So $100,000,000.00 was just spent (that’s right, 100 mill) and, as this article points out, virtually no positive results were reaped by the extra expenditure of cash-o-la invested in education by a fella with a pet education project named Randy Crew. Hmmm, what can we deduce?

*The Sticky Floor Theory is alive and well. (For those of you not familiar with the “sticky floor” theory in education it basically postulates that those who are down, once down, stay down — because the “floor” is sticky. Put another way, the thinking goes that once you sink into the combustible mix of poverty, sparse employment opportunity and low levels of education, there is a cultural sort of tar to this bottom-of-the-rung environment that seems to keep the feet of those who wish to climb up stuck to the ground levels. And upward mobility is plagued by there being an invisible yet formidable substance oppressing those who wish to rise. Essentally, it’s kind of an inverted cousin of the glass ceiling.)

*Money alone doesn’t solve problems. Without good ideas and intelligent practices, more money spent is not going to equate to higher results achieved. (Maybe this is why NCLB remains so under-funded? They know if they do fund some of this buffoonery it ain’t gonna make a spit of difference. Hey! I just realized something. George Bush was actually a fiscally prudent, insightful, almost prescient president. Whoo-dah-thunk-it?)

*More time in and of itself isn’t going to solve the problems. As you see the article mention, the kids were more fatigued from the extended hours, the teachers were more fatigued from the extended hours and yet there seems to be virutally no improvement from simply spending more time in class. (Might it be that quality supercedes quantity? However, I, for one, do believe that America’s kids need more time in class — not less, not the same but more. WAY MORE! Yet alone, this isn’t going to do anything.)

*The assessments are flawed. Ask any real teacher in a real Florida classroom about how much faith they put in the FCAT’s as an authentic measurement of student achievement — or as a tool that gives true insight as to the qualities of the educator — or as to the true aptitudes of the students and you’ll hear a boatload of complaints. Standardized testing, as it currently exists — and in my opinion — is a sham.

*The teachers charged with achieving the results sought were not properly prepared for the task. What was the PD prior to the expenditure of this money? Can we assume that this Zone experiment might have needed more prep time so that the people working in the Zone were properly readied for the task? Or, is it a case of the next item on the list…

*The teachers stunk. Unfair to say, but this certainly provides more artillery for those who want to fire every teacher in America and then hire a whole new work force. (As if people are beating down doors to go work in Miami’s lowest performing schools.) I mean, hey, we just spent 100 million for no improvement — it’s gotta be the teachers fault, doesn’t it?

*People will now be frightful of signing off on spending money towards, what seems to have been, an exceptionally ambitious and meritorious aim. I know very little about this guy Randy Crew. He was forced out with a six-figure buy-out according to this article but only the lord above knows what really happened in Miami. However, I salute the guy for going to bat for the poorest, lowest achieving schools and really trying to make a difference. I mean the man seems to have staked his career on this venture and he came up as the goat. So what, I say. He apparently took a swing of the bat and gave his best run for the money in an effort to help some of Florida’s least fortunate. (And if you know anything about Miami/Dade county, you know that when we’re talking about a textbook case of America’s severely disadvantaged.) Crew went to bat for these kids and for that I think he’s to be saluted. And I am not alone. As Board member Agustín Barrera said in the article, ”It was a well-thought-out plan that, unfortunately, did not bear the fruits we all thought it would. The mistake would have been not trying the zone, because then we would have failed the students by not trying something new.”

Was it a an attempt for personal glory — the article implies that, too — or a case of going to bat for the kids in a real and earnest and dramatic way? I really don’t know.

But it does seem that education reform for America’s lowest performing schools — not just in Miami, but all across our country — just took a Crew cut.

School is but weeks away from being over. And like every other year, this divides our faculty into two camps.

The first is the camp of faculty members who are counting the days until summer, a time when there will be no work, no assignments, no students and no kids smoking weed in the halls. (I threw that last one in because I just walked through a cloud of sensie bud to get back to my classroom. It’s Friday, lunchtime, and a few students seem to have already started the weekend. However, to be fair to my school, I am sure there are kids in Oakland, Miami, Portland and Peoria who took a hit of weed on campus today — rich or poor, black, white, brown or green, it doesn’t matter. Teens smoke pot on America’s middle and high school campuses all across the nation and folks who don’t think it’s happening their backyard remind me of the line in Casablanca when the police captain is, “Shocked. Shocked to find out there is gambling going on here.”)

