The report paints a picture of contractor Ross Lanham’s straightforward scheme: he billed the DOE at a high price, and paid his subcontractors at a lower price. The difference, allegedly, went into a lavish lifestyle that includes three houses on Long Island.

More surprising, though, is the extent to which IBM and Verizon turned a blind eye to Lanham’s accounting. For instance, when an IBM staffer noted irregularities in Lanham’s billing, Lanham protested that the DOE was “okay with it.” IBM, perturbed, shuffled Lanham and his consultants into a different subcontracting company with a different name, but said nothing to the DOE.

Next, Verizon accepted Lanham’s subcontractors after he threatened to take the DOE contract to IBM. Puzzlingly, Verizon found out that Lanham was not giving his subcontractors the full amount that Verizon was paying out, but only went into action after the DOE contacted them with their concerns.

Overall, the report presents a world of unsupervised greed. The language at the end is particularly direct.

IBM and Verizon, by their silence, facilitated this fraud. IBM did not contact anyone at the DOE about the Lanham consultants. Instead, they moved the consultants from one subcontractor to another to cover themselves. Verizon concealed from the DOE and law enforcement that they got millions of dollars in contracts through Lanham only after agreeing to hire CCS as a subcontractor. All of the subcontractors named in this report, except Bayview, facilitated the concealment of the fact that Lanham was profiting from the DOE while he was being paid to represent the DOE.

04-11 Lanham Rpt

Members of the Panel for Educational Policy voted to close two transfer schools — Pacific High School and the Bronx Academy High School — as well as P.S. 30, an elementary school in Queens. A spokeswoman for the city’s Department of education said that, including the decision to shutter Ross Global Charter School, 27 schools will begin closing next year.

It was Chancellor Dennis Walcott’s first panel meeting since Mayor Bloomberg named him to the post. Walcott said he hoped to change the tenor of the meetings by answering parents’ questions and publicly debating policy issues at a deeper level than his predecessors did.

Walcott began the meeting by walking down from the stage and into the crowd, where he promised parents, teachers, and students that he and his staff would respect them.

“You will never hear me be disagreeable with you,” he said. “The one thing we understand is these are emotional issues for you…the approach we’re going to take moving forward is be responsive to those issues even when we don’t agree.”

If audience members heard Walcott’s plea for civility, they betrayed no signs. The boos and catcalls that have peppered panel meetings for months reappeared last night, as did animosity between charter school supporters and the district schools they will have to share space with next year.

Wearing light blue shirts, parents and teachers from Coney Island Prep Charter School sat across the aisle from parents of students and teachers at I.S. 303, who wore orange shirts. Per tonight’s panel vote, Coney Island Prep will move into I.S. 303′s building next year, claiming classrooms that the middle school’s teachers said they need for high-needs special education students, but that city education officials have decided they can do without. Throughout the evening, parents and teachers from the two schools traded shots over which was the better school and why the charter school couldn’t move to another building.

Of the three schools that the panel voted to begin phasing out next year, Bronx Academy proved the most controversial. A large group of students, parents, and teachers attended the meeting tonight to defend the school against closure, citing its students’ improving credit accumulation and Regents passage rates.

In the last seven years, Bronx Academy has seen four principals come and go. It is currently on the state’s list of persistently low-achieving schools. Yet in September, the school began the process of transforming itself. It was given a new principal, Gary Eisinger, and it formed a partnership with Good Shepherd Services, a community-based organization that offers students counseling and support. Bronx Academy also switched from semesters to trimesters, allowing students to 18 credits a year instead of 14.

“I’ve worked in transfer schools, and I’ve never seen a principal work this hard,” said Kevin Towns, an advocate counselor with Good Shepherd. “The data you’re [the DOE] using is from the old regime. These people have been here eight months — let’s be real.”

But Department of Education officials said that they had seen enough of the school’s progress to decide that it wasn’t enough to justify keeping Bronx Academy open.

