New American Media’s UpFront Radio has produced a terrific audio report (MP3 audio link) on San Francisco’s Small Schools by Design policy and the district’s collaboration with CES. This report first aired on public radio station KALW on April 23.

Bayview Essential School of Music, Art, and Social Justice is featured as the first of the five schools to open under the policy in August 2008, as are established CES small schools Leadership High School and June Jordan School for Equity. Youth and education reporter Amanda Martinez establishes the connection between small schools by design and an explicit and thoughtful focus on race and equity, and Martinez captures a strong representation of student voices and perspectives.

Again, for the MP3 audio link to the story, listen here.

Since spending time recently with members of the CES Small Schools Network at the National Civil Rights Museum during our Spring network meeting in Memphis, TN I’ve been considering how a blog entry could really capture the experience and the continued personal transformation that the experience afforded me.

I’ve settled on the fact that my words alone cannot adequately represent the power of the experience. My reflections since however have pushed me in considering this question:

Can blogging help end racism?

My short answer, “Umm…kind of, maybe.”

To that end I want to share the framework for a personal working paper on the subject. It is intended to be a personal reflection document, something to help us explore our own ideas on race and racism.

I thought it might be fun to share it with you all, so:

Can Blogging End Racism?

Personal Working Paper

1. How do you define racism?

2. How do you respond (emotionally) to discussions of race and racism? Anger? Relief? Anticipation?

3. How do you respond (emotionally) to discussions of race and racism in blogs and on the internet? Do you respond differently?

4. Why are you personally interested in ending racism? How would ending racism benefit you?

5. How do you combat racism in your daily life?

6. What are you personally willing to do to end racism? What would you be willing to give up? What would you offer?

CES has designated May National Exhibition Month (NEM) and is calling for schools and support organizations across the country to engage in activities that make their exhibition work public and to advocate for the use of exhibitions in their local contexts.  Throughout May, students at over 100 schools will stand up to demonstrate their learning in academic performances that not only measure, but dramatically improve student learning.

These exhibition activities offer educators, policy makers and pundits an opportunity to see for themselves a powerful alternative to the standardized testing craze. Check out our NEM Page to see how schools are participating and to view resources and materials on exhibitions and our nation-wide campaign to promote them, including some footage from an actual exhibition.

In related news, the Forum for Education and Democracy has created a buzz with the release of “Democracy at Risk,” a report on the state of the federal role in education on the 25th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk.” One of the report’s top recommendations for turning around education in America is precisely what is accomplished through exhibitions.

Here, from the report: 

“Where do we go from here?…Focus curriculum on critical thinking and problem solving using assessments that require students to conduct research and scientific investigations, solve complex real-world problems in mathematics, use new technologies and defend their ideas orally and in writing.”

Feel free to join us at an exhibition activity this month. Check this list of participating schools for activities that may be happening near you. We will also be streaming footage from one of these events later in the month, so if you can’t make it in person, please join us virtually.

For reasons that elude our understanding, the Essential Blog lost several posts from last week. So, if you think  you came here and read about:

• The May 14 deadline for proposals for workshops, interest groups, and Critical Friends groups for 2008’s Fall Forum
• The challenge of creating media coverage of good news about schools
• The Forum for Education and Democracy’s report ”Democracy at Risk: A New Federal Role in Supporting Our Schools“
• The relevance of the Passover seder to education reform

You’re right, you did read that. We regret both that those posts are gone and our complete lack of insight as to why. Backup posts are being made henceforth. Our apologies, and let’s hope that the Essential Blog’s inner workings show a more fully developed tone of decency from now on. 

According to this article published today, when Jim Wong, Principal of Will C. Wood Middle School in Sacramento faces the challenge of making ensuring that his African American students are achieving at a level equal to that of their peers from other racial and ethnic groups and that the school is closing the racial achievement gap, what does he do?

Does he consider the cultural relevance of the curriculum to his African American students? Does he challenge the lower expectations that some may have of his African American students? Does he engage in a critical look at the supports and opportunities that these students might need, but aren’t getting in order to raise their achievement? Does he engage the school community in meaningful and difficult conversations about why the school is not serving well a significant number of African American students?

