Students rallied their classmates at the launch of the Own It campaign, Bryan Stromer’s Future Project, at the NYC Lab School earlier this year. (Philissa Cramer/GothamSchools)

When the school year began at the NYC Lab School, something was different. Yes, there may have been a fresh coat of paint in the C stairwell, and the light bulbs might have even been changed. But those are not the changes that I am referring to.

Instead, I’m referring to the appearance of an unfamiliar stranger on the first day of school. “What is your dream?” was the question that he posed to the sleepy-eyed second-period English class. When no one answered, he introduced himself.

“Hello, my name is Tim Shriver, and I will be your dream director for this year,” he said.

Some of us were able to restrain our laughter. Others just let loose and become hysterical. The rest just stared blankly with teenage skepticism.

I have always considered my high school to be progressive. We call our principal by her first name. Students can be found playing guitar in the hallway between classes. And we are constantly told to chart our feelings on a cardstock poster known as the Mood Meter.

But having a Dream Director seemed a little far out, even for Lab.

Tim is actually part of an organization called the Future Project. The Future Project, which was founded by two Yale graduates, sends full-time Dream Directors to schools in New York, New Haven, and Washington, D.C. Those dream directors help students bring their wildest ideas into reality.

As the weeks progressed, the walls of Lab began to be collaged with posters soliciting applications to become a Future Fellow. I applied, along with many of my classmates, and soon after I started my Future Project, launching the Own It campaign.

The goal behind Own It is to create school environments where students can feel comfortable owning what makes them weird. We believe that Own It is an effective way to address bullying because it creates an environment where the whole school will feel comfortable embracing and owning the things they traditionally might have been bullied for.

High school is often a place where diversity and difference can be shunned. However, most companies and colleges want students and employees who will celebrate their differences and diversity. This is why we believe that it is especially effective to get students to begin owning it in high school.

The Future Project has played an invaluable role in the success of Own It. Tim worked with my peers and me to transform the initiative.

I remember how after the launch of the Own It event, I wanted to set up a meeting with Chancellor Dennis Walcott to discuss the expansion plan for the initiative, but I was nervous to request the meeting. Tim encouraged me to make the request anyway, and Chancellor Walcott ended up meeting with the Own It team.

To me, the most valuable part of the Future Project is confidence that I have gained from knowing that I have a Dream Director who believes in me. It is so easy to feel defeated in high school, so it is incredibly powerful to know that there is someone in my school whose full time job is to support my dreams and believes in me.

I hope you’ll take the time to watch my complete presentation, in the video above. But here’s a taste of the personal narrative about teacher leadership that I present in my paper:

Over the past ten years, I have transformed from a third-year teacher who turned down opportunities to present his work because he felt he had nothing to offer other teachers, to a ninth-year teacher who co-founded a new school, writes for publication, delivers professional development, and nurtures in-person and virtual networks for teacher development, while firmly retaining a primary identity of classroom teacher. My self-recognition as a teacher-leader follows the identity-formation model of hailing (Althusser, 1972). Just as Althusser suggests that individuals become subjected to ideology through the recognition that a hailing “was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else)” so too has it been with me as a teacher-leader. Throughout my career, others have “hailed” me as a potential, novice, actualized, and then accomplished teacher-leader. Through this repeated call, I have had little choice but to assume the role. …

My experience suggests that schools and organizations must create structures to identify, develop, and compensate teacher-leaders in ways that recognizes their work while keeping them firmly in the classroom.  The attempt to conceptualize such individuals as teacher-leaders or teacherpreneurs is a necessary first step, which must be followed by opportunities beyond existing conference structures for teachers to not only to work with other teachers, but to earn recognition and compensation for doing so. By developing more teacher-leaders, there will be a dual benefit: the best teachers will have incentive to stay teachers, while the system will benefit from their knowledge and expertise.

And here’s the text of the slide I’m referring to, and standing in front of, during the presentation.

Slide text:
Creating Capacity & Space for Teacher Leadership

Goal: Transform education from field where expertise and success exists in isolated individual classrooms (or outside of them) to one where expert practitioners augment and influence beyond their classrooms.

How:
- Recognize novice teachers as potential teacher-leaders
- Create space for teacher-leaders to practice and develop
- Recognize and compensate teachers through formal leadership opportunities

Second Rule of Fight Club: DO NOT TALK about Fight Club

Has the New York State Education Department watched too many Brad Pitt movies? Okay, that’s a rhetorical question, but one that might be posed to other state education agencies also engaged in the business of high-stakes testing. This week, students in grades 3 through 8 across the state of New York are taking mathematics exams aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Following on the heels of last week’s English Language Arts exams, the math exams also promise to be unusually challenging, reflecting the complex skills and knowledge inscribed in the Common Core standards.

Regardless of broad pronouncements from policymakers and the media about the inherent superiority of the Common Core standards and the assessments designed to measure mastery of them, the truth is that no one really knows whether the standards will lead to higher student achievement, or whether the assessments will be good measures of students’ readiness for college and careers. In New York, although this year’s assessments are the first to be aligned with the Common Core standards, they have a short shelf-life: the state plans to administer the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers assessments in the spring of 2015, if those assessments are ready for prime time by then.

In the meantime, discussions about the content and quality of the assessments are hamstrung by New York’s decision not to release test items to the public. For educators, the issue is quite serious: Disclosure of secure test items by a teacher or school leader is considered a moral offense that can lead to disciplinary action, including loss of certification.

The strongest arguments in favor of keeping test questions and answers private are technical. It is desirable that different forms of a test, including those administered in different years, be scaled in such a way that a given score represents the same level of performance, regardless of the test form or year. Anchor items are used to link different forms of a test and equate them. Modern test theory uses the difficulty of test items, and their ability to differentiate higher and lower performers, as tools to estimate a test-taker’s performance. It’s important for anchor items to have a stable level of difficulty over time; if they become easier or harder over time, their ability to serve as a common anchor across test forms is compromised, as is our confidence that a given test score denotes the same level of performance over time. A change in the difficulty of a test item over time is referred to as item parameter drift.

Item parameter drift can occur due to changes in curriculum, teaching to a test, or practice. But the biggest risk is from the widespread release of test items, whether unintentionally, as in a security breach, or intentionally. If a wide swath of the test-taking population knows test questions and the right answers, the questions will be easier, even if the test-takers are not more capable. It’s for this reason that questions and answers in educational tests frequently aren’t released to the public: disclosing test questions would limit their ability to be reused and to serve as anchor items.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is a case in point. The No Child Left Behind Act provides that the public shall have access to all assessment instruments used in NAEP, but that the Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which houses NAEP, may decline to make available test items that are intended for reuse for up to 10 years after their initial use.

Of course, one of the other features of the lovely NCLB law is that it prohibits the federal government from using NAEP to rank or punish individual students, teachers, schools or local education agencies. For this reason, NAEP is a low-stakes test — despite the ways in which pundits jump to draw broad policy inferences from comparisons of NAEP performance over time or across jurisdictions.

But one could argue that disclosure of test questions and answers may be justified when the test is used for high-stakes decisions such as student promotion, or the evaluation of teachers and/or schools. For most such high-stakes decisions, there are winners and losers, and when these decisions are made by agents of the government, the losers have a legitimate interest in whether the decisions were fair. One need look back no further than last week, when New York City announced that, due to a series of errors made by NCS Pearson, several thousand children were incorrectly classified as ineligible for gifted and talented programs.

Or, if you wish, reach back to last year, when the New York State Education Department discarded a series of items in the Grade 8 English Language Arts exam based on a passage involving a talking pineapple. Not too many people rose to defend the test items associated with this fable involving a hare and a pineapple, but Pearson, the firm contracted to develop and administer the exam, did. The choice of both the passage and the items, the company claimed, “was a sound decision in that ‘The Hare and the Pineapple’ and associated items had been field tested in New York State, yielded appropriate statistics for inclusion, and it was aligned to the appropriate NYS Standard.” Vetted by some teachers, too, I reckon. But with all of that, the passage and items were ludicrous.

One item following the passage asked which of the animals in the passage was the wisest: the moose, crow, hare or owl. Pearson claimed that it was unambiguous that the wisest animal was the owl, based on clues in the text. One such clue was that the owl declared that “Pineapples don’t have sleeves,” which, Pearson reported, was a factually accurate statement. So too, to the best of my knowledge, is that owls don’t talk.

High-stakes tests administered by governmental agencies call for a heightened sense of procedural fairness, including the ability to interrogate the tests and how they were constructed, and what counts as a correct response. The point is not so much that bad test items get discarded — although that may be appropriate from time to time — as much as it is that the procedures are subject to scrutiny by those they affect. New York does not have a great recent track record on this. The technical reports on the construction of last year’s state English Language Arts and math tests have not been made public yet, even though we’re in the midst of this year’s testing. And the technical manual for New York’s statewide teacher rankings, a modified version of value-added modeling, was released months ago—before the manual for the tests on which those rankings were based. It’s hard to know how much to trust the growth percentiles or value-added models without more information on the tests themselves.

Moreover, it may be especially important to have open and public discussions about tests that are aligned with the Common Core standards, which are new to educators and the public. The point of these tests, especially in their earliest administrations, is really not “ripping the Band-Aid off,” as New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott has declared — nor is it to document just how few students will meet the new standards, as a vehicle for supporting one policy reform or another. Rather, it’s to engage educators, policymakers and the public in a conversation about what we want our students to know, and how we can move them toward the desired levels of knowledge and skill.

And one good way to frame that conversation is to ground it in the discussion of particular assessment questions. Might teachers disagree with one another about what the best answer to an assessment question is? If they do, shouldn’t they be talking about it? Will students have an opportunity to discuss why a response is incorrect, what a better response might be, and why? Or will they simply receive a scale score telling them, and their parents, that they are well below grade-level?

Much has been made of the notion that assessments aligned with the Common Core standards are to be “authentic,” with real-world content that parallels what students might experience in adult daily life. (Ideally, something more sophisticated than “If Johnny has $5.63 and is wearing a pair of Nike Free Run+ 3 shoes, how long will it take him to run to the 7-Eleven to buy a delicious Coca-Cola product?”) If the content is indeed authentic, and reflective of what we expect students to know and be able to do as productive adults, we should be discussing that content, not hiding it under a rock.

There is a middle ground between total nondisclosure of test items and answers, and complete disclosure. It’s possible to retain the security of anchor items while releasing items that won’t be used again. But it’s easier to do this when there’s a more extensive bank of assessment items with known properties, and such an item bank for the Common Core does not yet exist. It may not be the most popular conclusion, but perhaps we should be investing more in the development of good assessment items.

First Rule of High-Stakes Assessments: Talk about High-Stakes Assessments

Second Rule of High-Stakes Assessments: TALK about High-Stakes Assessments

This post also appeared on The Hechinger Report’s Eye on Education blog.