“The principal has come into a tough set of circumstances, and you do see the impact of his leadership in that school,” said Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg. “Even if there has been improvement, it’s well below what we expect to see. And well below what we see across transfer schools citywide.”

Senior Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky said that only two-thirds of Bronx Academy students were showing up to school every day and only a quarter are passing their Regents exams. Many students are still earning too few credits to graduate on time, he said.

“What I’m seeing is the culture in that school has changed and that is powerful and that is what has generated the positive energy, but the academic expectations have not changed,” Polakow-Suransky said.

Anita Batisti, who directs Fordham University’s school support organization, which oversees Bronx Academy, said she couldn’t understand why the city would want to close an improving school.

“I ask you, please give us more time,” she said.

Monica Major, the panel member appointed by the Bronx borough president, said the DOE was rushing to close a school that was just beginning to show signs of improvement. Although Major proposed that the panel table its plans to vote on the school’s closure, her motion was voted down. The panel also voted to open a new transfer school called Bronx Arena that will replace Bronx Academy.

“Marc, I’m really hoping Arena only gets eight months, the same amount of time you gave this school,” Major said to Deputy Chancellor Sternberg.

Asked after the meeting whether eight months would be enough time to judge one of the city’s 11 transformation schools — many of which have been given new principals and support after years of little progress — Walcott sidestepped the question.

“We can’t tolerate slow, incremental change,” he said.

• With the $3.6M he allegedly stole, a DOE contractor built a lux lifestyle. (Daily News, Post)
• The DOE says it boosted oversight protections after firing the contractor. (Times, WNYC, NY1)
• John Liu said he’s reviewing contracts with vendors implicated in the investigation. (WSJ)
• The UFT won’t survey all its teachers, a favor Educators 4 Excellence requested. (Post)
• Two high schools and an elementary school will be phased out after a PEP vote. (Post, NY1, GS)
• The Daily News: Parents behind a lawsuit should get sanctioned for “political theater.”
• Police: A Queens third-grader sold a handgun for $3 in school yesterday. (Post, NY1)
• A lawmaker wants to ban the handcuffing of children younger than 12. (Daily News)

And around the country:

• Harvard ed school students protest the school has abandoned social justice concerns. (Globe)
• The Calif. group pushing “parent trigger” has a grassroots base in churches. (WSJ)
• The man behind tenure law changes in Illinois is the child of two activists. (CNC/Times)
• Several California school districts are reaching to taxes to try to stave layoffs. (Bay Citizen)
• At the last Chicago school board meeting under Daley’s control, consolidations pass. (CNC)

But the outreach efforts did not increase the number of students admitted to the program’s most selective citywide programs. In fact, the number of students who qualified for the citywide programs declined. The number of students who qualified for the less selective district-based gifted and talented programs, which require slightly lower test scores for admission, did increase, growing by 319 students from last year.

The racial and family income backgrounds of the students whose test scores made them eligible for gifted and talented were not immediately available.

The city sent letters to qualifying students this morning, whose families now get to list the programs they prefer and hope for a spot in the program of their choice.

A place in the citywide programs is not guaranteed. Last year, 1,788 kindergartners qualified for about 300 seats. This year, the number of kindergartners making the cutoff is slightly larger, though the overall number of students who qualified for the citywide programs dropped by 149 students.

Two standardized tests determine whether a student is eligible for gifted and talented programs. The tests are the result of an overhaul of gifted program admissions that the Bloomberg administration led in 2008 with the aim of making the system more equitable. Before 2008, each gifted program set its own admissions standards, and critics charged that the intricate neighborhood-by-neighborhood system gave the savviest — and most affluent — families an advantage.

But the effort to make admissions more open to poor communities by standardizing them has proven unsuccessful so far. This year’s demographic information was not immediately available. A city spokesman said it would be released once students apply to programs.

One factor that critics charge could hobble the new system’s equity aims is the fact that the families who can afford to boost their children’s chances on the exam through tutoring will pay for it.

Bright Kids, a tutoring company launched in 2009 that runs a “boot camp” for the gifted and talented tests, more than doubled the number of students it served this year, said the program’s founder, Bige Doruk. The program served 300 students this year, she said.

