One-Room Schoolhouse

One-Room Schoolhouse

“Fernando.”

    Fernando looks at his friend Dahlia, who nods. He then rises grinning from his seat and bounces toward the teacher table at the front of the room. I hand him his book and, after giving it a cursory glance, Fernando twirls and retraces his steps. His friends giggle, and so does he.
    Between handing out books 17 and 18, I take a look around the room. Fernando is talking with his friends Irma and Jasmine. He has already put the book away in his backpack, not moved by the fact that there are still eighty-five minutes left in our block period. His friends don’t stop him and don’t ask to see the book. Unlike Fernando, they can read, but not in English. The same is true of Song, who arrived from Korea four months ago and seems most interested in the size of the book. He pretends to weigh it in his hands as he says something to Kim, a friend he has made in the class. They both laugh broadly.
    That’s the predictable, even easy part of the story. Now I look to my right and see Tina, focused and already reading ardently. Behind her, Juan is also eagerly chewing through hunks of text, only he’s reading out loud to his friends Milton and Rudy. His mouth seems to taste the words as it forms them, measured, deliberate. In the front corner of the room, Jose sits and stares, first at the cover of the book as he traces the drawing with his finger, then out the window.
    The thirty-two students gathered together in this ninth grade English class are so diverse an observer might fairly ask if there’s been a mistake. I have students from fourteen years old to eighteen, some brand new to the country, some born within blocks of the school. They have English reading levels from below the first grade to above the eleventh. To friends and family I’ve described it as anything from a balancing act to a grand pageant, from a juggling act to just plain impossible. A hundred years ago, students of all ages and skill levels in a community might be taught in one room by a single teacher. They called it a one-room schoolhouse.

I wrote that ten years ago. 

I had just moved from the school where I had taught for fifteen years to a brand new "pilot school" campus and we were creating a school where none had been. When we arrived we had to invent systems and structures that would serve our students and remain true to our mission of social justice and environmental responsibility. And because we were a k-12 span school, we had to do it for elementary, middle, and high school kids from 5 to 19 years old.

For those of you who don't know, pilot schools, established in 2007 through a side agreement between the Los Angeles Unified School District and United Teachers Los Angeles, are essentially the district's answer to the charter schools that have been siphoning off students and resources from authentic public schools for years. 

There is a much more fulsome interrogation of charter schools in a near-future post, but briefly: From the CDE website, "In 1992, California became the second state in the nation to adopt public charter school legislation." That measure was followed with additional legislation dissolving limits on charter schools and forcing districts and even existing neighborhood schools to divert more and more resources--up to and including giving away the public school's actual facilities--to support the charters with which they were now forced to compete for students. 

The district's responses to this existential threat have been reliably hapless and politically self-serving. Of course there was the capitulation to the testing-industrial complex that grew out of No Child Left Behind and its evil progeny. Once fully addicted to the poison pill of competition and synthetic accountability, the district resorted to mimicking its tormentors, adopting the assumptions and solutions of the school choicers and internalizing them.

So, rather than focus on the contributions of authentic neighborhood schools, their value to their communites, and the importance of strengthening them, the district instead opted for sham self-determination (school-based management, expanded school-based management, something called an iDesign Schools Division), or offered its own recipe for school choice (Public School School Choice and Open Enrollment).

In fact, LAUSD itself  got on the charter train almost immediately, with one superintendent even floating the idea of a charter district of LAUSD's very own. 

The pilot school model is simply one more answer to the wrong question. Not "How do we best serve our students, our communities, and our world?" But rather, "How do we  compete?" 

Because they are advertised as having several "autonomies" that allow them to operate independent of the school district, today's pilot schools are peddled as alternatives both to charter schools and to traditional schools starved of resources and trapped in a bureaucracy more concerned with scores than students. 

These autonomies include decisions with respect to testing and curriculum, budget, governance, and the school calendar. Most critically, the school--and by school, I mean principal--maintains control over staffing. The stated objective is to bring together like-minded individuals committed to a shared mission. One Elect-to-Work agreement reads: "The Principal may release staff members that are unwilling to support and implement the vision and mission" of the school. 

Theoretically, this independence facilitates the innovation promised by charter schools concerned with being more efficient--and more segregated--versions of public schools.

We're a pilot school! We're not like those other public schools. We have autonomies! We have a theme! We're small for personalized instruction! We can get rid of those troublesome teachers who won't get with the program or who--gasp!--don't believe in your kids.  

Sadly, in our school we quickly found limits we didn't anticipate. In spite of our outwardly posh surroundings, we were basically a bare-bones operation. We shared the campus with five other schools and both our staffing and our physical space were severely limited. Our middle/high school counselor had to keep track of about six hundred students. There were classes we couldn't offer because there were not enough classrooms. We were denied access to certain spaces--the freakin brand new  theatre, for example--and even our lunch times were subject to complicated negotiations. 

We had no teachers or classrooms to create an infrastructure for language learners, so even newcomers were programmed into traditional English classes, often with no additional support. And on the first day of school we found out we were a "full inclusion" school and students with special needs were immersed in the standard program, even if their previous experience was in a special day class. We were told this was in keeping with our "social justice" mission. 

In both these cases, it was clear to me that our model was not a sufficient response to the needs of our students. I didn't really understand the scope of the war being waged against public schools. As I've written, I was siloed in the day to day struggle of trying to serve my students and stay healthy. 

Even then, though, I could see that what we were doing--the posing, the authoritarian professional developments and prescriptive procedures, the minimal resources and skeleton crew, the disappearing of teachers who spoke out, and the compulsive testing--was not school. It was, rather, a reaction to the Walmartization* of schooling driven by the privatizers and school choicers in general and the charter school movement in particular. 

*Found here, and later here, and by Diane Ravitch here.

Charter schools have long benefited from a gigantic public relations/advocacy machine that has been very successful at shaping public opinion, intimidating dissenters, and influencing public officials--including district officials--to support them. Unfortunately, this pilot school pretend-charter model was a symptom, not a solution. 

However, saying so, and speaking up about the many ways we were falling short, did not make me a favorite with administration.

Pro tip: When your principal is assigned and paid by the district and exercises total authority over staffing (there's autonomy, for you), there's no such thing as independence from the district. 

The district's response to the enemies of public schooling was anemic and wrong-headed, but it was not entirely cynical. We wanted to be better. But we should not have wanted to be like them. 

So it was in this context that I was sitting at a table in my one-room schoolhouse, handing out books to the most eclectic group of students I had faced in my career. I was also trying to understand my school and district and the many ways forces outside my classroom were becoming more and more powerfully influential in the way I conducted my interactions with kids. I was very frustrated.

More of that frustration in the next post when I'll share what I thought about it all then, what I think about it now, and some of what I've been able to see from outside the silo. 

See you next time.