There is something painfully Benedict-Arnoldian about writing this post for me. I am passionately, openly, and sometimes foolishly, in love with authentic assessment and portfolio assessment. I have seen working as a teacher, and now alongside them, the power that relevant and meaningful work holds for students. I found my way into my current position after leaving the classroom for a professional development team funded by the New York State Department of Education. Working on that team, together with personnel from SED, gave me a chance to get to know the people behind the names on mastheads and SED edicts. Those experiences and names didn’t leave me once the funds ended. From my work on the school support team, I was lucky enough to join an organization that devotes itself to learner-centered practices and supporting schools to design curriculum, instruction, and assessments that are rigorous, meaningful, and relevant. One of the amazing things I get to do for a living is help schools design performance-based assessments that ask students to do something with what they have learned, not just recall what they’ve learned. My job does not depend on the success or failure of state tests. I have no stake in testing itself, beyond that of a taxpayer and an educator privileged to work with teachers and schools. So my passionate belief in the craft of the teaching profession comes from my professional experience in classrooms and schools. I believe, adamantly, in using both the science of learning and the art of instruction to provide a quality public education to all of New York’s students.

I’ve attempted to pull out five things that parents and the GothamSchools community may find interesting, or should, know about psychometrics, or test design. As you read through this, I invite you to think about policy makers and test designers sitting in side by side boxes. Test designers design tests given certain parameters. Policy makers, and politicians, attempt to make decisions about the results of those tests. The wall between them may feel thin, but things like Race to the Top, teacher evaluations, etc. are separate from test design. It can feel easier to see into the policy maker box — which houses State Education Commissioner John King and Mayor Bloomberg, among others — than into the “test designer” box. It might seem like the test designer box is plastered with Pearson stickers, and while in some ways, that’s accurate — the state did award Pearson the latest contract for test design — Pearson is following a protocol established by New York State and the field of psychometrics to inform the creation of the New York State Assessments. The test designers, the people moving the tests from conception to the tests seen by students this month, are not sitting in their box conspiring to make students fail. They are highly educated members of a field committed to honoring the art of art of teaching through the science of assessment. (Most have doctorates in psychometrics or statistics. That’s why I’m a groupie and not a card-carrying psychometrician myself: My degrees, certification, and teaching experience are in special education.)

So without further ado, here are five important things every New Yorker should know about test design:

1. Learning, like health, is a construct. Your doctor can’t directly measure how healthy you are, but he or she can directly measure variables that reflect health. For example, your heart rate at this moment doesn’t describe if you are healthy or not. It’s just a number that reflects an attribute of health. Your doctor can take your blood pressure, your temperature, and ask you how you’re feeling and combine those data points to ascertain if you’re healthy. Test design is similar. When we assess (strategically collect evidence of students’ learning), we can only assess a proxy or an attribute of that learning. We can’t pull out a child’s brain, slap it on a scale and say, yup, they’ve learned this much (and for the record, I didn’t just reveal some grand conspiracy. No one wants to weigh children’s brains). No standardized test that a child will experience can capture those amazing traits and attributes that make that child such a beautiful little person. Most importantly — they don’t claim to. A test designer’s job is to create a tool that can measure particular skills and particular standards in a particular way. Designers will tell us what they are measuring in two ways. First, they will establish the purpose for an assessment. Second, they will release a table of specifications (also known as a test map). New York State shares both of these details from its tests (here and here).The history of assessment design has some parallels in the evolution of the medical field. A hundred years ago, doctors were boring into patients’ brains to relieve migraines. The profession got better as the science got better. Much of the science behind medicine is inaccessible to the public, but SED, and psychometricians, put the science of their field right out for the public to access. (It was this transparency that uncovered the serious problems with the way Pearson scored New York City’s gifted and talented exams, discussed in more detail later on). The technical reports describe step by step how NYSED ensures the tests are measuring the right constructs and the design consideration documents clarifies what the designers need to attend to. This transparency is important yet often overlooked.
2. Security does not mean secrecy. Many are clamoring to see the items so they can judge them, and they view the state’s decision to keep the items secure as a way to keep parents from seeing and critiquing any bad items. Yet that’s not really what’s happening. The grade 3-8 tests were not secure for years, and I could not find any evidence of parents or the public successfully challenging or critiquing an item. When looking at an item, it’s important to remember that being an adult means having years and years of background knowledge. When adults look over the shoulder of a child or sit down to take a test designed for children, their response is influenced by their own background experiences. Even the most experienced third-grade teacher cannot see through the eyes of an 8-year-old. This does not mean adults can’t empathize or critique some aspects of item quality, but their assessment is complicated by the fact that what makes an item quality may vary from parent to parent, teacher to teacher. And the most useful evidence of the actual difficulty of an item is the feedback from the children taking a test — a child saying, “Question 7 was hard” is a powerful perceptual data point — but children might well report an item as easy or hard when their responses indicate the opposite.Knowing all of this, when New York State educators helped review the items students are seeing on the tests (the state requires that Pearson includes teachers in item review), we have to assume they did their very best to ensure the items student see are fair, rigorous, and aligned to the Common Core standards. Moving forward, field testing gives the test makers a real sense of an item’s quality and usefulness, and the students’ answers this week give them the final components needed to determine how high-quality a test is or isn’t. There are lots of checks and balances in test design to ensure that items are quality, including ways to handle students guessing, leaving items blank, and being confused by a particular wrong choice. Technical reports provide multiple examples of these balances. Keeping items secure after administration is a hard nut to swallow for those of us who want to dismantle the item response data and technical reports, but it’s a way to keep costs to taxpayers down and increase the strength of the tests from year to year.
3. Public accountability is a part of the social contract. Ever since President George W. Bush asked the question “[are] our children learning?” we’ve been thinking differently about how we capture evidence of success in public schools. Can success be determined by looking at some students in some schools? Or do we need to look at all students in all schools? New York, and most other states, concluded that we have an obligation to generate a data point for each child. (Again, no conspiracy theory. There is no goal to view a child as just a number or a data point. It’s akin to taking the temperature of all of children in the state. At the same time. In the same way. Your opinion of testing may influence what type of thermometer you picture in that metaphor.)Assessing every public school child in the state is an awesome undertaking that might or might not be warranted (there is lots of conversation among psychometricians about population sampling on large-scale assessments), but asking every teacher to report on student learning in such a way that can be accessible to taxpayers is lovely in theory, but impossible in design on a very large scale. In New York, we’re asking a slightly different question this year: “Can New York State public school students successfully respond to questions and tasks aligned to our new standards?” The tests we’re seeing now, I believe, come from a sincere effort on King’s part to answer that question. While some argue that student performance is a conversation that should be limited to parents and teachers, the social contract of public education is about all Americans, all taxpayers. Alternative assessments have been successful on a smaller scale through performance and portfolio consortiums, but the time those schools invest in assessment design, administration, and scoring is considerable.Where this public contract runs into problems is what happens with the data once they’re generated — and policy makers start making policy. How we communicate about student learning with the public is an important conversation. It’s a different fight, though, than about the tests themselves.
4. NYSED wants assessments that are worthy of the state’s students. Our state takes pride in having one of the longest standing departments of education. Look at national or federal panels around practically any educational issue, and you’ll likely see a New Yorker’s name. Our state has a reputation to uphold when it comes to innovation and commitment to students. (Case in point, the state added a bunch of standards to the Common Core before adoption. The most frequently occurring verbs in the New York State-added standards? Create, engage, and seek to understand.) Linda Darling-Hammond at Stanford University is doing very exciting work about the next generation of assessments, and the two national test consortiums are spending a lot of time figuring out what that means. Test designers write, research and think about what it means to measure learning, and a considerable amount of thinking is done about making sure the tools we use are the best possible.Ten years ago, the fourth-grade state assessments almost always included a fable. Fourth-grade teachers across the state taught fables, regardless of their curriculum. Our system will respond to the measurement tools we use, which is why we have an obligation to make those tools the best they can be. There is a lot riding on the line with these Pearson contracts. The company dropped the ball last year by overlooking final eyes on the Spanish language tests, and King rightly reminded Pearson officials of the terms of its contract with the state. Again last week, much to the chagrin of those advocating for getting this right, Pearson announced a serious scoring issue with the New York City’s gifted and talented tests. The gaffe is inexcusable. The only bright spot in the G&T debacle is how the problem was uncovered. It was the transparency mentioned in point 2 that allowed parents to review their child’s score. Pearson is big but not so big as to withstand getting dumped by New York.  This is not a defense of Pearson. What happened was indefensible and will likely be tracked to simple, boring human error (i.e. the wrong scale was used when converting scores). However, it is important to note that Pearson worked to right the wrong once brought to their attention and knows that the spotlight is brighter than ever on their test design departments — as it should be.However, as justified as the anger is around the G&T test, other complaints may be not rest on as solid ground. As we move towards worthier tests, our state is making small moves. Some of the details that the state put in the Pearson contract include the inclusion of authentic texts. Since textbook publishers, of which Pearson is one, also use authentic texts, people noticed overlap between textbooks and the tests. As provocative as the overlap sounds, it’s a coincidence. For each passage that appears in a Pearson textbook, we could likely find a passage in a McGraw Hill or Harcourt reading series. Authentic texts also talk about the world around us — which at times, includes trademarked names. Including a trademarked name isn’t a way for psychometricians to get kickbacks but instead, is a way to use literature or informational texts that reflect students’ worlds. So while these details — Pearson textbooks containing passages and the inclusion of trademarked names in text — feel like design errors or additional reasons to fault Pearson, they are the natural consequence of increasing the texts’ authenticity.
5. Test designers don’t control what happens in the classroom. As many have reported, students are spending 540 minutes taking the state’s math and reading tests this year. If students go to school for 180 days and spend, let’s say, five hours a day learning, that’s 1 percent of their school year devoted to taking part in an assessment of public education across the state. Yet schools have reported weeks spent on test prep and hours spent taking practice tests. Test designers and Pearson make for a great focus of our anger because they seem faceless and powerful. But they have no direct say in what happens in the state’s classrooms the other 99 percent of the time. Since the state’s tests are not yet worthy of our students (but getting better) it is critical that the assessments students see on a daily basis — teacher- and school-designed assessments — are rich, complex, challenging and authentic. Pearson doesn’t dictate how to talk about the tests with students or what happens at the local level with the results. Parents reported children cried because they were told they would fail if they didn’t pass. I wish I could sit down with teachers who believe that and walk them through the 1999 APA Testing Standards and the Code of Fair Testing Practices in Education to show them what testing is intended to do and the foundations that test designers operate on. Part of the challenge of establishing the science of our profession is figuring out how we talk about the science, and how we balance the construct of learning with the concept of quality public education. Test designers are not evil. They don’t want to trick children. They don’t want students to fail. They want to measure proxies of learning in order to provide evidence to answer questions about the health of our public schools.At this point, I would want to point to how the tests are supposed to be used. The first item in the 1999 APA Testing Standards is around purpose. That is, test results should only be used for the purpose the test was designed for. This item is usually the first thing that appears in a test technical report. It’s on the first page of the state’s 2011 technical report and appears on the list of required items for the required technical report in the state’s contract with Pearson. Going right to the source — how does the state intend for the results of these assessments to be used? — would be a great way for me to demonstrate the difference between test designers and policy makers. Except I can’t do that, because the 2012 technical report hasn’t been posted yet and the 2013 report won’t be out until at least 2014. That’s a problem that makes it harder for us to separate design and policy. Despite the report’s absence, we can still push back against bad policy. We can continue to raise questions about “value-added” measures of teacher quality, as many test designers and psychometricians are doing. We can demand that King honor the statements he made about no school being penalized based on this year’s scores. We can work to convince Bloomberg to change his mind about basing summer school enrollment and retention on state assessment scores.