“The pressure is coming from the public school system. They are failing in areas and getting crowded, and parents are now looking to the G&T,” Doruk said. The average fee per student is $1,000, she said.

In response, the city has stepped up efforts to recruit more students, especially students in poor neighborhoods, to take the two exams — the OLSAT and the BRSA — that determine eligibility. O

From L to R: Sharon Denson, Vice President; Raj Thakkar, Founder & CEO; Stephen Reid, Vice President; Karen Daniels, Chief Operating Officer

Disenchanted with the corporate world, Raj Thakkar was skimming job openings in 2003 when he found an ad from a charter school looking for a chief financial officer. He didn’t have any experience in education, but then again, the charter school barely did either: Explore Charter School was only a year old.

Years later, Explore is a growing charter school network and Thakkar has his own company, Charter School Business Management Inc., that has become one of the most widely consulted financial advisors by New York City charter schools. In a phone conversation yesterday, Thakkar estimated that he’d worked with more than 40 percent of the city’s charter schools at one point or another over the last five years.

Yesterday, the New York branch of the U.S. Small Business Administration recognized Thakkar, giving him and his company the New York City Small Business Person of the Year Award.

Thakkar’s company is unusual in that he has little competition: few firms do the same sort of work in New York, and none specialize in support for charter schools alone. Handling charter school audits, training finance staff, and coming in when schools are on the verge of bankruptcy requires a special knowledge of charter school law and accounting that few possess. Often, the people running charter schools don’t have this knowledge. When it comes time to figure out payroll or how to account for every check written in the last year, they run into trouble.

“People who start these schools are educators, so the last thing they ever thought about is how do I finance my renovations over the summer?” said Dirk Tillotson, who runs a program that helps mom-and-pop charter schools get started. Thakkar’s company has worked with many of Tillotson’s schools.

“When the house is on fire, he [Raj] can come put that out and understand that it’s unfortunate, but it’s not so surprising; it doesn’t deserve moral condemnation. His attitude is: ‘Let’s do the job and get of the way,’” Tillotson said.

Thakkar said that school founders often come to him when they’re opening and don’t have anyone to oversee their finances. In some cases, schools outsource all of their financial work to the company or ask for Thakkar’s help in hiring someone. In others, they already have a business staff, but want the company to train those people.

“We appear and reappear whenever schools want us to,” Thakkar said.

His clients have included small start-up schools like Growing Up Green Charter School and Lavelle Prep Charter School, but he has also worked for growing networks like Public Prep and Ascend.

Charter school finances don’t get much attention until something goes wrong. And then, they’re often a major reason why schools are closed. Last year, when the city’s Department of Education recommended that the state revoke East New York Preparatory‘s charter, many of the reasons officials cited were financial. Another school, Kingsbridge Innovative Design, could lose its charter this year for fiscal mismanagement.

Two of the schools Thakkar has worked with — Ross Global Academy and Harlem Day — will close at the end of this year. Both are being closed for their low test scores.

“The educators opening charter schools often don’t realize they’re running rapidly expanding multi-million dollar businesses,” Thakkar said.

“The majority of the more 600 schools that have been shut down since ’92 have been mostly closed for financial mismanagement. So to me that’s a travesty. That’s fixable,” he said.

As I stayed up late talking with my close friend last night, we realized something huge: In some way, elementary school and middle school are connected to each other. Fifth grade to sixth grade is a smaller jump than sixth grade to eighth grade, and as you get closer to eighth grade, you get closer to realizing that your years of being a younger student are over. Entering high school is all about entering as a much bigger person than the student you were entering middle school.

That’s why it was so rough for me when I didn’t know what high school I was going to. I had to imagine a time that would come very soon even though I didn’t know where to imagine myself. Then I did. I’m going to the Beacon School next year. When I found out, I felt like I could finally breathe. All of the waiting was worth it because I got into the school that I wanted and I felt this huge weight lifted off my shoulders. How unusual, though, that a month ago I thought I was the biggest failure ever but it turns out that I actually got into my first choice.