Anyway, I literally had a teacher inform me in the restroom earlier today as to the exact amount of teaching days left until we were “free”.

I just faked a smile.

Why a fake smile? Because for me, there’s a sense of, “WAIT!” I have too much more to do. There’s this I still want to do and that I still need to teach and this I was hoping to tackle and that I have a great idea for. That’s the second camp: the folks who feel threatened by the lack of time left to really make manifest all the bubbly aspirations we held for this school year way back at the start of the first week of the school year.

Yet, time is is almost cruelly democratic in that no matter which camp you are in, the clock ticks the same for all of us.

Let me clear… I LOVE CLASSIC LITERATURE!! It’s why I became a writer and a teacher. Books have been nothing less than a spectacular and irreplaceably special part of my life. They’ve shaped my career choice, my social circles, my overall outlook on life and the manner in which I am raising my daughter. However, no one takes value from books they do not read — it’s that simple — and being that I teach in a school where we sport a near 50% drop-out rate, the ol’ “my way or the highway” methodology when it comes to text selection overwhelmingly results in kids saying, “Okay, I’ll take the highway.”

And it’s happening in Chicago, Oakland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Miami, Los Angeles, Dallas, Tuscon and on and on and on…

Sure, kids are cutting off their noses to spite their collective face but on the other hand, thousands of them come into our nation’s classrooms every day with a salty, bitter taste when it comes to the thought of reading and if we, as educators, remain so immovable (as we overwhelmingly have in the past 20 years) when it comes to embracing the idea that a kid must first view a book as an object which potentially holds great pleasure and possibility for them, as opposed to only great shame and punishment, then we are complicit when it comes to the miseducation of America’s youth.

For the teachers who think they are defending the honor of the canon by remaining intractable when it comes to getting kids to first like books — something legions of kids today have never had anyone do for them — before they ask them to wrestle with deep, meaty texts, well… it’s a recipe for not only academic, but societal, disaster.

BTW, I am in no way, shape, or form alone in this quandary. As a matter of fact, I’d venture to say that there are SCORES of teachers across our nation who are facing the very same hurdles I am on a daily basis. They are asking themselves, “How do I take kids who overtly make no bones about the fact that they do not like to read and get them to first and foremost, engage openly and honestly with a book, start to finish, reading the whole darn thing.”

Just having kids complete a book — that’s right, just reading one whole book — is a success that a huge amount of middle and high school ELA teachers today across our country are not enjoying. Nathaniel Hawthorne is great but he’s not being gulped down under the covers and being read by flashlight long after mom said, “Go to bed,” and at my school, the English teachers routinely laugh at the idea that more people do not read The Scarlet Letter than do when it is assigned.

And what can they do, fail the kid? Well, get in line. Turns out that kid is already failing math, science, and history.

But there is another way. It’s called winning his heart. The YA books that are being trashed on this board for not being of “high enough literary merit” is how I do that.

I tell you this, hundreds of pages of adolescent literacy research clearly illuminates the immense benefits, if not outright, fundamental necessity for, engagement in the classroom. However, nowhere have I ever seen any research which supports the idea of dis-engagement as an instructional strategy. And when you are staring out at 37 teens armed with no prior history of almost any sort of positive interaction with books and all you are provided with is the canon, it’s a freakin’ tough road to hoe.

That’s why we build bridges using relevant, accessible, gripping, popular (goodness, did I just validate popularity — gawd, I must be a heretic!) YA novels.

And for those who disagree, all I can say is I hear that inner city Detroit has a few teaching positions open. Go bring your theories of high fallutin’ literature as a sole academic diet to where the rubber meets the road — particularly in urban America — and see how well you fare. Suddenly, Speak, The Outsiders, Monster, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid provide a whole new meaning to the term “being a text with literary merit”.