The laws of New York recognize the labor-management fault line, but they do little to guide a collective-bargaining process toward agreements in the many districts in which teacher-evaluation systems are contested. Each side brings a powerful public value to bear on the disagreement.

For the employers, it’s all about efficiency. It’s in the public interest, they argue, to recruit, retain and reward the best teachers, in order to maximize the collective achievement of students. A teacher-evaluation system that fails to identify those teachers who are effective, and those who are ineffective, can neither weed out consistent low-performers nor target those who might best benefit from intensive help. Rewarding high-performing teachers can, in the short run, help keep them in their classrooms, they claim, and, in the long run, can help expand the pool of talented individuals who enter the occupation.

For teachers, the key concern is fairness. Fairness is primarily a procedural issue: Teachers, and the unions that represent them, seek an evaluation process that is neither arbitrary nor capricious, relying on stable and valid criteria that they believe accurately characterize the quality of their work. In this view, an evaluation process is unfair to the extent that it can be manipulated by a building administrator or school district to yield a particular rating for a teacher’s performance. It is also unfair if random factors beyond a teacher’s control unduly influence the evaluation of his or her performance.

The values of efficiency and fairness collide head-on in New York’s Education Law §3012-c, passed as part of the state’s efforts to bolster its chances in the 2010 Race to the Top competition. The law requires annual professional performance reviews (APPRs) that sort teachers into four categories—“highly effective,” “effective,” “developing” and “ineffective”—based on multiple measures of effectiveness, including student growth on state and locally selected assessments and a teacher’s performance according to a teacher practice rubric.

The fundamental problem is that it’s hard to assess the efficiency or fairness of an evaluation system that doesn’t exist yet. There are too many unknowns to be able to judge, which is one of the arguments for piloting an evaluation system before bringing it to scale. The properties of the state tests that are to be used to assess teachers’ contributions to student learning are a moving target; the tests have been changing in recent years in response to concerns about their difficulty, predictability and coverage of state curricular standards. And in a couple of years, those standards and assessments will change, as New York and many other states phase in the Common Core standards and new assessments designed to measure mastery of them. The models to estimate a teacher’s position relative to other teachers in contributing to students’ test performance are imprecise at the level of the individual teacher, and different models yield different results for a given teacher. There’s been little to no discussion of how to incorporate this uncertainty into the single numerical score a teacher will receive.

The evaluation of teachers’ practices via classroom observations using New York State Education Department (NYSED)-approved rubrics, such as Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching or Robert Pianta’s Classroom Assessment Scoring System, is another unknown. There’s evidence that with proper training, observers can reliably rate teachers’ classroom practices, but the nature of the training is critical, and there is no evidence to date of New York City’s ability to prepare more than 1,500 principals, or the principals’ “designees,” to carry out multiple observations of many teachers, teaching many different school subjects, each year.

Amazingly, there is even uncertainty about whether the evaluations can or should be based solely on a teacher’s performance in a single year. The statute creating the new evaluation system in New York describes it as an “annual professional performance review.” But is this a professional performance review that occurs annually, or a review of annual professional performance—that is, a teacher’s performance in the most recent year? The guidance provided by the NYSED suggests that it has no idea. “For 2011-12, only one year of teacher or principal student growth percentile scores will factor into each educator’s evaluation,” the guidance states. “When more years of data are available, NYSED will consider whether each evaluation year should include more than one year of educator student growth results. Empirical and policy considerations will determine the decision.”

Well, that certainly clarifies matters. In other words, a “bad” year where a teacher is ranked relatively low compared to other teachers might reverberate, affecting his or her ranking in subsequent years. But a good observational rating in a given year seemingly will have no spillover effect into subsequent years. If, as has been true in Washington, D.C.’s IMPACT teacher-evaluation system, teachers generally score higher on observational ratings than on their value-added or growth-score rankings relative to other teachers, the carryover for value-added performance—but not observations of teachers’ professional practices—appears unfair. And in D.C., this evaluation system has resulted in the termination of hundreds of teachers based on one or two years of performance.

Teacher-evaluation systems have multiple purposes, which might include certifying teachers as competent or selecting some for particular forms of professional development to enhance their professional practice. For most of these purposes, it’s essential that those with a stake in the education system view these evaluation systems as legitimate—and the perceived efficiency and fairness of an evaluation system are central to such judgments. It’s not hard to see why a great many teachers, in New York City and across the state, have serious doubts about the fairness of New York State’s APPR process. And if future teachers do as well, the process could have the unintended consequence of reducing, rather than increasing, the pool of individuals willing to consider teaching as a vocation. This, coupled with the more than 1,300 principals across the state who have raised questions about the efficiency of the process, illuminates the challenges confronting the state as it seeks to implement the APPR system and avoid a scolding from U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

William Blackstone, an 18th-century English legal scholar, wrote “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” Benjamin Franklin, one of the founders of our country, later upped the ante to 100 to one. The principle captures squarely the trade-off between the value of efficiency and the value of fairness. A legal system that lets the guilty go free is inefficient, as these offenders are free to continue to transgress against the common good. But to Franklin and others, that was still preferable to a legal system that did not provide adequate procedural protections for all, whether innocent or guilty, because such a system would be inconsistent with the principle of fairness so central to the American polity.

It’s important to note that Blackstone and Franklin were concerned with the workings of government; fairness in the private sector was not a central concern, and efficiency was taken for granted as a consequence of market forces. Civil servants, as agents and employees of the state, arguably are subject to a different set of rights and responsibilities than those working in the private sector, and teachers are one of the largest groups of such public servants. What’s an acceptable tradeoff between efficiency and fairness in the mix of teachers’ rights and responsibilities? It’s a lot easier to speculate about percentages in the abstract than to confront the possibility that you, or someone close to you, might be out of a job because of an untested teacher-evaluation system that cuts corners on fairness.

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

Let’s take it a step further: what makes a great school? Again, the same basic logic applies: great schools are ones that produce the highest proportion of students who perform well on tests. The role of the school, in other words, is to produce students successful according to test proficiency.

Perhaps this framework appears overly simplistic, but it’s the framework that currently directs our efforts to improve public schools. Schools are knowledge-manufacturing facilities, with students being their products. This framework has led school reformers to advocate for accountability systems, human capital mechanisms, and other private sector management tools in public school reform.

Not surprisingly, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is an aggressive proponent of this business framework. The mayor’s private sector management approach recently led him to propose a “turnaround” program at 33 city schools that would require replacing half of those school’s teachers. Not happy with the product? Fire experienced workers and bring in cheaper, lower skilled replacements.

This framework is not just a New York thing. All across the country, school districts are being pushed, by influential figures like U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Calif. Secretary of Education Bonnie Reiss, to evaluate teachers based on a “value-added” analysis. What does this mean? It’s a kind of metaphor: students are raw natural resources; unprocessed, they contribute little to the economy and thus possess little value. If teachers process them effectively, however, their value increases.

Let’s leave aside our gut reactions to talking about children this way. The real problem with this framework is that it’s been a dead end. For the most part, debates about how to produce better students have led to discord within the field of education, while demonstrating little significant impact.

Applying an industrial-growth model to student learning has rightfully caused consternation on the part of both parents and teachers. Parents don’t send their children to school simply to be processed like chaff from wheat. Yes, parents want their kids to get good jobs and to be academically successful, but they also want their kids to become mature, responsible, well-rounded individuals. Parents look for more from a school than its achievement on tests: is the school safe? Will their child receive individualized support and attention? Are there extracurricular resources and programs available? Are children happy at school? What sort of curriculum is offered?

As special education teachers, we know how critical these environmental factors are. Our students, for reasons as varied as their individual learning needs, rarely thrive in a high pressure, test-driven environment. The vast majority of students with exceptional learning needs perform significantly below the norm on standardized tests, significantly enough that these tests (or the scores required to pass them) must constantly be modified so that our students can be accounted as successful. Students receiving special education services are often more attuned to environmental factors than their general education counterparts. It is this sensitivity to their environment that often makes it so difficult for such students to focus on their studies.

Schools as ecosystems

But positive, supportive environments are not important only for students with exceptional learning needs. All students thrive in environments that support their development in diverse ways: from offering a coherent, sequential curriculum to providing students with a comfortable, stimulating physical space. Such schools, like their curricula, take responsibility not simply for academic development, but personal development as well. School environments where the curriculum is designed around standardized tests, and where factors like the physical and social environment take a back seat to those tests, are not conducive to learning.

We propose a fundamental shift in the framework and language we use to discuss educational reform. Instead of a framework that views students as products, we propose a framework in which the products of education are viewed as the contexts and content of schools themselves. The schools we produce should be positive and nurturing learning environments where students are engaged in a rich, coherent curriculum. Rather than view our students as widgets, we’d do better to view them as vibrant, dynamic organisms, and view the school, by extension, as an ecosystem. While such a model would make it harder to quantify school quality based on a simple numerical scale, it would enable us to have more productive conversations about systemic education reform, and to take action in targeted ways that will have a sustainable impact.

There are principles for maintaining a healthy ecosystem that can provide guidance in strengthening our school environments. We are certain that this shift in focus will — perhaps paradoxically — result in more productive student outcomes. Land maintained according to sound ecological principles results in abundant microbial soil life, interdependency of diverse species, and a sustainable yield. A school maintained according to ecological principles will result in lower teacher turnover, greater community engagement, and positive long-term student outcomes.

