It's fitting that school board elections and the start of the school year fell on the same week. At Elissa Kim's election day party, I kept thinking of the students I'd met on Monday. In particular, I thought about how education, more than any other issue, has a disconnect between those who are directly affected by it and those who are able to influence its direction. Education is supposed to be about the students. However, they have no real voice in politics. They have to depend on people acting on their behalf.
The results of our school system show that we adults have failed to be great advocates for our community's kids.
Look at what education is supposed to produce: graduates ready to succeed at the next level. Currently, the typical graduates of our system are likely to flunk out of the next step of education, if they make it at all. Only graduates of our selective-admissions schools are shown to be college-ready on a consistent basis.
Ask yourself how often you heard about that during the past few months.
So if we weren't talking about our system's failure to graduate college-ready students, what were we discussing?
Issue #1: Margaret Dolan, Elissa Kim, and Will Pinkston raised record-breaking amounts of money for a school district race. Much (metaphorical) ink was spilled debating the proper amount of money to spend in a school district race and who should donate the money. How much of the money came from outside the district? How much of it is from outside Nashville?
This sucked up a lot of oxygen that could've been dedicated to finding out what these candidates would do to increase student achievement. Instead, we got conspiracy theories about whose puppet they'll be.
Issue #2: Great Hearts Academies was denied a charter by MNPS, citing teacher-licensing problems and perceived future economic and racial disparities. Our debate became: If Great Hearts admits too many low-income children, how will they be successful?
Precious few people acknowledged what I've spent years experiencing firsthand: low-income children can learn just as well as any child when they've got great teachers who work together to create a safe, supportive environment focused on academics.
Issue #3: MNPS' Great Hearts decision was overturned by the state board of education. We then argue about whether the state should have the power to overturn local decisions. This, of course, has nothing to do with providing more and better schools for our kids.
Issue #4: Great Public Schools PAC, funded by supporters of charter schools, donated to Dolan, Kim, Sharon Gentry, and Jarod DeLozier. The debate turns to which candidates are thought to be "charter-friendly" and which are assumed to be enemies of charter schools. A few salient facts are ignored:
- The current board approved most of this year's approved charter applications unanimously. One application, KIPP's expansion into Whites Creek, was at first rejected, then approved by a 8-1 vote. (The lone "no" vote, Mark North, had already announced his intention to not run for re-election.)
- More than 3,000 kids here already attend charter schools, including conversion schools that take all kids in a zoned area. Most of the charter schools regularly post higher growth scores than the relevant neighborhood schools. (The few who don't are going to be a great test of the new board's willingness to shut down failing charters.)
- Anyone who actually asked any of the candidates about charters got pretty much the same answer: We want operators who will run great charter schools. This doesn't mean we shouldn't focus on improving district schools.While we fight the tired ideological battle (and false choice!) of charter versus district we overlook the most important fact:
Many schools, both charter and district, have shown huge gains in student growth, placing the among the very best in the state. What are they doing that's working? What are the differences between those school and ones that show negative growth?
I've taught in both district and charter schools in Nashville. On practical level, there's nothing that's happening in one that couldn't happen in the other.
Charters and district schools aren't the zero-sum choice; it's high-performing versus low-performing classrooms.
Issue #5: Here in District 5, we heard a lot about Kim's employment with Teach for America. (The East Nashvillian article was so biased, it even got called out by the Nashville Scene.) Never mind that TFA has been part of the education landscape for years and its contract has been approved unanimously and without controversy each time it was up for renewal. Never mind what Kim's job actually entails: recruiting great teachers into the toughest-to-teach classrooms in the country.
The district annually churns 500 teachers. I, for one, am glad we now have a national expert in teacher recruitment in a position where she can do something about bringing more top teachers into Nashville's classrooms.
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I keep repeating this: We are wasting time and effort on the wrong debates. I'm not naive and realize this isn't new or unique to politics. Indeed, our national political dialogue is beyond parody. (Eating at a fast-food restaurant is now a political statement? Seriously?)
But I can almost understand it at the national level. It's so big and one election covers so many issues. That's overwhelming to most voters. Even the state level covers a lot.
(I'm not excusing our inability to have a straightforward conversation, mind you; I'm just saying I understand the factors at play.)
Our school board election, though, is decided among neighbors. It deals with one issue: education. There's even an easily measurable outcome: how many of the system's graduates are ready to succeed at the next level?
Yet we've barely mentioned that for the past few months.
We talked about political donations and assumed the worst intentions in both donors and candidates. We figured that people couldn't possibly be running for school board because they wanted to serve the community -- it must be some nefarious hidden agenda instead!
We used proxies like Great Hearts instead of directly addressing racial and economic divisions among ourselves. We ignored the one cure for these disparities: educating our children. Indeed, nearly every critique of Great Hearts simply assumed that they didn't care about educating all children and, even if they did, they weren't capable of it.
Our debate about charter schools was predicated on the notion that there must be a limited number of decent schools, and those that are succeeding are doing so because of some reason other than simply doing a better job of teaching kids. We pretend that there are no lessons to be learned from successful schools. We assume that there are certain kids who just can't learn.
We spent this election talking about everything but how to better educate all of our children.
This is why we've failed our kids for so long.
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As I said, I was glad to start teaching again this week. One night, I found myself talking to a parent. Some of her children are at charter schools, but others aren't the right age and, as a result, attend a district school. This parent wasn't concerned about charter versus district schools or if the Great Hearts approval process was properly decided. She doesn't know if the teachers of her children were certified through Teach for America, the Nashville Teaching Fellows, or a college program.
She was focused on her children being prepared to go to college. Even though her kids go to different schools, she expects all of them to be successful. Moreover, she expects all of her children's schools to offer a quality education.
She wanted to know what her child was doing for homework in English and what day is the first quiz on. She asked me about what her child would learn in class tomorrow.
When we have the right sorts of conversations, it's easy to keep our focus.
What are our children going to learn in class tomorrow?
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Update 8/5/12: Will Pinkston didn't receive a donation from Great Public Schools PAC. I've made the appropriate correction above. Apologies for the error.
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