled. We need to make a greater commitment to sending teachers to professional development conferences. It’s where the best of the best gather to give… and I always leave with a full bag of fantastic goodies.

Conferences are the moments in which great teachers are created.

Am I really supposed to take away a kid’s cell phone from them? I mean official school policy says NO CELL PHONES.

Yet virtually very kid on campus has one. And they make no bones about the fact that their phones are more than just phones — their phones are central conduits to how they live their lives.

To take away their cell phone makes me an instant jerk. And who is going to allow themselves to actually listen to and learn from a total jerk?

On the other hand, school’s cannot function without rules. Simply put, it’d be anarchy. Chaos. Pandemonium!(Not so unlike how it is now anyway, right?)

But rules are essential. A classroom without procedures, guidelines, and matters of protocol is a classroom that is going to implode.

So, does this mean school rules are optional, that I get to follow the ones that make sense to me and disregard teh ones that do not?

Well, if you ask my principal, my district superintendent or anyone at the state department of education, most certainly not.

But if you ask a teacher down the hall, a frontline soldier who has to actually work where the rubber meets the road, you are going to get an entirely different answer.

And you know what? Both sides are 100% right! That’s what so maddening about public education today. School boards and administration need to set policy and that policy needs to be followed in order for campuses to function. Otherwise, it’s a disaster.

But teachers who blindly follow non-sensible policies do so to the detriment of their kids… and that’s an even worse disaster.

So, do I confiscate the phone? If I do, I lose the kid. If I don’t, I am yet another rebel teacher who doesn’t buy into sending the kids one straightforward, unmixed message about matters of behavior on campus. I am the guy who clearly puts it out there that school rules are optional, subjective, dependent on individual circumstances and not really rules, but more like guidelines, take them or leave them.

Kids wear hats. It’s a violation of school policy. I never take a kid’s hat. Why? Because I care more about what’s going on underneath the hat.

Kid’s have face piercings. Like I really want to extract a nosering from a teenager’s nostril in the middle of 3rd period.

Kids bring drugs to school. I bust them with these — and I bust them… and good.

Weapons, too.

Spray paint cans, too.

But girls who wear shorts that are not quite to fingertips length down their sides? Whatever, I have other battles to wage.

And so I wonder, without any sort of real answer to this question, are school rules subjective and open to teacher interpretation?

See, this is why my students need to be readers who can apply text-to-world critical thinking to our classroom and the world at large.

Take for example, the inimitable actor Woody Harrelson, most famous for being Woody on Cheers but also pretty well known for a heck of a lot of other quite solid — and not so solid — movies he’s done.

White Man Can’t Jump… big thumbs up!

Money Train… big thumbs down!

Anyway, Woody admits getting into a physical confrontation with a paparazzi a few days ago. But he had a good reason. And I quote…

“I quite understandably mistook [the photographer] for a zombie.”

Yep, he really said this. And he also said this…

“I wrapped a movie called ‘Zombieland,’ in which I was constantly under assault by zombies, then flew to New York, still very much in character,” Harrelson said in a statement issued Friday by his publicist.

Niiiicce!

Now if my students were actual readers of the news — any news; The NY Times, The AP wire, FOX or MTV (those last 2 are kinda the same) — they could build a text-to-world connection that could easily get them out of their homework for the night.

I mean if I had a kid come into my class and tell me that “…while scouring the Washington Post for the latest political insight into world economic fiduciary policy they ran across this brief but salient human interest story about Woody Harrelson and then — whodda thunk it — alien zombies ate their HW assignement and there was simply no way Mr. Alan that it could ever be replaced.

And so, I should give them full credit yet not require to see the actual work.”

I’d go for it.

Text-to-World connections. If only our kids could see how valuable what we perpetually advise really could be to their lives.

This stuff is starting to make my head spin.

On one hand, our courts ban same sex marraige,on the other hand a high school in Los Angeles elects a male prom queen and on the third hand 1 in 4 U.S. school-aged kids are Hispanic, but they are not recent immigrants.

Jeez, I don’t know whether to be homophobic, heterophobic or xenophobic at this point. Goodness how I wish the myopic, closed-minded folks who steer public sentiment could give me a better sense of direction. These days it’s confusing to know who I’m supposed to hate.

Los Angeles Unified has also decided to cut summer school due to the budget crisis — but we’re going to keep credit recovery courses at the secondary level for high schoolers. Now this makes complete sense to me. I mean come on, what kind of hit would this school district’s iconic educational image take if we weren’t still offering the chance to make up 18 weeks of F work with 4 weeks of D work (via worksheets, of course) and kept funding programs that had been proven to help that small little segment of our state’s population like elementary age English Language Learners.

