In reflecting about my teaching with English language learners in the summer of 2011, I thought about inspiring the imagination of storytelling as bridge between the spoken word and the written word. Ultimately, as a teacher of English Language Learners, I am on a quest for fluency. Only by attaining proficiency in writing as well as speaking can we truly say a student is fluent in English. In my experience, the level of engagement has a significant impact on my students’ progress, and designing lessons that are consistently relevant and engaging to my students, has been both a challenge and inspiration to me.

So I designed a project in which my students would write their own stories. Working with graduate students in creative writing from Columbia University, my English as a Second Language students described their experiences leaving their families and home countries and living in the United States. Students read their stories aloud to seniors at the Cobble Hill Nursing Home, and we published a book of those stories, ”Stories That Changed Us Forever.” Proceeds from book sales will go into a scholarship fund for the students who worked on the project.

My guiding questions for myself for this project were: 1. How do adolescent immigrants find their voice in writing and in life? 2. What strategies engage students in using their voice to transform their writing, while also building confidence, strengthening literacy skills, and providing real audiences for their stories?

My guiding question for my students for this project was: What impact does my story have on peoples’ lives?

Below are excerpts from my students’ stories and from reflections that they wrote after reading their stories aloud.

After dinner, my brother went to his room to change his clothes, but he probably was looking at himself in the mirror.  I was in the kitchen, helping my mother clean up when suddenly, our house started wavering. It was like our house was being swallowed by the earth. We were really scared. My mother grabbed my hand, and the both of us were trying to get out of the house, but the building started to really shake. My skin was burning with fear. The dishes were dancing on the shelves and falling on my mother. At that moment, I knew it was an EARTHQUAKE. My mother started yelling “Jesus, protect us!’’. My brother ran toward us wearing only his underwear. The three of us collapsed in a corner of the room and we yelled together ‘’Jesus protect us!’’. As soon as we finished the sentence, the EARTHQUAKE stopped. Our next door relatives came and helped us to get out of the house.

By Darlie Firmin — Born in Haiti

I was in born in Ghana, which is in West Africa. I left my mom and her mother, my grandmother, when I was 5 years old. From that time I began a new life. My grandparents are the only parents I have ever known as parents, I grew up with them as parents. I never knew where my Mother was at while I was growing up. My Mother told my Pop’s parents to come and get me and take me to another country, Burkina Faso. All I know about my father is that he was living in New York for my entire childhood. My father left the country before I moved to Burkina Faso, he left in 1998. So I never got a chance to know my father. All I knew was what he looked like, I had a picture. After I left my Mother I didn’t know where she was or what she was doing.

By Adboul Zoure — Born in Ghana

“Dont worry” the black cars pass again but this time they stop and five black boys come out the car with a ak-47. Trison takes out a gun. Bruce drops on top of me I never saw Raquira, the gang  starts throwing bullet on us. I was so scared I peed myself.  I was crying and nervous, when everything stopped I was looking for Raquira and she was in a corner bleeding.

By Shanikua Barrows — Born in Panama

The morning of the day I found out my mother had cancer was the last day of school. I should’ve felt happy but instead I felt as if something bad was going to happen. I thought to myself that maybe the bad feeling was that I was going to have an argument with someone. When I got to school the feeling went away. I had forgotten all about it.

By Jackie Perez — Born in Puerto Rico

Reflections:

My story has impact on peoples’ lives. By asking other people their opinions about my story I found out that it affect their live, and have connection with it. At first I wasn’t sure about asking people for their opinion about my story, because I know that I wouldn’t like some of the answers that they might give me. We went to a nursing home to read our story to elderly, and ask them questions about it. Does my story have an impact on your life? I asked. Yes because you can remember the past, and write about it but I can’t do that the man answer. By hearing that I know that it affects him in a way because he can’t remember anything from when he was a child, and I was able to.

By Joaking Jean-Baptiste — Born in Haiti

It impact people’s lives by making connections with others. When I was in the nursing home I ask an adult: How do you feel now after you heard my story? After she listened to my story she feels good and my history is interesting and amazing and she also said that it’s important to learn about others peoples’ stories. The second question I asked is: Did you have any connection with my story? She did have connections with my story because a few days ago she lost her roommate. She had a connection with my story because my story is about my little brother who passed away. Isn’t easy to deal with someone that you know and this person gone forever. When someone gone people would ever see that person anymore. My story feels amazing to read to others and they also can learn a lot from my story, to never give up when you lost something that is really important to you.

By Kimberly Volcimus — Born in Haiti

My story changed people because when I read my story at the nursing home for the patients they said it’s emotional because my family could be in the same position as you. While I was at the nursing home I read aloud and asked” does my story affect your life”?  One of them said, yes your story affected my life because when you finished reading it I felt so much pain about the event that happened to you. After I heard it I felt like it was me who was there during the earthquake. I asked one questions again “how did my story change your life? One of them answered me, yes your story change my life because after you read to us your story and you say how this moment was struggled for you and how you have courage to survive after that. Now I would be brave like you and if will have an earthquake in N.Y I will remembered how you survived in Haiti. I felt so much pain and the other person said your story is emotional because your story has so much pain and suffering in it.

By Emmanuelle Desmourses — Born in Haiti

Jes Kruse is an English as a second language teacher at Kurt Hahn School for Expeditionary Learning in Brooklyn. Kruse’s students will be reading aloud from their personal stories at the Crown Heights Library on Tuesday. More information.

She was, according to this report, the worst eighth-grade math teacher in New York City, where she has taught since 2007.

“I was angry, upset, offended,” she said. Abbott sought out her principal, who reassured her that she was an excellent teacher and that the Teacher Data Reports bore no relation to her performance. But, the principal confided, she was worried; although she would enthusiastically recommend Abbott for tenure, the Teacher Data Report could count against her in the tenure process. With a new district superintendent reviewing the tenure recommendation, anything could happen.

Using a statistical technique called value-added modeling, the Teacher Data Reports compare how students are predicted to perform on the state ELA and math tests, based on their prior year’s performance, with their actual performance. Teachers whose students do better than predicted are said to have “added value”; those whose students do worse than predicted are “subtracting value.” By definition, about half of all teachers will add value, and the other half will not.

Carolyn Abbott was, in one respect, a victim of her own success. After a year in her classroom, her seventh-grade students scored at the 98th percentile of New York City students on the 2009 state test. As eighth-graders, they were predicted to score at the 97th percentile on the 2010 state test. However, their actual performance was at the 89th percentile of students across the city. That shortfall — the difference between the 97th percentile and the 89th percentile — placed Abbott near the very bottom of the 1,300 eighth-grade mathematics teachers in New York City.

How could this happen? Anderson is an unusual school, as the students are often several years ahead of their nominal grade level. The material covered on the state eighth-grade math exam is taught in the fifth or sixth grade at Anderson. “I don’t teach the curriculum they’re being tested on,” Abbott explained. “It feels like I’m being graded on somebody else’s work.”

The math that she teaches is more advanced, culminating in high-school level algebra and a different and more challenging test, New York State’s Regents exam in Integrated Algebra. To receive a high school diploma in the state of New York, students must demonstrate mastery of the New York State learning standards in mathematics by receiving a score of 65 or higher on the Regents exam. In 2010-11, nearly 300,000 students across the state of New York took the Integrated Algebra Regents exam; most of the 73 percent who passed the exam with a score of 65 or higher were tenth-graders.

Because student performance on the state ELA and math tests is used to calculate scores on the Teacher Data Reports, the tests are high-stakes for teachers; and because New York City uses a similar statistical strategy to rank schools, they are high-stakes for schools as well. But the tests are not high-stakes for the eighth-graders at Anderson.

By the time they take the eighth-grade tests in the spring of the year, they already know which high school they will be attending, and their scores on the test have no consequences. “The eighth-graders don’t care; they rush through the exam, and they don’t check their work,” Abbott said. “The test has no effect on them. I can’t make an argument that it counts for kids. The seventh-graders, they care a bit more.”

The state tests, she believes, are poorly equipped to assess real mathematical knowledge, especially for high-performing students. “They’re so basic; they ask you to explain things that are obvious if you’re three years ahead,” she says. The Anderson students “understand it at a different level. They want to explain with equations, not words.” But the scoring of the free-response items on the tests emphasizes a formulaic response, with the scoring instructions often looking for a single keyword in a response to garner credit.

“They’re not accepting answers that are mathematically correct,” Abbott notes, “and accepting answers that aren’t mathematically correct.” And the multiple-choice questions?  “Multiple-choice questions don’t test thinking,” she declares. Knowing how to answer them is “just an art.”

When she taught PSAT prep classes while on the faculty at the Bronx High School of Science, she realized that she was “teaching how to eliminate the wrong answer, not how to get to the right answer.” She didn’t mind doing that outside the classroom — but in her classroom, “mathematics is about deep understanding, and enjoying the process.”

How do her students perform on the content that she actually does teach? This year, the 64 eighth-graders at Anderson she teaches are divided into two groups, an honors section and a regular section. All but one of the students in the honors section took the Regents Integrated Algebra exam in January; the other student and most of the regular-section students will take the exam in June. All of the January test-takers passed with flying colors, and more than a third achieved a perfect score of 100 on the exam.

“They did phenomenally,” Abbott said. “If they did so well, I don’t see how they can say I added no value whatsoever.”

In mid-February, the courts authorized the public release of the Teacher Data Reports, and they were published in print and online by major media outlets in New York City. “It was humiliating,” Abbott said. “To be published online, and stay there forever—it felt like an invasion of privacy.” She was terrified about the possible backlash from parents.

But of the parents of the 128 seventh- and eighth-graders she is teaching this year, only one wrote to her school principal—to express appreciation for a number of things she had done in her classroom. Anderson parents are a notorious bunch; they’re like helicopter parents on steroids. “I’d be more worried about the parents whose students haven’t had me—their preconceived notions that I must be a bad teacher,” Abbott said. “They have this idea that I’m the worst eighth-grade math teacher in the city.”

This summer, New York State will release the new iteration of the Teacher Data Reports, ranking English and math teachers in grades four through eight all across the state on their contributions to their students’ scores on the state tests. For Carolyn Abbott, the numbers will be little more than a curiosity. She has decided to leave the classroom and is entering the Ph.D. program in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall.

“I love to teach,” she says. And she loves mathematics. Ultimately, she decided, the mathematics was more important than the teaching, although she envisions teaching mathematics at the college level in the future. “It’s too hard to be a teacher in New York City,” she says. “Everything is stacked against you. You can’t just measure what teachers do and slap a number on it.”

This post also appeared on Eye on Education, Aaron Pallas’s column at The Hechinger Report.

At the Bronx High School of Science, however, whether administrators acted in good faith on these matters is not clear. Last year, I was one of two editors of the Editorial page on the school’s newspaper, the Science Survey. While disputes between teachers and administration have received a high profile in media coverage, here is a side of the story you probably have not heard before.

Trouble In The Math Department

At the end of April 2010, the union complaint the math teachers had earlier filed through the city union was resolved by judgment from an arbitrator. The report more or less corroborated the complaints of the teachers and recommended that both the offending administrator and the union chapter leader, the well liked math teacher Peter Lamphere, be removed from the school. The city’s education department took Principal Valerie Reidy’s side anyway and more or less ignored the arbitrator’s findings. (In December, an arbitrator ruled that Lamphere’s low rating should be discarded.)

At the time, the newspaper, the Science Survey, had just selected its editors for the last issue and next year, and Seán Toomey and I were slotted as heads of the editorial section. As the situation in the math department had again hit the headlines (articles on the arbitrator’s decision appeared in several city newspapers), we all agreed that it would be incredibly unusual if the school paper didn’t have anything to say on the matter. We (this includes the editors in chief at the time and our faculty adviser) set about drafting an editorial addressing the issue.

