Growing up, suppertime was my student teaching. I learned what an IEP* was as an 8-year-old, delved into differentiated instruction** as a middle-schooler, and by high school, knew what a manifestation meeting*** was.
This jargon, and endless knowledge, came from my mom. She’s a career teacher. Years before I even knew what Teach For America was, she provided me with (often unsolicited) guidance about education.
What I wouldn’t do to have her at my school today. I’m at my second charter school in one year (my first laid me off), and in both schools, I see very few educators with anywhere near the 15 years of teaching experience that my mom has. With these years comes the type of knowledge that only time can provide.
Photo by Gabe Leland via via Wikimedia Commons
Ed Chambers, is a 20-year teaching veteran, and a 2012-2013 Teach for America Alumni in Excellence Teaching Award recipient and Teacher of the Year at his school. Ed will be speaking at Teach For America’s inaugural Alumni Awards and Educators Conference in Detroit on July 18, 2013. The conference gathers alumni teachers, school leaders and school systems leaders from across the country fora day of networking and professional development. Travel stipends are available. Alumni educators: register today.
As a member of Eastern North Carolina’s 1992 corps and a 20-year veteran teacher, I have weathered many trends in education. The latest push to eliminate honors classes in favor of a two-track system is under-serving many good, solid students.
In my previous school, there were eight sections of AP (Advanced Placement) English Literature. Students had the option to sign up for my course, honors, or college preparatory English courses. [Note: “College preparatory” refers to basic instruction courses.] The honors classes were a great option, because those courses provided skills necessary for college without overwhelming students who lacked preparation for the rigor of AP courses.
Then, in 2010, the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department Education began issuing guidance letters to school districts and postsecondary institutions around issues of fairness and equity and conducting compliance reviews to ensure that all students had equal access to educational opportunities, including college-prep curricula and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) classes.
The push to make sure students were receiving a fair and equitable education prompted many schools to eliminate honors course options in order to nudge more “honors capable” students into AP courses. The hope was that by granting AP course access to these students it would cause them to become even better prepared for college as they rose to meet the challenge of the more rigorous course.
However, that is not what I see happening. In her 1985 book, Keeping Track, Jeanie Oakes’ argues that tracking and ability grouping reproduce and perpetuate inequality. With no middle ground to choose from, the elimination of honors courses is prompting some of our best and brightest to relegate themselves to standard instruction “college preparatory” classes far more often, than they scale up to AP. Or, they jump from the college preparatory track to the AP course with no net to catch them if they fall.
Photo provided by Edward Chambers
Five links that made us think this week:
The NRA released a 225-page report on Tuesday defending its proposition that more guns in school leads to more safety. Asa Hutchinson, former Republican congressman of Arkansas, was paid by the NRA to present the report at a news conference with “unusually heavy security.” (Hutchinson even brought along a bomb-sniffing Lab.) The report asserts that if more schools provide weapons to their police officers, security guards, and even staff members, it will increase the security at schools and will lower the response time in the case of a shooting. Because if there’s one thing we need right now is more people with guns, specially more people with guns at school.
Photo by army.mil via WikiCommons
Mariella Magaña was a 2010 Los Angeles Corps Member. She now teaches 2nd grade at KIPP Comienza Community Prep in Huntington Park, CA.
The possibility of what could be…
The DREAM Act is a monumental idea that has been in the works since 2001. It has been gaining traction over the years and we are now at a pivotal moment where the call to act is needed now more than ever. The DREAM Act would prevent students from being deported and enable permanent residency status if students meet certain requirements such as full time enrollment in school and getting a college degree. The DREAM Act has yet to be introduced in the current congress and it is still unknown how the idea behind the DREAM Act will manifest itself in comprehensive immigration reform. Therefore, the time for action is now. All stakeholders must act in order to ensure that this idea is able to become a reality. Parents must act on behalf of their children. Parents must have a voice. Parents must tell their story. Parents must be seen as allies. But in order to be successful, they must be informed.
Parents are the most powerful advocates for children. L.A. parents rally for better schools. Photo provided by Calcharters.org
This post originally appeared on Salon. We have reblogged it with permission.