Good call! I mean heaven forbid we actually associated an F with the idea of failing or recognized that young kids who need more time in class but don’t get it while they are still young will turn in to old kids who don’t care about spending any time in class because they already know it all.

I mean I don’t want to say that this is a jilting bigger than that of Betty being passed over for Veronica by Archie (not sure I agree with this one, Arch, my friend) but still, if I was going for where my buck will get more bang, I’d be betting on the little kids who are trying to learn the language over the big kids who just had their chance to earn credits oh, 2 week ago.

And you wonder why teachers need aspirin.

State testing ended last week but school doesn’t end for me until June 26. This far-too-easily sets itself up to be an educational dead zone, a time whereby teachers can simply fluff through the last few weeks of the school year and count down the days til summer.

And the truth is, the kids kind of expect us to do this. Well screw that! Unless each and every kid is being courted by Harvard, there’s work to do. (And even if they were being courted by Harvard, there’d still be work to do.) Besides, what am I going to do, show The Lion King for the next month?

Now don’t get me started on our math department. (Okay, that was a cheap shot. I mean we certainly have a few extremely hard working folks crunching numbers down the halls, but still, ask around… there are some peeps…)

Anyway…

So a student named Laura just came up to me in class after I assigned our final year end project. We’re going deep into propaganda with an Animal Farm and The Giver unit I am just starting right now whereby my students will write, produce, star in and direct their own 30-60 second commercials before we say hasta la vista to this section of their academic journey. (BTW, these projects are going to be wicked. I’ll be sure to post some as they come through but seeing as how we now have more tech tools available than ever before, I am fired up about how cutting edge these things are going to be… or so I hope.)

However, Laura just asked me about timetables for the project. Well, her vocab wasn’t as sophisticated. She didn’t use the word “timetables”. Her exact words were, “When’s this due, by June 12, cause I’m going back to Mexico then?”

“Like, for the rest of the school year?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“But school isn’t out until June 26th. Do your parents know this?”

“I dunno.”

“What about your other teachers? Have you told any of them this yet?”

“No.”

“So it’s May 27 and you are going to be leaving in 2 weeks and you haven’t spoken to any of your teachers about small little academic things like missing finals or anything like that. When were you going to tell them/us?”

“I dunno.”

“Laura, let me ask you a question,” I said trying to remain composed. “Do you think that leaving school 2 weeks early is going to impact your grades?”

“I dunno.”

“Laura, let me ask you another question. Do you think a person should ever be paid full time wages for part-time work?”

“I guess, not really,” she answered.

“Laura, I think you need to go think this through a bit more. Maybe have a discussion with your parents, your other teachers and so on… and then create a plan. I mean you can’t just leave school for the summer whenever you want.”

But the thing is, she can. And probably will. This happens every year to teachers like myself. It’s a scene that has played itself out many, many times for gobs of teachers in California, Texas and so on. Matter of fact, it’s so common that I literally pilfered the scenario from my real life as a teacher and used it in my latest YA novel The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez, a book about a teen latina who is literally and figuratively caught between both two worlds and two cultures.

But in fiction, I get to solve the problem with a-learn-from-your-mistakes-inspirational-and-happy-ending. As a real teacher, I don’t. Laura and her family are going to make their own decision about when summer begins and my input probably will not carry much weight.

Aaarrgghh!! If only they could see what I see. School is a life-raft in America and we have got to get more of our kids to recognize how fiercely they need to clutch it.

A quarter is 9 weeks long. 2 weeks early means Laura will only have completed about 78% of her required attendance. And Laura is, at best, a C student in my class, so if you do the math (75% of 78%), she’s gonna be at about the 58% mark minus taking her year-end finals.

Extrapolate that across the board in all her classes and she goes from being a C student to an F student.

Well, there’s always summer school, right? Oh wait, she’s gonna be in Mexico. Hmm… now I teach in a school with over a 45% non-graduation rate and Laura is gonna bail out on the last two weeks of her freshman year of high school. I wonder how this is going to play out when the numbers get crunched in 2012?

Sonia Sotomayor was just nominated by Barack Obama for appointment to the Supreme Court. And though I can’t say I have read all of her legal decisions (or any of them, actually) I am already a fan.

Why? Because regardless of your political bent, she appears well-qualified.

And how did she get well-qualified? By becoming well-educated.

Born in the Bronx, lived in a public housing project, earned her way into Princeton. Graduated summa cum laude.

Niiiiice!

Went to Yale Law School. Became editor of the Yale Law Journal.

Niiiiice!

Been an assistant district attorney. Worked in a private law firm. Became a judge. Supported by President Bush (#1). Given a promotion by President Clinton. Confirmed by Senate vote in 1998.

