What We Know: Our students’ ability to achieve is only limited by our own investment in their success

Each year in Washington State the Regional Teachers of the Year are asked to contribute a piece of writing that is published in a book called Seed to Apple. What follows is my contribution from this year. It is a story about the work we do at Lincoln High School and what quality educators do at low-income schools all over the nation. I encourage you to check out some of the other entries by my fellow Washington State educators.

There are ten former students of Lincoln High School currently in jail for murder or manslaughter.

This isn’t their story. But their story and that number animate the work we do. It is the fuel that drives our staff. The stakes in a high-poverty schools are life and death. We know this. The kids we don’t reach will be lost to incarceration, unemployment, shortened life expectancy, and a lifetime of poverty. We know this. Vice President Joe Biden once said, “Don't tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.” I can tell you that society doesn’t value our students. We know this. 

They live in segregated housing on tattered and pothole filled roads. We’ve closed their elementary schools, local libraries, and Boys & Girls Club. We’ve cutback service hours and bus routes that serve their neighborhoods. They live in a food desert. My students are invisible. Tacoma, the City of Destiny, is infamous for its “grit” and often is mocked for its ramshackle appearance, but its future rests in the hands of my staff. We are planting seeds. We know this.

Our staff supports our students and our alumni academically, emotionally, and economically. Schools are the barometers of the health of our communities. Throughout my seven years at Lincoln, I have watched as families struggle and fall further behind. As a staff, we fill an ever widening gap between what the state provides and what our families need. We stock our desk and filing cabinet drawers with food. We run food drives to collect food to feed families over winter break. We buy and collect ties and dress clothes for job interviews. 

We pay for SATs when students have exhausted their fee waivers. We pool money to get people’s lights turned on after being shut-off or to prevent evictions. We buy textbooks for alumni at Evergreen. We buy linen for alumni from CWU. We send winter clothes to alumni at UW. We help when the paperwork from the financial aid office appears to be written in Vulgate Latin. We hire alumni on break from college to do yard. We shed tears. We sacrifice time with our own families. We celebrate our students’ successes.

In recent years our graduation rate has risen by 22%. We have sent an increasing number of kids off to higher education. But “sending them off” is not enough. We tell ourselves a lie when we treat the education of a young mind as some sort of transaction that ends at the end of school day, school year, or even graduation. The role of a Lincoln teacher extends into life and adulthood of our students. We continue to fertilize and till. Our students often don’t have uncles or aunts who are college graduates. They have us. 

Last fall during planning with the senior team, a few of us hatched an idea to support our graduates in college and inspire our current students. We batted around the idea of road trip; an Alumni Support Tour. The plan was to visit over two dozen recent grads in colleges east of the mountains. Nearly all these students were first generation college students and the majority were students of color. We had been getting calls and emails from students who were struggling to adjust and debating coming home. In late September, I sat on the phone for nearly an hour telling a homesick alumna that she owed it to herself to stay at Whitworth.

“You will hate yourself if you quit.”

“It doesn’t matter how they look at you, we both know you are smart enough.”

“I know there are no other black students, we talked about this before you left. This is how it will be.”

As I hung up the phone with her the road trip went from an idea to a necessity. 

In October, Mrs. Teague-Bowling, Ms. Bockus, and I piled into my Kia Soul and hit the road to visit the Lincoln Class of 2014 at Central Washington, Washington State University, Gonzaga, and Whitworth College. Along the way we asked why we hadn’t done this before. We wondered how the kids were holding up with the workload. Had we prepared them? We were curious about who might be struggling. But, most importantly, we questioned: why isn’t this kind of support the norm?

We stayed in a Super 8 in Ellensburg and a HoJo in North Spokane. We met our charges at each of their campuses and brought them pizza or burgers. Older Lincoln Alumni showed up as well. “I am so proud of you.” Tears were shed. “We did this, together.” Hugs were exchanged. We visited dining halls, toured campuses, and heard familiar tales of adjustment. They shared their syllabi and dorm rooms with us. We shared our pride and joy with them. They thanked us and talked about how prepared they felt for college and life. 