Our belief is that many schools commonly considered “great” already operate as healthy, sustainable ecosystems. Such schools offer their students adequate sunlight, fresh air, exercise, and nutrition. Their students feel intellectually, emotionally, and physically safe because their school communities celebrate diversity and offer equity of opportunity. These schools offer an array of supplemental options–such as music, foreign languages, clubs, and sports–to meet the diverse needs of their dynamic student bodies. They offer protection from short-sighted policies and destructive external forces through the strong relationships and trust engendered and developed within the school community. They possess built-in mechanisms to maintain equity and equilibrium, preventing one type of personality or learning need from dominating at the expense of others.

Cultivation, not demolition

How does this framework relate to ongoing conflict around school closures? Under the Department of Education’s current “turnaround” plan, as many as 33 city schools could be closed, re-staffed (with as many as half their current teachers replaced), and reopened. At schools all over New York, teachers, students, and families have voiced concerns about the city’s slash-and-burn approach to school “turnaround.”

If schools are factories, tearing down “ineffective” ones and replacing them with newer, shinier ones might sound like good business. If, however, we view schools as ecosystems, then struggling schools are depleted ecosystems desperately in need of resuscitation and support. Such resuscitation requires a holistic, long-term approach.

Using an ecological design approach, reformers could not treat schools as vacant lots primed for subdivision. Instead, school revitalization would need to be a community-driven, long-term process. In an ecological framework, school reformers would need to acknowledge the complexity of school communities, rather than simply pretending that schools could be leveled, bulldozed, and magically reinvented as high performing lots of isolated land.

Implicit in such a framework, and diametrically opposed to the “student as product” framework, is the understanding that there is no ideal school (nor student). Just as healthy ecosystems might come in a myriad of forms, healthy school environments may come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, dependent on specific local community needs and circumstances. That said, healthy school environments, like ecosystems, are guided and cultivated by a set of core principles, which the authors would like to explore in future posts.

Perhaps the best part of this paradigm shift (for the authors) is that in such a framework, the role of the teacher would shift from test-prep overseer to environmental steward. Instead of being trained and treated as a widget, teachers would be content experts and community leaders of their classroom and school ecosystem, responsible for all the students who inhabit it. Such stewards would necessarily need to be long-term inhabitants of these ecosystems themselves, growing more and more effective as their knowledge of the environment deepens and their relationships within the school community strengthens.

A new metric

Do we sound like dreamers? Would such a model be impossible to quantify? We do not believe so, and we’re not the first to propose such a paradigm shift. In fact, we believe that by refocusing our attention on the content and contexts of our schools, we can establish a new measuring stick. What’s more, since this framework would not be based on improving student test scores but on improving school environments, the responsibility would be shared by all who work within and support that community, rather than solely upon the backs of individual students and teachers within the confines of an isolated classroom.

In the posts that follow, the authors will lay out a series of ecological principles that we believe can be used as a guide for effective school design and reform. We will also examine model schools and investigate how they’ve constructed such exceptional school environments. We look forward to your feedback.

I recited those lyrics — an adaptation of a Watch the Throne song that I called “Regents in Paris” — over the public address system at my school last week. Teachers and students danced in the hallway chanting in time “Let’s do this test/Let’s pass this test.” It was an absurd scene that fit with the absurd scenario: Students’ reading/writing ability was about to be “officially” assessed in the form of a three-hour-long onslaught of mundane, out-of-context passages that students were supposed to care about enough to analyze in short snippets of writing.

Yes, it was time for the January Regents exams. I had asked half of my junior class to sit for the English Regents even though they did not need to pass it until June. The plan was that we could get the test out of the way for them. The other half of the group took a mock Regents exam to prepare for the June test, and I took it with them. I wanted to understand the test-taking experience more genuinely.

Before I could get to the Regents exams, though, I had to review students’ final papers for my English class. I spent the beginning of the week doing just that. Though the students’ work had some internal inconsistencies and plenty of room for growth, these essays showed that they had successfully analyzed novels through the lens of gender identity and gender socialization. The essays were well structured, validated by quotations, and genuinely interesting to read.

Reflecting on the book she read, one student wrote: “Seeing a forked tongue on a human for the first time, Lui states that it ‘is normally something done by crazy people.’ This suggests that modification has become less of an expectation for women and more of self-expression for both genders.” Another student compared the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” to the Japanese novel “Snakes and Earrings.” The student wrote, “Yet, despite the constant burdens placed on the women mainly because of their gender, by the end of the 20th century they were able to make it possible for people such as those in Hitomi Kanehara’s ‘Snakes and Earrings’ to exist without constant oppression from the men in their lives.” The students’ writing showed a level of insight and engagement that outstripped what I had in high school. These papers were the result of two weeks of drafting and revising — otherwise known as the writing process.

By Wednesday, I had finished grading the final papers and joined all of the school’s English teachers as we sequestered ourselves in a room and pore over of the results of the Regents exams. After hearing the feedback and reviewing some of the work myself, I felt like the students’ writing had regressed to an eighth- or ninth-grade level. Some very talented kids wrote sufficient but very rudimentary essays. This upset me and set me to reflect over why there was such a gap between the final papers and the Regents.

Was it:

A. They ran out of time
B. They forget details of the books they had read
C. The simplistic format produced simplistic results
D.  My editing and consultations during the writing of their final papers had completely supplemented their lack of skill

To answer this question, I looked at the results of my own mock Regents exam and compared it to other writing I have recently done. I found that the writing gap existed for me too.

For me, the reasons were clear: A and C were the main engines for my decline in writing quality. A lack of time made me rush. Because I was pressed for time, I chose vocabulary that was simple rather than sophisticated and displayed my hasty and embarrassing handwriting. I was also self-conscious because I knew that I would only be able produce a first draft.

The format was simple and so was my essay. As many teachers know, you get what you ask for. If you give students a series of questions with one line on which to write the answer, you are guaranteed to get a stripped-down, one-line answer. When the standard increases, usually so does the quality. The Regents demands that essays be taut and focused, but ultimately lacking in insight and original thought. The students gave the state what the state asked for.

I finished Regents week with “Regents in Paris” still echoing in my head and being sung by students before tests. I am anxiously waiting for the official results, sincerely hoping the students passed — but not because it would validate my teaching and not because it would prove that they are indeed quality readers and writers. I want them to have passed so they can focus on higher-level writing and thinking — the kind of intellectual engagement that will make them successful in college and beyond.

Halfway through my third year of teaching music, in 2007, administrators in my St. Louis district decided to cut student time in the arts by 64 percent at the middle-school level as part of a plan to improve student test-scores. Appalled, I sent an email to my fellow arts teachers across the district asking what we were going to do.

The response from my colleagues? There is nothing you can do; this has been happening for the past 20 years. Nonetheless, unwilling to let the arts programs go quietly, I circulated petitions among staff, acquiring signatures from several hundred teachers—arts and non-arts teachers alike. It didn’t do anything.

Out of ideas, and with no sense of what it might accomplish, I called my union. The response was immediate: The union would help mobilize teachers and parents opposed to the planned cuts.

In the end, the union’s role in the struggle was minimal. But at that moment when I felt ready to give up, its contribution was decisive: It rejected the powerlessness that my colleagues had articulated, and affirmed my professional convictions about the centrality of the arts in public education. With renewed confidence, several of my colleagues and I began to organize, and following a large outcry from parents and teachers, the administration ultimately reversed its decision.

Flash forward to today. I am in my sixth year of teaching, now in New York City, and what bothered me then in St. Louis bothers me even more now.

I am frightened by a perceived powerlessness in my profession—teachers across the nation who have given up advocating for their students not because they don’t wish to, but because it seems an impossibility. And I am saddened by the fragility of our hard-forged convictions. I am saddened that my efforts researching and negotiating the work of public education seem meaningless in the face of current policy debates—and that last year’s nationwide struggle over teacher tenure or this week’s “debates” over teacher evaluation in New York arrive forcefully, demanding immediate reaction rather than initiative from educators.

Consider this past year. By all accounts, it should have been one of teacher outrage. For me, 2011 started—as it did in many school districts across the country—with the announcement of teacher layoffs for the fourth year in a row. In New York City, this included 6,000 teachers, with a disproportionate share of those in physical education and the arts. Over the summer, my school also joined many others across the country in losing its Title I funding when a large portion of these funds expired with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And then in October, $753 million in cuts to New York City schools forced mass layoffs of school support workers: secretaries, teacher aides and parent coordinators.

Additionally, my school’s budget was reduced by 3.26 percent (adding to a total of almost 14 percent in the past four years), general per-pupil funding was cut by 6 percent, and the city decided students with special needs would receive 15 percent less per-pupil funding than before. Students in poverty would receive 50 percent less.

In total, this meant a budget reduction of more than $300,000 for my small school, 80 percent of whose students live at or near the poverty line.

What interests me here, however, is not the magnitude of the cuts and layoffs, both at my school and across the nation. I could list the effects on my school, where we made hard choices to reduce after-school programs and time for teacher collaboration in an effort to maintain moderate class sizes and services to students with disabilities.

Instead, what interests me is the fact that these cuts—coupled with other challenges that teachers faced in 2011—targeted students in poverty and students with special needs, that they targeted arts and physical-education programs, and that they severely disrupted school processes as one seismic change after another was proposed. What interests me, too, is how the cuts to schools came and went so quietly while other education issues raged in the public eye.

How do cuts so brazenly disproportionate toward students in poverty and those receiving special-education services happen without notice?

I believe these cuts were made—strategically, perversely—to the very populations least likely to detect and fight against them. I have seen this happen all too often in the short decade I have worked in education.