Getting an article approved in your school newspaper covering an incident that garnered the institution bad publicity citywide is the sort of thing that probably would be a chore in any circumstance. But it was an even dicier situation at the Survey, where the administration took its power of prior review over the paper seriously.

A pre-publication proof of the paper had to be sent to the principal and English department head about a week before publication. They would then take their time combing through our proof pages, ferreting out grammatical errors, but more importantly, criticism. Articles on rather banal school activities had sentences scrubbed because they could be interpreted as critical of the administration, or, heaven forbid, Department of Education policy.

So as we crafted the editorial, we decided right away to not even attempt to take a stand on the merits of the arbitration complaint — we knew that even a straight news article, let alone an opinion piece on the substance of the decision, would be instantly shot down. Instead, we went for a much softer message that school administrators should probably level with students in the event that a faculty dispute makes citywide news. We emailed the principal our intentions, and Seán and I had a cordial meeting in her office to get her side of the situation. I can say that she is more polite in person than press accounts have indicated. We even encouraged the principal to write her own response to our editorial, which we would run unedited, next to our already milquetoast piece.

A week of email correspondence ensued, when we tweaked and shifted the piece on advice of our faculty adviser, the outgoing editors, and rather terse responses from the principal. We were all pleasantly surprised and thought that we actually would be able to run the piece. By the end of the week, we were ready to publish and emailed her for approval. It was “not the editorial we discussed,” she replied.

And so our last issue of the year instead featured a short rant on chairs, the typical senior reflection, and a rather large picture of a folding chair on the opinion page.

More Troubles At The Survey

When the editing staff returned from summer to run the paper full time, we had come to accept the content restrictions and work around them. We became rather good at the practice of self-censorship, for example barely hinting at the teacher turmoil in a “the 2000s at Bronx Science” retrospective we had run the previous year. When the (actual) police were called to respond to an incident at the school during the traditional start-of-year senior event, we were not allowed to mention their calling in our story. We decided to preserve our credibility by not running a piece that omitted the one aspect of the incident most of the students remembered. Opinion pieces on “controversial” issues (the bulk of the disagreement came from the administration on these sorts of things) had to be run as “pro/con” pieces, with a student writing a piece parroting the administration’s position, to create the impression of disagreement among the student body. Examples of this at work include an opinion piece one of our staff did criticizing the increased use of an online grading system. It was widely disliked by students, but one wouldn’t get that impression from the equal billing we had to give both sides.

The biggest dispute over the paper, and the only one that became a big enough issue to leak out as a series of rumors to the rest of the student body, was the controversy last year over the annual April satire issue. In previous years, the administration had typically loosened the grip here, allowing us to run content that actually satirized the administration (one of my favorite covers from the year before I joined the paper stylized the school as a sort of Soviet totalitarian state) and toed the limit of propriety (the cover article on the joke issue our junior year was on a certain well endowed graduate coming to speak at our graduation).

When A Joke Is funny, And Then Isn’t

So no one batted an eye when some of the staff on the paper decided to run a mock “March Madness” bracket in the satire issue. The idea was that a bunch of teachers at the school were written as competing in a series of one-on-one basketball games. The piece seemed to have passed muster with the administrators, as we were allowed to publish.

Nay, how we were mistaken. In the piece, which took up the whole bottom fold of the back page, several portions raised complaint. A male teacher was referred to have lost a game against a female teacher because he was “too focused” on her “body movement.” Later in the piece, two female teachers were noted to have “showed their exquisite ball handling skills, while riding all the way to the final four.” Another male teacher was then noted to have won the tournament, however, by “finishing on top.”

Two of the teachers mentioned — one of them the “focused” male teacher — complained to the administration about the content of the issue, and suddenly, it seemed as if there was an oversight in the content editing process. On our end, of course. The assistant principal of the English department sat in on our traditional end-of-issue debrief, and our faculty adviser seemed to continually hint at what sort of process “improvements” we could make in her moderating of the conversation. The next day, Reidy herself made an appearance at the Survey room to essentially lecture us on our lack of propriety. She made a concerted effort to tell us she was not visiting to “intimidate” us, which as you can imagine at the time rang particularly hollow. We didn’t hear much on the subject after that; rumors swirled that the principal had ordered all copies of the paper still in the school trashed, and our stacks of excess issues suddenly were missing the satire issue.

It is unclear what happened regarding that issue, but I can say that the Survey currently has a different faculty adviser. I do not know whether this had anything to do with the above-mentioned dispute. In my rather non-objective view, she was a capable manager of the paper and excellent teacher, but such is how things go.

Postscript

When I was contacted by GothamSchools to adapt a post from my blog into this piece, I was asked to include quotes from current staffers at the Survey. I spoke to several students currently on the paper, and all declined to comment, citing the fact that they were still at the school. I can say with certainty myself that exactly one year ago, as this controversy was looming over us as we prepared the final issue, I would not have put my name to this story either.

Abraham Moussako is a 2011 graduate of Bronx High School of Science, where he was an editor of the Science Survey student newspaper. He is currently a student at McGill University in Montreal. This piece is adapted from a post on his blog, Another Note in the Cacophony.

Relationships comprise the foundation on which the real work of schools reside. Teachers meet with one another to plan curricula and assessments (or at least, they should), examine and share student work, analyze data, and share resources and ideas on how to manage children with challenging behavior or inadequate academic progress. Students often have strong relationships with multiple adults in the building, such as the security guard, the secretary, another teacher down the hall, or a trusted paraprofessional or school aide. Teachers use tricks to capitalize on these relationships, distracting students in crisis by asking them to deliver pretend “mail” to other teachers, or sending them to a corner or outside the classroom with a co-teacher or paraprofessional to “de-escalate” and engage in a problem-solving conversation.

As a special education teacher, my students often engage with a number of adults on any given day as part of their services delivered via their Individualized Education Program (IEP), such as counseling, speech-language therapy, one-on-one tutoring (SETTS), or occupational therapy. Many of my students are also English language learners (ELLs — gotta love all the acronyms, eh?), and are also pulled for small group English as a second language instruction. This year, I am teaching in an inclusion, co-teaching classroom, and my general education students are also sometimes pulled for academic intervention services (AIS) and dance practice for a school performance. Many of them also attend after-school programs most days of the week.

Now think of how many adults contribute to the education of the students I am responsible for. And the farce that is value-added accountability becomes apparent. How can you possibly disaggregate my individual impact on a student from the collective impact of the school environment and that individual student’s work with other adults?

I am tired of the endless iterations of the line that teachers are the “single most important factor in raising student achievement.” Yes, teachers matter. We are the adults that students spend the preponderance of their time with while in school, therefore we have the greatest impact on student learning. But what about all the other adults that students interact with, build relationships with, and work with? What about the practices, rituals, procedures, and culture of the school? What about the physical environment of the school?

The reality is, the whole school matters, and this quixotic exercise of attempting to disaggregate individual teacher impact on a child completely obscures the real work of a school in developing a positive environment that promotes well-being and intellectual and emotional safety, as well as in delivering a rich, coherent curriculum.

So what should we be measuring, then? How can we possibly hold schools accountable for the learning of the students they are responsible for?

My advice is to recognize the importance of relationships in a school in raising student achievement, and seek a means of measuring the context of a school, such as the trust and strength of relationships between the adults in the building, the ratio of positive to negative words used, and the quality of the physical environment. We can stop shelling out public money yearly to testing corporations, and instead adopt a randomized testing schedule, and we could put some of that money instead towards the much more important face-to-face accountability of leaders stepping foot into schools, rather than examining disaggregated data dissociated from its context. This could be coupled with some modified form of the inspectorate model currently used in the United Kingdom.

But contexts alone are not the only service that schools provide. Schools deliver content to students, and all too often, the critical importance of a strong curriculum is completely ignored. We can measure the strength of a school’s curriculum by assessing how well it is horizontally and vertically aligned, as well as in how well it targets and addresses student gaps in background knowledge.

Let’s stop pretending, therefore, that students are products. It takes a whole school to educate a whole child. And that whole school must have a strong, coherent curriculum that is delivered in an environment of trust and respect that promotes well-being, risk-taking, and empathy.

20 minutes on the clock.
My brain is sweating.
My pencil’s racing through pages.
My hands are crying
“I can’t take it anymore.”
My eyes cry onion tears
Oh no! 10 minutes left
One passage blank
One response half done
The pale chalk
In my teacher’s hand
Mocking my pain
As she erases the numbers and says
“Two minutes left”
Smoke is coming out of my ears
What does “dismal” mean?
I need an ambulance
My heart is going to come out
My hands have a cold
It’s shaking as I circle
The letter B
I am drunk
I’m shrinking
And the room is getting bigger
HELP!
5,4,3,2,1…TIME’S UP!

The fact that this was real — and that this was really going to happen — set in when I passed the auditorium around 1 p.m. and saw the final adjustments being made to the tables, chairs, and microphones that would facilitate the contentious meeting. I was unexpectedly hit with feelings of sadness and resentment; the auditorium where I had participated in so many concerts, plays, poetry readings, and awards ceremonies was being “invaded” by bureaucrats who had never visited our school, or interacted with any of our students. I joked with my students that it felt like the penultimate scene in ”E.T.” when scientists set up shop in Elliot’s house.

As I recount the details of that evening, there will be one recurring theme: I am so proud of my students!

An hour before the hearing began, about 15 students gathered at the end of a hallway to make posters supporting our school. The posters expressed many different ideas: “Save Our School,” for example, or “You Can’t Destroy our Dreams” and “137 Years Strong, We Belong!”  The poster-making session was accompanied by lively discussion that included anger, optimism, pessimism, and cynicism. “How can they close our school?” one student asked. “Mr. Albertson, do you think there is any chance that they may vote to keep our school open?”  In a nearby office, students helped each other draft and edit speeches that they would present at the hearing.

We walked to the auditorium as a group and immediately signed up to speak. Some of the students meandered through the growing crowd and were collecting signatures on a poster reading: “Save our School!” Within minutes there was no free space for any additional names.

As I looked around the room, I saw the familiar faces of colleagues, students, and parents — but their countenances showed sadness and uncertainty.  Several of my band students asked, “Can we play the drums?” What a great idea! We carried about 10 bucket drums and a container of sticks from the music room and gathered players across two rows of seats. Along with several teachers we performed an energetic beat that immediately changed the mood in the room. Sensing this new energy amidst broad smiles and camera flashes, we changed our beat to three big unison hits: “Save our school! Save our school!”

It was time to begin.

After a brief overview by a representative of the Department of Education, Deputy Chancellor David Weiner read a summary of the Flushing’s Environmental Impact Statement — a legal document outlining the process of closing a school and reopening a new one under the federal turnaround model. The crowd politely listened — for about one minute.

For me, this was the most infuriating point of the evening. Weiner was speaking about our school using such sterile language and the crowd was not having any of it. From the audience came boos and shouts: “Lies!” “The numbers are bogus!” I could have never anticipated what would happen next, and the emotional response that I would have.

Just as Weiner was stating, “Flushing High School has many positive attributes and has shown improvement, but the students are still not achieving” a picture of the students in my jazz band popped up as part of a slide show that was being displayed on the stage. I found myself choked up with emotion and began to tear up. I have worked with many of these students for four years; they have become like my own children. As a trained musician, I am quite familiar with proper audience etiquette, but found myself breaking all of the societal niceties that I usually abide by: I stood up pointing at the screen, and leaning over the chair in front of me was screaming at the panel, “Look at them! Look at my students! They are not failing!”

The following day one of my students observed, “Mr. Albertson, you were crazy last night.”