There are, to be sure, issues around this year’s assessments, such as the time and length. Some of these issues will be resolved in the post-test reliability procedures. Some will be resolved by the movement to computer-based testing in the future. But regardless of how they are resolved, please be assured that there is a science to test design. What students saw last week and will see this week was reviewed by local teachers, vetted for quality and worthiness, and represent a sincere effort to answer the question, “Are we providing New York State public education students with a quality education?”

For this reason, the opportunity to showcase and discuss my students’ work comes as a great treat. I teach philosophy at Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science & Engineering. The ninth-graders study rhetoric and logic; the 10th-graders, ethics and aesthetics; and the 11th-graders, political philosophy. (I have written about these courses here and here.) I have selected three pieces to discuss; each one, in a different way, has enriched my thinking and the courses I teach. They are all first and sole drafts (with minor edits in the latter two cases); in a future article, I might examine a piece as it progresses from first to final draft.

I will begin with a piece that a 10th-grader wrote for the first assignment of the year:

To get a sense of my students’ ideas and writing, I asked them to write about a situation involving an ethical dilemma, either in their own lives or in a work of literature. I rarely give assignments on personal topics, but this proved instructive; I was overwhelmed by the thoughtfulness of the responses. Among all of them, this one stood out for its philosophical thinking and play. It begins:

While I was about to start this assignment, I spent about twenty minutes stressing over the fact that I couldn’t think of anything that made me question ethics. I complained to my mother that I couldn’t think of anything to say. I then asked her whether I should ask Professor Senechal whether I could make it up. Mom raised her eyebrow. “Is that ethical?” she asked.

This student (who requested anonymity) clearly took the assignment seriously and treated it with respect. His initial thought was not exactly to lie, but to ask me whether he might make something up. Then came the delightful detail of his mother raising her eyebrow, and the question, “Is that ethical?” which the student realized was an ethical dilemma right there. Thus, he ingeniously turns his dilemma about the assignment into the very topic of the assignment.

In the second paragraph, he examines philosophical positions on lying: Kant’s argument that any lying results in loss of dignity; utilitarian arguments that lying may be acceptable if it is used to a good end; and more. He concludes that he is somewhere between Kant and utilitarians. Implicit in the discussion is his decision, for this particular occasion, not to lie. I learned from his piece, first of all, that this was going to be a good year; and second, that real-life applications of philosophy need not be shallow, if the philosophical thought is strong.

The latter point has affected the way I plan lessons. Early on in my teaching, I resisted the overemphasis (in many schools) on real-life learning, where students talk and write about their lives without reading much of substance. I was determined to have my students tackle interesting and lasting books. I keep that determination but recognize that we are all finding our way through our lives, and that the books can help, directly or indirectly. So, I explore with my students why these books matter, as well as what they contain.

The second piece was written by Khadijah McCarthy, also a 10th-grader, for a test that the students took in late October:

Students had to choose one of two open-book essay questions (and were allowed to use their books and notes). Khadijah chose to compare the ideas of Immanuel Kant regarding value and dignity with those of Martin Buber regarding “It” and “You.” (The students had read substantial excerpts of Kant’s “” and Martin Buber’s “I and Thou.”) This was an especially challenging question, because their ideas appear similar at first glance.

Both Kant and Buber are concerned with human dignity and how it is upheld or demeaned. According to Kant, each of us has value and dignity; our value is that which can be measured and replaced (our job skills, for instance), whereas dignity allows of no measurement or replacement. In Buber’s view, humans have a dual attitude toward the world: an “I-It” attitude, which involves treating others (humans, animals, trees, things) as objects, and an “I-You” attitude, which is a full relation, an acknowledgement of the entirety of the other. Like Kant’s “value,” “It” can be described, experienced, and contained; “You,” like Kant’s “dignity,” has no limits. Khadijah, who has shown exceptional perseverance and keenness in working with complex texts, was able to find a difference between the ideas of Kant and Buber:

Kant offers a solution that is everlasting; as long as you have dignity, then you can never be matched, and because dignity has an intrinsic origin, you will have it for as long as you live. With Buber, you can only remain in the “You” realm for so long; as Buber states, “It [the “You” realm] lacks duration, for it vanishes even when you try to cling to it.” If this “You” realm has the ability to vanish at any given point, and there is nothing that you can do to prevent that, then this may not always be a tangible, realistic alternative or solution.

I was fascinated by Khadijah’s idea that Kant’s solution is more “realistic” than Buber’s (if his can be called a solution). I asked myself: is this so? One might also argue that Buber’s is more realistic, because it acknowledges the extreme rareness of relating to others in their fullness — and the greatness of such relation. Also, alhough Buber’s “You”-encounter vanishes, it can affect the rest of a person’s life, and thus has a kind of eternity. At the same time, Kant’s idea of dignity does seem unshakeable, intrinsic to humans, and thus more practicable than Buber’s “You.” Khadijah’s interpretation of the texts challenged my own thoughts and helped me form questions for future class discussion.

I conclude with an 11th-grader’s parody of Plato:

In the fall, the 11th-graders delved into ancient political philosophy and discussed the benefits and pitfalls of different forms of government. After we finished Book VIII of the “Republic” (where Socrates explains one form of government decays into the next, until tyranny is reached), I asked students to write a continuation in which Socrates and Glaucon explore how tyranny devolves into something else. Through this assignment they could demonstrate their understanding of the reading, their grasp of Plato’s logic, and their political imagination. As I collected the students’ work, I started reading Christian (“Kit”) McArthur’s piece and stifled my cachinnation. I looked over at Kit, who looked back with a mischievous twinkle. The piece begins (with Glaucon speaking first):

Well, I am still unsatisfied. Socrates, could tyranny devolve further into something else?

Possibly.

We’ve already established that an aristocracy devolves into a timocracy, which devolves into an oligarchy, which further devolves into a democracy, which even further devolves into tyranny.

Absolutely.

Therefore, according to logic, the tyranny would have to devolve further.

Of course.

Kit grasped that much of the dialogue in Book VIII isn’t dialogue at all; most of the time, Socrates speaks and someone else agrees. (Elsewhere in the “Republic,” there are substantial exceptions to this pattern.) Kit’s piece turns the tables, making Glaucon lead the way, yet it’s clear that Socrates remains in charge (or does he?). The piece becomes increasingly sophisticated as it progresses, with a combination of wit, insight, and parody. Such qualities in combination cannot be conjured at will, but I want to do more to make room for them.

Grading homework does not always bring delight; often, when working through stacks of papers, I realize that I am not offering my students the detailed comments they deserve. (Or the grammatical errors start to endanger my hair.) Everything from the ideas to the spelling needs attention, yet I must work fast in order to get the grading done. Then a piece comes my way that makes me stop and marvel. I sink briefly into thought, then shake myself and move on. Still, the piece doesn’t go away. It finds its way into a lesson or question; it comes back to mind months or years later. Often I am overwhelmed not by all the work I have to do, nor by the distractions and disruptions, but by the gifts.

In a professional newsroom, employees are often warned to get used to the spotlight of scrutiny. When you make your living holding others accountable, you have to expect that others will hold you to a high standard.

In the last decade, as the number of professional journalists has shrunk, activists and bloggers have stepped in to do the tough work of journalists, namely holding the powerful accountable.

This is especially true when it comes to education in New York City, where many people have stepped into that gap to hold the powerful accountable. Among them is Leonie Haimson, founder of the NYC Public School Parents blog and executive director of the non-profit organization Class Size Matters.

Haimson’s narrative as an activist began 15 years ago, when she enrolled her daughter in elementary school and was discouraged to discover a large class size. Since then she has become an influential thought-leader, activist, and blogger, her grassroots expertise widely cited and quoted in significant conversations about public policy that impact New York’s children.

So it made sense that when Geoff Decker, a reporter for GothamSchools (another organization dedicated to holding public school officials accountable) learned that Haimson’s only minor child was attending a private high school, his instinct was to write a story.

It was a good call.

As a journalism ethics consultant at Poynter, I’ve guided reporters and editors through hundreds of decisions over the past decade. That’s why Philissa Cramer, managing editor of GothamSchools, asked me to do an independent analysis of her newsroom’s decision to make Haimson’s choice to put her child in private school public knowledge.

GothamSchools had two choices to make. First, Decker and his editors had to decide whether Haimson’s school decision for her child was newsworthy. And after determining the story was newsworthy, the site had to decide what sort of treatment to give the story.

To make the first choice, Decker and his editors had to simply ask: Would people be interested to know that the editor of the NYC Public School Parents blog is no longer a public school parent? Of course they would.

Critics of the story suggest that because Haimson works for free, her private choices about where to enroll her child should remain private, that the public has no business knowing where her child goes to school.

But the fact that The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News picked up the story reinforces the idea that it was truly newsworthy.

That brings us to the second choice: How to handle the story. GothamSchools didn’t name the child, the school, or even if the child is a boy or a girl. Decker interviewed those who viewed Haimson’s choice both positively and negatively.

Decker found out about Haimson’s school choice from an anonymous source last summer. In September, he asked Haimson where her child was going to school and she answered truthfully. When he suggested that the private-school choice was worthy of a story, the reporter and the activist disagreed.

Haimson is a forceful personality, Decker said. He was afraid of making her angry and losing her as a source. So he held off on writing the story. “I was a little bit intimidated to do the story and to talk to Leonie about it.” He said. “I wanted to do it thoughtfully. It was more than just a story about a public school parent sending her kid to private school.”

He was hoping he could convince her to participate in the story. Finally last week, at the urging of his editors, he pulled the trigger on the story. When he told Haimson he was publishing, she published her own blog post. Comments under both posts were mixed, but largely supportive of Haimson.