Ironically or not, Beacon is a school that doesn’t even consider a student’s score on the Specialized High School Admission Test, a test that I felt I had failed. I no longer felt alone and embarrassed. From sixth grade on, I worked hard to achieve good grades so I could get in to the school that I wanted to. Although the SHSAT score was upsetting to me, I realized later on that it had no effect on the school that I really and truly wanted to get into. I took the test in hope that I would just find out early, and that didn’t happen. But it didn’t lower my chances of getting into the school that I actually cared about.

So then the high school part of my year was over, and all I could do was sit back, relax, and see where the rest of the year would take me.

I learned soon enough of the things that fill up your last year of middle school. Turns out it was not just my friend and me who were observing the transition and thinking about how we were really growing up and becoming adults.

Eighth-graders around us are realizing the same thing, but instead of just thinking about it, they are taking action and doing grown up things assuming that it’s okay now that they are graduating middle school.

As they smoke and drink I ask myself why they are rushing to grow up. I am using the rest of my middle school experience to look back at how much I’ve grown and get ready for my high school experience. But other people around me are using the duration of middle school to rush forward. I feel separate from them.

When I am an adult, I want to look back at my childhood and know that I was happy and that I lived it full. These last few months in middle school are filled with the pressure to end childhood on a good note and the sadness knowing that it’s coming to an end. I don’t rush because I know that I don’t have much longer to be kid, but I have the rest of my life to be an adult. 8th grade for me is about savoring the moments that I have left and living them well.

As we come to a time in our lives where we have to leave our childhood behind, people do strange things. For me, I try to hold on to my younger years. Others try to do adult things that show other people that they aren’t babies any more.

I know that I am going to high school next year and I know that I am ready to grow up, but not as fast as others and not in the way that others are. We all want to grow up but we’re choosing different ways to make us feel like we actually are. Others are rushing into the feeling of growing up by doing grown up things, and others are using reflection and remembering the past in order to prepare themselves for the future.

I fall into this second category: For me, eighth grade isn’t as much about looking ahead to high school as it is about looking back at your childhood and pushing yourself forward to a new world of learning. Come to think of it, I’m actually doing both.

*The story published in today’s Post print edition described the lawsuit as “ridiculous” by saying that “everyone acknowledged” it as so. The story originally published online also included that description. But at some point this morning, that wording was revised to say that even the people who filed the lawsuit “admit” the suit is “unusual.”

The original sentence read, “In a notice of claim filed yesterday that everyone acknowledged is ridiculous, the newly formed New York City Parents Union puts the wreckage of Black’s tumultuous tenure at $100 million.” The sentence now in the story’s web version instead begins, “In a notice of claim filed yesterday that even the filers admit is unusual.”

During a visit this morning to Paul Robeson High School — one of the schools that the Panel for Educational Policy voted to phase out over the next three years — Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced plans to place all of the phase-out schools in the same networks. The change, which would take effect next school year, would mean that the new, as well as currently phasing out, schools would receive administrative and instructional guidance from the same set of people.

Currently, schools are grouped into networks — called Children First Networks (CFN) — that provide resources ranging from professional development to budget writing. Phase-out schools have remained within the same networks before and after the closure decisions, even though their needs often change as their size dwindles.

Under the new plan, schools like Robeson will leave their current networks and join new ones composed only of other schools that are phasing out. Typical networks have a staff of about a dozen people and focus on giving guidance to 25 schools.

Walcott was vague about what additional help the phase out schools would receive in the new networks. The city’s plan does not include additional funding or staff for closing schools, which are forced to excess many of their teachers and close their after-school programs as their student population shrinks.

“Next year, schools in the process of phasing out will receive a range of supports that are specific to the goals they share in common—with a focus on resource management, leadership and teacher development, communication with parents and families, and guidance for students with disabilities and English language learners,” wrote Matthew Mittenthal, a spokesman for the Department of Education, in an email.