With a horse voice I responded, “Don’t mess with my students.”

The public comment period was the highlight of the evening. Approximately 60 students, parents, educators, and community members spoke up passionately defending the institution that has meant so much to us all.

The students were the stars that night. To be 15 or 16 years old and to stand up in front of a large audience addressing city officials in suits is nothing short of amazing. They spoke with so much passion and from so many different personal experiences.  One young man stood up and stated, “I will not speak to you in English, but rather in Spanish.” This was a powerful statement, and one that captured the essence of Flushing High School: We are a school composed of diverse learners from many different backgrounds. And yet the department has not reached out to non-English-speaking families: The original letter from Chancellor Dennis Walcott stating that our school was slated for turnaround, for example, was never sent home in any language besides English — even though we have many parents who only speak Spanish, Chinese, Korean or Arabic.

As the evening progressed, an interesting theme developed: Students were defending their teachers, and teachers were defending their students. One young lady argued, “It is unfair to blame our teachers. I am in classes with students who don’t pay attention, put their heads on their desks, and make noises, while many of us are trying to learn.” And while many might assume that teachers would be defending their jobs, most spoke up for their students: “These students come to this country speaking no English and graduate four years later.” “We have great students!”

We showed the best of what Flushing High School has to offer and put up a valiant fight. There was a strong sense of community in the room during a year where it has felt as though we are constantly being torn apart.

Perhaps the best defense of our school — and of public education in general — came from a 10th-grade student who had immigrated from Ghana. This young lady was in my drumming class last year and I asked her ahead of time, “Are you planning to speak tonight?” She was hesitant: “I don’t know if I can do it — I would be so nervous.” Needless to say I was thrilled when I saw her approach the microphone. She stood with a confident posture looking directly at the panel and immediately began to cry. Through uncontrollable tears she forcefully and passionately defended the school, finishing with, “And every time there is something that I don’t think I’ll be able to do, my teachers always say, ‘Yes you can!’ ‘Yes you can!’ ‘Yes you can!’”

As several of my colleagues and I stood to applaud her, I saw that we all had tears in our eyes. We became teachers to work with students, not for the money, the recognition, or the two-month summer vacations. Our tears were a result of pride, empathy, and the realization that our wonderful school, Flushing High School — the oldest public high school in New York City and the first to have an integrated student body — will most likely not be here next year, at least not in its current form.

In the middle of Act III, however, we got to my favorite scene in the play. It’s the one where Friar Lawrence chews Romeo out for being self-absorbed and melodramatic. While I love this scene, I’ve never figured out an effective way to teach it: it’s filled with long speeches that students often find very difficult. In the past, I’ve just walked the students through the scene, making sure they get the key points. It works, but it’s kind of boring.

This year, rather than reuse my old lesson, I planned something new. I put the students into groups and had them divide up the speeches amongst their group members. In their groups, the students created contemporary versions of the scene, translated into their own contemporary language and supplemented with stage directions. It was a two-day lesson and my plan was to have the students perform their versions of the scene at the end of the second day.

As it turned out, I was too ambitious. While a few groups completed everything in two days, none of them had a chance to rehearse for a performance. Many groups didn’t even complete their stage directions. According to the goals I set during planning, I — or my students, or both — had failed.

Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. After all, the students learned a lot from these lessons; the evidence was there in their writing. What’s more, I got a better sense of how to teach this scene next year, and of my students’ capacity to handle complex texts independently. In the end, however, I set my objectives before the lesson and I failed to reach them.

This facile approach to evaluation is all the rage these days. Teachers across the country are being forced to set “Student Learning Objectives” at the beginning of the semester or school year; if the students fail to reach these objectives, the teachers are deemed ineffective. For example, in September I might say that I’d like ninth-grader Regina to produce precise thesis statements and develop her arguments using textual evidence. Sounds like a good goal, right? By the end of ninth grade, I hope all of my students can do this.

Here’s the problem: Regina tries really hard all year, and she still struggles to craft strong thesis statements. That should be okay, because all of her practice will eventually pay off. Learning is complicated; sometimes it takes longer than we expect.

Unfortunately, according to the boosters of value-added metrics for assessing teachers (including the Gates Foundation and Education Secretary Arne Duncan), learning is simple, and so is teacher evaluation. Effective teachers achieve measurable results, and ineffective ones don’t. If Regina’s not writing strong theses by the end of the year, I should pay the price.

So this is one problem with the value-added approach: no measuring stick can account for the complexities of teaching and learning. Here’s another problem: failure can be a good thing. This isn’t just philosophizing or fuzzy math. It’s a report from the American Psychological Association.

According to the report, “Children may perform better in school and feel more confident about themselves if they are told that failure is a normal part of learning, rather than being pressured to succeed at all costs.” This makes a lot of sense to me; I’ll bet it makes sense to a lot of teachers and parents too. It also runs completely contrary to the high-stakes, high-pressure approach driving educational reform in New York and beyond.

If pressure is bad for students, imagine what it’s doing to teachers. Beyond the intense public and political attacks we’ve faced from all sides in recent years, the increased pressure placed on our students by high-stakes testing is actually undermining our work in the classroom.

If people are really serious about improving public education, it seems pretty obvious that the first step should be decreasing the pressure placed on students and teachers. The findings are clear: Fear of failure is bad for everyone.

The scene doesn’t make sense to me. Sure, we have our fair share of hallway scuffles, but compared to most schools in the neighborhood, ours isn’t terribly violent. I get closer and recognize that all the kids in the group are cast members in Les Miserábles, the spring musical I’m directing. Now I’m even more confused. Some of these kids may struggle academically and some have tough home lives, but there’s not a bully or a thug among them. Even so, the energy of the scene automatically triggers memories of my early days as a new teacher breaking up fights in the back of my classroom, memories that are quick to surge up and flood me with adrenaline despite the trusting relationships I’ve built with my students, the leadership work they’ve done over the years and the creative challenges we’ve faced together while developing a musical theater program at Bronx Prep.

The chanting gets louder. I race down the hall.

When I get to the scene, the circle of kids unknots itself and I struggle to make sense of what I’m seeing. George — the student on the floor — is laughing so hard he can barely breathe. The boy kneeling over him is not punching him, but hugging him and slapping him on the back with enough enthusiasm and force to have toppled them both over. Several of the boys around them are wiping tears out of their eyes. At first I assume they’re tears of laughter.

I ask what’s going on.

Thomas, the boy doing the hugging, stands up and straightens his tie, then extends a hand to George, the senior who plays the show’s lead, Jean Valjean. George stands up, shoots me a sheepish grin and coaxes Jasmine, who plays one of the other leads, Fantine, out of the stairwell at the end of the hallway where she is burying her face in her hands. She blushes and smiles shyly.

“Um, yeah, so we were just singing Fantine’s death scene for the guys, here,” says George.

“Yeah,” says Thomas. “And it was so awesome that they made everybody cry.”

I look around at the boys. With the congratulatory brouhaha I’d mistaken for a smack-down fully subsided now, I can feel the lingering charge of the emotion that incited it. The guys are embarrassed, avoiding my gaze, kicking the tile floor with their sneakers. One kid wipes a tear-stained cheek with his shoulder. “I don’t cry,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Ever. But that was really, really good.”

I’m stunned.

First of all, before we even get to the crying thing, there’s the simple fact that the kids are rehearsing on their own. Finally, after nine years spent building up a performing arts program from scratch through what has mostly felt like sheer force of adult will — the endless hours my colleagues and I have spent begging students to show up on time and get to work, calling kids’ homes after every missed practice, trying to convince young people whose default setting for self expression is texting and tweeting that real art takes time, discipline and painstaking follow-through — this moment offers a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, this group of kids is finally starting to take ownership of their creative process.

Secondly, it occurs to me that my initial fears that urban teenagers wouldn’t connect emotionally to an operetta set in 19th century France might have been unfounded. Could it be that they are actually starting to understand and connect to these characters?

Finally — and here’s the kicker: In a neighborhood where so many of the kids I interact with every day seem to spend the bulk of their energy trying to convince the world how tough they are, how unfeeling they are, how little they care about what happens to them or the people around them — where even the appearance of emotional vulnerability can equal social rejection, a serious ass-beating, or worse — these kids are not only crying openly in front of each other — they’re crying over musical theater.

Partly this phenomenon has to do with this particular group of kids and the coming of age of a program that has been nearly a decade in the making. Our school is a combined middle and high school that spans fifth to 12th grade, and we’ve been putting on musicals since 2006, so our older kids have formed close bonds, establishing a tightly-knit culture of positivity, creative risk-taking and emotional support. Two of our senior cast members have received acceptances (and full rides) to competitive BFA programs in acting and set design from SUNY Purchase and Ithaca respectively. And my co-director on this show is former Bronx Prep student and musical theater star Denisse Polanco, who earned her undergraduate degree in Arts in Education from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 2011 and has returned to Bronx Prep this year as a theater teacher and speech coach. With so many successful upper classmen and alumni leading them, it’s not surprising that younger students coming up through the ranks of the program are feeling inspired this year.

But there’s more to it than that. The level of commitment we’re seeing this year is bordering on a weird kind of fervor. Put simply, the kids have become Les Mis freaks. Students who claim to “hate reading” are devouring the Victor Hugo novel the show is based on. Cast members who say they don’t care about history or math are making Google maps of Paris and calculating travel times for revolutionaries carrying ammunition from one end of the city to the other. While we lost some cast members who couldn’t get their grades up in time, a large number of students who were failing four and five classes as of a few months ago are now staying at school until all hours and getting tutored by their fellow actors so they can meet academic requirements and stay in the cast.

In all my years making theater in the Bronx, I’ve never seen kids give this much of a damn about a show before. Ironically enough — given how far removed it is from them in terms of time period, geography, race and culture — I think it’s because we’ve never done a show that connects so directly to their lives.

The first moment I realized that the kids were understanding the story more deeply than I ever had at their age was the first week of rehearsals when we started learning the big musical numbers. Put it this way: When a roomful of young people — many of whom can trace their families’ roots directly back to the Middle Passage and the Triangle Trade — instinctively launch their fists up when they sing, “It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again!” there’s an electricity in the air that was noticeably absent from the version of “The People’s Song” I sang with my high school choir back in Wilton, Conn.

I sat in the classroom that day listening to the kids sing with every hair on my arms standing on end, thinking, “Victor Hugo couldn’t possibly have predicted it, and Cameron Mackintosh couldn’t have known it either, but I’m pretty sure this show was created for this exact group of kids to perform at this exact moment in history.” Since that first week of rehearsal, the kids have been discovering resonant overlaps between the student uprisings at the heart of Les Miserábles and the expansive revolutionary spirit — as well as the countervailing energies of apathy, cynicism and fear — fueling so many present-day events. One of our student leaders, a 12th-grader named Ruth, recently designed and ran a workshop for the cast called “What Is Your Breaking Point?” in which she helped kids understand the uprisings in Les Mis by analyzing blog posts written by real-life student participants in the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, and the Million Hoodie March organized in protest over the death of Trayvon Martin.

“When a bunch of Bronx Prep kids are debating whether to wear hoodies to school in honor of Trayvon — and some of them are cynical about whether their act of defiance will actually mean anything in the end,” Ruth says, “that’s really not so different — on a basic level — from these kids in Paris in the 1800s deciding whether or not to stand up and fight on the barricade for what they believe in.”

Even more compelling in my view than “text-to-world” connections the kids are making are the “text-to-self” connections — the very specific and intimate ways they see their own lives and families’ experiences reflected in their characters’ stories. Every day more of these art-and-life intersections surface, and every time another student talks about how they see themselves in this show, I get chills. Here are three examples the kids have shared over the last few days:

Thomas (the enthusiastic young actor from the hallway scene) says that playing the role of Marius, who wrestles over whether to risk death on the barricade for his revolutionary ideals, has given him a deeper understanding of the agonizing moral dilemmas his grandparents faced living under the brutal dictatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s.