Who, then, will speak up—and not simply for marginalized students and communities, but for all students? Who will articulate what it means to attend music class, or what it means to be in a class with 28 students versus 35 or 40 students? Who might feel that these issues are no less worthy of attention than that pertain to teacher tenure or evaluation?

Most teachers, it seems, have learned simply to “shut up and teach” (as one conservative blogger has advocated). The atmosphere has been so relentlessly damning and thoughtless about our work these past few years, it’s hard to know where to start engaging with the public. By my best estimate, under 10 percent of New York City’s teachers participated in any kind of protest or public action over last year’s threatened teacher layoffs. The budget cuts, as I have noted, came and went quietly.

What happened?

Perhaps teachers heard what I had been hearing as I sought to organize: “This has been happening for the past four years,” or “There is nothing you can do.” Perhaps teachers learned the lesson that Gov. Scott Walker hoped we’d learn from the Wisconsin protests: It doesn’t matter how loudly you shout.The power to direct education lies with politicians who consider it one of many special interests, with billionaire philanthropists who’ve been plowing policy changes that suit their business models through Congress for nearly a decade.

Mark me: I do not believe that teachers alone should run schools or direct education policy, nor do I believe that every idea from the business sector is misguided. But there are deep problems when teachers are taught to shut up and “teach,” as if they could do so in silence. When teachers cease to advocate, we cease to fulfill one of the most essential elements of teaching: the act of caring.

To teach is to care—and to care deeply when students don’t get the services they require, or when class sizes are unwieldy, or when test prep becomes synonymous with education, or when there’s not enough money to pay for after-school programs.

There is a grave negligence, I believe, when the public gives the work of education over to bureaucratic and market forces. More than politicians and the invisible hand of markets, it is teachers working as professionals who recognize that students are not numbers to be thrown into global economic wars, but rather lives and bodies—bodies that sit in desks, that suffer, that grieve, that matter uniquely in the future we wish to create. It is, indeed, the charge of the teaching profession to further the work of education, in consideration of our children, our society’s needs, our changing world.

Lest I be accused of naïveté, let me point out that part of teacher professionalism is advocacy about job interests—compensation, money for supplies, pleasant working environments. It is also true that the perspectives of teachers may be biased toward the immediate needs of their students, and less concerned with larger social and economic needs. But this is no less true in the bureaucracy (politicians look out for votes) or market (investors look out for profits): These are all compromised spaces, which must have shared voice and dialogue to serve as checks and balances, and to build on the best that each offers.

A few examples of reforms suggested by professional associations of teachers seem called for here—examples that in the past decade have been overshadowed by talk of testing, accountability and choice.ASCD, a national association of education leaders focused on curriculum practices and policies, launched an initiative in 2007 called “Whole Child,” which calls for states to coordinate services, resources and data collection across school, social, health and safety sectors. Urging broader definitions of achievement and accountability, it proposes a plan that measures achievement by including access to healthcare, safety, personalized learning and support, learning that is connected to the broader community, and academic challenge across all subjects.

In 2008, a coalition from various education researchers and diverse professional associations launched a campaign for “A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.” In it, the authors coupled a bevy of school-improvement proposals with investment in pre-k and kindergarten, health services, and access to a range of out-of-school programs. The policy paper is notable for its repeated emphasis on evidence based in serious and sustained research.

What happens when these kinds of proposals that grow out of education communities are lost or rendered mute? What happens when the discipline of education is devalued? Or when teachers come to learn that no one will listen to their testimonies, assessments and analyses of what they daily see and hear?

If you ask me what needs to happen, I have a few suggestions. First, unions need to widen their discourse beyond bread-and-butter issues like compensation and work environment. Teachers must be able to engage seriously and continuously in their profession’s discussions of evaluating teacher quality, of developing standards and curriculum, of allocating resources. Only then will we see substantive engagement, and not the kinds of rushed reactions I’ve seen recently from New York City teachers over the current teacher-evaluation debates.

Second, in order to do this, leaders of all teacher professional associations must do a better job of organizing teacher voice. Here there is fault in our unions and our professional associations, which for too long have served as top-heavy lobbying organizations. Small, local associations such as the New York Collective of Radical Educators have found ways to foster and direct teacher voice by creating member-led committees that develop projects and actions; a few national organizations have done similar work with membership networks. It is imperative that our unions and largest associations find ways to build spaces for member action, and to focus member discourse on innovative practices and policy.

Third and finally, teachers need to find ways to engage with education policy. This engagement—which the act of caring for our students demands of us—includes finding and creating spaces within our professional associations where we can speak of issues that matter to us, and where we can act in ways amplified by the weight and work of the associations.

These are not easy tasks, and I do not have a precise blueprint for where to start. But my experience working in several cities and participating in teacher associations has convinced me that there’s an eagerness among teachers to participate in our profession as professionals, not as technicians isolated in classrooms and subject areas. To build that capacity after years and perhaps decades of isolation, though, will require careful attention and hard work.

The stakes—the voices of those who work with children daily, the building of educators’ capacities to care fully and advocate for those they teach, the valuing of teaching as a profession—have rarely been higher. But I believe they are the right stakes, and the ones on which not only our educational but also our civic lives will thrive.

Eric Shieh is a founding teacher of the Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School, “A School for a Sustainable City,” which opened in New York City in September 2010. His article “Can Music Professional Associations Build Capacity for Curricular Renewal?” will appear in the Spring 2012 issue of the Arts Education Policy Review. This piece originally appeared at the Hechinger Report.

It was a day in late March and I had planned a lesson to prepare my students for the Regents exam in USand Global History. The lesson involved a simple strategy for teaching students to find success on the document-based question (DBQ) essay. With pressure to prepare students for the exams increasing, I accepted teaching test-prep lessons, but my heart wasn’t entirely in it. This would not be a “Stand and Deliver”-style lesson.

I arrived to school sweaty and frustrated after having stood for over an hour on two trains and a bus to get to the school in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx from my apartment in Washington Heights. After passing students waiting in line to go through the metal detector, I turned the corner of the building and was blasted by a wave of hot air upon opening the door. I immediately took off my backpack, jacket, and hat.

“Why do they keep running the heat when it’s warm outside,” I had once asked.

“The budget for next year’s heat is based on the amount of fuel used this year,” another teacher had told me. Of course.

After gathering attendance and making copies, I pushed through the heaviest door in the building to enter the first of four classrooms I would teach in that day.

This one was on the second floor and had a massive furnace lining the wall opposite the door and beneath the windows. Although the door to the room was heavy, the hydraulics in the door closing mechanism created an extraordinarily slow swing speed until the last two feet, at which point the door would slam shut like a Venus Flytrap for slow-moving students. In addition to nipping any student taking his or her time on the way out, it also created a powerful gust of air that would consistently blow one student’s hair into the face of the student sitting next to her.

“Come on!” Enrique would say as he brushed Cynthia’s hair out of his eyes.

On this particular day, I walked in a few minutes early to what seemed like something of a commotion on the far side of the room near the window. After I told students about our activity for the day, I noticed Rosie in the back with a smile on her face like she had a plan. As I went back and forth between facing the board and the class explaining the DBQ activity, I noticed giggling around Rosie.

“Mister. Can we open the window?” asked Rosie. “¡Hace calor!”

She wasn’t wrong. The room was hot. It was temperate outside and the heaters were going full-blast, often making a sound akin to a workman pounding on the side of an aluminum room with an oversized hammer. But there was something about the beginning of class and the way she said it that made me think she had more at stake in opening the window than just cooling down.

The school aide opened the door to grab the attendance.

“COME ON!” said Enrique as he had to refocus.

“No,Rosie,” I said, using my teacher instinct. “I think we’ll be okay.”

I returned to my instruction on using the DBQ strategy when the assistant principal opened the door to tell me I was needed in the office as the school’s chapter leader. Janet, another social studies teacher, would be covering for me.

I walked out of the room for what would be fifteen minutes discussing a contract issue.

“PPPHHHHHFFFffffttttt!” Enrique made a scene as we leave. I imagined a minor skirmish ensuing.

When I returned to the classroom, Janet gave me a sideways smile. The door closed and Enrique threw his paper and pencil over his shoulder in frustration.

“We have a visitor,” said Janet, pointing at the ceiling.

I looked up and saw a pigeon perched on pipes near the ceiling. Beneath it was an empty table with bird droppings on it. The five students who had been previously sitting at the table were now clumped with five other students at a table on the other side of the room laughing and pointing at the pigeon.

I looked at Rosie and knew exactly what had happened.

Janet offered a sincere apology, wished me good luck, and walked back out into the hallway. This time Enrique ducked and came back up with a smile.

Preferring to teach and worry about the pigeon after class, I calmed the class down and convinced them they could still learn even with the banging, the heat, the hair in Enrique’s face, the pigeon, the giggling with Rosie, and a frustrated and exahausted teacher who wasn’t confident of the utility in teaching students to pass a state test. I yelled the rest of my instruction across the room as the heater was as loud as ever. On the plus side, the window was open, so I wasn’t sweating as profusely.

Students strained to hear me during instruction and wore looks of agony and frustration as we moved into the work period. They complained of being unable to concentrate. But many worked hard to write something down in their second language despite the banging, the heat, the hair, the pigeon, the giggling, and the frustrated and exhausted teacher.

When the bell rang, I collected their papers and stuffed them into my backpack in a hurry to get to my next classroom.

By the end of the day, the pigeon had escaped unharmed. The students, I’m not so sure.

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.