A Department of Education official said that the network employees hired to oversee the phase-out schools will be chosen from applicants who have successfully led or taught in closing schools. The city will release their names in the coming weeks, he said.

Since the city announced plans to close Robeson last year, teachers and students at the school have not been silent about their concerns that they will be neglected while the city focuses on the new school it plans to open in the building. At a Panel for Educational Policy meeting in February, Robeson student Lizabeth Cooper, who is also the student representative on the panel, pled with the panel members to save her school.

Today, Cooper said that she is still concerned that Robeson will be ignored over the next three years. Currently a junior, she will graduate before the school closes.

“I want the freshman and sophomores to be able to graduate. I want them to focus not just on the new school,” she said.

A Principal at another phase-out school shared Lizabeth’s fears. She spoke about her students: “They feel left out of the community. We’re going to be losing resources because we’re losing teachers.”

Today, Walcott, along with Councilman Al Vann and Borough President Marty Markowitz, framed his visit as a response to those concerns. “I just don’t ignore you, that’s why I’m here,” he said to a classroom of juniors.

Walcott emphasized that space-sharing schools would receive equal attention. “I don’t want any us versus them,” he said, referring to the incoming school.

Robeson has been operating under the leadership of interim Principal Ronald Wells, who stepped in after the DOE removed another interim Principal, Katherine Kefalas. Students, parents and faculty have expressed their concerns about conditions at the transitioning school.

Currently, Robeson is affiliated with Network 305, which provides supports ranging from professional development to technical support. Principal Wells said that he was awaiting information about the supports that the new network would provide, adding that he would welcome “the types of supports that we are currently receiving.”

A principal at another phase-out school, said she would have to wait for more information before judging whether the city’s plan will help her school.

“I don’t really know what it all entails.” she said.

An official from the city’s teachers union did not return requests for comment.

“One of my top priorities is to free up more of your time so that you can focus on the critical tasks that directly improve student achievement,” Walcott wrote in this week’s Principals Weekly email, the first to contain a letter from him.

While Walcott has said repeatedly that he plans to continue the school policies that Mayor Bloomberg and former Chancellor Joel Klein established, his note indicates a subtle — but meaningful — divergence. Klein considered principals the CEOs of their schools and emphasized their management responsibilities, many of which brought new paperwork requirements. Walcott’s letter focuses instead on principals’ role as instructional leaders.

Walcott told principals he would starting working soon with their union and the groups that support them to “reduce even further the burden on your time of non-instructional tasks.”

Teachers and principals have complained in recent years about mounting levels of paperwork they are required to complete. A teacher who retired early in 2009 cited the mounting paperwork as a chief reason for her exit from the classroom. And research suggests that the burden of paperwork tends to fall most heavily on low-performing, high-needs schools, which compose much of the city’s school system.

Walcott’s complete message to principals is below.

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past nine years I’ve met many of you at your schools and at meetings and events, and it’s an honor for me to address you as Chancellor for the first time in Principals’ Weekly. I want to begin by thanking you for all of the exceptional work you do every day for our students. We have hard work ahead of us to ensure that our students graduate college and career ready, but I am confident that we will be successful because of our talented and dedicated school leaders and teachers, and supportive parents.

I’ve seen you in action and I know how hard you work every day, whether you’re observing classrooms, providing feedback to teachers, leading teams to develop targeted supports for struggling students, actively involving parents in your work, or meeting one-on-one with students.

Your time is precious, and one of my top priorities is to free up more of your time so that you can focus on the critical tasks that directly improve student achievement. In the coming weeks, we will work with the CSA, principal advisory groups, and cluster and network leaders to begin an effort to reduce even further the burden on your time of non-instructional tasks.

As we work to implement Common Core standards in order to prepare students with high-level skills they need for college and careers, we’ll need you to work with your teachers to develop strategies that help students meet these standards. That’s why we will do our best to minimize the flow of work that comes to you from central, with the overarching goal of freeing up more of your time so that you can spend it supporting your school community, developing your teaching staff, and enhancing academic instruction. Indeed, one of the key objectives of Principals’ Weekly is to provide you with a clear sense of the operational and academic tasks you need to accomplish, and we will continue working to streamline it so that you can properly delegate and plan for that work.