For a junior named Miguel, the play’s critique of the criminal justice system hits home directly. Like Jean Valjean, Miguel’s older brother went to prison for a crime he committed in the process of trying to help someone, and then found he couldn’t get a job with a living wage when he got out, “not even a job at McDonald’s,” Miguel says. Miguel’s favorite part of the show is when Valjean, embittered by his treatment in jail, steals a silver cup from a bishop, who responds with a surprising gift of two silver candlesticks and an inspiring admonition to Valjean to change his ways and walk a path of redemption. The bishop’s radical act of generosity reminds Miguel of the life-changing employment assistance his brother has recently received from the state.

Tenth grader Jada says that in the awful days following the shooting death of her brother Jared this February, the lyrics of “The Café Song (Empty Chairs at Empty Tables)” played through her head constantly, bringing her unexpected stretches of a “strange kind of comfort” at a time of overwhelming grief.

***

Over the last several decades, budget cuts and the pressures of high-stakes standardized testing in English and math have either squeezed arts education out of middle school and high school curriculum completely or reduced it to a frivolous, once-in-a-while add-on in a huge number of schools across the country. Programming losses have hit students in the nation’s poorest districts the hardest. Cuts to arts education programs fly in the face of abundant research confirming what those of us lucky enough to continue this work know in our bones: that arts education is more than just a tool for boosting test scores and closing the achievement gap. Access to rich and relevant learning opportunities in the creative arts is a fundamental human right — a right worth fighting for.

***

Les Miserábles Student Edition will be performed at Bronx Prep May 21-23 at 7 p.m. with a special encore performance including student reflections and stories in Manhattan on Friday, May 25 at 7 p.m. Contact me for more information.

As always, the students featured in this post agreed to let me share their stories; the views expressed here are my own and not those of my school’s administration.

I’d like to share an example of the latter, not just because I’m proud of it but because I think conflict resolution with authority figures is one of the most important skills we can teach young people — particularly young people of color who are so often the victims of harassment and unjust targeting. I hope others will share strategies for addressing the Bernards in their lives.

Bernard arrived late to my classroom yesterday (as usual). Unbeknowst to me, he had accidentally brought his phone to school with him and (miraculously) it had not been detected by the scanners through which every student must pass. When he realized it was there, he panicked. He couldn’t let a teacher see it, or it would get confiscated. But the pocket he’d kept it in — a mesh pocket on the outside of his backpack — was too obvious. He didn’t want to keep it in a pocket of his backpack, lest someone steal it. He apparently walked into my room completely preoccupied with what to do about this situation.

Students were writing essay, and one girl had asked to type on my laptop. I’d let her sit in Bernard’s front row seat so the computer cord could reach the outlet. Bernard, despite being late, was furious and refused to sit anywhere except his seat. Exasperated and worried about losing time, I asked Bernard to step into the hallway and planned to negotiate with him in a moment when I was finished getting the other students working.

Peeking through the window of my doorway, Bernard could see that Jesse was wearing sweatpants with deep pockets. He beckoned Jesse, who swiftly asked to use the bathroom, into the hallway to ask if he could hide the phone in his pocket. Jesse agreed, but as he was handing the phone over, the guidance counselor caught sight of it. She confiscated it and chastised the two boys for talking and laughing in the hallway during class. When I came out to see what was going on, Bernard was already stalking away from the classroom. When I tried to call him back, he called out an obscenity and kept walking.

Bernard came back into my room about 20 minutes later, having obviously cooled down. I spoke to him in the hallway and explained my reasoning for sending him out: he’d disrupted what had otherwise been a productive period so far, he was late, and I knew that if he and I spoke privately we’d be able to work something out so that he could get his essay finished. Does what I’m doing make sense? I asked him. He nodded. Can you come in and work productively on your essay? He nodded again.

After class, I asked both Jesse and Bernard to stay.  I’d already addressed Bernard’s behavior in my class, but I wanted to address how he’d treated me and the guidance counselor in the hallway.  That was when Bernard finally had the opportunity to explain the whole phone saga.  I saw that he simply hadn’t known what to do with the phone.

“In the future,” I said, “the best thing for you to do would be to let an administrator know you have your phone and ask them to store it for you some where or help you find a safe place for it. That way, you wouldn’t get in trouble. The problem with what you did was that you made it look like you were doing something wrong — and that’s what’s going to get you in trouble. The more honest you are, the more you will be trusted.” (Of course, there are many cases in which confessing to breaking a rule could be dangerous for Bernard. I am lucky to be at a school where students know all adults, from teacher to administrator to security guard, want to help him succeed, and will help him in any way they can.)

“I also,” I told Bernard, “want to address the word you used to address me and Ms. Alexander on your way down the hallway.”

“I wasn’t cursing at you,” he responded. I struggled to keep my face relaxed as my temper flared. How dare he focus on technicalities when cursing at all is such an obvious misstep? But then, this is why I love Bernard. He’ll argue with you to the root of the matter, but it’s because he really does want an explanation. And not to belittle any of the unique gift his other teachers have to offer, but what I’m about to say is why he loves me: I’m willing and able to give it to him.

“No, you weren’t. But you were cursing, and that is an inappropriate way to deal with your anger in that particular situation. Don’t you think I ever want to curse when I’m angry at school?” Like right now, for instance?

“Yeah,” he said, “but you’re a teacher. That would be inappropriate.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m preparing you for a profession where it will also be inappropriate. It doesn’t matter what you do — you can’t handle your anger by cursing in a professional environment.” He nodded in agreement and apologized.

I understand why some schools would not have allowed Bernard to wander the halls for his manly cool-off time. I understand why they might not be interested in his excuses for being heated and cursing at two teachers in the hallway. But what Bernard just got — instead of the discipline or even arrest he might receive at some schools — is a precious opportunity to learn conflict resolution skills. I’m grateful, not just because I like him or because I like a healthy spar with a hard-headed teenager. I’m grateful because the ability to speak one’s mind professionally in the heat of a conflict is one he will need long after he forgets everything else he learned from me. In a city of stop-and-frisk and scanners wherever he goes, knowing how to argue could mean the difference between fighting for his life and arguing, articulately, for what he knows is right.

“School is right around the corner,” my aunt said on an unusually chilly August day two summers ago. She tried to sound casual, but I could hear the slight urgency in her voice.

“So?” I replied.

“So, shouldn’t you be registering or something? It’s up to you to take charge and get things done.”

I hadn’t been to a “regular” high school in almost two years. Instead, I’d been going to the small high school at a residential treatment facility upstate, which had few students and a lot of help from the teachers. But now, after moving from the RTF to my aunt’s house in Brooklyn, I was headed to a new high school, probably a bigger school where I wouldn’t know a single person.

I assumed my aunt or another adult would take the initiative and find a school for me. I’d become pretty reliant on someone else taking control since, in the RTF, adults made the majority of decisions for me. It made me uneasy to realize that finding a school was up to me. For the first time in a while, I was making a big decision on my own. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, this was just one of the many lessons in “self-empowerment” I was about to face.

Self-empowerment means gaining the strength or power to do something on your own; taking control of your own destiny. It’s especially important to youth in foster care because we struggle through more than the average teenager. Moving to different foster homes; dealing with pain, hurt, and frustration; and navigating life without much family support are all things that most foster kids go through. Since we don’t have as much of a support system as most kids, we have to feel empowered to make a lot of life decisions on our own.

Searching for a School

With that in mind, I began browsing the High School Directory book, where more than 400 New York City high schools are listed. (New York City allows students to apply to any public high school in the city, although some schools have requirements that limit who is accepted.) I narrowed down my choices to five schools and asked for some advice from a trusted adult who knows a lot about local schools. He said I should visit a few schools to make sure I chose the one that suited me best.

I visited two big high schools first, but I didn’t like either one because both had more than 1,000 students. I realized that part of making good decisions is knowing myself and knowing what kind of environment would work for me. A huge school might feel overwhelming to me. My next stop was Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School.

I felt optimistic about BCAM because the school had only around 300 students and it had a theater program — both things I wanted in a school. However, when I visited I got a bad gut feeling. The setting was plain, with no murals or collages on the walls. What I did see on the walls were two roaches. I thought that was straight nasty. I wanted to run around the corner to catch the nearest train.

I thought I had seen the worst of it, but then the parent coordinator looked at me and bluntly said, “You’re going to behave now, right, Mr. Turner? No problems, no acting out or anything of that nature?” I blinked at the lady. I hadn’t even said anything, and I felt like I was already being judged as a delinquent? I felt like she’d instantly labeled me.

“No, I won’t act up,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief.

“Good. I don’t want any people misbehaving.” Then she muttered, “There are enough rowdy clowns here.” She left me slightly shuddering.

After that, a student who worked as a teacher’s assistant gave me a tour. I hadn’t even gone 10 steps before I heard a loud, threatening voice say, “Yo! Little boy! Come over here. I’m talking to you, little n-gga!” I was ready to turn right back around and punch his face in, but I just ignored him. I’d been kicked out of one school already for making a verbal threat (one of the reasons I’d been in an RTF to begin with) and I wasn’t ready to get kicked out of another before the first day.

Although I was definitely getting negative vibes, I still wanted to give it a shot. I met my guidance counselor and some of the teachers, and they were warm and welcoming. The teachers were talking excitedly and they seemed sincerely happy about starting a new year. “This school won’t be that bad. Maybe I can do this,” I told myself. With that, I enrolled at BCAM. I was proud that I’d taken on the responsibility of choosing a school and that I’d made my own decision.

First-Day Disappointments

On the first day, I woke up with a sudden burst of energy. I wanted everything to be perfect. I brushed my teeth longer than usual, put on a little cologne, and ironed my pants and shirt three times. I was happy about a fresh start in school and I expected everyone to share in my enthusiasm.

I wanted to become a social icon, the kid everyone knew and loved. I could imagine the scene already: I would walk into class with everyone smiling at me. I would go through the halls, getting a lot of daps from my boys and hugs from the ladies. But when I walked into the building that first day, I realized maybe my hopes were too high.

The school, although small, was intimidating. The other students were guarded and didn’t bother to make me feel welcome, even when I initiated a conversation.

“Do you like it here?” I casually asked one kid.

“It’s all right,” he answered, and the conversation was over.

“Is your commute long?” I asked a girl.

“Sometimes it’s long,” she answered.

Every time I tried, that’s how it went. Their two- or three-word answers instantly dampened my mood. It didn’t get much better on the second or third day, and I was discouraged. I didn’t think I should have to go out of my way to say “hi” when I was the new person. I thought the students who had been in the school since 9th grade should open themselves up more and converse freely.

Instead of being the social icon I’d hoped to be, I felt like a loner and an outcast. (If you’ve ever been the “new kid,” you know what I’m talking about.) Walking the crowded halls felt like walking through a maze that never ended. And there was clearly a social order that I was not part of.

As I shoved my way through the sea of students, I saw the popular kids with their fancy designer outfits and it seemed like they had bulletproof confidence. While all these “popular kids” spread out everywhere during lunch, laughing and having a good time, the kids who were considered “lames” or “virgins” were forced to sit in a small unpleasant area near the garbage.

The “virgins” and “lames” walked cautiously with their heads down, and their voices didn’t sound too confident. I think it was this atmosphere that made kids unwilling to put themselves out there by saying “hi” to the new kid.

Showing Off?

I hoped that at least my classes would be good. At first I was really hype about my science class. I raised my hand a lot — until I realized my peers thought I was showing off.