I’m one of those New Yorkers lucky enough to send his kids to solid public schools with involved parents and committed teachers. A recent social studies test given at one of my kid’s schools shows how hard it is to teach critical thinking when we adults struggle to model it ourselves.

Having studied early colonization in America for about two months, my middle school child came home with a “study sheet” for an upcoming test. The questions and the “right” answers, all bullet points, were listed. “All I have to do is memorize this,” my child explained.

Many of the bullet points were simplifications that required little complex thinking. According to the time and place rule, for example, “the closer a source is to the time and location of an event, the more reliable it is.” I asked my child about sources being biased and learned that the students had also been told to memorize the bias rule: “All sources contain bias.”

“Don’t you want to show your understanding by giving a few examples?” I asked. Despite a tepid initial response, we did eventually discover that my kid had learned a little bit of the background behind the bullet points and was prepared to write about it.

That Monday night I asked how the test went:  “All we had to do was write in the bullet points. There was no space for examples.”

This admittedly simplified example of the divide between our aspirations and our practices is seen more broadly in Mayor Bloomberg’s recent State of the City address. Among the reforms he highlighted was the opening of hundreds of new schools, and the closing of large “comprehensive” high schools.

But are these new schools an improvement over the ones they replaced?  It isn’t clear.  How do we know this?  By examining the available data and thinking critically about it.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was a prime mover behind the small schools movement, putting close to $2 billion into small schools in New York and elsewhere.  But as they looked at the data, Gates grew so uncertain of the schools’ impact that it stopped funding the project in 2008.  They concluded it was not the school’s size that mattered, but the quality of instruction and other factors.

After the foundation’s decision, New York continued to open small schools. A 2010 study that I wrote about offered scant evidence that their graduates were better prepared for college. The percentage of students earning a Regents Diploma was only marginally improved. English language learners and special education students were not admitted to these schools during their first two years, which likely boosted these results. Despite the anemic results, advocates crowed about the impact of this initiative.

Now a followup analysis with more data showed that nearly 42 percent of small school graduates earn a Regents Diploma, against 35 percent of students who wanted to, but were not able to, attend a small school. Small schools graduates did better on the English Regents exam, but not on the math test.

If small schools can maintain this progress over several years, and include English language learners and other harder-to-serve kids, it suggests they may be part of a solution. But they have hardly “transformed” the future for our neediest children.

Education reform is hard work. Not every good idea works out in practice, as Roland Fryer’s plan to reward kids for good grades showed. Researchers know you can learn as much from failure as success, but you have to be able to think critically about the data, not just regurgitate memorized bullet points.

In “Someone Has to Fail,” Stanford education professor David Labaree points out that from its inception education reform has asked our schools to do for our kids what our politicians (and we as a society) refuse to do. I’d love to think that the Common Core standards will lead to increases in critical thinking, but as the old saying goes, “the fish stinks from the head first.” As long as policy-makers don’t bother to check if the facts support their beliefs, I fear my children will continue bringing home bullet points to memorize in place of real learning.

I have worked in the same school for the past nine years. I can dismiss the sensationalistic claim from Bloomberg that 50 percent of teachers are ineffective, because it is simply not true. Likewise, when I hear defenders of educators claim that all teachers do great work, I know this is not correct either. The answer lies somewhere in between — in the case of my school, much closer to the defenders of teachers.

I want to describe the thankless service being done everyday by my colleagues and mentors. It is my hope that readers might share these personal profiles with friends, family, colleagues, and politicians to spread the word about the great work being done by educators in the schools the mayor has targeted.

At my school — labeled “persistently low-achieving” and slated for possible closure — there are several teachers with doctoral degrees. They could have pursued careers at selective high schools or even at colleges but chose to work at our school. Most have dedicated 10+ years to the school and are respected as the academic authorities in our building by both students and staff. They are able to translate their advanced content knowledge and make it relevant and exciting for our students.

At my school — labeled persistently low-achieving and slated for possible closure — there are many teachers who give up their lunches, preparation periods, weekends and vacations to work with students — for free! While this is not always a popular position with hard-line union supporters, these professionals put their students ahead of their own personal interests. Just last week, I saw teachers:

• work an entire period with a senior on a college entrance essay, leaving the teacher with no lunch break between teaching four classes;
• use their professional period to meet individually with seniors who are behind in credits, but hope to graduate this June;
• come to work 45 minutes early to host a celebration recognizing students with outstanding attendance;
• stay late on a Friday afternoon to tutor a student who needed a little extra help this marking period;
• discuss how to differentiate instruction to reach all students in their classes during lunch; and
• seek out other teachers for advice on effective material to use with their students.

And to think, this is just what one person witnessed in a single week — the same week that all of the teachers found out they might be losing their jobs.

At my school — labeled persistently low-achieving and slated for possible closure — a teacher coordinates a leadership class, which has created a culture of service among an impressive portion of the student body. Students:

• donate blood through on site blood drives, several times a year;
• collect food, money, toys and clothing for those in need;
• fundraise for cancer research;
• translate for non-English speaking parents at parent/teacher conferences; and
• host after school sessions advocating tolerance and respect.

At my school — labeled persistently low-achieving and slated for possible closure — there is a teacher who has successfully implemented a peer mediation program.  Student volunteers work to help their peers resolve conflicts through discussion rather than fighting.

At my school — labeled persistently low-achieving and slated for possible closure — I have had students who went on to attend Columbia University and Rollis College on full scholarships and law school at Temple and Georgetown universities. Some of my former students have gone into pre-med programs, and others are finishing up with teacher training programs.

And last week I received great news during this otherwise difficult time: a student in my jazz band with whom I have worked for the past three years was accepted on full scholarship to play Division I football at West Point.  Another was accepted to two colleges —one on scholarship — but is waiting to hear back from her top choice.

Does this sound like a failing school?

In fact, the student attending West Point is the second student we have had in the past three years to go on to play football for a Division I school. An impressive feat for any program — and especially for ours, where the coach built a program from scratch only recently, several years after I came to the school. The coach has also helped hundreds of our athletes to improve academically; he established after-school study halls to make sure all keep up with their work.

When I found out about about my students’ achievements, I immediately found myself texting family and friends to share the great news. I also took a stroll down the halls to tell anyone who would listen. Out of nowhere, I found myself welling up with a mix of emotions.

One of my colleagues saw that I had tears in my eyes. She congratulated me on my students’ successes and gave me a hug. When she stepped back, I saw that she had begun to tear up as well.

“It’s just too bad, isn’t it?” she started. “We have such a great school with so many great students. It is sad that this may be the end of an era — the end of something that has been great for so long.”

“I think we just had an Oprah moment,” I told her.

For that moment we were able to share a much-needed laugh, at a time where there is little to laugh about.

Michael Albertson is in his ninth year teaching instrumental music at a large public high school in Queens. A version of this piece originally appeared on his blog, Urban Education: Music and Beyond.

The assistant principal’s office is crammed into the corner of the second floor of the nearly 90-year-old James Monroe Building in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx. Behind me is the door into the hallway, an opening into the dizzying array of students from different schools and languages from different countries. Before me sits the instructional coach our administration hired to help us make sense of outcomes-based teaching.

I sit in tennis shoes, jeans, a flannel shirt, and keys hanging from my three-year-old caribiner attached to my right belt loop. My unshaven face pushes against my right hand pushes against my elbow pushes against the desk frustrated. Not frustrated because of my missed planning period, nor the student I chased down for stealing breakfast that morning. Not because stacks of papers loom over us on both sides of the desk we’re working at like Manhattan skyscrapers, nor because boxes of books and newly ordered materials touch nearly every floor tile, making the movement from one corner of the office to another a journey four times longer than it would otherwise take. Frustrated for a different reason.

Peggy and I stare at the plan I’ve created. “These outcomes are really nice, very impressive. I’m just worried you may be overestimating the students’ ability levels. This looks like something you’d do in freshman-level college course.”

How would you know if I’m overestimating their ability? They’re my students. … is my thought, but only fleeting. A brief ego shield that quickly melts away under the heat of reality.

It’s so easy to fantasize about teaching the really interesting things about history and social studies that require the background knowledge they don’t yet have to really engage in, to expose them to rigorous standards and high expectations that you know you don’t have time uphold.

My assistant principal looks at my eyes and asks how much sleep I got. “Enough,” I say, knowing it was at least twice as much as she got.

 In a rush to cover everything at the end of the year in a meaningful way, I had created jumbo outcomes for what traditionally gets taught in history between 1870-1945 that every student would be responsible for.

Explain how liberal ideas of democracy developed during European imperialism, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. 

And then I had created smaller, more manageable outcomes that only some students would be responsible for. In my teacher Narnia, students would then provide information to the whole class on their assigned outcomes.

Analyze European motives for African and Asian imperialism.

In a way, I wanted to scream, “WHY CAN’T I TEACH THIS STUFF!!! We’re supposed to be holding them to high expectations, right? We know that when we hold students to high expectations, they’ll rise to them? Isn’t that what we all learn in teacher school? The stuff I’m trying to teach isn’t even really that advanced!” But I knew every bit as well as Peggy why these outcomes were overly ambitious.

“Do you really think you can get your students to do this?”

“I KNOW every single one of them can do this, and I KNOW I could get them to do it. (In Narnia I could.) I’m just not sure I have the time and resources to help them get there….”

My assistant principal reviewing new teacher resumes on her blackberry now. Peggy slowly and confidently nods at me. Her eyes say this was the conclusion she was hoping I’d come to when she began her line of questioning. “That’s something you’ll have to consider.”

I put my backpack on and leave the office with the outcomes I’d spent an entire weekend creating.