We know you have many thoughts on this topic and I encourage you to share your ideas and suggestions by sending an e-mail to principalrecommendations@schools.nyc.gov.

Sincerely,

Dennis M. Walcott
Chancellor

Dear Marc,

I read with great interest your recent post on treating teachers like professionals. I share many of the values you listed and consider most of them to be part of our culture of professionalism at Renaissance, a fully unionized, conversion charter school.

I am very happy to report to you our newest initiative. We are working in collaboration with the United Federation of Teachers to modify our teacher evaluation plan both to bring us into compliance with Race to the Top requirements and to reflect better what an innovative teacher evaluation system can and should look like in a knowledge economy. A knowledge economy requires students to be intellectually skilled, therefore creating a highly educated labor force with a competitive advantage. (For more on this topic, see the 2005 book “Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools.”)

What is particularly exciting is that we have asked our teachers to draft the plan. The road will not be easy especially with the Race to the Top student performance measurements that must be included.  Still, in a time when there is so much emphasis on standardized test scores, I believe we have a real opportunity to craft a plan that blends statewide measurements with other indicators of authentic learning. As a K-12 school this is a huge task, but it is one that can be instrumental in measuring teaching and learning over time.

My hope is that a teacher-generated plan will foster strong individual accountability while at the same time promoting collaboration and cooperation among colleagues, core values at Renaissance. Clearly, a plan that one takes part in creating should have buy-in and ownership. Most importantly, any evaluation that values problem identification and self-reflection is one that is sure to support positive change in practice both at the classroom and school-wide levels.

I am confident that the experienced, diverse professionals who comprise this team (selected by their union chapter leader) will think creatively and out-of-the-box. I would like a focus to be on teachers-as-agents of change and leadership. A sound and fair plan combines process and outcomes keeping in mind the necessary professional standards and attributes that must be present to create growth both within teachers themselves and the students they teach.

I look forward to updating you on the progress and challenges.

Best,
Stacey

The parents’ lawsuit seeks to block Success Academy network from opening a charter school in the Brandeis Educational Campus, which is currently home to five public high schools. It accuses the city’s Department of Education of using inaccurate enrollment numbers to make the case that the building has enough space for a sixth school. Responding to the lawsuit today, lawyers for the charter school said that the suit should be dismissed. City attorneys said they plan to file a similar response.

“We will be filing the papers with the court shortly and we oppose the relief sought by the plaintiffs,” said city attorney Thomas Crane.

In their response to the parents’ suit, Success Academy lawyers said that the parents’ arguments “nitpick to an absurd degree” and “engage in unseemly fearmongering.” They said that what’s driving the Upper West Side parents’ lawsuit is anger that despite massive opposition, the city’s school board voted to give the charter school space in Brandeis.

Community Education Council President for District 3, Noah Gotbaum, one of the parents involved in the suit, said that the Brandeis Campus does not have enough room for the Success Academy school. Several of the high schools in the building have hundreds more applicants than they can accept, he said.

“The city is basically shutting the door on these growing high schools,” he said.

Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Dismiss

The study surveyed adult New Yorkers on their knowledge of the basic structure of government. The authors Eric Lane, a professor at Hofstra University, and Meg Barnette of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, conclude that few New Yorkers know “even a little about the Constitution.”

They connect the poor showing to New York’s response to the federal No Child Left Behind law, arguing that the focus on math and English has hurt students’ Social Studies knowledge.