“You trying to act smart now, boy?” said one guy.

“He just trying to show off,” a girl added, smacking her gum loudly. I didn’t know how to feel. I wasn’t trying to show off; I was just enthusiastic about learning. Was that so bad?

I realized that the other kids didn’t raise their hands much at all. It seemed like even the really smart kids “dumbed down,” and made fun of people who applied themselves. I stopped raising my hand as much and started fooling around in class. It was stupid to follow others, I know, but I wanted to blend in.

For the first three months, I found that I constantly wanted to transfer. I tried to convince myself that I was overreacting, but the school just didn’t feel inviting and I didn’t know how to change my situation. I had worked hard to find a school that seemed right for me, and I was upset to realize that it was going to take time and energy to find a social group that worked for me, too.

I decided to get involved in activities I liked, where I might meet people like me who were open and friendly. I tried joining the basketball team, but I wasn’t good enough. I tried to volunteer as a tutor, but they told me I hadn’t been in the school long enough to tutor anyone. I joined the newspaper club, but almost no one attended the meetings.

When I realized no one came to the newspaper meetings I felt somewhat hopeless. It obviously wasn’t the end of the world, but it was disappointing that writing, one of my favorite things to do, was an extracurricular activity that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy in school. I still felt driven — I thought there must be some club or activity for me to join — but I also felt a tinge of doubt after trying out so many clubs already. I still wasn’t part of things the way I wanted to be and it felt lonely.

Try, Try Again

It took time and persistence, but I did eventually find some groups that I liked: I’m now involved in yearbook and a college-readiness program called College Now. I grew fond of some of the kids in those groups and we started to hang out.

Eventually, I also gave up on becoming a social icon. I realized that it was an entertaining yet unrealistic expectation. And it wasn’t really me, anyway. I prefer to spend my time with a few close friends rather than having 20 acquaintances that I small-talk with.

Realizing this helped me clearly identify the people I like to hang with and who I’m most comfortable with. I ended up making a good friend, Ty, in my English class. Usually, we crack jokes or read parodies off the Web. Having a best friend made my high school experience a little better.

Finding my niche and putting aside the idea that I needed to be a social icon made me feel less stressed. I didn’t have to try too hard to make everyone like me. Also, after watching the popular kids, I saw that popularity isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. You need lots of money, fancy clothes, and a certain style to maintain your status. That’s mad work. Of course, I’m still vulnerable to my peers’ influence, but I realize that’s my own insecurity coming out.

Relying On Myself

I’m glad I took the initiative to choose a high school because, although it’s not the best school, it felt good to have some control over my own future. Plus, choosing a school on my own taught me something significant: Taking care of your business is important because there won’t always be a parent or caseworker to guide you.

The same applies to finding your social circle in school. Just because you’re an outgoing and friendly person doesn’t mean that you’re automatically going to make friends with everyone in the school. And if you rely on others to define you, you might end up changing your personality to fit in. It’s better to be yourself and, even if it takes time and effort, develop real friendships with people who are loyal, have your back, and respect you for who you are as a person.

The challenge of starting over at a new school is never an easy task, but it’s not an impossible one, either. I’m now in my second year at BCAM. On the first day of school this year, I saw a lot of freshmen who all seemed as enthusiastic as I was my first day. Walking to my advisory class I saw a freshman who was obviously lost.

“Hey you,” I said in a sarcastic but cheery way. She looked all around wondering where the voice was coming from until I walked up and introduced myself. Then I showed her where room 214 was.

“Thank you,” she said smiling. “It’s pretty hard to find people to talk to here.”

I smiled and said, “I know. I felt the exact same way last year.”

Anthony Turner is a student at Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School. This piece originally appeared in Represent magazine. It is reprinted with permission from Youth Communication, a nonprofit that aims to helps youth reach their full potential through reading and writing.

Olympic athlete David Oliver with students from 51st Avenue Academy in Queens at Madison Square Garden earlier this year. (Photo courtesy of Mackenzie McCluer/SI Kids)

Last spring, I felt as if all of the energy and momentum of the first half of the year was being sucked into a vortex. Was it caused by consecutive years of teaching the same grade, or was the inevitable arrival of test season to blame? I knew my students were feeling it too; I found myself refereeing more than the usual number of disputes over pencil ownership and hurt feelings. It was about that time that a link appeared on GothamSchools: “How to get an Olympian into your classroom. Teachers, apply here to adopt an Olympian to work with your school.” It sounded like something that would be good for kids, so I applied. The truth? I am a full-on Olympics fanatic, so I applied.

The organization behind this intriguing offer was Classroom Champions. Their stated mission is to use Olympians and Paralympians as role models for success and goal-setting, while increasing students’ digital literacy. They would accomplish this by connecting athletes and students via blogs, videos, and live video chats.

I teach a fifth-grade Integrated Co-Teaching class that includes general education students and students with special needs. Engagement and community are always issues. I was hoping that Classroom Champions would give me a boost in these areas. It sounded so cool; what kid wouldn’t want to meet an Olympic athlete? But I’m never really sure that what thrills me will have the same impact on my students.

Each class is paired with an Olympic or ParaOlympic hopeful, and each month the program has a theme, such as Community or Goal Setting. I know that my students hear me remind them to treat each other well or to do their best. I suspect that to them, I sound like the adult in a “Charlie Brown” cartoon- mwa, mwa, mwa. It turns out, however, that they do listen when their athlete sends them a greeting and a message in a video. At first, they just sort of parroted the sentiments: I will treat people with respect; I will set a goal and work toward it. But the videos that the students create using the program-provided Flip video camera show that Classroom Champions is touching something deeper. Sometimes their videos have the raw intensity of a reality-show confessional:

Some people laugh at me; how I dress and talk. I want them to stop. But I know that I also need to be nicer and friendlier.

If you were the new kid, I would show you around and sit with you at lunchtime. I would make you feel at home.

I want to be a better friend.

I’m going to read at least one book a week to raise my reading level.

Kids think I’m bossy. Sometimes I get involved in issues that are none of my business.

I started to see my students in a different light. I thought that they would be reticent about having others see their videos, but the exact opposite has been the case. They write, revise, and film their own thoughts and skits, and can’t wait to share them. One child, who never speaks, not even to her teachers, has recorded three videos. On camera, she shines like the sun. My principal has commented that my students are unafraid to express themselves, and I believe that she meant it in a very positive way.

It turned out that Classroom Champions has put some powerful bait in my room. The self-motivated are all over it, and the reluctant learners are sitting up and taking notice. Students who struggle to complete writing assignments will write and revise in order to use the Flip camera. Geography is more interesting when you use map coordinates to track your athlete. It’s more fun to do a landmark data project when you use your athlete’s stats, and see your work posted to the program’s website. Classroom Champions does not make the content connections for me; it’s been a conscious effort on my part to integrate the program into the curriculum. Teachers have to post two lesson plans per month to the networking site, so I’m sure that as the program grows, so will the bank of lesson ideas.

Through its technology sponsors, Classroom Champions has provided its classrooms with teleconferencing equipment for “live chat” with our athletes. We are preparing for this now, and it would have been the high point of the year, except that my class had the unexpected thrill of watching our athlete compete live and then meeting him in person at Madison Square Garden. It was an intense experience for some of the kids, one of whom cried with joy, and another who found it a bonding experience and told me in a letter that “it felt like we were a family.”

Last spring I clicked on a link and made three wishes: to engage students, to improve their communication skills with the use of technology, and to provide them with some useful life lessons. The program, for us, has delivered. It is a resource, not a cure-all. Some of my students still don’t like each other, but they manage to get along. Not everyone is sticking to their plans in order to reach their goals, but many are. Yes, it requires a little extra work on my part. I have to find ways to integrate it into my plans, but I like being able to mold it to my needs. I never know when our athlete’s video will post, so it’s up to me to keep the momentum going. This is not difficult, as we enjoy all the photos and videos that the other athletes and classes are posting. Every time we make a video, I wish we kept the room neater. C’est la vie; I stopped stressing about it. Our athlete may not always come in first, but there are lessons, important ones, to be learned about how to handle disappointment and adversity. The bottom line is that Classroom Champions is what you make of it. You can choose to bring it to the forefront, or you can keep it in the background and draw from it as needed.

Classroom Champions said that it would connect students and athletes, and it has. David Oliver, a 110-meter hurdler, is our athlete. You can be sure that my students and I will be watching all of the Classroom Champion athletes competing this summer in London, but we will be cheering longest and loudest for David. He is my students’ hero, and he is their friend.

Lois Kivelson teaches at 51st Avenue Academy in Elmhurst, Queens. Classroom Champions is accepting applications for next year’s class-Olympian partnerships through March 31.

Earlier this month, Amani A., whom I am proud to be able to call my student at the Academy for Young Writers, took third-place at the annual Knicks Poetry Slam at a sold -out Broadway theater. I am hardly an aficionado of performance poetry, so I won’t comment on the quality of the poem nor its performance (though I can only assume she was robbed of first place), but I do want to engage with the content of her poem: the education of young men of color. There is much to admire and love in her message.

Amani starts by juxtaposing the media attention given to acts of violence committed by students against teachers with the lack of attention given to the violent results of  abdicating the responsibility for actually educating young men of color.  She notes that a Google search for “students hitting teachers” leads one to read, “A student hitting a teacher is a serious incident that merits a serious response.” Yet when searching for “teachers miseducating students” all she found relevant was “Lauryn Hill” (an allusion to Hill’s 1998 modern classic, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill”). It is a powerful and attention-grabbing opening.

Amani then goes on to describe the young men she has observed throughout her education, who “think fists are words” and that “they have to play God to make change.” This is the most powerful and effective stanza of the work. She rebukes the young men for their reliance on violence as she simultaneously calls to question society’s failed attempts to promote role models in the guise of Great Men (Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, etc) who are taught typically as saints, or naturally gifted, or the product of remarkable circumstances, but nonetheless, as people who are far greater than you or I ever could hope to be.

Later in the poem, Amani attacks the classroom culture of criticizing mistakes. This leads young men to build up “tension in his body” when condescended because of a wrong answer (something I hope I rarely do when it comes to my content, but must plead guilty to the crime when it comes to lack of math skills in my students), or worse, leaving the anger “caught in their throat.” This leads them to “package the silent treatment into their fists/ [to] make sure they’re heard.” One could easily extrapolate that experience to apply to binary standardized tests that tell students they are wrong or lacking in skills. Good teachers know that mistakes are wonderful, because they are the most powerful opportunities for learning and growth. It’s disheartening to see that Amani has witnessed something different throughout her education.

My lone criticism of the poem is that the solution it posits is slightly simplistic; her diagnosis is far more sophisticated than her prescription. Amani calls on her audience to “Call these boys / Call their voice / Tell them it’s time / Tell them we’re listening.” Giving students more voice in and outside of classrooms is an important step, but it is only one of the panacea of steps that are necessary to actually improve the 400-year history of individual and structural racism in this country, let alone the educational component of it.

The full text of the poem is below, which Amani generously shared with me to publish, but this is a poem meant to be seen and heard, so please watch the video, and share with others you know.

Education (Calling) by Amani A.

When google searching ‘students hitting teachers’ – relevant results:

• A student hitting a teacher is a serious incident that merits a serious response.
• Students’ assaults on teachers hit high in 2006.
• It’s also important to keep in mind that if a teacher or other staff member tries to break up a fight and a student hits that adult accidentally, that’s a serious issue.
• 6-year-old student suspended for hitting teacher

This is all the power us students have.