And that’s fair too, even though Decker’s 1,300-word story practically bends over backward to be fair to Haimson, more than the Post or the Daily News, which both followed up with mean-spirited stories meant to humiliate, did when they tackled the story. It may be that Haimson’s supporters knew the tabloids would take their shots.

Haimson told me on the phone that she received an enormous outpouring of support.

“I never misrepresented myself,” Haimson said. “After September, I never identified myself as a public-school parent.”

But that’s the rub. There was an established narrative about Haimson that in part was the basis of her expertise. In not actively correcting that, Haimson was vulnerable to outside criticism.

In hindsight, she told me, she should have just written a blog post in September about her decision to send her child to private high school.

“I didn’t want to have go into explaining the circumstances,” she said. “I knew that it would provide ammunition for my ideological opponents.”

In reporting the story, Decker and GothamSchools did their due diligence. They didn’t rush the story. They searched for alternatives that allowed them to deliver relevant news to their audience in a way that minimized harm to Haimson’s child.  They didn’t name the child or the high school.

Ultimately, if you want to tell a complicated truth and hold the powerful accountable, you have to be willing to hold yourself to that same standard. Even though Haimson’s particular message is that all parents deserve small class sizes, she established her authority through her personal experience as a public school parent.

When that changed, it didn’t invalidate her authority. But it was a noteworthy fact for the many people who regularly participate in the debate over public schools in New York. And GothamSchools stepped up and reported the story.

Kelly McBride is senior faculty for ethics at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies. She specializes in journalism’s transformation and its impact on democracy. 

To prepare for the discussion, we asked teachers who will participate to answer one question: What is the biggest issue teachers and students in your school are facing as the Common Core math exams approach? Here’s what Bushra Makiya, an eighth-grade math teacher at C.I.S. 303 in the Bronx and a Math for America Master Teacher, had to say.

The greatest challenge we have faced at 303 regarding the Common Core has been wrapping our heads around the depth of each standard. The Common Core has required us to completely readjust from the New York state standards, which were extremely scripted. Each standard  has multiple dimensions; they are not just single skills where every problem looks exactly like the next. This has meant that it takes a lot more time for teachers to unpack the meaning of each standard than it did in previous years.

Also, transitioning all grades in a single year means that most of my students do not have the background knowledge or skills required to be successful with the new standards. This means that we are trying to play catch-up at the same time we are trying to implement a new and very rigorous curriculum. This has caused a lot of stress for both teachers and students at my school.

Related to this, teachers and students feel very worried that they do not know what the tests will look like this year. My students read in the news that scores will drop this year and that the test will be harder, but when they ask for reassurance, we don’t have answers to give them.

On the other hand, I am very optimistic about the renewed focus on problem solving that the common core is pushing. I am grateful for the strong push away from procedural teaching and towards enabling students to make sense of mathematics for themselves. The CCLS process standards exemplify what math teaching should be and I am happy to see the Common Core pushing us in the right direction.

I remember so vividly the anticipation of getting my grades each term in the mail, tearing off the perforations to reveal whether or not my all-nighters were worth it. Had I studied enough? Had that extra trip to the writing center paid off? Should I have gone to tutoring? Now, even though grades are available in an instant and perforated paper is a thing of the past, I have that same excited anxiety for my students each time they send me their grades online.

First-semester grades can be a very exciting time for some students and a harsh wake-up call for others. College work is different from high school work and, unlike at the beginning of their first semester, I don’t have to remind my students of this when grades come out. They remind me, unprompted.

Nationally, many students don’t make it past the first semester of college. Though none of my students have completely withdrawn from their schools, some have an uphill battle they’ll have to fight to get off of academic probation. Despite our plan and my encouragement, they now find themselves on academic probation or academic warning at their respective colleges, including one who is facing the reality of academic dismissal if he cannot bring his grade-point average over 2.0 this semester.

As much as I want to prevent my students from getting to this point, the hard truth is that I’ve found that sometimes students need a poor semester in order to light a fire inside. Last year, I had a few students with poor first semesters and, without exception, all have brought their grades above the academic warning benchmark. One of my students ended his first semester with six credits and a 1.5 GPA last year, but we weren’t surprised. He admittedly slept through many classes and didn’t follow the study plan we had laid out. He figured he could slide by just as he did in high school, without putting in the effort that successful college students expect to expend. For his second semester, we worked hard to find productive study techniques and an efficient calendar so he could better use the time he was not used to having in high school. Earning 17 credits and a 3.1 GPA during the spring, he is now consistently maintaining over a 2.5 cumulative GPA.

But it is not just poor study habits that hold students back in their first semester. Students also find themselves academically unprepared for their first semester classes, feeling that they just didn’t enter college with the skills they need to succeed. As a counselor with Bottom Line, I encourage my students to take advantage of the tutoring center, writing center, and professors’ office hours. Many don’t realize that part of the cost of their attendance goes to these resources, so they should use them (especially if they’re paying for them!). It can be frustrating for students, especially those at the top of their high school class, who suddenly find themselves lacking the skills needed to keep up with the rigor of college academics.

It’s important to remember that, even while on academic probation, all is not lost. The transition to college, as we know, is tough, but it’s not impossible. My students and I have worked hard to create realistic study plans and calendars for getting their work done well and on time. Two are in the process of transferring from their current two-year program to bachelor’s degree programs at various State University of New York colleges. I’m very proud of them and optimistic about the progress of my freshmen who are currently adjusting to the rigor of college academics.

One of my favorite parts of the Passover seder has always been the discussion of the Four Children. The traditional seder discusses four children — The Wise Son, The Wicked Son, The Simple One, and The One Who Doesn’t Know How to Ask. Each of these sons has his own question, and the haggadah explains the appropriate response for each one. Since entering the classroom, I’ve had my own thoughts about each of these children, and their manifestations in my own classroom.

The Wise Son asks, “What are the laws and statutes by which to fulfill the commandments of Passover?” This son is exalted, because he seeks to learn more about the rituals of Passover. Furthermore, this question is considered wise, because it shows understanding of the story of Passover and seeks deeper meaning from the seder.

A wise child in the classroom hopefully offers the same sort of questioning for the teacher. A wise child is not content with the cursory understanding of a topic or a strategy, but asks for more information. While too many children are willing to absorb knowledge passively without further elucidation, a wise child asks for more.

More often in my classroom, however, it has been the “wicked” child who challenges me as a teacher. The response to The Wicked Son’s question, “What does this ritual mean to you?” has always bothered me. The haggadah instructs us to “set his teeth on edge.” Had this child been alive during the time of the exodus, the haggadah explains, he would not have been redeemed. Harsh.

The haggadah’s interpretation that this child has excluded himself from the community and rejects the tradition of Passover only partially explains the reaction to The Wicked Son’s question. I know the frustration and anger all too well of a child who scoffs at the rules and routines of the classroom community I’ve created. However, a child who refuses to include himself or herself in a classroom community is also one of the sadder experiences I’ve felt. Is a violent rebuke really the best response?

I’ve also felt that this child’s questioning is also equally valuable as the wise child’s. What does this mean to you? Whether it’s the story of the exodus, or reading, writing and math strategies in a classroom, we all should feel obligated to understand and explain our own connection to a community. This isn’t to absolve the Wicked Son of his disrespect, but all rituals, whether religious or pedagogical, are ultimately strengthened when they are challenged and questioned.

The third child, the Simple Son, is perhaps the most prevalent in the high-needs classroom. But while the Simple Son of the haggadah is implied to be too young for rebellion or wisdom, the “simple” children of our classrooms are not the youngest. Rather, these students populate our classrooms because of a number of factors that yield huge gaps in reading, writing and mathematical skills.

When presented with tasks that require higher-order thinking, their response echoes that of the simple child, “What is the meaning of all this?” These children require more than the equivalent of the haggadah’s instruction to explain the core meaning of Passover. We as teachers are challenged to create scaffolds and tiered lessons that allow these children to engage in critical thinking consistently until they too are challenging us in the same ways as the wicked and wise children.

Finally, we have the children who do not know how to ask. These are the children in our classrooms who suffer most needlessly. Without the means to attract attention via rebellion like the wicked child, or loquaciousness like the wise child, these children fall through the cracks. Too often, the quietness of these children is lauded as good behavior. They may be partly or completely lost, but they’re scared or unable to verbalize this confusion. As a result they become practically invisible.

The essential challenge of a teacher is to recognize and help all of these children learn in the classroom. The haggadah offers some ideas for how each child demands a different response, but the reality of our classrooms is very different than that of a Passover seder. There are no one-sentence answers for these children. Rather, our classrooms require a sophisticated, diligent approach that makes all children feel welcome and able to learn. I’m not sure it’s possible to create a classroom that erases these sorts of differences in one year, but I’m reminded of the words of another figure from the seder, Rabbi Hillel, who said, “You are not obligated to complete the task, but nor are you free to desist from it.”

I participated in a Passover Seder meal this year. Raised in the Catholic Church, I’ve got a soft spot for ritual and the way that so many of our senses are engaged in religious ceremonies. As I sat through the Seder, I couldn’t help but think, isn’t this a perfectly crafted educational experience?

As a Seder newcomer (I’ve been to about three in my life), my interest trumped my lack of knowledge about Jewish religion and Hebrew language. Even though we sat at the table for over four hours, I was engaged throughout. Part of my engagement came from the knowledge that something important and sacred was about to happen. It made me wonder: How do I make classroom experiences important, even sacred, to my students?

The female rabbi, our leader in this Seder, provided a Haggadah she had assembled for each person at the table. The pages were numbered, as books in Hebrew always are, from back to front, tying us in a simple way to the traditions that we were about to practice. The ritual, which retells the ancient story of the Jews’ exodus from slavery in Egypt, was conducted with a mix of Hebrew, English, and Aramaic language. While some participants were familiar with all three languages, some, like me, only knew one. As a teacher, I thought: How do I expose my students to cultures with which they are unfamiliar? How do I invite them to bring knowledge of their own cultures to the classroom?

The leader began by providing us with an outline of the parts of the Seder, pronouncing the Hebrew names of the components, with them providing an English translation along with a hand motion. Throughout the Seder, as we transitioned from each part, we chanted the parts we’d completed, using the accompanied hand gestures. While I never did fully remember each Hebrew pronunciation, my level of confidence increased each time we sang and gestured. And even though I hadn’t understood, I was fully able to participate in the hand gestures, my favorite part. I asked myself: How can I integrate the arts into the classroom to provide more entry points for experience an expression?

The story of the Exodus from slavery to freedom is told and retold throughout the meal. If you miss it or don’t understand it the first time, hopefully you’ll grasp it later — and each way is told differently. The story of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt is told through the answers to the Four Questions, the parable of the Four Children (which Ruben Brosbe related to his own classroom), the song “Dayeinu,” and the explanation of the Seder Plate. It made me think: How can I tell stories in multiple ways, gearing them towards multiple learners at varying points in their journeys?