These were the three best days of my career. We drove over 650 miles, visited four campuses, and broke bread with nearly 30 alumni. Over three days we were able to see our harvest.

Teaching is more like farming than many of the other careers it gets compared to. Lincoln is a massive farm with nearly 1,500 seeds in the ground. Some have nutrient rich soil. Others are in shallow, sandy dirt and require more attention. At Lincoln 80% of our seeds live in poverty. That just means they need more fertilizer, more careful watering, and more attention from us, the farmers.

Too often when we talk about students in poverty, my students, we approach them from a deficit--we awfulize students in poverty--we talk about them as if they are incapable of learning.

They aren’t inferior, they’re poor.

They are literate, but the ways in which they are literate aren’t measurable by our assessments. There’s an academic vocabulary gap, not an intelligence gap. With love and support they’re capable of reaching the same highs as all other students. My students are worth the investment that I make in them as their teacher, and they are worth the investment we ought to make in them as a society.

We know this.

Just in Case Things Weren't Clear

My recent post on the importance of effective teaching, school segregation and equitable school funding touched a nerve. On this site it received over 250,000 views. Additionally, it was republished in the Seattle Times, Washington Post, Hechinger Report, New York Observer and the Huffington Post.

The vast majority of the feedback, even from dissenters, was thoughtful and brought up points that I hadn’t considered, or angles I had contemplated but (for reasons of brevity) chose to leave out. The responses pushed me to reconsider some of the things I said in the piece. That is the Internet at its best.

However, one piece of feedback, a letter, stuck out to me. It arrived in the mail at my school this week and I want to share it with you. It reinforces much of what I said in the original piece about the contempt that many people in America have for people of color, and especially for black America.  It was dictated by its author, Ralph Fusco (probably to his paralegal), and I present it here to you as is, unedited and unredacted.

Letter from Ralph Fusco

In many ways the letter speaks for itself.

The casualness with which Mr. Fusco denigrates the whole of black America is breathtaking.

Although I disagree with almost every single word Mr. Fusco wrote, I appreciate his honesty and willingness to share his point-of-view. I am guessing, if asked, he would claim “I am not a racist.” As Ta-Nehisi Coates has jested previously, there no racists anymore. It’s apparent Fusco has (probably by choice) had very little interaction with actual black people (he is missing out, we are pretty awesome!).

Mr. Fusco isn’t some unhinged, hood wearing or toothless Confederate flag waver, nor is he a white-supremacist, from a compound in the Far West. He is probably an upstanding member of his community and active member of all the usual community organizations: Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, etc.

I do not believe his views are atypical, only his willingness to put them to paper. Many of our current social ills: un(der)employment, segregated housing patterns, mass incarceration, inequitable school funding, and disparate educational outcomes are underpinned by this type of thinking. It must be combated and public education is the best way forward. This is the work. This is the challenge.

I am glad that Mr. Fusco put it all out there.  

The Conversation I'm Tired of Not Having

I want to tell you a secret: America really doesn’t care what happens to poor people and most black people. There I said it.

In my position as a Teacher of the Year and a teacher leader (an ambiguous term at best), I am supposed to be a voice and hold positions on a host of ed policy issues: teaching evaluations, charter schools, test refusal, and (fights over) Common Core come to mind. I am so sick of reading about McCleary (Washington’s ongoing intragovernmental battle for equitable funding for K-12) I don’t know what to do with myself. But, increasingly I find myself tuning out of these conversations. As a nation, we’re nibbling around the edges with accountability measures and other reforms, but we’re ignoring the immutable core issue: much of white and wealthy America is perfectly happy with segregated schools and inequity in funding. We have the schools we have, because people who can afford better get better. And sadly, people who can’t afford better just get less--less experienced teachers, inadequate funding and inferior facilities.

There is simple lack of political will. The situation in education is analogous to the status of gun control. Last June, @DPJHodges tweeted that “In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.” Unless dozens of members of Congress are themselves directly impacted by gun violence, there is no major gun legislation coming anytime soon. We have retreated to our camps; there is no turning back. It is the same with school funding and school segregation.