As I walk down the stairs to my classroom, a war wages in my mind that disrupts my emotions. I’m reminded we don’t have enough rooms so that I can have a quiet last ten minutes of my planning period, so I instead choose to join the Spanish class. On one side of my head fights the six-year-old expectations for what I’d been led to believe was my immense capacity to educate students and change lives coupled with an innate lifelong idealism. On the other, the fresh lessons of the past six years learned battling student apathy, poverty, and the staggeringly negative effects of adult incompetence and ego.

As Spanish class ends and I begin digging through my backpack for the work I’d planned for my ELLs (primarily recently-arrived Dominicans), one of my students asks me if I want to collect the homework from last night. “Oh my gosh, yes! Thank you for reminding me. Please, everyone give me the homework from last night.”

Most students look at each other and snicker. One with a big smile on his face: “Come on, mister. You know we don’t do homework.”

Something I’ll have to consider.

The unit plan I made last summer was far from perfect, but it was a beautiful reflection of the perceptions of Kurt Hahn students—subtle and profound — that I have assimilated over the last two years, of what I’ve come to love about them as individuals and as a collective. It’s a reflection, too, of my best self: the teacher I dream myself to be when I am fully energized and fully focused on my students’ literary and literacy progress.

When I return to it now — halfway through the school year — that airy summer musing already feels light-years away. I have had to adjust the pace and the sheer multitude of work I assign, not because of my students’ capacity but because of my own. The rigorous assignments I came up with require twice the rigor from me: I have to complete models and rubrics of each so that I can demonstrate to students what I’m looking for. I have to be ready to grade and hand back drafts at a rapid pace. Meanwhile, I have to keep up with the not-technically-contractual-but-crucial-for-everything-else-to-work responsibilities of my small school: an 11th-grade advisory who are starting to think about what they’ll need to graduate on time, collaboration with a first-year global studies teacher, the small writing workshop I launched to help students meet the Common Core standards.

I could do all of this if I were, you know, one of those teachers: the kind I always envision making the cut for Teach for America or one of the leading charters, who can pull full days of teaching and full nights of work, who don’t need much sleep or can function without it until a free weekend comes along. I can give maybe one-week of high intensity, dawn-to-dusk work, and then I crash.

I need to pace myself, to work a solid day and then go home and remember who I am for a few hours. That, I’ve been telling my mother since day one, is simply not possible for a new teacher trying to respond to student data (i.e. often recreate her curriculum) as she goes. If all that work I did during the summer is really going to help me, it shouldn’t be long term but detailed to the day. And frankly, even my geekdom has its limits. As a 28-year-old bachelorette, I refuse to pay rent in this city just to hang out with my cat and plan lessons.  (I actually don’t even have a cat, which makes that image all the more depressing.)

It’s interesting to note that policymakers concoct teacher certification requirements in a space similar to that in which my ambitious unit plan materialized this past July: free of the mental cacophony and exhaustion of a typical school day, with the highest expectations of students and teachers as the only limit to their ambition. Why does our field engage in this collective amnesia about what teachers can actually accomplish day after day after day?

Colleagues and I have fantasized about a school calendar that spreads the summer recess over the course of the year. Time to regroup between terms, when one already knows one’s students, would make for more personalized units and more careful grading. I could assign the kind of deep research projects that the Common Core Standards prepare kids to complete without wondering where I’ll find the time to teach their processes or grade them once they’re finished. I could conceive of a poster presentation and not have to exchange it last minute for a written project simply because I lack the time and energy to make a quality model of what I’m looking for from my students. I could enjoy more relaxed and in-depth discussions with my principal and beloved mentors. I have colleagues who would do the same. Maybe we, with our bright eyes and bushy tails, are the odd geeks out; maybe other teachers would skip town during these weeks or drink them all away. But to assume so is to assume the worst and encourage the rest of us to sink to their level.  Treat my planning time as professional time and my performance — not to mention my profession — will improve.

We’ve heard plenty of times that testing doesn’t make better teachers. Reformed hiring, firing, and tenure procedures don’t make better teachers. Teacher improvement leads to better teachers. And what leads to teacher improvement is time to think about what we’re doing when we aren’t teaching: how we’re planning, how we’re working with others, and how our more experienced colleagues solve the problems we are facing. Just as our students can only progress if we give them time to absorb what they learn, we can only improve that if we’re given enough time and space between teaching experiences to reflect, regroup, and revise. It’s time we started compensating teachers for the work that really matters in the classroom: all the work we do outside of it.

In late November, however, Mayor Bloomberg proved me wrong. Speaking at a conference at MIT, Bloomberg said that if he could, he would get rid of half of New York City’s teachers. Why? For starters, we are apparently not that bright. Bloomberg explained, “We don’t hire the people who are at the top of their class anymore. … In America, [teachers] come from the bottom 20 percent and not of the best schools.”

I know this quote is old news, but the “bottom 20 percent” claim really stuck with me. I’m used to being attacked for my exorbitant salary, cushy benefits, and lavish lifestyle. I’m not used to being ridiculed because of my poor academic skills or below-average intelligence.

Like a lot of teachers, I’ve got a bit of a chip on my shoulder. When I heard Bloomberg’s comment, I got defensive. How dare he attack my credentials? What does he know about where I went to school, or what kind of grades I got? What does he know about anything?

Then I calmed down; I thought about what it would mean to be a part of this “bottom 20 percent.” I’m a special education teacher. Many of my students are in the bottom 20 percent of their high school classes. This isn’t a criticism; it’s an observation about how these students perform academically.

I like these students, this bottom 20 percent. First of all, they present us teachers with some interesting challenges. It’s easy to plan a lesson for the overachievers; it’s a lot harder to plan for students who struggle. How do I convince a student who suffers from both attention deficit disorder and acute depression that he should try reading a section of “Huckleberry Finn” in a Southern accent? How do I get a hyperactive student to sit still for a 100-minute history exam that consists of two essays on European imperialism in the 19th century? Figuring this stuff out is endlessly frustrating, but endlessly interesting.

Truthfully though, these academic challenges are not really why I like these bottom 20-percenters. I like them because they’re extremely likable. In general, these students are more emotionally mature and complex than their academically gifted counterparts. By the time they reach high school, they’ve experienced failure on many occasions. They don’t bully; they don’t make fun of their classmate for giving the wrong answer. Possibly as a defense mechanism, most of them develop a quirky, entertaining sense of humor. They’re used to being ignored, so they’re uncommonly patient. They know how to empathize and they appreciate small kindnesses that other students take for granted.

I don’t know what portion of this bottom 20 percent might go on to become teachers, but I hope some of them do. Patience and compassion are qualities that every teacher should possess, and these students possess them in abundance. More than that, as much as we try, many of us will never truly understand what it means to struggle with fundamental skills like reading and writing. A student who has struggled with these skills and found ways to succeed would be uniquely capable of both planning lessons for and empathizing with challenging students.

2011 was, among other things, the year of the bottom 99 percent. It was a year when those of us who don’t live fat and happy stopped feeling bad about it and went on the attack. Teachers played a part in this movement. Thousands of us joined with the Occupy Wall Street forces and proudly announced our place among the bottom 99 percent.

There wasn’t much good news for teachers in 2011, but this growing sense of solidarity was an exciting development. So, Mayor Bloomberg: keep the insults coming in 2012, please. I’ll take the bottom 20 over the top 1 percent any day.

I also understand that while the majority of parents welcome sex education for their child, others are apprehensive. I would like to address the concerns and critiques that have surfaced since the mandate’s announcement.

One major concern is that teaching sex education in schools undermines values that parents teach at home. Critics of the mandate point to the “risk cards” used by the Reducing the Risk curriculum which compare the relative risks of sexual practices. They also cite homework assignments that require students to locate sexual health resources in their neighborhoods.

It’s important to keep in mind that nearly half the DOE-recommended curriculum lessons for high school students are devoted to abstinence, refusal techniques, delaying tactics, and ways to avoid high-risk situations. These teach our teens how to think critically about making healthy decisions. The risk cards and sexual health resource assignments arm them with medically accurate information that informs those decisions. It is well documented that having information about and access to contraception does not advance sexual activity. Knowing where to go for sexual health resources is a skill and safety measure that will protect them throughout their lives.

And early detection of potentially fatal sexually transmitted infections and HIV is critical for effective treatment and reducing transmission. A report just issued by New York University’s Silver School of Social Work on adolescent sexual health disparities for Bronx youth cites limited access to reproductive health services among adolescents as a key factor in their poor sexual health outcomes.

Keeping youth ignorant cannot be our strategy for keeping them out of trouble. And we would be naive to think that they aren’t learning about sex from other, less credible sources, such as TV, Facebook, YouTube, and cell phones. There is a need for objective, medically accurate information to be provided, and the opportunity for teens to reflect and problem-solve about that information. The logical question that follows is “who should provide it?” Is it the role and responsibility of families or schools?

I submit that both have a responsibility. When over 8,000 teenagers give birth to babies each year in New York City and statistics tell us that most teen mothers and their children have outcomes that limit their chances for successful, healthy lives, then schools, as a social institution, have an obligation to act. Does that undermine the responsibility of parents to act? Not at all. Parents have the largest responsibility, but when we see futures being derailed by risky sexual activity and premature parenting, then it is appropriate for multiple social institutions to respond.

Sexual development is an inevitable part of adolescent growth and human development. Children will grow into teens with new bodies that are capable of sexual behavior and reproduction. But teenage pregnancy is not inevitable. Reducing the number of teen pregnancies and youth with sexually transmitted illnesses and HIV is a responsibility of all of us.