My school was on lockdown last Thursday. At recess, 12 shots rang out; we shuttled the children inside and declared a school emergency. Half my students suddenly had to pee. I couldn’t let them go; all doors shut—no movement. Our security guard stopped by each room to announce the danger.
Then, we kept teaching.
The week after Sandy Hook, I’d had nightmares about places I could hide my students if a shooter came—they’re little, so I could put them in closets or drawers, I could stand outside the door and try to talk the guy down, I could dial 911 behind my back—but that’s not what our lockdown ended up like.
Photo by Bbjeter via WikiCommons
This post originally appeared on TeacherPop. We have reblogged it with permission.
Emily Southerton (Delta '10) is a teacher and poet who created and runs The Poet Warriors Project.
When we read the lines, “Between Walls/the back wings/of the/hospital where/nothing/will grow lie/cinders/in which shine/the broken/pieces of a green/bottle,” on the last day of my poetry unit, I ask my middle schoolers to discuss in groups what it means to them.
“Even when others are negative around us, we can stand out and be different,”
“Even if we are dealing with something hard in life, we can smile,”
“Even if we come from a bad area/family/school, even if we are broken, we can be successful; we can shine.”
Photo courtesy of Emily Southerton
As I handed back their aced exams, my seventh graders tried to hide their proud-but-too-cool-to-show-it smiles. Not me. I beamed, unhesitatingly conceding 5 minutes of hard-earned free-time. Some of the girls huddled together. “Look,” one said, “we’re just like Ms. S—really good at math!”
Another, her A-paper in hand, walked up to the board, took the eraser, and padded it all over her shirt. “No, now we’re just like Ms. S—really good at math…and covered in chalk.”
Photo courtesy of Kristin Szczepaniec
This is the first of several posts about immigration reform that will be published on Pass The Chalk in the coming weeks. For more information about the impact of the Dream Act on undocumented students and their families, visit United We Dream and The Dream Is Now.
Back in January, our Chairwoman, Wendy Kopp wrote on TIME Ideas about comprehensive immigration reform (CIR), an issue we all know is one of the most pressing agenda items right now in Congress. Wendy stated, “Every time a student’s potential is cut short by their legal status, our country wastes precious resources and loses out on talent we need.”
Given my work in the Latino Community, I was both excited and anxious about what this position in support of education principles in the DREAM Act actually meant for Teach For America. I thought about our ability to find meaningful ways to support this position with action. Would we actually take an active stand? Or would we just stand behind the principles of CIR? In order to do right by Latino kids and families in the communities where we teach, I believed we needed to work hard to identify appropriate actions that would allow us to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.
Photo by Chzz via Wikimedia Commons
Two years ago, I had the chance to hear Wendy Kopp speak to an education entrepreneurship incubator. She wowed the audience, but faced a tough question in the Q&A—what was her biggest regret? Wendy answered that, after 20 years, TFA still had not moved the needle nationally on student achievement.
“So how will you change that?” was the next question. Although Wendy freely admitted that she did not have the answer in hand, her response stayed with me: “I don’t know how we get this done unless we leverage technology in a way we have not done for the last 20 years.”
Two years go by. I conducted a search in TFA’s online community for corps members and alumni, TFANet, to see an index of all the TFA alums working in district or charter management organization (CMO) leadership. There are 500 of them. But just 13 have jobs related to technology. Eight of the 13 work for a district. Six of the 13 have a senior position (district or charter). Two have a senior technology role in a district. And only one has a senior technology role in a large district.
Photo courtesy of Jeff Newman. Clever, founded by Dan Carroll (Colorado '09) won the LAUNCHedu competition at SXSW earlier this month.
Although by the time I was 11 my grandmother had Alzheimer’s and could no longer speak full sentences, I loved and remember her presence.
It was my ritual to grab her hand and ask her all sorts of silly questions she had no cognitive ability to answer. Like, “Grandma, what’s your favorite football team? Is it the CowBOYS or……or (then I’d whisper really lowly) the Packers?” Occasionally, she’d repeat, “boys,” well, err, more like, “bo,” and I was set! I’d dash into the living room yelling, “See Dad!! Gramma’s a COWBOYS fan like me, not a Packers fan like you! Told ya so!!”
Photo by Miriam Villalta via WikiCommons
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