Don't Forget South Central

What do you do for the third act of your career? Will you keep the promise of service to a challenged community that you made in your early career? (to drunk colleagues at a Margarita Jones?) ”We’re Lifers,” we all agreed, after our third round of margaritas. Do you give yourself one final challenge and give yourself to other kids who need you just as much but in different ways? What will you do when you only have 10 years of teaching left? (ish) These are the questions that have left the Sensei in an existential funk for the last year or so. Never bright eyed and bushy tailed, work at my last school (a middle school) was every bit the challenge I knew it would be. Questionable leadership, racial politics, and the massive effects of poverty on students made the teaching conditions there…unique. Yet, still, there were incredibly talented teachers who were making a dent in the system. A system where the odds were against these students and teachers, and little wa...

 The big news this summer is the speed and ferocity of the federal governments new education reform plans that fall under the umbrella of Race to the Top.  RTTT is a competition for federal funding that will be awarded to winning states who adopt the reforms espoused by the President Obama and the Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan.  Some of these reforms include merit pay for teachers, reforming teacher evaluation, increasing testing in all subjects, imposing sanctions to the lowest performing 5% of schools, and lifting the cap on charter schools. As we have said before in this blog, the ideas and policies of those in power always present themselves in a different iteration at the school level, and in South Central L.A., even more so. For example, take the idea of reconstitution.  The idea is that if a school has very low test scores, and has had them for a long time, then it must be the fault of the faculty.  If you fire the faculty and only ret...

  The internet has given many folks the opportunity to chime in about education reform (including those that author this blog, teachers from Los Angeles Academy MS).  Our school that has been labeled "Program Improvement" -California's label for "failing" schools--- for the last several years.  This is due to one simple measure, created by George Bush in his signature piece of legislation known as No Child Left Behind.   In NCLB, each school has to have 100% of students scoring Proficient or higher to be deemed a successful school.  This includes all English learners, and special education students who are mentally impaired.  Many schools, including ours, did not meet our targets, hence the PI label. But does one single test label measure the worth of a school?  I believe not.  Having worked at several schools in the Los Angeles Unified District, and having hundreds of colleagues spread out all over the district, state, an...