When google searching ‘teachers miseducating students’:
It’s about the poor
It’s about the ideology and identity
It’s not the teacher’s fault because…

• As a consequence of lower teacher expectations, poor students are more likely to be less able

When googling ‘teachers miseducating students’
The only thing found relevant is Lauryn Hill.

I live where children think fists are words
Think they have to play God to make change
They rather be wanted for murder than nothing at all.

There’s a boy
In the back of every classroom I’ve ever been in
He’s plastered to the wall.
Does no homework
Doesn’t have enough home
Or help.
Or hope.

The tension in his body mocks the way the teacher condescends.
He doesn’t know the answer to the question.
But he knows of the pompous remark he gets
When he is incorrect
And the hands he has to shove it back down
Someone’s throat

If the only thing miseducated about this
Is Lauryn Hill
You’d think there’d be some mending melody
To these boys
But their anger is caught in their throat.
Here
They are too coughed aggression to make sense
So they package the silent treatment into their fists
And make sure they’re heard

To these boys
Fists are words
These boys
Have replaced the melody of their voice
With the art and taunting they make out of other peoples’ bodies
Change is less democracy and more face arrangement here.
Here – their hands represent everything
Here – they have power for knuckles

This is for the anger we make them live with
The stillness we make them live in
The home of a boy full of tension has been misplaced
But he is still one of us.

And everyone that wants the action from us,
Cause they think it be louder than words,
Has to remember that action is still action no matter how it’s done

Because it starts
With something no one knows these boys have
Besides their fists
It has a name
It’s called a voice
Call these boys
Call their voice
Tell them its time.
Tell them we’re listening.

Leave questions for Bloom and Chajet about their research in the comments section.

What questions guided your study?  

Bloom: How does social class impact students’ choices about post-secondary education and their transition to college?

Chajet: What happens to students when they move from a small urban public school, with a college-for-all mission, to college, and how does this illuminate the power and the limits of small school reform and the policies and practices of higher education?

How did you conduct your research?

Bloom: I used ethnographic research to study students at three small New York City high schools over the course of a year. The elements of my research were: Weekly observations of college prep or “advisory” classes; focus groups and individual interviews with a small target group of students; interviews with parents, college counselors, teachers, and the school principals; two surveys administered to a large cohort of seniors at each school.

Chajet: My study had two parts: 1) an ethnographic school based study that included participant observation, interviews with staff members and students, and document collection at one academically-unscreened small school; 2) a graduate follow-up study for which I followed a group of 6 students for three and a half-years as they transitioned into and through college – including interviewing them and their families, visiting them at their colleges, collecting their of syllabi and assignments, emailing and calling them. I also did interviews, focus groups and surveys with approximately 100 other graduates.

What were your major discoveries?

Bloom: Research indicates that the post-secondary outcomes of this transition for low-income students are often negative. Educational sociologists and other scholars have debated whether these outcomes are due to ‘contradictory attitudes towards education’ exhibited by low-income students.

My findings, however, point to a different explanation. With few exceptions, the seniors that I followed, all of whom were qualified to attend college (as demonstrated by their acceptance to four-year colleges), initially declared their intent to go to college. Their journey towards that goal, however, varied based on their backgrounds and financial resources. Poor and working class students face significant economic, social and psychological risks that middle and upper class students do not.

First, while many people are aware of the skyrocketing costs of college over the past 30 years, fewer are aware that the percentage of federal financial aid available as grants has dropped precipitously, while the percentage represented by loans has grown proportionally. For low-income students and families, taking out significant educational debt poses far larger risks than it does for middle and upper income families.

Second, these students and their families enter the college application process with far less familiarity with the landscape of higher education and the requirements for matriculation, which makes the application process far more difficult.

Finally, as the first in their families to go on to post-secondary education, students are often intimidated by college campuses, and the make-up of their faculty and students; and they carry a heavy weight of family expectations and fears with them as they head off to a new and unknown world. The transition to college campuses is often much more fraught for these students than for those from middle and upper income families, where college is a known quantity.

Thus, rather than students’ attitudes being contradictory, they are reacting to real barriers to college that they see and experience in their lives – even if those barriers may be invisible to middle class educators, policymakers and researchers.

Chajet: My study showed that when a small school redefines structures, practice, and relationships, it produces graduates who outperform national averages in rates of college attendance and persistence and emerge with an increased desire to continue their learning. At the same time, graduates’ journeys collectively demonstrate the complexity of implementing a college-for-all mission given the reality of the obstacles low-income students of color face in college.

*National numbers come from 2003 US Census data compiled in “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2003” (US Census Bureau, 2004) and New York City numbers come from 2000 US Census data compiled in Census 2000 Summary File (US Census Bureau, 2000).

Bridges’ (pseudonym for school studied) persistence rates were higher because it structured its school towards its college-for-all mission: classes were not tracked; all students had access to college guidance and were helped to apply to college; students and teachers engaged in trusting relationships; academic courses were designed for rigor and engagement; high-stakes standardized tests did not dictate standards; and teachers, treated as professionals and given the power to shape practice.

At the same time the numbers were not what small schools educators’ hoped for; the obstacles were more varied and constant than many ever imagined. Graduates’ journeys revealed a complex story – one that captured students’ intense desire to learn and how trying college can be for low-income students of color. Critiques of college teaching, stories of money and family-related stress, and indications of alienation from campus-communities were echoed throughout many interviews and surveys were.

My findings spoke to practices in both small high schools and colleges. The data illustrated that small schools – even high performing ones – need to do more around college-readiness; specifically, they need to do more to develop students’ understanding of the landscape and costs of higher education and to support students through the college search, financial aid, and choice process. They also need to increase family involvement and provide professional development around college-readiness to all staff. At the same time, the post-secondary experiences of Bridges graduates reinforce many of the documented problems within higher education for low-income students of color: inadequate financial aid; the challenge of living between two (or among many) cultures; alienation from campus communities; a lack of tacit knowledge needed to navigate the system; and un-engaging classroom practice.

While the media and policy makers often attribute low persistence rates in college to high school under-preparation, there is a need for more accountability in higher education to support, engage, and integrate low-income students of color into college.

What can policy makers learn from your work?

Bloom & Chajet: If the New York City Department of Education is going to hold schools accountable for their college-going outcomes (as it is now doing on school report cards), it needs to dedicate sufficient resources to making this possible. This means vastly increasing the resources for hiring and training college counselors in schools, providing resources to help students visit college campuses and take part in programs on these campuses, as well as training teachers and providing curriculum to high schools to do work with students about college-going, beginning in middle school.

Have you done any follow-up work? 

Bloom & Chajet: Since completing our research, we have gone back into schools (through a grant from the Higher Education Services Corporation, administered by the Institute for Student Achievement) and worked to develop these kinds of resources to train teachers and implement curriculum with students. This year, with our colleague Lisa Cowan, we started an organization — College Access: Research & Action (CARA) — to help schools, community-based organizations, and the larger policy arena put into practice what we found through our research.

Are there further questions you are exploring? 

Bloom & Chajet: A “college-going culture” is often seen as the ideal. However, many schools struggle to operationalize this: Beyond wearing college sweatshirts or naming advisory classrooms after colleges, how can schools create a “culture” that encourages ALL students towards informed choices around post-secondary education?

In case you’ve forgotten, teenagers are extraordinarily self-conscious. A few of them put their hands up right away, ready to stroll up to the front of the room and try on some Elizabethan English, but they’re a small minority. When I ask for readers, most students aren’t even thinking about Shakespeare’s language; they’re worrying about the pimple on their nose or their changing voice. So when I ask for volunteers, it’s never surprising that many students simply slump down in their chairs and try to hide.

I teach in Brooklyn now, but my hunch is that this response, this hiding, is universal. Some years ago, I taught at a private school in Ann Arbor, Mich.; my students there used to hide too. What are these kids hiding from? What are they so afraid of?

It’s clear to me that they are afraid of failure. In many cases, they’re absolutely convinced that they will fail. Day after day, dejected students tell me that they can’t do things. They can’t write a paragraph; they can’t draw a tree; they can’t multiply fractions. Very often, our job as teachers is simply to push students to engage in tasks that they already know how to complete. It might not sound like hard work, but many of our students are so demoralized, it’s a wonder they even get out of bed in the morning.

Here’s the thing: They’re not just being moody teenagers. These students are expressing a hopelessness that’s been drilled into them for years. Day after day, year after year: our students hear the same message: that they are failures.

The 2010 film “Waiting for Superman,” which played like an informercial for charter schools, exemplified this message. It’s subtitle was “How We Can Save America’s Failing Public Schools,” and a widely aired preview made a point of telling the audience that American students lag far behind their international counterparts in every significant area but one — confidence. In other words, not only are our students failing, but they’re too dumb to realize it.

Granted, this little dig said more about the filmmaker’s attitudes than any educational reality, but these attitudes have been embraced and repeated for years. President Obama has said our students are failing; President Bush said they were failing. How many times do our students have to hear they’re no good before they start believing it? (Both presidents and pretty much every other prominent education reformer ignore the fact that when you control for poverty, our students are keeping pace with their international counterparts.)

Despite assertions to the contrary, academic overconfidence is not a big problem, at least not in the four schools I’ve worked in over the past 13 years. Fear and self-loathing most certainly are. I’ve counseled a weeping ninth-grader who couldn’t bear to be in the classroom because she felt like she wasn’t smart enough for high school. I’ve watched a student shake so violently that she could not complete the recitation of a 14-line poem. I’ve proctored a high-stakes trigonometry test where a student became physically ill because she was so terrified of failure. (She had to be excused which meant that she failed the exam.)

Which brings me to my next point: On top of all the nasty rhetoric about our students, our educational leadership has actually created a system designed to make our students fearful. I’m writing, specifically, about the fear induced by years of repetitive, stressful, high-stakes testing. In a system designed almost entirely around these tests, how could all but the few who excel on these tests feel good about themselves? The fearfulness we teachers encounter on a daily basis is a predictable consequence of this system, not some surprising side effect.

And this brings me to my final point: The fear is not only predictable, but is in fact desirable for a small number of people. Specifically, fear is very useful for the people who will employ our students, if those students are lucky enough to make it through high school. A frightened, malleable workforce, desperate for approval, is far more agreeable to some of these employers than a confident workforce that demands its worth be recognized.

Sound too conspiratorial? It’s exactly how our schools treat their workers. From allowing unreliable Teacher Data Reports to be published to leveling vicious anti-teacher rhetoric, the city and state have worked hard to create a climate of fear.

Earlier this month, the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher was published, and its findings suggested that fear is the dominant trend in American schools today. According to the survey, fear of all kinds — from teacher fears about job security to student fears about family finances — pervade American schools. In an excellent analysis of the survey, teacher Dan Brown writes, “Pessimism and worry are pervasive in American schools. Contending with elimination of services, suffocating poverty, more layoffs, larger classes, and an accountability regime at odds with genuine teaching and learning, America’s teachers are freaked out.”

This type of fear has no benefit for our students; it certainly has no benefit for our teachers. As long as a submissive workforce is a priority, we’ll all keep suffering in the classroom — and our Shakespeare performances will suffer too.

In my class this year, we have a motto: “You are not a number. You’re a human being.”

It’s meant to be silly and serious at the same time. Around here, we encourage 13-year-olds to embrace their silliness. So, on Monday, we took a moment to acknowledge and release a bit of the pressure created by the impending state exam. On the agenda, I wrote “Celebration of ELA-related Creativity.” I gave my students the instruction to create something that would help us kick off the test preparation unit. The only guidelines: It must be creative; it can be funny if you like, and overall, it must be positive.