Should parents be forced to have their children participate in comprehensive sex education if they believe it undermines their values? No. That’s why they can opt their child out. It is my opinion that we should not aspire to teach sex education without values. Its goal should be to teach young people that engaging in sexual behavior is complex and requires critical thinking about their health, values, identity, spiritual beliefs, culture, and goals for the future.

A public institution should share in the responsibility of educating its citizenry, particularly when there’s substantial evidence that their health and well-being are being compromised. The more than 8,000 babies born to NYC teen girls each year present serious public health and social welfare problems. And, as reported in the Silver School study, New York City’s HIV and STI rates among youth are significantly higher than the nation’s in four out of five boroughs.

Finally, I would like to address the fear that when we simultaneously teach abstinence and risk reduction, we are confusing youth through mixed messages. Does teaching teens about contraception imply that we have no faith in their ability to control their behavior and avoid sex?

I believe that we must respect the intelligence and integrity of our youth to make healthy decisions about sex when they have accurate information at their disposal. Moreover, it is our responsibility as adults and role models to communicate our values and our belief in their ability to make sound choices. If we trust that they are capable of doing so, why should we feel compelled to withhold critical information, an essential component to making any sound decision? They need not be ignorant to keep their innocence.

Linda Lausell Bryant is the Executive Director of Inwood House, a teen pregnancy prevention and teen parent support agency serving nearly 4,000 underserved youth annually, including at a number of city schools. Since 2009, she has been a mayoral appointee to the Panel for Educational Policy.

The opportunity presented by the widespread adoption of the Common Core Standards can be harnessed by a collaborative design model that has proven extremely effective in the field of software development. This model is known as “open source.” When you hear that term, you most likely think of “free software,” and much of the open source movement has been oriented around concepts of equity in access that lends itself to that conception. But what has been most revolutionary in the open source approach is not simply that the products created are sometimes free, but rather that the process of production is entirely transparent and accessible to anyone based on a GNU-style license of software code. This license turns the traditional notion of property on its head by basing ownership upon the right of distribution, rather than exclusion (for more about this concept and the success of the open source model, read Steven Weber’s provocative and insightful book).

If we agree that public education is indeed “public,” and therefore part of the commons, then it is no great stretch to suggest that the content we teach to our students should also be purveyed with transparent and accountable public access. The fact that most of our curriculum — when it is even acknowledged — is developed under proprietary license speaks to the fundamentally flawed priorities of our society. Do we consider it more important to protect the rights of corporations than that of children? In the field of education, unfortunately, this question is far more than rhetorical.

I strongly believe that the curriculum we design and implement, as in open-source software, should be produced and distributed under a non-proprietary license, such as the now well established Creative Commons license. This will open access to curriculum to anyone who finds it useful and applicable, whether a home-schooler, a private school, charter school, or public school teacher. It allows anyone to take that content and modify it as they see necessary, so long as they give credit to the makers of the content they used. And when they modify it, they can then present their modifications back to the community, to be embraced and modified yet further.

Our federal government has signaled support for recognition of open educational resources (OER) by establishing a new technical framework for sharing, which can be viewed on its Learning Registry website. I’m excited by the potential that the framework — a form of metadata, called paradata, that can facilitate a sophisticated and evolving system of embedded data — can provide in linking disparate OER across the web.

The next step is in ensuring that this curriculum is developed in a collaborative manner that recognizes expertise and fosters excellence. I believe this requires a common vision and starting point for effective curriculum design. Curriculum design models I have found that are based on solid and equitable principles are the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) models. Using these models, I have created my own templates for unit and lesson design. You can view and copy my unit plan template here, and my lesson plan template here. Disagree with something in my templates or feel something must be added? Then modify it and share it! These are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License, after all.

Teachers, consider this — our curriculum will either be developed for us, or we will develop it ourselves. And which curriculum would our nation prefer — one developed by non-public interests that stand to gain loads of money, with little accountability or oversight? Or one developed by our professional public educators that work directly alongside our children everyday, in collaboration with content experts in higher education and other areas of professional practice? I believe the answer is clear.

I have outlined in this series of posts the dramatic about-face that is required in educational reform. We must focus directly within our schools, directly into our classrooms, and target the product that will have the greatest impact — both immediate and over the long haul — on our nation’s future: the content that we deliver to our children every day.

In creating a curriculum that can target inequity and enable all students to achieve in our society, we must address these factors:

• Curriculum must explicitly address the non-academic skills proven necessary by research for life and career success, such as social skills, self-control, perseverance, and character
• Curriculum must be unified to clearly delineate the underlying foundations of content
• Curriculum must be an adaptable, living creation developed collaboratively by actual teachers and content experts via networks operated under a GNU-style license

If you believe in any of these precepts, then I encourage you to follow some of these steps:

1. Go to the Shanker Institute and sign your name to support the concept of a core curriculum
2. Advocate for scheduled and paid common planning time that is consistent and structured
3. Join or set up an EdCamp “unconference” and host an open source curriculum development session with educators.
4. Go to my website on open-source curriculum development to see some of the baby steps I’ve taken in this direction — or start your own!

Why is this proverbial teacher alone? Why doesn’t he have the guidance of other experts in that content area to guide his task analysis, aside from some glossy multi-colored binders of biblical proportions with large fonts and tons of sidebars (“teacher-friendly”) that came along with his district’s purchased curriculum? Why isn’t this teacher sitting with other educators during a scheduled, paid time of his day?

Herein, I believe, lies the rotten core of our educational woes: Teachers working in isolation from each other and from content experts, with only the curriculum purchased by their district — and manufactured by a major corporation or educational institution — to reference their work. Some may think that a well developed textbook and resources (we’ll pretend for a moment it’s “well developed”) should be reference enough for a teacher, but that material tends to be distant from the actual needs of the students that a teacher has before them. Most teachers — especially teachers of children with exceptional learning needs, English language learners, and/or students living in poverty — must adapt, jerryrig, recreate, or otherwise MacGuyver whatsoever material that can be scrounged on-line, bought on their own dime, or obtained from other teachers. This necessary process of drastically modifying curriculum is what is known as “differentiation” (and thus is generally reviled by practitioners).

But teachers shouldn’t have to desperately reinvent authentic, meaningful, and cognitively challenging (better than “rigorous,” ain’t it?) lessons out of blood, sweat, and duct tape. If we had a coherent, comprehensive curriculum that addressed social and emotional skills and needs (character education) and built up — in a sequenced, logical, and vertically and horizontally aligned progression — the concrete academic background knowledge , vocabulary, and domain specific facts necessary for comprehending higher-level content, then students would be much better prepared to deal with abstract academic texts and tasks, even with the added challenge of a learning disability. We’ve stopped teaching our students comprehensive character, grammar, phonics, and vocabulary, and — I can tell you because I see the effects everyday — it is devastating on already disadvantaged children.

Teachers should never plan content in isolation. Not when the curriculum is this important, not when the future of our children —and thus our nation’s — hangs in the balance. We should be sitting down together at the table and holding a structured, disciplined conversation in which we share our professional knowledge and expertise of best practices so we can systematically address our students’ needs. This type of professional learning community, in which knowledge and expertise is leveraged from within schools themselves, is precisely where we must target our education reform efforts, rather than wasting vast amounts of taxpayer money upon contracts with external vendors with little accountability for the sustainability and depth of their programs.

In our interconnected, collaborative, technology-driven new world, we can extend that table of professionals to include educators from all across the nation. I’ll discuss exactly how this is happening — and how teachers in New York City can take a seat — when I conclude my series on curriculum tomorrow.

My fiancée worked at Harlem Success Academy 3, which lost more than a third of its staff over this summer alone. This figure did not count those who were fired or who left of their own volition during the school year. Ms. D is just one of the many dedicated young educators who were incompatible with the school’s structure and model for teachers and students. One popular defense of high turnover rates is that teacher firings are always done for the good of the students. Yet the refrigerator art in our apartment stands as just one compelling example that hasty dismissals can have a profoundly negative effect on students.

At non-union schools, top-tier administrators can now dispose of any teacher at any time, with or without cause. In my fiancée’s case, just a few months into her first year teaching she was given 10 days to get “98 percent compliance” in all her classes, whatever that means, or be terminated. She had no choice in the matter and was ordered not to tell any of her 150 students that she would not be back the next day. This explains the students’ questions (“What happened?” “When are you coming back?”) included in personal notes written after they realized she was gone.

None of this was a surprise to me. I had seen similar scenarios play out three years earlier, when I worked as an after-school tutor at Promise Academy charter school. A teacher would be working on grades and conferencing with students one day, and then all but disappear the next. No staff member spoke his or her name, acting as if that teacher had never been there. But the students could not forget so easily. I remember kids expressing to me that they felt like the entire year was starting over in March. Not a good time to completely turn the page, but that was the students’ problem.

Though Hyde Leadership Charter School, where I work, retains teachers well, we have had faculty members resign for one reason or another (they were moving or going to graduate school). I have seen how the loss of a trusted adult has set some students back emotionally, if not academically. It’s hard for any of us when a mentor or a special adult is suddenly taken out of our lives. This feeling of abandonment is only compounded when it happens to students, like many of ours, who have already suffered this kind of loss in their personal lives (Dad leaves, a family member goes to jail, a grandparent dies). Last year I was struck by how many students asked me how long I would be staying at Hyde and if I would be coming back next year. It seemed to me that this was their way of trying to salvage some sense of security and consistency. I believe that students should not have to feel such fear that the adults they trust will stay with them.