Maybe… but first, they simply change the students’ demographic information and reclassify them as a different race altogether, thus rendering the entire African American population of 100 students statistically insignificant. What do these changes mean? Well, according to Principal Jim Wong the changes “get me out of trouble”.

Much more than rendering our African American young people statistically insignificant, their lives are made more and more insignificant and their achievement, success and future deemed inconsequential by the manipulative changes made by this school and more than 80 other California schools that have made similar changes to student demographic information over the past two years in order to “get out of trouble” with No Child Left Behind.

While the standardized tests associated with NCLB aren’t the best measures for what students know and are able to do, the disaggregated data they do provide about student achievement can give us with some insight into issues we, as educators need to address if we are committed to closing the racial achievement gap, but only if we are honest with ourselves about what is really going on and willing to confront difficult truths.

“One issue is denial within the school about what’s going on—or at least a lot of rationalization. Especially in a school where there have been consistent patterns of failure for certain kinds of kids, it’s often the case that people locate the source of that failure in the kids themselves, or in their culture, their community, or their parents. Some teachers are very willing to accept credit for success—the kids who go to good colleges—but they’re not so willing to take responsibility for the kids who don’t succeed.”

– Pedro Noguera

Carl Chew, Seattle middle school science teacher, declined to administer the WASL state standardized test to his students, saying tests are “bad for kids,” and much more. Seattle Times story here; Chew’s own statement on why he refused to administer the WASL to his students, and why he thinks other teachers need to take a similar stand, here.

Here’s a bit of Chew’s statement:

No one ever asked me or any of the teachers I know whether high stakes testing was a good idea. In fact, we teachers are made to jump through seemingly endless hoops to prove our worthiness to be professional, certificated educators. Public school teachers are responsible for the educational lives of over a million students in Washington State, yet, in the end, no one actually wants to listen to what teachers have to say about what is best for the students in our care. 

Chew says a lot more - take a few moments to read and consider his words, and tell us what you think. Would you, in some way, refuse to enable standardized tests, whether by outright refusal or choosing a teaching setting that avoids them. Have you already?

News of advertisting on school buses is pretty much guaranteed to trigger a rant from us, and so it goes for this New York Times story about BusRadio, which is what it says it is, a radio system for school buses with, of course, ads. Lots of ads, directed at an audience that has no choice whether to be exposed to them.

The school districts that install BusRadio get revenue and/or lots of goodies (a GPS system connected to communication that lets parents/others know when their kids’ buses are drawing near, which would of course be cool and convenient, seductively so). And BusRadio gets lots of revenue too, we can only presume. Lots and lots of revenue.

And whether they like it or not, kids on the bus get music. I’ll be quick to say that with my own personal kids in our own personal car, I am exceedingly pro-music, as the hundreds of songs on our iPod can attest. Of course, we control what we listen to and when we listen, and we do so without corporate sponsors banging away at our brains. This is a choice that I make for my family; it is not a choice I would allow anyone else to make for my children.

Bus drivers may get plenty out of it too - happier kids on often long rides, as the driver quoted in the Times affirms. Again, that can be a wonderful outcome, one that my iPod and I seek on our family’s long car rides - and that, thanks to neighborhood public schools in a higher-density urban area, my kids don’t have to slog through daily to get to school, unlike many millions of other kids in less populated areas, or in urban areas with school assignment policies that send kids all over cities. But it is not an adequate solution for the “trapped” time kids have on buses. Encouraging good conduct on school buses may well be a challenge; commercially laden radio is not the answer.

Schools cannot be in the business of providing captive audiences to advertisers. If BusRadio is in your community, or is being considered - or if this just ticks you off as much as it does us - visit the Campaign for a Commerical-Free Childhood’s “Turn off BusRadio” campaign. Or send a letter to your congressional representative and BusOne and other advertisers through Commercial Alert’s campaign against advertising to public school children in school settings.  Or visit Obligation.org’s blog listing BusRadio-related problems with bus safety, exposure of young kids to inappropriate lyrics, examples of citizens standing against BusRadio, and more.