In the explanation of the Seder Plate, the Passover story is symbolized by the food we eat, adding yet another way to understand and remember what the story is about. This part has stayed with me since the first time I participated in a Seder during the eighth grade as a part of my Catholic religious education. I distinctly remember dipping parsley in salt water (and that I didn’t like the taste), which I was reminded this year is meant to recall both the arrival of spring and the salty tears shed by Jewish slaves. The plate and its contents provide a way to remember the important parts of the meal, either through taste or simply visualizing the plate in one’s mind. I asked myself: What hands-on and visual symbols can I bring into my lessons to enrich the experience for students?

Along the way, our rabbi tied in more recent events and our knowledge and experience throughout the dinner. Tying the story of the Jews’ quest for freedom to the African-American Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech was read, and the group also sang “We Shall Overcome.” I think the singing here was one of my favorite parts, probably in part because I knew this song! How is what we’re studying relevant to my students? In what way do we make emotional and socially relevant connections within the classroom?

And who could forget — a game is incorporated into the Seder as well: the search for a hidden piece of matzah, the Afikomen, which happens at the end of meal in order to keep children engaged through the long history lesson and meal. A little fun goes a long way! As a teacher, how can I make learning fun for my students, even when the task is not easy?

One of my favorite components of the evening I attended was one that is not standard but instead was added by the rabbi who led the Seder: a discussion of the Jewish tradition of charity, called tzedakah. In the tradition of the tzedakah box, one could place money into the box as an act of charity. And one who needed money could take some from the box. The important thing was that no one knew who was doing the giving and who was doing the taking. This ethos of exchange should be present in the classroom, which is home to a constant give and take of teaching and learning between student and teacher and among students. How do we create this type of balance in our classroom — a place where responsibility is shared?

While I certainly can’t fully explain or dictate each part of the Seder, I will say I remember so much of it and understand a decent part of the symbolism, even though it was a short experience. This is in part due to the careful planning of the leader along with the wise merits of ritual religious experience that speaks to the senses and the memory. As I returned to school from spring break, my Seder experience has stuck with me, and I am contemplating one overarching question whose answer I’d like to guide my work: How can we, as teachers, make school a meaningful, wide-awake experience that stays with students beyond the classroom walls?

It’s 8:30 p.m. on a cold February night in Washington Heights. The huge crowd outside of the United Palace Theater is anxious about missing the opening number of tonight’s one-night-only “In The Heights” benefit performance. When the show’s writer/star Lin-Manuel Miranda races around the block, high-fiving fans and hollering, “We don’t start until y’all get inside!” people whoop and cheer. But our students barely notice their idol blowing by. They’re too wrapped up belting a cappella versions of the show’s greatest hits. Auditions for our school’s production of “In The Heights” are still a week away, but the kids have already memorized the whole score.

In the history of our performing arts program, I’ve never seen kids so amped up about a show before. But then, I can’t say I’m surprised.

For a decade, the kids in our program have been stretching far outside their cultural comfort zones to put on musicals that have little do to with their own life experiences. It doesn’t matter that we’ve intentionally chosen a broad range of shows, including ones that prominently feature people of color, like “Once On This Island” and “Aida.” At the end of the day, the French Antilles and the shores of Nubia are still a far cry from the corner of 172nd Street and Third Avenue in the South Bronx. And each of those shows, like every other show we’ve done — with the lone exception of “The Wiz” whose composer/lyricist is African-American — was created by white people.

It’s not like we weren’t trying to find Broadway musicals that could have hit home more directly. They just weren’t out there.

So when I first saw “In The Heights” on Broadway five years ago and found a stage packed full of performers who looked exactly like the students I teach, telling stories that Lin-Manuel Miranda could have overheard in our school’s hallways, I knew our students’ response to the show was going to be epic.

I wasn’t naïve enough to think that musical theater’s whole cultural landscape would shift overnight as a result of one show. If nothing else, the almost all-white Broadway crowd around me back in 2008 was a clear indication of how much work remained to be done in terms of access.

But ever since “In The Heights” has been on the scene, I’ve been less worried about young African-American and Latino actors coming out of our program after playing lead roles in “Les Misérables” only to find that their best hope in the professional world is getting cast as “Thug #3″ or the lead character’s “Sassy Best Friend.”

We’ve had to wait the better part of five years for the amateur licensing rights to “In The Heights” to become available, but the time has arrived. And now we’re kicking off our creative process with a field trip to see the original Broadway cast show us how it’s done.

As we finally make our way to our seats inside the United Palace Theater, one of my students looks around at the capacity crowd, does her best “Home Alone” shocked face and nudges me playfully. “Yo, Ms. Q,” she says, “There’s a lot of black and brown people in here!”

A combination of the show’s widespread popularity and organizers’ efforts to reach a broader audience with $30 tickets for Upper Manhattan residents means that the crowd is more diverse than any group of theater-goers I’ve ever seen. (And there’s reason to hope that this demographic shift may be part of a wider trend, since the evening’s proceeds benefit The Broadway League’s Viva Broadway initiative, a new audience development partnership with the Hispanic community to help bridge the world of Broadway with Latino audiences around the country, as well as Family First Nights, a nationwide program specifically designed to encourage at risk families to attend theater on a regular basis.)

The rest of the evening is a blur. The audience is cheering and singing along throughout most of the show. Actors pause before the big laugh lines so the audience can shout them out en masse. At the curtain call the whole place leaps up, dancing to the music and waving Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Mexican flags. We haven’t come prepared for this Rocky Horror Picture Show-level of audience participation, but we join in happily.

The emotional high of the evening sets the scene perfectly for auditions for “In The Heights” at our school. This year’s turnout is enormous and includes an unprecedented number of first-time participants.

At the callback, one 12th-grade newbie named Chris says,

There’s no way I would’ve considered trying out if we hadn’t been doing this particular show… Let’s just say musical theater was never really my thing. But being Dominican, these characters and the stories they’re telling through the music and the dance all really hit home for me.

Once auditions are behind us and rehearsals begin, the students show up with a level of professionalism and initiative unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Gone are the days of pulling teeth, begging actors to get focused and learn their lines. These kids are off-book at the first read-through, leaping up to perform each song fully memorized with provisional blocking and improvised choreography already in place.

When our leading man discovers that Lin-Manuel Miranda himself has “liked” a rehearsal photo of him posted on Facebook, his comment is the following:

“Omg omg omg, my heart’s gonna blow up!!!”

And while I like to think I’m immune to celebrity worship, here’s what I comment back to him:

“Yeah. I feel you, dude. Me, too.”

The new curriculum reflects two significant shifts. Whereas the old framework was essentially a series of topics, the new framework focuses on what the state calls “Key Ideas” and “Understandings,” as well as adding the Common Core Literacy Standards and what the state calls “Social Studies Practices,” which reflect the key skills in our discipline.

On the Framework’s opening page, there are a list of objectives that I found refreshing and of which I am very supportive. According to the document, the purpose of social studies “is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”  Toward that end, the Framework claims to allow “students to develop an understanding of concepts and key ideas driven by case studies, analysis of primary and secondary source documents, and an examination of patterns of events in history,” and teachers “to have increased decision‐making power about how to teach and illustrate conceptual understandings and key ideas to promote student understanding.” On those three points rests the entirety of the work I do with curriculum, teachers, and students. Count me in!

A little of the substance that follows this promising introduction does take steps forward toward indicating what students should be able to do in high school social studies courses. Both the Common Core standards, which I’ve written about elsewhere, and the conception and inclusion of the Social Studies Practices, are significant advancements from previous state guidelines which only focused on content knowledge.

However, the extended list of 59 Key Ideas and the multitude of Understandings serve to completely undermine those efforts  I have three main concerns, as well as suggestions to address these concerns.

First, a certain interpretation of history is established through the “Key Ideas” which is meant to be transferred to students, as opposed to a series of questions being posted to lead to the inquiry necessary to demonstrate most of the Common Core standards such as argument (Writing 1), comparing texts with different views (Reading 9), and all the Practices. This static approach to historical content assumes we know what matters about the past and simply need to transfer it to students, rather than acknowledging that social studies is a contested field of knowledge, in which interpretations of the past are continually questioned and reevaluated.

Second, in grades 9-11, there is no consideration of why this history matters today. As a result, the Framework includes no way for students to achieve the stated goal of social studies to “help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”

To address these past two concerns, the Framework should be shifted from answers to questions that would demand actual inquiry, thinking, rigor, and decision-making. For example, the current Framework demands that 11th-graders know that “the success of the revolution challenged Americans to establish a system of government that would provide for stability, while beginning to fulfill the promise of the ideals outlined in the Declaration of Independence.” This assumes that the Constitution provided stability, an idea the Civil War challenges, and that it was a step on the road to certain ideals, despite its protection of slavery and the slave trade. It also fails to look at the Constitution in the present day.

Instead of starting with the answer, it would be better if  we started with questions: “To what extent did the Constitution succeed in fulfilling its stated goals in the Preamble? To what extent did the Constitution fulfill the promises of the Declaration of Independence? How well does it still work today? How might it change to work better?” The Gilder Lehrman Foundation has a much longer list of similarly provocative and essential questions for U.S. history that might serve as a model.

Third, and most importantly, there are too many ideas and understandings to do well in the given courses, and every single one of them is mandated. It takes time to help “students to develop an understanding of concepts and key ideas driven by case studies, analysis of primary and secondary source documents.” It takes about six weeks for my students to come to the required understandings of the Constitution, while simultaneous developing core skills and practices. However, the Key Idea of the Constitution is only one of 14. I would need at least 84 weeks to do this curriculum justice, but I only have 40. The senior year curriculum is even more daunting, with 10 Key Ideas for government and 15 for economics. But each of these classes last only for a semester, or 20 weeks.

Rather than removing understandings from the list, however, I would rather see a model that, as the Framework claims it wants to do, explicitly empowers districts and teachers to make choices. I would suggest the state consider the International Baccalaureate model. In that curriculum, there are a small number of prescribed subjects that take up about a third of the course, in combination with a longer menu of options for the rest of the course. The IB history exam models how students could be assessed. The exam includes a large number of questions, and students choose to answer a few questions on a number of different subjects.

It is my hope that the State Education Department hears similar feedback from teachers across the state, and that these changes are implemented before the new curriculum takes effect. I hope those who agree with my critiques will take the time to share their input in the coming weeks.

If you share my concerns, you can find the proposed draft, fill out the state’s feedback survey (due Friday night), sign a petition, and read more critiques of the curriculum here. Maybe together we can transform a stumbling block into a stepping stone.