The other side of this picture, of course, is those more rare scenarios when the only consistency students can count on is to have consistently bad teachers. So, how do you create a system that allows you to retain dedicated teachers while being able to dismiss that minority who are doing their job poorly? Kay Merseth, a former instructor of mine at Harvard, suggests in “Inside Urban Charter Schools” that there must be leadership opportunities for teachers so that the longer they stay, the higher they climb on the ladder. This idea has been embraced by charter schools and others, including Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp. While it rewards educators’ hard work, we risk creating a revolving-door situation where people teach for several years and then, by the ripe old age of 25 or 26, graduate to bigger and “better” things in education. Merseth mentions a more enticing idea pioneered by Community Day School in Boston, which offers sabbaticals for teachers to pursue studies that would enhance their curriculum and instruction. The model treats teachers like professionals and urges them to improve upon their craft. Yet the model would be too costly for many schools.

One option is to find the funding to offer teachers sabbaticals — something the city has eliminated in this tough budget climate. Another option is to create systems in schools where teachers, especially young teachers, will be helped rather than fired if they experience some struggle. They don’t need to have a “job for life” but they do need the assurance of job security as they figure out just how to do the job. Sadly, these ideas seem radical in the current political climate. If you work in certain charter schools your job is always in jeopardy. Recent reports show that Ms. D was not the only one who felt the overwhelming burden of that fact.

There is no evidence I have seen that this intense pressure improves teacher performance, and there is no evidence I have seen that it improves student performance. What we do know is that this new way of treating these once eager teachers can make them miserable enough to jump ship, depriving students of yet another much-needed lifeline.

While only persuasive nationally, the now-final Second Circuit ruling settles matters for multiple states within this judicial circuit (New York, Vermont, and Connecticut) but only affects those districts that want to start prohibiting services (probably few, but includes New York City).

Haven’t we been here before? In 1998, the high court declined review of a similar Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling. And, despite these decisions and others along the way, since 2002 Bronx Household of Faith has been holding services in P.S. 15 in the Bronx. The DOE estimates that dozens of churches now rent space for Sunday services, despite courts approving Chancellor’s Regulation D-180, Section 1(Q), prohibiting the practice. Can this really be the end?

The DOE says so, releasing a statement from a senior city lawyer within hours of today’s decision that declares “Sunday, Feb. 12, 2012, is the last day that churches and other groups can use the schools for worship.”

I am taking that with a grain of salt. This controversy has raged for over a decade and most legal observers thought Bronx Household of Faith had a good chance of winning this latest round. Since the Supreme Court upheld the federal Equal Access Act in Good News Club v. Milford, 533 U.S. 98 (2001), public schools have had to treat secular and religious groups similarly in renting their facilities. As an extracurricular organization, the Good News Club was clearly conducting worship, much as a chess club would pursue its core activity, theorized the court, and, under the First Amendment, schools could not discriminate on the basis of this content.

The Second Circuit, which had sided with the district in Good News Club, clearly again fought against the tide in Bronx Household of Faith, arguing that the DOE could still decide against a church’s regular conduct of services on Sundays. Not that the DOE was required to bar the church, but it could if, in its judgment, the arrangement blurred the distinction between church and state:

 The Supreme Court has never ruled on whether permitting the regular conduct of religious worship services in public schools constitutes a violation of the Establishment Clause, and we reach no conclusion on that question. As discussed above, considering all the circumstances, we think the risk that permitting the regular conduct of worship services in public schools would violate the Establishment Clause is sufficiently high to justify the Board’s adoption of a content restriction that prohibits the performance of such services but does not otherwise limit the expression of religious viewpoints. slip opinion at pp. 32 -33.

Thus the Second Circuit engaged in judicial hair-splitting to reach a conclusion at odds with the controlling Good News Club precedent. So it came as a surprise that the Supreme Court denied the church’s appeal. While creating no binding precedent, the action allows the circuit court ruling to stand, preserving the DOE’s discretion to ban rental of schools for worship.

However, this will not stop the political wheels from turning. Under the Second Circuit’s decision, the DOE can giveth as well as taketh away. So the evangelical community and its allies will likely pressure elected officials, including the mayor, to rescind the Chancellor’s Regulation D-180 ban. It’s been a long time on the books. So long that the mayor might well decide that it’s time to take another look at the rule based on legal precedents and a popular drift away from strong church/state separation.

Recently, Mayor Bloomberg opined on protesters’ right to erect tents in Zuccotti Park. With today’s decision in Bronx Household of Faith, the mayor has yet another chance to put his mark on an important First Amendment issue.

At the end of the day one of my students, a heartbreakingly adorable girl whose thick Spanish accent is slowly lightening up, told me that one of her former classmates is “mean now.” We talked briefly about this before we had to go our separate ways. Although it was a small moment in the course of the day, it sticks out in my mind now as a reminder of the profoundly multifaceted world of children.

It stands out now in stark contrast to the relatively simple, safe environment of my college classrooms. This week in my class on teacher quality we simulated a panel on teacher pay structure for the Rochester City School District. We grappled with the intricacies of teacher pay and the concerns of different stakeholders as we weighed different benefits and costs. And yet the exercise felt incredibly uncomplicated compared to the ecosystem I used to share with 25-30 children. This disconnect is one I am constantly aware of and working to bridge as I prepare for my transition from the theory of education reform to its practice.

Earlier in the day during that same visit to P.S. 310 I received a note from one of my old students. It was a short thank-you note, but I was deeply moved by the innocence and sincerity of its tone. For some reason as I read the note my mind flashed to a phrase from a Hebrew psalm, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill!” Those words, “If I forget you,” were unshakable. Just as Jerusalem is at the heart of the Jewish faith, so must the classroom and the kids within it remain central to my work in education. If I forget that, I need to find a new line of work.

Solving the big problems of education is certainly difficult. I am grateful to have the time and space away from teaching this year to study, think and discuss the questions of how to build a better system. At the same time, I am consistently thinking about the distance between my work at Harvard and the work I did in the classroom. The classroom is where the solving of the big problems will eventually take place, and as my short visit reminded me, there are countless variables that are often hard to remember from afar.

In several of my courses we have discussed the concept of the instructional core. Essentially it is the idea that at the center of the framework for all successful education systems is a successful relationship between teachers and students. While the ideas for education reform might sometimes originate in universities or district offices, this idea can’t be ignored. The teacher-student interaction is remarkably complex, but it is the nexus of educational transformation. It’s vital education leaders never forget that.

On Nov. 17, I marched with the Wall Street occupiers and thousands of other New Yorkers. We were protesting the occupation’s eviction from Zuccoti Park and proclaiming that the movement was as alive as ever. I cannot claim any deep involvement with the occupation movement, but it has inspired me. Marching the streets of New York with tens of thousands of students, teachers, nurses, janitors, and other occupiers inspired me even more.

Like many teachers, I often get pessimistic. Budget cuts, attacks from the media, and an ever-growing pile of ungraded assignments make the idea of progress seem like a fantasy. Watching the Occupy Wall Street forces build a movement over the past couple of months has reminded that cynicism is not only unproductive, but it is always rooted in illusion.

Day after day, we teachers grade our papers, teach our lessons, create predictable routines for our students, and so it’s natural that the world would start to look stale and stagnant. Yet all teachers know that stagnation is an illusion. Month after month and year after year, we see new life emerge from these repetitive routines. Behind their tired eyes, our students learn until one day, seemingly out of the blue, those tired, distracted children have become writers, scientists, and actors. It’s why we chose this occupation.

Growth is real; movement is real. As teachers, we are responsible for directing that growth in small, but significant ways. A student who three months ago claimed to hate reading is now frustrated because we’re reading The Odyssey too slowly. Two other students are gossiping in terrible, ninth-grade Spanish. Small moments, but the Occupy movement has shown us that small moments can turn into big things.

No matter how lazy or unmotivated they seem, our students (like all people) are curious and enthusiastic. They’re excited about learning and frustrated when they don’t learn enough. They hate being bored; they hate thinking there’s more to life and they can’t figure out how to find it. Like the occupiers from Wall Street and Oakland and Tahrir Square, our students (in their best moments) have had enough of sitting at desks and filling in scantron sheets. They want to build something new.

A teacher in struggle is also teaching — this phrase comes from the Spanish, “El maestro luchando también está enseñando.” This was the chant of Mexican teachers in the state of Oaxaca who fought corrupt government officials and union leaders who went along with these officials. They occupied the main plaza in Oaxaca City, setting up tents and camping for weeks at a time. They marched with electrical workers, parents, students and other Oaxacans who believed that their democracy was failing — that it was, in fact, an illusion. I thought about these teachers when I was marching towards the Brooklyn Bridge two weeks ago.

On Nov. 30, I will be marching again as part of the “Budget Cuts Hurt Our Schools” coalition of teachers, students, and parents from Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences. We are opposing Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget cuts and the ongoing lack of advocacy for city schools from the mayor’s office that together threaten once again to slash funding from hospitals, transportation, firehouses, libraries, and especially schools. Teachers, students, and parents from schools across Brooklyn will be marching to save our schools, but also to save our city. Transit workers (whose union has endorsed the rally) will be joining us, as will firefighters, health care professionals, and other concerned New Yorkers.

As teachers, our job is to care for students. Sometimes that means planning lessons; sometimes that means grading papers. Sometimes it means struggling through a lesson while the students stare at us like zombies. We know how to struggle. This is our occupation.