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For many in the CES Network, Fall Forum is the alpha and omega, the high point in the cycle to which an immeasurable amount of collective energy builds and grows. The first key phase of the Fall Forum process, the Call for Proposals, is now open! We invite anyone who has work to share that benefits Essential schools and all personalized, equitable, and academically challenging schools to submit a proposal.

Fall Forum epitomizes the Common Principle “student as worker,” albeit it calls on conference-goers to be workers - that is, facilitators of knowledge and learning experiences. The vast majority of Fall Forum content is generated by CES and like-minded practitioners that share their successes and challenges through interest groups, workshops, and Critical Friends groups. We hope that you will think about what you have to share and submit a proposal! We are accepting Fall Forum proposals through May 14, 2008.

Fall Forum 2008 will take place November 6-8 in Charlotte, North Carolina. General information is available here. For those new to Fall Forum, here’s recap of last year’s proceedings in Denver, Colorado.

Note to readers: here’s a guest post from Annie Chien, science teacher at New York City’s School of the Future, submitted via our You Blog feature. Annie wrote this last year - we’re re-featuring it here thanks to a recent comment that made us realize Essential Blog readers deserved an opportunity to reread Annie’s call to focus student voice in particular on academics as demonstrated by student work.

I see myself teaching ’til I face my death bed - that’s how much I love being in a classroom. Perfecting my practice is the one thing that keeps me going, and I find conventions, workshops and meetings as one of the valuable places to nurture my growth. But as I approach the mid-career stage of my job, conventions, workshops and meetings have become stagnant to me.

Something is missing. I’ve found these events all talk. Inquiry-based learning is the thing! Student voice is important! Get students involved in your classroom! Yeah, yeah, I heard it all. It sounds peachy, but with all this talk about student-centered classrooms and schools being the key to developing great learners and problem solvers, I can’t seem to find the evidence to these rants

I hear students wanting a voice, I hear students talking about the type of education they want. But I don’t hear or see students talking about math, science, English and Social Studies. I don’t see students working out problems in math, and I don’t see students engaging in debates about our government. Where is the abundant great student work in science and English that these student-centered institutions are supposedly creating? I don’t see a slew of student inventions and original work where they demonstrate mastery and creativity. Where is the hard core evidence that supports student centered organizations?

If we want to train new schools and teachers that will initiate great learning in our students, we need to start off the successful student work and performance that exist. We should then work backwards - what were some of the processes that went to creating such great work and voices? What strategies did the students find most successful in creating such work - what support did the teachers and schools provided did they find most helpful? How do teachers scaffold and guide these students to turn misconceptions into deeper and meaningful understandings - what were the thoughts and strategies that the students took on themselves that made this learning experience successful?

It’s evident that we all came together at CES because we believe in involving students. I do not need to be drilled again and again on how fabulous it is. I want raw evidence of student learning, and a juicy conversation with the teacher and student on the process of making such great understanding. While I cherish my students who are articulate and can stand up for their rights, their voices really don’t mean a thing if their cover talent is not backed up with an inner self that embraces deep thinking, a love for learning and a knack for problem solving. No more shiny bells - I want student work and performance as my guiding light to perfect my teaching practice.
Annie Chien
Science Teacher
School of the Future

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Today’s Edutopia magazine arrived with lots of its usual great stuff including “Reinventing the Big Test,” Grace Rubenstein’s look at efforts to create assessment systems that will not only measure but encourage the sorts of skills, habits of mind, and knowledge base that K-12 students - and all of us - require. The alternative assessment approaches that Rubenstein describes - portfolios, exhibitions, and the like - will be familiar to CES educators, as will the Essential schools that serve as examples: Anzar High School, Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School, and Urban Academy Laboratory High School.

We’ll be revisiting the idea of an assessment system that supports teaching and learning and that best serves citizens of the 21st century as we get ready for and embark on National Exhbition Month 2008. For now, what are your ideas for what students need to know and be able to do to demonstrate that they’re ready for the new road ahead? What’s your idea of what that road contains? And what are the ways that schools and society should - and perhaps should not - measure that learning and the teaching that supports it?