The first day of my ninth-grade English class at the High School for Arts and Business this past year was like any other: full of nerves, anxious glances around the room, and fresh notebooks. But this year would be different, I informed the class. We would be embarking on a marvelous opportunity where their voices would be heard — literally and figuratively — through a program called StoryCorpsU.

To start, I directed students to get out of their seats for an activity. I handed out index cards with questions on them and within minutes the room was abuzz with discussions about students’ vision of a perfect day, their hopes and dreams for the future, and the three objects they would bring to a space station. Thus began our first StoryCorpsU class and we were on our way.

StoryCorpsU is a college-readiness curriculum consisting of 29 lesson plans, centered on content produced by StoryCorps, the nonprofit organization that helps people across the country share their personal stories. The goals of StoryCorpsU are to improve students’ speaking and listening skills, boost their self and social awareness, and promote school connectedness, or the belief held by students that adults and peers in the school care about their learning as well as about them as individuals. My school was picked to partner with StoryCorps after being introduced through the Association of American Publishers Adopt-a-School program.

Rigorous testing schedules often don’t allow time for students and teachers to share stories and get to know one another, so my students eagerly look forward to StoryCorpsU Fridays. Having this opportunity allows for a break from test preparation, while still holding students accountable for producing a meaningful product with measurable results. StoryCorpsU also allows for building trust and respect amongst students and teachers in the classroom. It was an excellent way to start the year because the curriculum is student-centered and interactive. The activities foster sharing of experiences and I got to really know the students and they got to know each other.

If students come to school and feel isolated and unknown in their classes, will they feel driven to ask the tough questions that will allow them to reach their full academic potential? Both the research on school connectedness and my 15 years of teaching experience tell me the answer is no. Over the following months, my students shared stories about important people, places, and events from their past. They then began to reflect on how these stories impact who they are today. These stories illuminated strengths and aspirations I knew the students had but did not previous have a way to express. The StoryCorpsU lesson plans allowed me to learn that Jose wants to be a pilot, Christian’s family owns a farm in the Dominican Republic, and Jennifer has studied Jiu-Jitsu and has a green belt in karate.

The students aren’t the only ones sharing stories. I’ve shared stories reflecting on my challenges and successes as well. One story in particular stands out. I recorded a story to model an assignment that asked students to share an important event from their past. My story was about the unconventional path I took in earning my undergraduate degree. I was nervous as I cued up the recording in class. I’ve spent the past 15 years in front of students in the classroom but this was different. I was sharing a story that was personal and I felt vulnerable. I worried about what my students would think as I hit play. When the recording finished the students asked a barrage of questions about my life and journey to being the first in my family to graduate from college. I was all too happy to share in the hopes that I might inspire my students who face challenges to push past them toward their futures.

Through the curriculum we’ve created a safe space where students’ stories, families, and experiences are honored and welcomed. It’s a space I look forward to each week, just as my students do.

It’s nearly springtime, when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). At least in odd-numbered years. I’m not so young, but lately I’ve been thinking about NAEP, which is widely regarded as the best barometer of changes over time in the academic performance of U.S. students. No assessment can do all that we ask of it, but NAEP is a well-designed project supported by $130 million per year in federal funds.

Though not a substitute for careful evaluations of particular programs and policies, NAEP does crop up frequently in education policy circles. In New York state and New York City, for example, the discrepancy between trends in performance on the fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math NAEP tests (which were largely flat between 2007 and 2009) and the performance of the same population of students on the state’s own annual assessments (which skyrocketed over the same period) led New York state to change the threshold for student proficiency in 2010, and to make the state tests more challenging and less predictable.

The disparity also called into question Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s and Chancellor Joel Klein’s claims about progress in student performance and closing the city’s achievement gaps. There’s little doubt that the mayor and chancellor were annoyed with pesky reporters and bloggers using NAEP scores to poke holes in their claims.

This led me to speculate about how they might have responded. If you believe that tests are de facto measures of student learning, and that therefore test prep and teaching to the test are to be encouraged rather than vilified, why not do test prep for NAEP? It’s probably not illegal—although test prep for NAEP would certainly distort comparisons of performance over time and across urban school districts. Might Joel Klein, in the waning days of his tenure as chancellor in 2010, have put in place a NAEP test prep initiative for the Spring 2011 NAEP administration in New York City?

I don’t know. But I figured I could ask. So in July 2011, I filed a request for public records with the New York City Department of Education. New York state, as is true of most places, has enacted a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) that provides public access to most records maintained by public agencies, to support an open and responsible government. There are, of course, records that are exempt from disclosure, such as those pertaining to trade secrets or those that would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

I wasn’t asking for anything like that, and an agency can always redact anything it deems irrelevant to the request or inappropriate to disclose. (This is why so much of Joel Klein’s email correspondence released in response to FOIL requests consists of blacked-out pages.) I was fairly specific in my requests, asking for email communications and letters among Department of Education (DOE) personnel relating to preparing students to take the 2011 NAEP assessments, including test preparation materials, memoranda, directives and/or instructions issued to central DOE personnel and/or personnel at elementary and/or middle schools regarding the policies and procedures for preparation for, and administration of, the 2011 NAEP assessments in New York City. There were a few other specific requests, and I followed guidance from successful requests in crafting the language of the letter. For example, I asked that the DOE disclose records as soon as they were identified rather than wait to gather all records.

New York’s FOIL law requires that an agency respond within five days to a reasonably described record request, and either (a) make the records available; (b) deny the request in writing; or (c) if it is unable to respond to the request within 20 business days, state in writing both the reason for the inability to grant the request within 20 business days and a reasonable, specific date when the request will be granted in whole or in part.

But the New York City DOE routinely fails to comply with this provision of the law.

Every month, I receive a letter that reads: “Pursuant to Section VI.B of Chancellor’s Regulation D-110, due to the volume and complexity of requests we receive and process, and to determine whether any records or portions thereof will be subject to redactions permitted under Public Officers Law 87-2, additional time is required to respond substantively to your request. Accordingly, a response is currently anticipated by [date],” where the date given is one month in the future. And, when that date rolls around, I get the next month’s letter, identical except for a new anticipated date.

My initial reaction was that this Chancellor’s Regulation must be pretty powerful to trump state law. But the regulation simply states how the NYC DOE is to comply with the FOIL law. Section VI.B pertains to responses to FOIL requests, particularly the responsibility of the Central Records Access Officer to determine a reasonable amount of time in which to grant the request. State regulations do allow the volume of requests and their complexity to be taken into account in determining a reasonable time.

But neither the FOIL law nor the Chancellor’s Regulation that must adhere to it allows an agency to delay a response indefinitely. I requested these records 19 months ago, and still have no idea when, if ever, the DOE will grant access to them, as the law requires.

I’m not alone in this situation. Advocates for Children of New York and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund filed an unsuccessful lawsuit seeking to compel the DOE to comply with a series of FOIL requests to which the DOE only partially responded. Their case showed the same pattern of monthly unilateral delays in responding.

Fernanda Santos, former New York Times beat reporter for the city schools, just got a partial response to a FOIL request she filed 26 months ago. Santos is now the Phoenix bureau chief for The Times, but she’s passed the information on to her successor, Al Baker. And, outside of New York, journalist John Merrow, whom I respect greatly, has been stymied in his efforts to get to the bottom of how the District of Columbia Public Schools responded to allegations of test cheating under Chancellor Michelle Rhee. District of Columbia agencies have not responded to his FOIA requests from nearly eight months ago for a memo that is known to exist.

The obvious counterpoint to this record of delays in New York City and Washington, D.C. is how the NYC DOE responded to the FOIL requests submitted in October 2010 by many New York media organizations for public release of the Teacher Data Reports, the city’s version of value-added measures of teachers’ performance. Despite the complexity of the request, the DOE was prepared to respond the day after the request—and maybe even the day before.

Public agencies shouldn’t be able to pick and choose which requests for public information they respond to, escalating some while stalling on others. It’s antithetical to the spirit and letter of the law, which exists to promote openness, responsiveness and trust in our political institutions.

Did New York City put its thumb on the scale by engaging in test prep for NAEP? Are officials hiding the presence of their thumb? We don’t know, because the DOE has not released any relevant records in the past 19 months. In the meantime, the 2013 NAEP administration is already under way.

Thumbs down on public transparency and accountability.

Those straight A’s I was pulling in my graduate program at Teachers College didn’t matter worth a damn in that makeshift theater classroom. Standing there in front of those kids, I felt like I had no idea how to teach anything to anyone, let alone an art form based on trust and vulnerability A.) to African American and Latino teenagers whose experiences were worlds away from my upper-middle class suburban roots, B.) at a school that trained teachers to embody a top-down, boot-camp style of classroom management (and routinely fired the ones who couldn’t pass muster), and C.) in a neighborhood where street codes punished kids for risking emotional openness with taunts and even violence.

About halfway through that first year, at a moment when I was seriously considering quitting teaching and never looking back, a ninth-grader named Denisse Polanco made the audacious suggestion that we put on a musical. I tried to explain to her that I had never directed a full-length show before and that I was way too overwhelmed with my other teaching responsibilities to take on such an ambitious project. But Denisse wasn’t having any of it. Never mind that she herself had zero musical theater experience; she arched an eyebrow at me, smiled and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”

We’ve come a long way from those days in the church parking lot. A decade later — (full of humbling moments, behind-the-scenes nightmares and hard-won triumphs of student leadership) — my colleagues, students and I are thrilled to officially unveil a 10-minute documentary that chronicles the evolution of the Bronx Prep Performing Arts Academy — a program which Denisse and many of her fellow Bronx Prep graduates have returned to help nurture and lead. Over the years, the academy has grown into a multi-generational family of performing artists, designers, and directors, many of whom are now pursuing college degrees and careers in the performing arts and mentoring the young actors, directors, and designers following in their footsteps.

Stay tuned as our kids set aside their corsets, fling off their fedoras and lay down their French revolutionary flags — so they can celebrate their own cultural traditions and family histories in a show that finally feels like home.

Special thanks to Academy co-founder Andrew Simon, Academy co-directors Lou Cardenas and Sarah Rosenberg, the whole Bronx Prep artistic staff, the huge crew of creative professionals who have supported us throughout the years, the alumni who continue to nurture and inspire our students, and especially to Bronx Prep Artistic Director and my creative partner in crime, Dr. Geoffrey Kiorpes. Video credit and special thanks: Alejandro Duran and The Digital Project.

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

For months now, despite a state mandate to build such a system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city’s Department of Education have been locked in a stalemate with the United Federation of Teachers over the terms of a teacher-evaluation process that, by law, must be agreed to via local collective bargaining.