Right now, caring for our students means more than simply planning lessons. It also means making sure the world into which they graduate has something to offer them. It means making sure their horizons aren’t limited by city and state officials who cut school funding. It means showing our students that the democracy we advertise to them, from their first day of kindergarten through their senior year, is not merely an illusion.

Please join us on Nov. 30. We plan to meet at 4 p.m. outside the Coney Island/Stillwell subway station and march to Abraham Lincoln High School, a mile away. A teacher in struggle is also teaching.

Last month, she worked her last day at my school.

On Oct. 7, three school aides and the family worker worked their last day at my school, cutting the number of aides at my school from six to three and leaving us without a family worker entirely. Losing our school aides unfortunately was just another cut our school of 700+ students and 50+ staff members has had to endure over last three years of budget cuts, which have also shrunk our teaching staff and caused us to lose intervention teachers. But my colleagues and I have been feeling the loss of our school aides every day since the layoffs.

The aides at my school served many functions throughout the school day. The most visible area where the school aides were the greatest help was in the cafeteria. With four periods of lunch with students ranging from pre-kindergarten to fifth grade, the aides were watchful eyes and the go-to people if there were troubles at any of the tables. The school aides also helped make copies for over 50 teachers, phone calls to parents to assist the parent coordinator, and plans for parent workshops and special events.

In addition, the family worker worked to make sure CAP (another special education database system) and SESIS were up-to-date and compliant to state and city requirements. She was also the first welcoming face any new student coming to our school after a placement change would see and interact with, and she provided as smooth of a first day as she could. With over 70 students with IEPs and constant new student influx, this was no small undertaking.

Beyond day-to-day tasks, the school aides in general were members of the community. Parents and students knew who these women are because of their presence around the neighborhood. Because they were from the neighborhood, they earned a lot of respect from parents, students, and teachers alike. The students referred to all the aides by either their first names or nicknames their parents and teachers used.

City officials have been quoted saying that principals made the ultimate decisions about school aide layoffs, but my principal said the layoff decisions were “out of her hands.”

The first few days after the layoffs left my school in a state of confusion. I heard rumors from the staff that the school was waiting for an influx of more senior school aides to fill in positions, but no one new came. Photocopying for teachers was put on hold for a few days while administration delegated the school aides’ responsibilities to other staff members. The parent coordinator has been running around and picking up even more duties that the laid-off aides left.

The cafeteria that was once run by school aides is now run by every out-of-classroom, non-cluster staff member, regardless of position. Both the school psychologist and the school social worker complain about having to cover lunch duty for one period each day, leaving both of them scrambling for time to finish a plethora of new referrals. I’ve seen more of the IEP teacher with my students in the cafeteria than providing IEP support.

Nowadays, our school has adjusted to the loss of the school aides just as we have adjusted to the loss of resources and staff members over the last couple of years. With the loss of any staff member with no replacement, the staff picks up more tasks and our jobs get harder. We lose more time to focus on our teaching practice and helping our students.

My co-teacher, who has worked at my school for eight years, assured me that the laid-off aides were all married and will be “fine” financially. What about the family worker, who  came back for a day the week after she was laid off to help the already-overworked special education support staff add her tasks to their own? From what I’ve gathered from her and the other women I interacted with before the layoffs, they were all in good health and supported financially, albeit meagerly.

I can only wish the best in health and finances for her and the rest of the school aides who are out of a job — and for the schools they left behind.

Think about that for a minute. Do you really believe that residents and businesses are likely to leave the state because a tax that has been in place for two years is going to be continued? Have you noticed real-estate prices in lower Manhattan dropping precipitously as all the millionaires have fled since 2009, when the tax was first enacted? Of course not.

But a recent poll found that 72 percent of registered voters in New York support continuing the tax, so it’s clear the governor is indeed taking a stand that carries some political risk. Why would he do that? Why would he say, as he did, “The fact that everybody wants it, that doesn’t mean all that much”? The answer has to be that he is counting on the support of the super-rich, and he’s not going to push any policies that make them nervous. Support for what? Let’s just say that Cuomo is ambitious.

So, what does this have to do with education? Well, of course, without more than $4 billion in revenue in the next year from the millionaires tax, schools across the state, but especially in the city, are looking at huge cuts to education. I’m a public school teacher and have seen the effects of budget cuts firsthand. But it is as a parent that I am most outraged.

As the parent of a second-grader at a neighborhood public school in Brooklyn, I’ve seen huge changes in just the short time my daughter has been in school. When we toured the school the year before she began, there were 20-22 students in the kindergarten classes we saw (yes, we counted). When she began the next fall, there were 25 kids in her class. Last year, there were 27, and this year, 29. Her teachers, all of whom are dedicated and hard-working, appear exhausted every afternoon, and I feel like I’m watching them burn out before my eyes. And we are told there will be more cuts in January, and then again in June? It’s hard to fathom.

Cuomo’s response to parents who complain about budget cuts is to note that New York State spends too much on education for too little in the way of results anyway, so what’s wrong with cutting the funding? In his State of the State address this year, he noted that New York is “number one in spending but 34 in terms of results.”

There are a few reasons this argument is nonsense. First of all, as Education Week analyzed, when you adjust for the demographics of the student population as well as regional costs, New York actually comes in fourth in overall spending and second in outcomes — not first and 34th. New York has a much higher percentage of students who live in poverty and students with special needs than the national average, and those students tend to score lower on standardized tests and receive extra federal funding. So raw numbers regarding their scores and amount spent per pupil will make New York look both underperforming and overspending, but those numbers are misleading.

More important, however, is that the New York State’s spending average is brought way up by the wealthier districts, some of which spend upwards of $40,000 per pupil. The Byram Hills School District, where Cuomo sends his daughters to school, spends about $6,000 per year more than New York City on each student.

And here’s the kicker. How is Byram Hills dealing with the cuts to education certain to result from Cuomo’s decision to cut taxes on the super-rich? The district is raising more revenue through local property taxes. In fact, wealthier school districts around the state are opting out of the current law capping property tax raises at 2 percent a year. The Westchester supervisor in the County town of Bedford (which includes the Byram Hills school district), said, “We should be able to dictate our own financial future,” explaining why the county voted itself a waiver from the cap.

In Bedford, the average home value is almost $1 million dollars, and the average individual income is about $280,000 a year. In other words, Bedford has just voted to continue a version of the current millionaires tax in order to support its school system, which is already paying $6,000 per year more than New York City for each student. So far, there has been no exodus from Bedford reported in the media.

Watching the success of Occupy Wall Street in recent weeks, it occurred to my wife and me that ordinary people — just parents of a kid in public school — can organize and push back. We’re not able to camp out in Zuccotti Park for the next few weeks, but we can let the governor know what we think of his plan, and we have persuaded others to join us. Today, Election Day, we’ll be in front of the governor’s New York City office (from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at 40th Street and 3rd Avenue). We’re bringing our kids. We’ll be making some noise and engaging in some street theater (selling cupcakes to make up the shortfall — at a dollar apiece, we only need to sell 1.4 billion!). We need to convince the governor that his political future depends on the success of the state he is running, not the campaign contributions of the top 1 percent.

These are the ones who keep me up at night, the ones who often have undergone childhood experiences so unfathomable that even to speak of the students out loud makes tears spring to my eyes and my voice so thick I don’t try to speak, even with loved ones.

Such students drive us teachers nuts while they are in our classrooms (and all too often, in our hallways). They are the ones rarely absent, the ones that disrupt the entire class dynamic and rivet everyone’s attention. They always demand immediate answers, they do not accept authority unless it stands up to their own notions of justice, and they make fun of pretty much everything that crosses their radar, which usually includes students unable to stand up for themselves.

But it is these students who come back to me. These are the students that teach me how to be a better teacher, and a better person. They have been teaching me what they had been put through, from their earliest days. They were sharing — in the only way they knew how to communicate it — something deep, and fundamental, and raw. And as I have grown to recognize those lessons, I have learned how to better love all of my students, and even — at the risk of sounding cheesy — how to better love humanity. Sometimes, anyway.

Children are constantly looking to the adults around them for guidance on how to navigate the constant bombardment of stress, anger, and anxiety that their lives bring, as well how to deal with conflicts with others. The sad thing is that we often are not ready to provide that guidance, whether due to competing demands on our attention, lack of professional therapeutic training, or simple lack of life and soul experience. Yes, I said “soul experience” — that deep, dark place of grit that comes from overcoming life challenges that can not be faked and for a lack of which challenging children will call you out on within a moment in a classroom setting. If you can’t meet their challenge consistently, decisively, and with complete integrity, they will take you down into that wounded place of raw, bereft, acute despair within which they have had their formative experiences.

It takes a whole school to reach the most challenging students. It takes a staff willing to do whatever it takes to address that child’s needs, rather than abandoning them to a teacher already overwhelmed with the only slightly less immediate needs and demands of their other students. It takes a community that supports, nurtures, and cultivates emotional literacy. It takes a school that has the courage to acknowledge that for some students, the rules must be broken, and we can’t just punish our way into compliance, but rather must work carefully to cultivate warm relationships and a supportive, positive environment that slowly coaxes motivation from that student.

Though it was hard to see it at the time, in the midst of all the negative conflicts and stress they put me through, I’ve learned to cherish these challenging students. The students with exceptional learning needs. The students who have lived in shelters. The students abandoned first by their mothers and subsequently by a string of foster parents. The students who challenge us to love them, challenge us to care for them, challenge us to be the kind of educators that can believe in them no matter what —unconditionally — because that’s the kind of educators that they need.