Niiiiice!

I tell my students all the time that I really do not care what they aspire to be. Plumber, Mechanic, Surgeon, Computer Engineer, whatever. Yet, what I do tell them is that what ultimately will determine their success, I believe, is their ultimate ability to do a job supremely well. Not kinda good. Not fairly decently. Supremely well. Do that, and they will beat a path to your door, almost regardless of your chosen industry. However, render yourself unable to do that and you are facing serious impediments to scaling the highest of heights.

That’s the classroom lesson I am going to bring when I copy an article about Sotomayor this week so that I can introduce her to my students.

Is it important that she is Hispanic? You betchya. (Especially considering the demographics of my school — my kids are really gonna love that.) Is it important that she’s a woman? Well, she won’t be the first but it’s still refreshing to see. But is it race or gender which brought Sotomayor this nomination?

Of course not. And that’s why I am so high on this pick. It’s the proverbial teachable moment. And goodness do I love those.

Niiiiice!

When I was named Teacher of the Year for the state of California in 2007 I was given, among other things, a free trip to Princeton, New Jersey to visit the HQ of ETS.

Talk about georgoeus. I mean this place was Shangra-la.

And all I kept asking myself was, “This place is non-profit?” No freakin’ way. They gotta be hauling in money by the truckload.

The SAT. The PSAT. The AP tests. The GRE.

Holy smokes… is anybody doing the math on these guys? That’s all I could think about my entire stay.

Well, someone did do the math.

Read this and tell me that that something isn’t reminiscent of a famous quote from the play Hamlet.

Here are some highlights:

Last year, the SAT cost $45 for the basic test, which 1.5 million U.S. students took. The College Board does not comment on how much revenue each test brings in, but once you factor in the nearly 222,000 students who received fee waivers from the College Board, you can roughly estimate that SAT revenue was at least $58,360,365. I say at least because many students take the test over and over again, trying to refine their scores to get into better colleges. That’s not to mention the litany of extra fees the College Board charges if you get your scores by phone ($12.50), rush the results ($36.50), or ask for a refund ($7). The real revenue is likely to be millions more than $58,360,365, and that’s before you factor in the foreigners who want a piece of an American education ($26 international processing fee; $23 more if you’re taking it in India or Pakistan).

In 2006—the most recent year for which the College Board’s tax returns are available—the College Board brought in a total of $582.9 million of revenue.

Over a half a billion per year for the bubble test industry? When people cry out for change, we have to realize the forces which are in opposition to this change.

And the forces of opposition will always be the folks who are raking in the serious cash. Heck, I’m scared that I’m gonna get a poison blow dart in my neck simply from typing this type of post.

You think Wall Street is worthy of investigation and re-thinking? Might I suggest… twwwppp!

There’s the blowdart!

“Honestly, California has lost its way.”

This quote doesn’t come from me. It doesn’t come from my compadres in the Golden State. It doesn’t even come from a person who is known for making blustery, large, sweeping statements like this.

It comes from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, speaking to dozens of mayors, superintendents and school board trustees at San Francisco City Hall this past week.

Ouch!

And then he put some spank on it.

“California used to lead the nation in education.”

That’s right… used to. But now, as we all know, California looks like some sort of mushy-brained prize fighter from an era gone by who still thinks it has the chops to be in the ring with a ferocious opponent — yet its face is being turned into hamburger meat by the opposing educational forces it now faces.

Used to… Damn if that don’t slice to the core.

He also said that, “Our dysfunctional adult relationships have hurt children in far too many places.”

Gee, I might find that grossly offensive it it wasn’t so grossly true.

Duncan also slammed Schwarzenegger’s proposal to lop seven days off the school year, saying students need to be spending significantly more time in class to close the achievement gap. I’ve been saying the same thing for months. I mean by Arnold’s logic, if cutting 7 days of school is going to be fiscally prudent, why don’t we just cancel the entire 2009/2010 school year — that might be downright profitable!!

Thing is, as my state and my peeps out West get body-slammed by Duncan, there’s one thing we all know to be true. If you were to take a look at the top of the mountain, the tip of the iceberg which is above water and not the whole glacier, there’s no one who wouldn’t agree that the state of California has some of the most wicked, most phenomenal, most cutting edge, leading thinkers and educators on the planet. In a definite amount of places, California rocks like no other.

Heck, if we were Rhode Island, we’d be slam-dunking on fools like Kobe Bryant at a Laker game!

But we can’t seem to find a way to spread the love we have at the top all around. The upper tiers have it — and they have it good — but the rest of the state is getting pummeled.