Among other things, my students composed a “Schoolhouse Rock”-style singalong song, performed a re-written Shakespeare scene, showered the audience with paper airplanes containing a mathematical formula that determines the odds of getting a good score by guessing on every question, and choreographed an interpretive dance. I can tell you, for last-second projects with no grade attached and 30 minutes to create, they were awesome. This never fails: I am always humbled and amazed by the outpouring of creative energy that occurs when kids are given the space to express themselves in a non-judgmental environment.

Going forward, of course, I shall dutifully instruct them on reading skills, comparative essay writing, and test-taking strategies. Is it possible to make this instruction interesting and engaging? Sure, to a certain extent. But for those moments when the boredom borders on painful, we now have a poster to point to and sing (to the tune of B-i-n-g-o), “There once was a cow who went to school and studied for the ELA…”

The score I received on my own teacher data report is based on the two years I spent teaching seventh-grade English in the South Bronx. I’m not too concerned with the results: The magical math placed my teaching abilities in the “above average” range. Lucky for me. Also quite fortunate is my current position in a school where I am respected as an educator and an individual and allowed to be thoughtful and creative with my teaching. And, certainly, there are other advantages. I tell people, “Getting this job was like winning the teacher lottery.” Due to the school’s popularity, we evaluate and hand-select each student who comes here. The parents are supportive, their kids motivated and cooperative. We have all the materials and technology we need. I readily admit that these factors make some of what I describe much easier to achieve. But I’ll ask my readers, just for the moment, to please suspend your conclusions until I have reached mine.

Teaching such academically inclined, successful students presents a different set of challenges from those encountered in many public schools. Our kids, quite frankly, are far too stressed out for their age.  The system of high school acceptance in New York City creates a focus on grades and test scores that approaches fanatical among students vying for spaces at the “top” schools.  It begins in elementary school: Fourth-graders are made aware that their state test score will be a determining factor in their middle school acceptance. If they want to come to a school like mine, they had better receive a “top” score and “top” grades.

Imagine your sweet, intelligent, talented 9-year-old child going through the following thought process: I mean, if I don’t get into the right middle school, then I won’t get into my first-choice high school, which besides proving that I’m not as smart as I’m supposed to be, will prevent me from going to the college I’ve had picked out since kindergarten because my genius older sister goes there and then my parents won’t love me as much as her and I’ll end up working at McDonald’s and my life will be ruined forever. Obvi.

An over-dramatization for effect?  Perhaps. But believe me, it isn’t so far from the truth. I watch my eighth-graders spin those wheels for months out of the year. Soon they’ll have similar thoughts about college, and on and on it goes. Some people will tell me, well, that’s just life: Be realistic — if you want to be the best, if you want to be successful, you have to be competitive. This, Ms. Lacey, is “the way the world works.”

I am so over that argument. The world is hardly static. Things change so rapidly that our slow adult brains need kids to explain the continual shifting of popular Internet memes. Yet, people still seem to think we should be educating for the way the world once was, or is right now, and so we unwittingly limit our children as we have limited ourselves. A poignant symbol of this phenomenon is the education community’s obsession with quantifying people’s value. We have been reducing students to data points for years, but now that the same has been done very publicly to teachers, people seem ready to have a real conversation about it. I have no problem with using valid data to measure performance and help us improve, if we can find a way to do it wisely; Bill Gates already made that argument for us. The consciousness of our culture is clearly tuned into this issue at this moment, so my hope is that we will use the momentum to move in a positive direction.  A possible first step in that direction?  Let’s adopt my classroom motto and begin our conversations from there.  “You are not a number.  You’re a human being.”

Teachers are human beings; usually, the types who feel compelled to do something beneficial for the rest of humanity. You can’t reduce to data the complex human exchange that occurs between teachers and students. Where do you account for the value of teaching empathy and service to community? Of celebrating a child for her own quirky personality, talents, and uniqueness? How about the building of self-awareness and esteem? Sparking an interest in something that will bring a student joy for the rest of his life? You know as well as I that this list could go on forever.

Teachers are in a position to plant seeds for a positively evolving future. We chose this job because we understand the need to educate our fellow humans in a way that nurtures their potential, compassion, and vibrant inner lives. In my school, I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to act on this understanding. Students need to be respected, supported, and appreciated in order to grow and flourish; their teachers need the same. I choose to envision a future in which we all receive those things in abundance.

Trina Lacey is an eighth-grade humanities teacher at East Side Middle School as well as a writer.

As the first notes of congratulations began to arrive in my inbox, I understood that people meant well, yet I felt annoyed that anybody would and could delve into my professional life. Notably, I also felt grateful that my numbers would not force me to ashamedly try to explain them away. I was keenly aware that the rope that would have me swinging back and forth in jubilation could just as easily have been wrapped around my neck in humiliation. I felt sickened by the numbers next to the names of my colleagues who I know to be hardworking. I wrote back to those who sent their well wishes, disavowing the data and explaining that the so called “evidence” meant nothing because it could not measure that which makes a teacher valuable.

Now in my ninth year in the classroom, I understand the art of teaching, that is, those things not measurable by multiple-choice questions or by assessors armed with clipboards and checklists who believe the breadth and depth of learning in my room is revealed by the freshness of my bulletin board or the sheer quantity of newsprint hanging from my walls. I could teach in a hut with a dirt floor and be an excellent teacher because what makes me excellent is, in large part, an unquantifiable aesthetic that cannot be captured by a mathematical procedure. Inspiring students, giving them something to think about long after the school day is over, pushing and poking them to be their best selves, nurturing wisdom, stimulating passionate efforts, assisting discovery, facilitating connections, determining when to lead, guide or let go — these things cannot be found using an algorithm.

Armed with this belief about teaching and the positive responses of those I loved and valued, I reached out to other teachers in the 99th percentile to see if they felt the same. Many of them did and a group of us have signed a statement renouncing the data’s usefulness and publication.

Still for all the motivating anger I felt, I also felt demoralized and quite simply sad. The data had no power to prove my worth, yet, since it was being used for political purposes and to misinform the public, the data did have the power to make me feel worthless. And that is when a very unlikely visitor reminded me of the true value that I add to my students’ lives.

A wonderful hallmark of my brief teaching career has been a constant flow of former students who come back to visit me. I can always count on the previous year’s crop to return but last week a student whom I hadn’t seen since my first year came by.  Lena was the type of student a teacher could never forget and not for any positive reasons. She presented a world of problems at a time when I had the fewest skills to deal with them.  She was angry, oppositional, violent and absent a lot. She was the first student to call me a “bitch.” Once she was so mad about something, she put her fist through a glass partition at school. Another time, she and a fellow student got into a fight, which led to a suspension after she hit a police officer who had tried to break it up. And since teaching can generate wildly conflicting emotions, it should come as no surprise that I had loved this girl, prayed for this girl and had also been downright grateful when this girl was not in attendance.

I wondered if my face betrayed all these emotions when I saw her standing in my doorway. She was a bit taller and fuller in the face but otherwise unchanged. We exchanged a long, strong hug in front of my current students. I felt like crying as I thought to myself, “She’s still alive” (something I had wondered about many times over the years). She said she had business nearby but couldn’t miss her chance to see her “favorite teacher.” It was the use of that phrase that filled my eyes with tears. A veteran teacher once said to me, “All you can do is plant seeds. You may never know whether or not they grow.” Her words manifested themselves before me as I looked at this “seed” I had been uncertain would grow. Lena is going to school to become a dental hygienist. She has a 3-year-old daughter and reported that overall things are going well for her. I know there is more to her story that she chose not to share. I know her life is not perfect but still she was alive and working toward a stable future and quite frankly that is more than I had expected. On top of that, to have her call me her “favorite teacher,” well — that was unbelievable given how incompetent I was my first year, how troublesome she had been, and how often we butted heads. We spoke a bit longer and before she left, I tried to hug her long enough to last awhile, as if the strength of my embrace could shield her from trouble. I want so many good things for her.

After Lena had gone, I turned to my current group and said, “Teachers don’t get paid a lot, but when students come back to visit it’s like getting an extra paycheck. I want you to remember that when you are walking by this school one day. Come up to see me; it does my heart good. And to have Lena say that I was her ‘favorite teacher’ — well, that is why I work so hard, because 30 years from now when you have your own children and see me on the subway, I want you to say, ‘You see that woman. She was the best teacher I ever had.’” And as I stood there before my students, having made this confession, generous voice after generous voice said, “I’ll come back to see you, Mrs. Whitehouse.” For a little while, we were all a bit verklempt, me most of all for having been shown my true value.

Figure out a way to put that in an algorithm and perhaps I will accept it as providing some relevant evidence about the value I add to a classroom. Until then, keep your 99th-percentile rating. I prefer a letter of recommendation from one of my students.

Maribeth Whitehouse is a special education teacher at IS 190 in the Bronx. She is in her ninth year of teaching eighth grade.

Scanning is quite the operation. Students are herded into a roped-off line leading into the gymnasium, which is transformed into a pseudo-airport where scanning machines and a large police presence have replaced games of basketball and volleyball.

The items at the center of this process seem to be cell phones. Department of Education policy prohibits cell phones in school, but many schools turn a blind eye. Some students are able to get their phones through the scanners while many have their phones taken from them. If a phone is taken, parents are required to come to the school to reclaim their child’s property.

Is cell phone use in schools a serious problem? Yes. I understand, and can empathize, with the argument frequently made by parents: Having a phone is a matter of safety and allows parents and their children to contact each other in the unfortunate case of an emergency. But students are constantly using their phones in non-emergency situations.

Cell phones, for better or for worse, have become an engrained part of everyday life. My students do not know life without them — they use them to text in the hall, entering and leaving class, and in the middle of lessons. Teachers are responsible for curbing usage to some degree, and creating quality lessons, I hope, encourages participation and discourages phone use. At the same time, I can attest from experience that there are some students that will push the boundaries regardless of the pace of the lesson. (I believe the answer lies in teaching proper phone-use etiquette.)

Despite these challenges, scanning and confiscating phones is not the answer. These are some observations I have made during the days where scanning has taken place:

• As students approach the school they must walk up a long, gradual hill. On scanning days, police vehicles parked in front of the building alert students to the situation. Those that fear the loss of their phone simply turn around and choose not to attend.
• Those who make the decision to attend have their phones taken away. In many cases these are academically-conscious students who rarely use their phones during instructional time.
• Students that do attend are very late to class because of long lines.  The first three classes on these days are generally “throw-away” as such reduced attendance does not allow teachers to move ahead with the planned lesson.  (In one instance, scanning took place on the day students were to take school-wide quarterly exams.) Additionally, with the gymnasium being the center of activity, all physical education classes are relegated to sitting in the auditorium for 45 minutes.
• Students who have their phones taken are in bad spirits for the rest of the day.  They feel angry, upset and violated — focusing on academics is not the first thing on many of their minds.

While I do not have access to the detailed findings of scanning, to the best of my knowledge there has been no public, or school-wide, announcement of any weapons being found.

On scanning days, my students have told me: “This is a school, not a prison.”  “The lady at the local deli is holding phones for the day for one dollar so students can attend without losing their phones.”  “One student tried to turn around when he saw the police outside and he was tackled by them.”

I cannot attest to the accuracy of the last two student comments as I did not witness either event. But even if they are rumors, they are troubling and distracting to the school environment. (And at many schools with permanent metal detectors, local shop owners and even mobile storage trucks charge students to keep their phones safe during the day.)

Yet it is the first comment that merits the most concern.

Students feel that in our school — a place that is supposed to provide physical and emotional safety — they are increasingly being treated more like criminals than students. This is a serious problem with serious implications. How “random” is the scanning? Are students at top-performing test-based-admission schools facing the same situation?

