Van Schoales is executive director of Education Reform Now, a Denver-based national advocacy group.
The scariest part of watching “Waiting for Superman” for the first time a couple of weeks ago in New York City (it finally opens Friday in Colorado) was seeing the school where I started my public education career 22 years ago. I’m not sure what was worse, seeing how little Woodside High School’s (California) data had changed or reflecting on how much I had aged. While it was nice to see that the school has a nice new performing arts center, the student results were similar to when I started teaching science there nearly a quarter-century ago.
Only about half the students at Woodside high are at grade level in reading and math, much the same as the state of California. The school’s dropout and college success rates mirror the Golden State. The school’s student demographics are similar to California’s with about half the kids Latino and the same number being low-income, which was what originally attracted me to the school.
While Woodside is located next to one of the richest towns in America (Woodside), the long list of billionaires who live there – like Oracle’s Larry Ellison – don’t send their kids to Woodside High. The school is in Redwood City adjacent to East Palo Alto, from where kids were bused to Woodside. East Palo Alto had the dubious distinction of having the highest homicide rate in the US in the late 80’s. It has changed a bit with the new development that pushed the poor out but it is still largely an impoverished community.
Back when I entered teaching, I naively thought you could redesign a big school from within if only you had the right structured conversations to surface problems and propose solutions. It all seemed fixable with given the right curriculum, pedagogy, schedule, new structures and conversations.
Oh to be young.
I spent the first five years of my career working tirelessly to become an effective teacher while I also led Woodside’s reform efforts. It was the school reform equivalent of being a new marine in Vietnam in 1968. I worked with my fellow teachers, students, the union, parents and the administration to make schedule and course changes in an attempt to make an impersonal 2,000-kid school a bit more kid-centric but it was overwhelming given the culture and history of the school.
The problem was that there were too many parts to change with far too many vested interests. The administration was only willing to support changes that didn’t fundamentally alter the system, while the teachers’ union was fine with any change as long as it didn’t affect our contract. Aand parents (meant to say PTA leaders) were supportive as long as it didn’t negatively affect the AP track or the sports programs for their typically privileged kids.
I started teaching my first day on the picket line over a contract dispute and later became the building leader for the union before I lost faith in the “union” when my fellow district union leaders killed a plan to change the school’s schedule (in spite of our school’s faculty support) that might have implications for the rest of the district’s teachers’ contract.
I realized then that I was member of a union of factory workers, not a guild of professionals as I had envisioned when I started. I knew that labor unions brought working people a living wage, healthcare and a safe work environment, all things to celebrate. But I learned first-hand at Woodside that modern teacher unions had become almost perfectly designed to protect teachers from any meaningful change and create a culture of victimization among teachers, rather than a culture of professionals serving kids. My experience at Woodside gave me a hands on education in what brilliant historians like Ted Sizer , Larry Cuban and David Tyack have so well described in their books about the fixed “grammar” of schooling and the remarkable power of the system to deflect reforms while it “tinkers towards utopia” (must read for any educator).
I couldn’t wait another century so I left to start other organizations and schools that were free from much of the existing inertia of these 20th Century big factory model schools.
Seeing “Waiting for Superman” and Woodside High School was a reminder of how hard it is to change existing public schools while also a hopeful vision of what’s possible with some of the new schools described in the film. While I’m not looking forward to the state of my body in 22 years, I’m more hopeful than ever about the future of public education in this country a decade or two from now as I’m just passing, I hope, the mid-point of my life.
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Here’s a great new animation celebrating the power of an effective teacher. I was reminded of why I went into teaching and why I’m still working to hard to improve public education.
See here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_pGiUeVFEU
It looks like it was done by the same folks that did that wonderful animation calling for reform.
Van, I did not know your background but have always enjoyed your perspective and efforts for reform.
Years before you I grew up in the mission district of San Francisco–far from woodside and perhaps even worse than east Palo Alto. I went to Horace Mann junior high and my neighborhood assigned school was Mission high school. It only graduated 9% of its students.
Luckily I was admitted to Lowell high school, the San Francisco ‘Honors’ high school.
That changed my life and is the main reason that I not only finished high school but have a PhD in business and economics.
I started being frustrated with school as a child and now am even more frustrated after 4 decades of trying to improve public schools.
What are we to do? Should we join the conservatives and create ‘good’ voucher plans? Keep throwing rocks at the unions, who do not change? Get rid of local control (as Gertsner and I have recommended for years?), what?
http://www.edlyell.com for articles on my perspective about radical school change
Thanks Ed for your comments. I’ve appreciated your thoughts as well. Lowell and other magnet schools have saved a large number of kids. It’s scary to think about the tens of thousands of kids that schools like Mission failed to serve.
This is why charter schools are so amazing, parents and teachers work together to make sure the childern are educated. Since parents “choose” the school they have a vested interest in making sure the school is run right. Most people spend more time researching a dentist than were their kids go to school. These are “public” schools but you have to make the effort of choosing it and bring your kid there. No busing-district gets to keep that money. But it works-uniforms- yes can’t tell who has money really. Home work yes lots. But the kids read at grade level or higher and their math scores are amazing. Some parents don’t like it because you have to volunteer, you have to partictipate in your childs education. But what a difference 10 hours a school year can make.
Deb, it is a leap of faith to say that just because a parent chooses a school that they are then vested in the success of the school. Parents do put in the time to research schools, but this does not always translate into a commitment of time or resources from those parents. Time and time again I have seen parents shop around for schools, enroll their students in to the school, and then in a few years transfer their students out of the school to the next best school they find.
Yes, there are SOME amazing charters as much as there are SOME amazing non-charter public schools.
Thanks so much for pointing out that there are SOME great charter schools. There are also some terrible charter schools. Charters are not a silver bullet!
Schools need resources to function effectively. I hope Colorado will start to invest in its children!
Local control is in the Constitution folks and a society that believes it can ignore the founding documents that created it is more dangerous than any foreign threat we could face. I’d say put the question on the ballot asking the voters to give the state more control and you know see what happens.
I support local control and limited Washington influence because in its truest form it creates personal responsility and prevents us from raising a generation of children, who when they become adults, think that whenever problems arise just let Denver or Washington fix them.
While you’re at it ask the voters once again to approve vouchers but be certain that these are inclusive and that private schools are required to take students of all types and not “cherry pick” the easiest to educate. Public educators are hard working and caring individuals who are doing the very best they can given the challenges they face.
I am quite happy to ignore founding documents. The people who created them were humans, not gods and life changes. Local control happens in most Western industrial societies. Typically what happens is that if shouting local control helps you win your political battle, then you use it; when it doesn’t suit your needs, it gets put away.
Local control of air and water pollution used to work so well before the EPA…
And by the way, it takes real adults to take the responsibility to create systems and structures, maintain them and evolve them when necessary to ensure the greater good of the people. Just waving your hands and dissolving government and hoping the adults will save the day I take to be not very… adult.
After attending a community meeting at Martin Luther King Middle School this evening, Oct. 12, a fellow handed me a flier for “Waiting For Superman” and advised me that I could go online at greendotamerica.org to get tickets. I found sold out listings for Phoenix and Palo Alto, I believe, but no listings for Denver or anywhere in Colorado. So, does mean that “seating is limited” to only those who drink the Kool Aid of “reform?” Is the film just another example of choice by chance?
Mr. Lyell, I am enjoying reading your thoughts, ( via link), and I appreciate all the thought and effort you are displaying.
There is another “opinion” on this site, from Marc Waxman, regarding a new paradigm for learning and I noted your work includes a paradigm shift. Would love to see you in that discussion.
Again, thanks for your efforts.