And they highlight a recent decision by the state Board of Regents to cancel an annual Social Studies test for fourth- and eighth-graders as the latest symptom of that disregard, which they dramatically term an “abandonment of history”:

For years New York required social studies assessment tests for its fourth and eighth grade students. The eighth grade assessment consisted mostly of history questions, while the fourth grade assessment tested skills such as graph reading. Overall, New Yorkers did not perform well on those tests, and New York City students performed horribly…As an explanation for this problematic showing, school officials said that they pay little attention to fourth and eighth grade social studies assessment tests “because they are not among the criteria used to determine if schools are performing adequately, either under state regulations or the federal No Child Left Behind law.”41 Proving that point, in the summer of 2010 the Board of Regents addressed the problem of low performance by ending the fourth and eighth grade social stud- ies assessment requirement, assuring, in the words of one education expert, the abandonment of history, and any hope for improvement in civic literacy at all.

The decision to cancel the test, made in June 2010, received little coverage at the time. In a memo explaining the move, the Board of Regents argued that the test was a casualty of budget deficits.

In New York City in 2011, slurs against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are considered hate speech and grounds for suspension. We’ve come a long way. Yet this rule does not ensure respect for sexual and gender diversity among my students. In a society where it’s acceptable to laugh at stereotypically gay behavior, my students continue to make the same kind of knee-jerk comments that my classmate James did — but I find my trying to turn these remarks into important lessons about diversity. But because these lessons are so subtle, I never know how to measure their impact, how to reflect on them, or how to do better next time.

Take the topic of small-group work, for instance. Just those words together are enough to turn the stomachs of my students into blocks of ice: Without very explicit instruction from their teacher, students will be afraid to enter into authentic academic discussion in small groups. So before we get to work, I open with a low-risk skit activity designed to help us label the exact behaviors we do and do not want to be a part of our group discussions. I choose low risk topics, such as restaurant and movie preferences, and pick two sets of volunteers: one to act out a “disrespectful conversation,” and the other to act out its counterpart.

For purposes of engagement, the disrespectful conversation has to go first. Students forget any concern that it’s uncool to name disrespectful behaviors in the sheer hilarity of watching students, at the instruction of their teacher, make fun of each others’ mothers, gesticulate as if they were going to slap each other, and interrupt each other loudly in their debates over Burger King versus McDonalds or which movies they think are worth seeing in the theater. Subsequent brainstorms easily elicit a perceptive list of these behaviors. When we exhaust that brainstorm, I motion to the other pair — Aaron and Ella — students waiting patiently on the other side of the room to act out a “respectful conversation.” And this is where what started as a lesson in respect must also become a lesson in sensitivity to diversity.

Immediately, Aaron sticks his rear end out and preens toward Ella, his palms spread across his thighs as if he were absorbing hot gossip at a sewing bee. He smiles wide and asks, in a high, lispy voice, whether his partner doesn’t think “Chrith Brown ith jutht tho dreamy?” Ella answers him rather soberly and they keep up what would be, on paper, a completely respectful dialogue.  The class is not paying any attention to the content of their speech, however. They’re roaring with laughter at Aaron’s affected effeminate behavior.

“Okay, okay,” I say, hating the referee in my voice as I interrupt their creative flow. “Pause right there.” It takes Aaron a few moments to come out of character, he’s having so much fun. The class applauds and the two move toward their seats. I stop Aaron so that the entire class can see us.

“I need you guys to do that again,” I say.

“What?” he asked. “Why? We were being thoooo respectful!” More giggles.

“You definitely were,” I said. “But is it possible for a guy to be respectful and be straight?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Then let’s do that.”

They do.

There’s no student “aha” moment to close out this post. I’m not sure if Aaron will remember my subtle lesson the next time he wants to do his best impression, or if another student will harbor it in the cockles of her heart years from now when she is coming out. I wonder if I should have engaged the rest of the students besides Aaron, asking them why they had laughed so hard or why our perceptions of masculinity are so strict that a guy can’t demonstrate respect without putting his manhood on the line. I tend to heed the wisdom of “less is more” in these situations, especially because, in the past, when I have addressed a similar issue in an explicit way, my students have responded with even less tolerance. Sometimes you do something small and just pray that whoever needs to see it will see it. Teachable moments, like teaching, are difficult to plan for and even more difficult to accurately assess.