Entry # 33:
All Hands on Deck

A lot has happened since my last entry. I went to San Francisco for the Spring Colloquium of the National School Reform Faculty (NSRF). This year's colloquium had a theme of "Looking at Student Work, Accountability, Equity and Student Achievement."

The Colloquium was a joint effort by The Annenberg Institute, The Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools (BAYCES), NSRF and The Small Schools Collective. Critical Friends Group coaches and other educators from around the country all worked on this year's event.

I was pleased to see educators who share the same basic values in the same place. Sometimes it feels like everyone is trying to carve up the reform movement into little private areas of influence, complete with activities and protocols with "their" names on them. It wasn't like that this time.

The problems our kids are facing are big enough to share around. We need all hands on deck, and we need them all pulling in the same direction. When real differences in thinking or approach arise, we should be able to respect each other and our common goals enough to move ahead, agreeing to disagree, testing out our strategies in principled ways.

Sounds good on paper, but the reality isn't always as easy as it sounds. We all come to the table with different experiences or at least different views of our common experiences. Who decides on our joint mission? How much agreement is enough to move ahead?

Peeling back the layers

We all agree that using protocols to collectively examine student work is a powerful experience, one that can redirect our teaching and learning. We are able to peel back the layers of our intentions and our activities in order to gain insights into our teaching and our students' needs and talents.

Using protocols, making our practice public, having these conversations, makes us accountable in ways that are meaningful, ways that can lead to changes in our classrooms and our schools, but does it make our work equitable?

How do we define equity? More to the point, how do we define equity in a society built on bias and inequity? How do we challenge our own assumptions and biases in ways that empower us to renegotiate the status quo? How do we bring our students and their families into this process?

We struggled this weekend to clarify the connections between accountability, equity and student achievement. We talked about looking at student work in service of the other three.

Some people worried about overwhelming new folks with too many tasks at one time. One colleague compared the protocols to the letters of the alphabet, and using the protocols in the service of accountability, equity and student achievement, with fluent reading. They warned that we shouldn't move too quickly.

I liked this metaphor, but felt it needed to be carried a step further to reveal the masses of children in our public schools, the ones who are still being denied access to the "letters." Can we put off the bigger picture and slow down the process when so many are left behind every day?

The lack of access that I'm referring to is in full flower every time we teach in ways that limit the learning of our students. When children are marginalized because they are "other" than we expect them to be. When they learn, look, or sound differently than we do, the balance often shifts away from equity and toward bias.

Does "better" mean "just like us"?

In Growing Up Poor, a literary anthology edited by Robert Coles, Dorothy Allison writes of being conscious of herself as "other" from a very young age. She writes vividly of the pain she's experienced, as she has tried to distance herself from the reality of her identity, her sexuality, and her family.

How many of our children feel this same sense of alienation when we try to make them "better" than their families? Does "better" really mean just like us? Who decides?

Who decides that our students lack experience when they come into our schools? Do they really lack experience or do they just have a different set of learnings that we don't understand or value? What happens when we start looking at kids as having deficits instead of assets before we get to know them?

In one of my small groups we focused on the barriers faced by students who come into our schools with Spanish as their first or primary language. We wondered how being bilingual was still seen as a liability in a world where diversity is becoming the rule. We talked about concrete ways to honor the language and culture of these children so that they can make use of their added abilities.

We thought about organizing small groups where bilingual students could tutor teachers and other kids in conversational Spanish. We also talked about the importance of reflecting the students' culture in our classrooms, not just on International Day or on special holidays, but every day throughout the year.

How can we break through these barriers of cultural difference to build new learnings for all? If we can agree that we learn differently and that such diversity is to be celebrated, how can we continue to test our sameness? How can we administer tests that we know are meant to simply sort and label at least half of our kids as being deficient or "less than"?

Student voices

The Colloquium was kicked off by a group of students from a group called, "Youth Speaks." These high schoolers are very involved in the use of "Spoken Word" poetry. The first young man spoke about "prosperity as the reflection of our disparities." He went on to juxtapose "access and excess." He questioned rights that would only bend 90 degrees when full access is 360.

Another student painted a melancholy picture of a boy who used to be "blind to colors and labels, a boy without a chisel, a boy he once knew." He detailed his loss of innocence, skillfully using his words, dramatically raising the question of how we grow into the biases that somehow become "etched into the stones of our character."

A young woman spoke of drug use and insecurity. She used her voice and range to painfully present the loneliness and self destruction that claims so many of our young people.

Hearing their voices, seeing their faces, learning from their performance, underscored the importance of why we do this work.

It will probably be a long time before I completely digest all the lessons of the Colloquium and I know I will need to learn some of them more than once. It's the nature of our system; it's bound up with my being "other" from most of the students inside our schools.

An urgent struggle

On another very much related note, I learned yesterday that my position will soon be cut. I'm not sure where I'll be in September, but wherever I end up, I plan to press ahead on the use of protocols and their purpose, until access means equity, and not just the opposite of the excess that gets held up as enviable in our society.

Linda Darling­p;Hammond spoke at the Colloquium and she shared many insights into the high- stakes testing assault on our children. She closed her comments with the quote by Frederick Douglass about "power conceding nothing without a struggle." Ms. Hammond used part of the quote and it really hit home for me so I came home and headed for the shelf to find the entire context of his remarks:
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will submit to and you have found the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows or with both."

-- West India Emancipation Speech (August 4, 1857)

Our struggle is an urgent one. Our children don't have time for us to slowly learn all the steps before we proceed to the next level. Their very lives are caught in the imbalance. They don't go home to a different, more equitable world after their last class is over, they don't have that luxury, and we can't afford that illusion.

[Editor's note: Deb is co-moderator of the MiddleWeb listserve.]


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