The parties have already missed a Jan. 17 deadline set by the governor, sacrificing a 4 percent increase in state aid for education to the city. But the governor and other state officials should have known that punishing the city and its children by withholding this aid — and future funds as well — would be both bad public policy and an ineffective strategy to force an agreement.

This dispute is about principles that each side believes to be far more important than the money at stake, and at the heart of the disagreement is just how many teachers we’re talking about calling incompetent — and therefore unsuited to educating our kids.

The mayor’s stance is clear: there are good teachers and bad teachers in New York City, and a teacher-evaluation system must be able to identify and fire consistent low-performers. Their replacements are likely to be better teachers, and children’s achievement will increase as a result. If these new teachers have lower salaries than the ones they are replacing, so much the better.

Published reports suggest that Mayor Bloomberg quashed a tentative agreement between the Department of Education and the union due to a “sunset” clause providing that the agreement would be in force for two years and then be renegotiated. Indignant, the mayor said that any agreement that would end before the completion of a process to remove a teacher rated “ineffective” in two consecutive years was a sham. If the agreement would expire before any teacher had been fired for cause, he argued, it was worthless.

The union’s stance is equally clear: A teacher-evaluation system must be fair to teachers, providing an accurate picture of their performance and an opportunity to improve if their performance is not up to snuff.

The issue of accuracy is a serious bugaboo: Estimates of teachers’ contributions to student learning, whether in the form of value-added measures or growth percentile scores, are imprecise, and, if they fail to take account of factors beyond a teacher’s control, unfair. Moreover, many teachers fear that an unscrupulous or incompetent principal will rate a teacher unfairly when observing him or her in the classroom. The union thus seeks to build procedural safeguards into the evaluation system to minimize the risk that a teacher will be unjustly identified as ineffective, and subsequently terminated.

Lost in this clash of principles — efficiency vs. fairness — is the question of just how many teachers ought to be judged ineffective and fired.

Is it 2 percent? Five percent? Twenty percent?

If you believe our schools are failing kids across the board, you’d likely set the number high, citing the very low number currently fired as utterly unacceptable. But if you’re a parent, typically satisfied with your child’s own school and teacher, you’re likely to set the number low. If you’re Mayor Bloomberg, you might covet the flexibility and cost savings that would come with dismissing a large number of highly paid teachers and replacing them with malleable and cheaper novices. And if you’re the teachers union, your legitimacy is in the hands of your members, none of whom wants to be fired, especially for reasons they deem unfair.

The truth is that, no matter how much we try to craft teacher-evaluation systems that are fair and impartial, the question of how many teachers should be rated “ineffective” and dismissed is still a value judgment. And that fact reveals just how arbitrary the new world of rating teachers can be.

A little over a year ago, Bloomberg told a group of students at M.I.T. that given the opportunity, he’d fire half of New York City’s teachers and double the compensation and class sizes of the remaining “good” ones. That’s a lot more than the 18 percent that a Department of Education official said an evaluation system piloted at 20 New York City schools identified as “ineffective.” (The department later said that number was actually 10 percent.)

But 18 percent is a big number, too. In Washington, D.C., which has pioneered an evaluation system similar to the one New York City might adopt, two percent of teachers are rated “ineffective,” and an additional 14 percent are rated “minimally effective”—but two consecutive ratings of “minimally effective” can result in termination.

In New Haven, Conn., which also uses a system similar to what’s being developed in New York, 10 percent of teachers received ratings of “needs improvement” or “developing,” the two lowest categories in a five-category evaluation system. Hillsborough, Fla., the nation’s eighth-largest school system, initially proposed that at least 5 percent of tenured teachers would be dismissed each year for poor performance under its new teacher-evaluation system. But with experience, the district has determined that only about 1.5 percent of teachers are unsatisfactory, and another two or three percent receive a rating of “needs improvement.”

Are we really to believe that the quality of teachers varies so dramatically across districts and over time? It’s far more likely that these figures reflect local values and priorities. And this is the heart of the New York City dispute. Mayor Bloomberg prizes efficiency and believes that the discretion to fire a large number of teachers is essential. The UFT champions fairness and due process, asserting that teachers who’ve been awarded tenure by the city have demonstrated their effectiveness, and that very, very few have received unsatisfactory evaluations from their principals. The values conflict boils down to a big number versus a small number.

As Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor winds down, he’ll seek to cement his legacy, with education as a signature issue. An evaluation deal that is too easily undone will tarnish that legacy. Conversely, the UFT, aware of the mayor’s disdain for the teachers of New York City, is content to wait him out, betting that a new mayor will be more favorably inclined toward teacher evaluation, and perhaps working conditions and compensation as well.

Neither side is likely to agree to an evaluation system that gives the other party too much control over who gets fired. Perhaps the current standoff wouldn’t be intractable if the two sides could at least agree on some bounds for the number of teachers who will be judged “ineffective” and subject to termination. But what’s the magic number?

But every year, another policy-level challenge makes our already difficult work seem nearly impossible. First it was massive budget cuts, then centralized layoffs of school support staff, a special education overhaul, rotating teachers sent from the Absent Teacher Reserve (but not enough money to hire them!), and rising numbers of mid-year over-the-counter transfer students. Now, the challenge is a second year of space changes planned by the Department of Education.

Like many other public schools in the city, our school shares space with three others: a District 75 school for students with disabilities in grades K-8; a district middle school; and as of this year, a charter elementary school. After less than one year since the last space shift, the Department of Education has proposed two big changes: The district middle school, M.S. 203, will phase out over the next two years, and Bronx Success Academy 1, the charter school, will expanded to eighth grade over the next five years.

Though the individual teachers, students and staff from the other schools in our building have been respectful, generous neighbors, the system-level decisions about space and co-location have resulted in serious concerns for the Bronx Letters community. While the city’s planning documents say that our “enrollment will be unaffected” and that we will “be able to continue offering the current academic program,” our experience over the last seven months has shown us that is unlikely to be true.

We only have one chance to convince the Department of Education to recognize Bronx Letters in its space plans going forward: a public hearing – at 6 p.m. on Valentines’s Day! To prepare, our high school House Council student government representatives planned “community education” activities, with my help. Almost every advisory group in the school engaged in a facilitated discussion around the following three questions: 1) What do you appreciate most about Bronx Letters? 2) What are your concerns related to the proposed changes in our building? 3) What is something you’d like share about your experience at Letters that could affect decision-making about our shared space?

Together, they turned their answers into statements that could be presented at the public hearing. The statements, excerpts of which I am sharing here, reveal the profound effect that co-location and space allocation policies have on the learning and growing that happens in a school building. Even if the negative consequences of sharing space are unintended, they are deep and wide — and can truly change a school. I’ve seen it happen, and so have my students.

***

Quin, 11th grade:

I am a Bronx Letters student and because I have a little sister in Bronx Success Academy, I can honestly say I understand that there are many sides of this issue. This is very hard for me and my family. We understand that Bronx Success wants to grow to eighth grade for a better future for their students, but we are both great schools and both want to remain that way! We want all the schools in the building to be treated fairly.

Since Bronx Success moved in, the number of students in the same classroom has increased. It is becoming harder for teachers to teach and harder for students to learn when the teacher can’t meet every child’s needs. Without the space we used to have, the classes will only get bigger and harder to manage.

Ashley, a junior:

Our school is now spread out through the building, breaking the community that the middle and high school here has worked very hard to create. … Bronx Academy of Letters has not been and is not the same place it was five years ago. Not only does this affect me now but this would affect my future. What I want to be and what I have always wanted to be is a dancer. I want to major in dance in college and make it my career choice for the rest of my life. As a junior I no longer have access to the dance room in my schedule. This has never been true in my six years of being at this school. Last year I was not given dance as a class but I was allowed to have access to it during lunch. This too is no longer true. During our lunch period, another school is having gym in the dance room! … What’s going to happen when I have college auditions and nowhere to rehearse for an audition that determines my future?

Tajonae, eighth grade:

This school year, the seventh and eighth grades moved to an area that has tiny classrooms and small hallways spaces and we are always bumping into each other, which causes conflicts that could have been avoided. Every time I am in a classroom, no one can walk around the classroom without bumping into something or someone…

Fatoumata, eighth grade:

Bronx Letters is supposed to be a family and now the middle school and the high school don’t interact that often. We want to be less spread out and have spaces that are connected to one another … Now, rooms are being used ALL the time. Students have a hard time finding teachers. One on one time with teachers is very difficult because there is literally nowhere private they can meet.

Ana, ninth grade:

We have so many opportunities to be successful in our future. One of them is office hours, which is like tutoring that all teachers have during lunchtime on Tuesday and Thursdays. You have no idea how helpful these are to me to improve my grades and my understanding of in my classes. Sometimes even now office hours is hard because there are too many teachers in each room and we can’t get any attention. But this school is already amazing by trying to help us. Please don’t take that away from us. The space we have is already small and crowded. We make the best of it but if things change too much, one of the things we might miss is office hours!

Kyesha, 11th grade:

One of the reasons why I decided to stay at Bronx Letters for high school is because I felt comfortable. By the time I got to the ninth grade, I already knew some of my high school teachers and, even better, some of the high school students, which made it easier to transition into my new high school experience. Now, being a junior, I look at the middle school students and have no clue who they are, which is breaking the school community that we once had. It is also frustrating to see that our seniors have to stay outside during ANY weather because there is no supervised classroom for them to be in to eat. I will be a senior next year and don’t know how well I am going to take having to eat my food outside in the snow. Also, during lunch time we have to wait in the hallway until the other school leaves, the cafeteria is cleaned up after them, and if the cafeteria staff is ready for us to come in, which takes about 15 minutes of our lunch time with nowhere to go.

Delquan, eighth grade:

I have been at the Bronx Academy of Letters for three years and have witnessed many changes between last school year and this one. We have been forced into the corners of this building and we don’t have enough space. When we are released from classes, we’re all on top of each other and if we had more space, we could avoid conflict. Our school is divided into different parts of the building and I don’t know the other students in our sixth grade or in high school so it’s harder to make friends outside my grade.

Destiny, eighth grade:

We also have to wait and wait to go into our Math class and you know why? Because we have teachers sharing EVERY classroom. The teachers have no time to set up their lesson plans. All of this space loss is hurting our learning environment.

Roxanna, eighth grade:

The hallways get cramped in between periods, and kids shove, push, etc. That leads to conflict and problems and we can’t ever get away from each other. Most of our classrooms don’t have windows or heating. One of my favorite classes is gym and I have to share the gym with four schools! It is very cramped and we are sometimes getting hit with basketballs. Some of our classes like Drama, Math and Health are in very small rooms because all the other rooms are being used. How are we supposed to focus in small, sweaty rooms??! Our grades have dropped because of this. We need a bigger, more comfortable environment to learn and study in.