The staff and administration work tirelessly everyday to help our students to improve academically.  As we continue to work amidst the impending turnaround vote – one that would see 50 percent of the staff displaced and our school reopened under a new name — the city has thrown yet another roadblock in our path. Attendance rates play a part in how schools are rated on the yearly report cards — we have no control over the fact that scanning has given us several days of abysmal attendance.

If the goal of the Department of Education is to provide every student with a quality education, policies such as scanning — which lower attendance and interfere with learning — cannot be implemented at schools that are already facing monumental challenges.

Teenagers are freethinking citizens of the United States who are discovering their growing ability to argue, to think for themselves. If they are not given the opportunity to face the consequences of their own choices, these citizens will not grow up to be the responsible adults we need them to be. Unfortunately, sometimes the consequences include low scores.

I recently witnessed a scene in my school’s main office that reminded me how powerful and necessary it is for the adults in a young person’s life to put the burden of academic responsibility on his shoulders. This scene needs to be shared as badly as any TDR data, lest the notion of the teacher who doesn’t check in with parents — not to mention the stereotype of the parent who doesn’t check on his child — go unchallenged in our city.

As a public school, Kurt Hahn lacks the personnel and after-school hours (let alone the legal prerogative) to truly require anything from parents beyond an emergency contact card. Yet our parents know they are welcome in our doors at any time, and I’ve seen teachers repeatedly drop their prep materials to have the essential conversation with students and parents that puts everyone on the same page about academic progress. This is how I witnessed a student’s freshman year forever change — for better or for worse, of course, is still up to him.

The student — let’s call him Daquane Andrews — had come in with his mother to meet with his math teacher about his low grades in her class. Ms. Andrews repeatedly emphasized how difficult it was to take off work and get to East Flatbush. She was concerned that football practice was taking away from Dequane’s energy level and was becoming an excuse for him to not get his homework done. While she was waiting for his math teacher to arrive, the ninth-grade history teacher, Ms. Blain — who was typing a lesson at one of the office computers and didn’t notice Ms. Andrews — asked Daquane to explain his disruptive behavior in class the day before. The mother picked up on this and inquired for details. When Ms. Blain realized who Ms. Andrews was and that she and Daquane were in the office for an academic conference, she set her work aside and joined them in conversation. The arrival of the math teacher turned the conversation into a dialogue about the student’s general lack of focus and tendency to, as his mother put it, “play middle school games.”

Both teachers heartily refuted reports the boy had given his mother that he was never assigned homework. They supported her suspicion that the behaviors he was exhibiting now would lead not only to irritation from future teachers but failure to prepare adequately for his state exams and for college. The mother asked her son, in front of these teachers and the entire office, if they were going to need to reinstate the homework signature sheet she’d made for his teachers in middle school. She asked him how he could get up at 5 a.m. for football practice but not get his math homework done each night. She told him that if he doesn’t start bringing homework home from math and history every night, she’d make assignments for him herself. Her son listened silently, experiencing not just the gravity and humiliation of the situation but the concern of these three women all talking to him together in an open, familiar room. (Of course, if he’s a healthily egotistical teenager, he was probably too miserable at the idea of losing football to appreciate his luck.)

Which is why the final straw was the entrance of a burly man with a backpack swinging his way to the other side of the counter.  The boy’s eyes lit up momentarily, then went dark with mortified fear. “Oh,” the mother pounced immediately. “This must be your football coach.” She proceeded to repeat each of her threats so that the coach would hear them. Her son was officially caught in a stifling wraparound web that would make it quite difficult for him to double-cross these particular adults again. The attendance secretary, who acts as a surrogate grandmother for most students, sat in the corner cluck-clucking about how “these foolish kids don’t know how lucky they are.” She’s right.

I spoke to Ms. Blain later in the week about how striking that scene had been to me. She reported that, sadly, Dequane had still shown up without his homework the next day. Despite her fervor in the office, Ms. Andrews is not home in the afternoons and evenings to reinforce her orders. Daquane’s scores won’t improve just because his mother and teachers have breathed down his neck. They shouldn’t. He is becoming an adult, and perhaps he needs to experience the consequences of his own failure — the loss of opportunity, low scores on state exams, the surpassing performance of his classmates — in order to grow. It’s a teacher’s day (and night) job to teach, but it’s a student’s lifelong job to learn.

Don’t get me wrong—teachers should be evaluated on our progress and held to consistent and high standards. But when the core of our work is growing people who will also one day be held to professional standards, society can’t afford to rest a teacher’s career on student performance. We must find a way to convey the responsibility both teacher and student have in creating a successful education system. We need to harness parent energy in whatever form — at whatever time of day — we can get it. We need to fight the symptoms of poverty that distract so many of our bright young students from their schoolwork. And we need to address — head on and without fear of political finger-pointing — the healthy stubbornness of a confident young adolescent whose leadership and confidence we will need once his math, writing, and reasoning skills are strong enough to give voice to those qualities.

Through most of that time, Bloomberg has justified mayoral control as a mechanism for focusing accountability for the achievement of New York’s 1.1 million students. Mayoral control, he argued, placed him solely responsible for the system, and he should be judged by the results. If members of the voting public didn’t like what they were seeing, well, they could just vote him out of office at the end of his term.

The centralization of authority in a single individual paralleled a structure with which Bloomberg was highly familiar: CEO of a large, complex business. Bloomberg L.P., the company Mike Bloomberg founded, offers an array of financial and information services to hundreds of thousands of customers around the world. The company’s website describes its hallmark as “innovation and a passion for getting things right.”

That’s why it’s so disconcerting to hear the mayor hold forth on educational outcomes in New York City. Is he speaking as a CEO seeking to bolster his investors’ confidence in his products? Or do his public pronouncements reflect the assessments that he uses to guide the internal strategies of the organization? Does he respond to new information and incorporate it into his thinking? A certain amount of public optimism and embellishment would be tolerable if they were accompanied by a realistic appraisal of the successes and failures of his initiatives. Does the mayor truly understand the state of education in New York City?

Speaking at a panel on big-city school reform in Washington, D.C. on March 2nd, Mayor Bloomberg repeated a claim he’s made before: “We have closed the gap between black and Latino kids and white and Asian kids,” he said. “We have cut it in half.”

It’s a claim that has never held up to serious scrutiny.

Among the various scholars and journalists who have discredited this assertion are Nikhil Swaminathan, Sharon Otterman and Robert Gebeloff, Elizabeth Green, the Associated Press, theGotham Gazette, Jessica Shiller, Anna Phillips, and my colleague Jennifer Jennings and me (see here,here, here, and with Sherman Dorn, too), and me alone (here, here, and here).

Now, some of these analyses are a few years old, and the mayor was speaking just last week. It therefore seems like an opportune time to revisit the question using the most recent data available — the 2011 New York State test results, which report performance in English Language Arts and math for students in grades three through eight, and the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress data for New York City, which report performance for fourth-grade and eighth-grade students in reading and mathematics.

I wanted to see if the magnitude of the average score difference between black and Latino students, on the one hand, and white and Asian students, on the other, had declined from 2003 to 2011. The year 2003 is an appropriate baseline for assessing what has happened under Mayor Bloomberg’s control of the New York City public schools because the law giving him control was passed in June of 2002, and the 2003 tests were administered relatively early in 2003, before any of Bloomberg’s signature reforms had been implemented.

Given the mayor’s penchant for reducing complex phenomena to a single number (Teacher Data Reports, anyone?), I have summarized the shrinkage in the achievement gap on the NAEP and New York State assessments as the percentage reduction in the gap. (For the technically-minded, this involved calculating group differences in citywide standard-deviation units, weighted by the size of the four racial/ethnic groups, for each grade and subject area, and then averaging those group differences, in both 2011 and 2003. The ratio of the 2011 group difference to the 2003 group difference indicates the extent of the change in the achievement gap over that eight-year period.)

So here it is: Looking across ELA and math scores on state exams for New York City students in grades three through eight in 2003, the achievement gap separating black and Latino students from white and Asian students was .74 of a standard deviation. In 2011, the achievement gap was .73 of a standard deviation. This represents a 1 percent reduction in the magnitude of the achievement gap. The careful reader will note that the mayor has thus overstated the cut in the achievement gap by a factor of 50.

What about for NAEP? In 2003, the achievement gap, averaged across reading and math scores in the fourth and eighth grades, was .76 of a standard deviation. In 2011, the gap was .78 of a standard deviation. Far from being cut in half, the achievement gap on the NAEP assessment actually increasedb y 3 percent between 2003 and 2011.

Bloomberg said, “We have closed the gap between black and Latino kids and white and Asian kids. We have cut it in half.” But the gap has scarcely budged; it’s shrunk by 1 percent on the New York State tests, and increased by 3 percent on NAEP.

It’s the emperor’s new close.

This post also appears on Eye on Education, Aaron Pallas’s Hechinger Report blog.

Teaching in a school devoted to serving the needs of English language learners from across the world, Scott taught in a way that might have seemed unconventional. Learners used to understanding teachers as providers of knowledge might have been caused discomfort at first.

On the day I walked into Scott’s classroom, every one of his social studies students was engaged — a challenge often noticeable enough in an environment where students’ needs are so diverse. What I was most impressed by, though, was that no more than three students were working on the same task.

As I made my way through the room looking at students’ work and asking questions, I was amazed to see students creating posters, writing essays, having academic conversations, or tutoring others; all as a means of demonstrating learning of the same material. In the middle of the room Scott stood taking notes as one student after another stepped up to defend the learning he or she had accomplished in the unit the class was concluding.

To the layman, it may have appeared as if Scott had merely be blessed with a batch of phenomenal students. To the aspiring expert teacher, the distinguished skill and dedication necessary to create this kind of classroom learning space — done during, but more often outside of class time (e.g. curriculum planning, parent conferences, diagnostic assessments, relationship building, classroom culture and routines development, professional development around effective strategies for English language learners in the social studies content area) — was inspiring.

I left Brooklyn International so excited that the next day I spent nearly 15 minutes relating my observations to colleagues at my school in the Bronx. We decided that on the teacher effectiveness rubric being used to assess us, a rating entitled “Scott” should be available beyond “distinguished.”

I tell this story because it so nicely encapsulates one of the things about working in New York that so vividly stands out in my memory: the opportunity to improve with the best.

I offer my assistant principal as another example.

The first time I met Liz, she grilled me not on how many years I’d been teaching or the kind of personality I had in the classroom or my favorite instructional strategies, but the last book I read. We had a lengthy conversation about the purpose of social studies education and how that purpose varied depending on the school environment and students.

Liz and our principal set aside money for professional development and time for teacher collaboration in a way I’d never seen in any other school I’d worked in. She stepped in my class at least a few times a month, not to evaluate or suggest changes in my style, but to listen to the students learn and co-teach from time to time. During this time, she taught me to teach students who’d only been speaking English for a few years how to make meaning out of parts of a complex text like Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith — a feat I’d found challenging with native English speakers.

A few other things I learned from Liz? Great writing is about great thinking. School is an apprenticeship in learning; students should be learning primarily how to learn. Teach content just slightly above the class’s most advanced learner, create structures for the learning to trickle down, and you will have an effective means of differentiation.

I taught for four years before moving to New York, often feeling like I was coming up short finding useful ways of improving my practice. My experiences in New York advanced my teaching quickly, and I found myself on a whole new level, exploring new pedagogical subtleties I hadn’t previously been aware of.

While everyone in the city might not be lucky enough to have such a competent administrator or visit the classroom of a truly master teacher, New York, as it does with many professions, offers teachers the opportunity to work with many on the field’s forefront. Take the time to work with these professionals, and New York City is the ultimate professional development experience.

James Boutin taught in New York City for several years and now teaches in a small school associated with the Coalition of Essential Schools in Washington State. This piece originally appeared on his blog, An Urban Teacher’s Education.