If you are reading this blog, you've probably seen the images coming out of Detroit Public Schools: buckled floors, toilets without seats, roaches, mold and even mushrooms growing in damp, disgusting, mildewy classrooms. Like the images of American torture and abuse last decade in Abu Ghraib, these images should have shocked the nation. Instead, they elicited a collective national shrug, stretch and yawn.

The View from the Burbs is Sweet. Through white flight and suburbanization, wealthy and middle class families have completely insulated themselves from educational inequality. They send their kids to homogeneous schools and they do what it takes, politically at the local level, to ensure they’re well-funded, well-staffed, with opportunities for enrichment and exploration. Poor families lack competent and engaged administration (see Chicago, Detroit, etc), the levy money (locally, see Highline), capital budgets (see rural Central, WA), and the political capital wealthier families enjoy.

Ask yourself, would suburban schools ever be allowed to decay like what we saw in Detroit? Nope. What's happening in Detroit could never happen in Auburn Hills; what’s happening in Chicago could never happen in Evanston; what’s happening in South Seattle could never happen in Issaquah or Bellevue. Middle class America would never allow the conditions that have become normalized in poor and brown America to stand for their kids.

This past week I attended a convening of the 56 State & Territorial Teachers of the Year in San Antonio. There I spoke to a veteran teacher (17 years in the classroom) from Maryland. Her school is located five miles from the nation’s capitol and in her career, she has never taught a white student. Never. Her county and its schools are completely segregated. We aren’t in this together.

This week, I also encountered a tweet from @mdawriter that stopped me cold in my tracks: “61% of Blacks, 55% of Hispanics support gov't intervention to address school segregation. Vast majority of whites (72%) say nope!” They’re perfectly satisfied with situation as is. Integration? Busing? Redrawing of school or district boundaries? Nope, nope, nope.

So what is to be done? The pessimist in me says nothing can be done. Polite society has walled itself off and policymakers are largely indifferent. Better funding for schools is and will remain elusive, because middle class and wealthy people have been conditioned over the last 35 years to think of themselves as taxpayers, rather than citizens. They consistently oppose higher taxes--especially tax expenditures for programs for “the other.”

I’d offer the answer lies in the teaching profession itself

If you ain't talking about the teacher in the classroom, I ain't listening. Teacher quality matters. Too many in the profession are quick to awfulize students in poverty to rationalize poor results. Better teaching inspires students and gets better results. Better teaching engages students and keeps them in classrooms, rather than the streets. Better teaching is the one thing we never really talk about. Better teaching is the only mechanism we have left.

Our most needy students need our best teachers, yet our highest need schools have the least experienced teachers, the most turnover and are becoming burnout factories for those who remain. All the existing structural incentives for effective educators push them toward work in suburban schools, where they’ll be better supported and the workload is sustainable. Nobody wants to talk about this.

I am done with charter fights and Common Core spats. You won’t hear me caping for (or against) Danielson’s Framework. If you’re looking for me in the near future, you won’t find me at the edu-fundraiser or non-profit luncheon with a parking lot full of Teslas. For my own sake and the sake of my kids, I will be supporting organizations and people putting in work in these areas:

• Fighting the impacts of systemic racism and white supremacy in our schools and among teachers.

• Helping, through my speaking opportunities, to recruit passionate people, especially people of color into the profession.

• Supporting policies aimed at identifying, developing and retaining effective teachers.

• Advocating for the creation of systems that encourage our most effective and passionate teachers to stay in the profession and supporting them in working with our most needy schools.

• Encouraging policymakers to make the work of effective teachers rewarding and sustainable by trusting them and not burdening them with new and ever changing mandates.

• Giving teachers opportunities to lead, within the profession, while remaining in the classroom.

Take what you will from what is and isn’t on that list.

Now that we’ve made it this far, I realize I may have misspoken at the top--I am not done with ed policy discussions--but I am done with ones that don’t have to do with teaching.

Onward.