The juniors of Bronx Academy of Letters Thomas House Advisory:

Last year, our advisor was saying that we were going to lose space because Bronx Success Academy was moving in. We felt like we had no say. We were scared, frustrated, and disappointed after we had written letters begging to keep our space and explaining all of the extra-curricular activities and opportunities we would risk losing. She left a few months later saying that she didn’t like the way that the school was going.

Now, here we are again. This year there is a new advisor asking us to do the same thing. We feel like our education is threatened and are afraid that when we, the class of 2014, return to visit after graduating, we won’t have a school to come back to. … Part of the reason why schools in this area aren’t offering a strong education to students is because of problems like this. We want our concerns and voices to be heard and to think of compromise so that our school can be successful and Bronx Success can offer the best education possible as well.

Now, as a fourth-year elementary school teacher in a public school in Brooklyn, I am no stranger to lunchtime drama. No matter how much work I do toward creating a positive classroom community and a supportive learning environment, all bets are off when my students enter the lunchroom. Typically, my co-teacher and I brush off these cafeteria skirmishes by encouraging our students to deal with their issues during lunch and not bring them back into the classroom. But every now and again a problem pops up that needs to be addressed with the entire class back upstairs in our room. The Boy Scouts issue certainly merited further discussion.

I wanted to be thoughtful about the way I addressed the boys’ behavior at lunch. My students know that there’s not much that gets Ms. Krent truly upset, but excluding classmates or otherwise hurting other students’ feelings is the fastest way to do it. I am a special education teacher in an Integrated Co-Teaching classroom and issues of inclusion are very close to my heart. My co-teacher and I work hard to create a classroom that a stranger could enter and not know who is labeled as a special needs student and who isn’t. I taught for two years in self-contained classrooms and my students in those classes were much more self-conscious of their special education status than the students I’ve taught for two years in ICT classrooms.

Creating a classroom community where everyone feels welcomed is incredibly important to me. In both types of settings I’ve taught in, there have been students who clearly stick out a little more than the others. I have worked hard to speak honestly about difference with my students while at the same time, I’ve more or less forced them to include any and all of their peers in class activities. We don’t let our students call an activity “easy” and we explicitly teach that what’s easy for some isn’t easy for all and we never want to make anyone feel bad about trying their hardest. Of course, this is second grade and kids are kids. There will always be kids who are nasty to each other for whatever reason, but we try our hardest to foster empathy amongst our students and to make them aware of the effect their actions have on others.

I have believed strongly in an inclusionary model of teaching since I studied psychology at Wesleyan University and finagled my way into writing a psychology thesis about inclusion and special education. My summer training for the New York City Teaching Fellows program intensified my already strong desire to unpack issues of inequity in education. I entered the classroom knowing I wanted to teach through a lens of social justice.

Because of this social action orientation in my teaching, I knew I couldn’t just tell my students they had to let the girls sit at their table and that was that. Instead, we had a class conversation about the differences and similarities between girls and boys. We talked about all the jobs both boys and girls can grow up to have (police officers! bus drivers! teachers!), all the likes and dislikes boys and girls might have (the color pink! SpongeBob SquarePants! video games!), and why it’s important to let everyone sit wherever they want to sit. Both my female and male students mentioned that it seemed unfair that our school only offers Boy Scouts after school and not Girl Scouts. I had inquired about this when the Boy Scouts first started using our cafeterias once a week after school. I didn’t receive a very compelling answer, but then again, why do we still have Boy and Girl Scouts anyway? Can’t we just all be scouts together?

Either way, I felt fulfilled by the conversation I had with my students. They engaged with the questions I posed to them and while they probably didn’t radically alter their views on gender, I can feel satisfied knowing I exposed them to new ideas. I certainly don’t have any answers when it comes to equity in education, but I have a lot of questions and as long as I’m teaching, I’ll keep working through them with my students.

At age 20, more than three decades before the publication of On Liberty, Mill, already a contributor to utilitarian thought and writing, found himself in a profound intellectual crisis characterzed by “a dull state of nerves” and loss of interest in subjects that previously had excited him.

It was William Wordsworth’s poetry, among other things, that helped Mill see beyond his despondency. His home education (though remarkably rich) had given meager attention to the inner life and the emotions. Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism, in which Mill had been steeped, treated emotions as though they could be tallied by means of “felificic calculus” — that is, a method of calculating pains and pleasures. Over the years, Mill sought  to synthesize his concern for the common good with his concern for the individual; one can view his treatise On Liberty as such a synthesis.

When I told my 11th-grade students about Mill’s intellectual crisis (before we began reading On Liberty), I sensed unusual interest in the room. They were looking up; some were nodding. When I read them part of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” (which Mill mentions in his Autobiography), the room was hushed; later, in discussion, a few students spoke about what had moved them. Yet I walked away unsatisfied with the presentation; I knew that I had made slight errors and left out some subtle points. Still, I thought, this was a start.

The following day, we discussed a long passage in the introductory chapter of On Liberty; students explained the progression of ideas within it. They understood Mill’s argument that political philosophy of past centuries had concerned itself, first, with setting proper limits to a monarch’s authority, and later, with the formation of a representative government — and that people had lately come to see a discrepancy between the ideal of “self-government” and reality. Students understood (at a certain level) why societal oppression was of such concern to Mill; they could explain the concept of the “tyranny of the majority” and give examples of it.

This is my life at school and outside — and despite its high demands, I enjoy it. I have nearly 270 students; I teach three high school philosophy courses, each of which meets twice a week. The 11th-graders are studying political philosophy and have read Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke; the 10th-graders have begun a unit on virtue and are reading the second book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; and the ninth-graders have been working with syllogisms, logical operators, and truth tables. Outside of class, much of my time goes into planning lessons and correcting homework; other chunks of time go to meetings and paperwork. Beyond this, I spend time with the philosophical works themselves, and find myself needing more time. I must not only know the material but be capable of interpreting it, even if I am “only” leading a discussion.

This aspect of teaching — the immersion in the subject — often gets overlooked. We hear a lot about teacher preparation — and even about “lifelong learning”—but not about the daily mulling and pondering, which often takes place on the fringes of the day, early in the morning or late in the evening. Teachers need time to read and think, even if they have a strong background in their subject. Certain works and concepts reveal their meanings over the years; on the other hand, teaching is one of the best ways to delve into them. Not only that, but such delving will inform the very practice of teaching.

Like Mill, I have felt discouraged when surrounded by proponents of one school of thought, no matter what it might be. I find hope in an intelligent kind of synthesis — not just a balance of everything, but the right combination at the right time.

For example, in my first few years of teaching, I encountered educators and coaches who emphasized anything but the text. I saw lessons devoted to pre-reading activities, turn-and-talk activities, prediction activities, and so forth, with minimal attention to the text itself. Later, I encountered educators who insisted on sticking to the text and the text alone — without introductory presentations, historical background, or any other kind of preface. (These approaches have their analogues in literary criticism.) While I emphasize close reading in almost every lesson, I see no harm in offering an introduction with a story. Mill’s story, in particular, gives students an entry into the text and even into the study of philosophy.

Students, too, find themselves confused about many things, including school. Some avoid doing their schoolwork, even knowing that this will hurt them. Others spend hours on schoolwork without knowing why. Many students yearn for meaning, but meaning does not come on demand. Some go through long periods of doubt and indifference, and then, one day, find something interesting in a lesson. Then comes another such instance, and another — and then a way of looking at things that wasn’t apparent before.

In a recent post in GothamSchools’ Community section, Nikya Medford wrote of her fears of being alone when on her college campus, without the guidance and support she found at home. Nikya is a student that I visit once a month at the State University of New York at Albany, and while Nikya quickly learned that she had much more support that she originally perceived, her fear is a common one among the college students that I work with.

Though there is a great amount of social and academic support to be found on most college campuses, many students have difficulty connecting to those resources. Working with college students across three New York campuses I have noticed that regardless of whether a student lives at home or on campus, rarely are students aware of all the services available to them, or that it is considered their responsibility to access these services.

Of the 19 college students that I work with across three New York campuses, about half are living away from home. In conversations with adults about my work, many are quick to assume that those students living at home have a much easier time transitioning to college than students who live on campus. However, students living at home often have a hard time acknowledging that expectations of their work have changed from what they were in high school and no longer will their teachers grade them based on effort and potential alone. Students who were once at the top of their class but coasted there on teachers who knew them well and knew how smart they were frequently have a very difficult time acknowledging when they are doing poorly; and thus they are less likely to seek help.

A part of my job is helping students acknowledge when and why they are struggling, and then planning for how to help them. I do this in several different ways, but a large part of it is getting students to visit the academic resource centers available on campus. Often, visiting the writing center or the math tutoring center is exhausting for students, as they must not only make time for these visits, but also follow up on the extra work they are asked to do by the center staffs. However, after papers are handed in, or tests are taken, my students have always acknowledged how much this extra step helped their performance. By helping students find academic resources and schedule appointments I can help my students find the help they need; and then by sending them reminders, and checking in after they have seen their tutors, I hold my students accountable for keeping their commitments to their own academic success.

In addition to having designated resource centers, most schools encourage students to visit with their professors. But few 17- or 18-year-olds are eager to take time out of their busy lives to meet with a professor for extra help. While I make it a priority for my students to introduce themselves to their professors and visit office hours more than once a semester, it is rare that a student is easily convinced to complete this task. In high school, students saw their teachers all day – in the halls, in class, at lunch – and an appointment was rarely necessary to discuss a paper or test. When an appointment is necessary, high school teachers are more likely to take the initiative to meet with students who are demonstrating a need for extra help, rather than expect vice versa. Once students enter college, it is easy for them to presume that if a professor wants to discuss something, he or she will let them know.

So when I suggest that my students visit office hours for the first time, I frequently meet resistance, as students are unclear why they should seek out a professor that does not seem to need to speak with them. This perception — that professors will talk to you if they need to, and office hours are only for if you have a question — is an unfortunate one, and something I work to change in my students. Often I suggest having a conversation with professors so that they can get to know each other. From these meetings the student will likely learn more about the class topics from the change in presentation format and the professor will recognize, and likely appreciate, the student’s eagerness to learn more about the topics. It can only improve the student’s class experience. Last semester, as we made finals study plans, I wrote specific office hour visit days in students’ calendars. This encouraged students to meet with professors as part of their finals preparation as well as to push them to begin studying early for finals, so they could have sufficient questions to speak with their professors about.

While it is important for students to be told that they will be successful in college, it is equally important to remind them of the changing academic expectations that will be placed upon them. First-year college students do not frequently have the background knowledge of how to approach professors or seek out academic support services on campus. These skills need to be taught to students before they begin school, and their development encouraged as students progress through college. More often than not, the support services that students need to be successful are available to them — students just need to be given the encouragement and guidance to take advantage of the assistance.