“It’s often at times of crisis we get the reforms we need,” Duncan also mentioned. Well, we certainly need reform. And we certainly are in a crisis. And being that he was pretty much right about everything else he said, I certainly hope our Secretary of Education is right about this one, too.

Social promotion is the scourge of public education today. The fact is we are simply passing our kids on up the ladder whether or not they have demonstrated any sort of comprehension of the subject matter they are supposed to have learned in the class/course/grade level in which they are enrolled. This folly creates a ripple effect of domino-like failure because most of our education system is predicated on knowing what comes before in order to be able to succeed now and thereby prosper later.

For example, when kids don’t learn their multiplication tables it becomes almost impossible to do their algebra. Without their algebra, they can’t do geometry. Without geometry, they can’t pass high stakes tests like the California High School Exit Exam… so then they can’t earn their high school diploma.

Obviously, we need to stop stop the students from moving up the ladder — before they take the exit exam, before they enroll in geometry, before they take algebra — and ensure that they know their foundational skills like multiplication tables before the ensuing calamity befalls them when they are teenagers.

Thus we need gatekeeping checkpoints. I mean, if a students does not possess a certain minimum level of aptitude in specific subject matters, it’s ridiculous to move them up in the system because we are simply setting the kids up to fail.

Logical, right?

I think we need checkpoints before students enter school in grade 1 (so we can assess their aptitude before they even enter school to determine whether they can write their name, read, and so on. I mean some kids come in ready to read chapter books and some kids come in lacking the ability to recognize sight words — the difference is HUGE and if we continue to toss them all in the same class when their needs are so drastically different, we are feeding the social promotion monster right out of the gate).

Then we need checkpoints at grade 4, grade 8 and grade 12. (Well, grade 12 are already in place, dysfunctional as they may be in so many places — but don’t get me started on bubble tests. The assessments we need also have a need… to be re-imagined, but that’s for a different blog post.)

Sadly, however, the fact is that public education is in such general disarray that we’d be retaining too many kids at the lower levels with a checkpoint system and adults in policy circles all over the U.S. quake at the idea of eventually having 16 year old boys in classes with 12 year old girls as this system would seem to create. So since we can’t handle the volume of kids who need to be retained, re-taught, worked with some more because they learn at a different pace through a different modality, perhaps, we simply pass them on up with an F on their record.

Hello, social promotion. I mean what if NASA allowed their pilots to fly rocket ships without being able to even get a crop-duster off the ground. There’d be crashes everywhere and people would be screaming STOP, you freakin’ fools. Lives are being destroyed because of this nonsense.

Now don’t get me started on how we also pass these kids up with feelings of incompetence, low academic self-esteem and an attitude of why bother to even try because I’m too stupid to learn this stuff anyway. Even though they are failing our classes, we are teaching them things, that’s for sure. And the things we are teaching them emotionally hurt. (And we wonder why the kids act out?)

Yes, our problems are complicated problems, that’s for sure. But until someone puts a stop to the nonsense that is social promotion the entire system is going to continue to buckle. After all, a house built on a weak, pathetic foundation simply will not stand.

We need gatekeeping checkpoints. And considering that I proctored state tests today whereby kids all over my school were being asked to solve problems about Y intercepts, linear inequalities and quadratic equations on a graph with sloping, curving lines — and this is on the Algebra I test — is there any wonder that the chances of my school doing well this year are diminished by the fact that so many of our students struggle with things like long division and quickly decipher things like the answer to 9 x 7? Yet when they were struggling, when their teachers saw that they did not know the material, when years ago the educators knew that, “Hey kid, if you don’t get this, there’s no way that you are going to get that later on,” where were our policy makers then?

Why is it that common sense is so uncommon in our schools?

No one climbs a ladder without being able to step up from a prior rung.

In a topic that is dear to my heart for a variety of reasons I saw this article and immediately flashed to a, “Why can’t all the kids who have made bad choices in terms of getting embroiled with gangs see the same light?”

When I was writing Homeboyz, a book unfortunately inspired by too many true-to-life violent circumstances involving my own students, I uncovered more and more and more “things” in the course of my research than anyone ought to know. And basically I came to realize that the relationship between youth violence and education is inextricably tied.

You may poo-poo my insights, you may think I am a bleeding-heart liberal who is opining for more government spending, you may think I am one of those softee folks who doesn’t see the side of the victim and their pain when I advocate for felonious kids. Well, that may be true. However, gangs are a scourge on our nation and as society gets more polarized between rich and poor, have and have-not, well-educated versus poorly schooled, realize that the price being paid by not being more effective with our children while we have them in our classrooms is costing our communities immensely.

Here’s a class project (an enhanced podcast) my students did about gangs in Lynwood. Great work about a tragic topic.