Rejected NEH Admission Essay (Later Accepted)

In 2002 I attended a symposium at the University of Kansas celebrating the centennial of poet Langston Hughes’ birth. While I have to admit that I was excited to see Kevin Powell because of his stint on MTV’s Real World, and the reading by Paule Marshall at a local bookstore was a highlight, it was a lecture by Amiri Baraka that heralded my sixteen year fascination with the blues. I had just begun teaching a few years earlier, and my knowledge of Langston Hughes consisted primarily of The Negro Speaks of Rivers and Mother to Son, but Baraka introduced me to Hughes’ twelve-bar blues. That same year I took began recording a spoken word CD.Students would write poetry, and we would go to a studio owned by a former student to professionally record and mix the tracks. I have shared examples and modeled “blues poetry” that year and every year since, but I have never been able to find the hook. I want to use the knowledge I gain from this conference to find new avenues to lead my students to a deeper appreciation and understanding of the poetry of the delta.

For a long time the blues was a personal obsession. I would annoy my wife and son on road trips listening to Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, and a seventeen minute version of “Tobacco Road” by Edgar Winter. I insisted that we stand front and center on the hard packed dirt of a rodeo arena in ninety-five degree heat to see Leo “Bud” Welch at the Pilgrimage Festival in Nashville. At the Beale Street Music Festival, I made a beeline to the blues tent, and later that night, we jammed ourselves against the railing to see the headliner, Jack White. Arriving earlier than usual to LouFest, a local music festival, I made sure that the whole family enjoyed Buddy Guy’s set. We have stood in line in the French Quarter to hear the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, forced our son to take our picture at the Tallahatchie Bridge, visited the Woody Guthrie Center and paid our respects at Robert Johnson’s grave, but until this last school year I had not been able to successfully incorporate this love of music into my classroom.

Over the summer I went to a workshop sponsored by Teachrock.org. It was held at a local casino, and to be honest I thought it was going to be terrible, but I knew that after we listened to their speil, we would gain free admission to the Little Steven concert that night. The presentation was only a half hour tour of their website, but it is the mother lode of music related lesson plans. The very first thing I did after the concert was to type the word “blues” into the search bar and found a lesson entitled The Blues And The Great Migration. I eventually adapted this in to a project based lesson called “Red, White & The Blues” in which students read Fences by August Wilson through a musical lens, studied the local St. Louis crime ballads “Stagger Lee”, “Frankie & Johnny” and “Duncan and Brady,” and created presentations with a soundtrack for an era in African-American history. My research for this unit brought me full circle to Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and his book Blues People: Negro Music in White America and led me to a deeper understanding blues history of St. Louis, but I feel that I have only scratched the surface.

W.C. Handy wrote the song “St. Louis Blues” in 1914, yet the title of the song is more widely known as the name of the city’s NHL franchise. One hundred and two years after it was composed we became home of the National Blues Museum, and that, for most people, is the sum total of St. Louis’ connection to the history and culture of the Mississippi Delta. Residents embrace their connection to western expansion with a mid-century monument, constantly remind visitors of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and name libraries and grade schools across the region after Lewis and Clark. Route 66 is celebrated with signs and historic businesses, while Hwy 61 is virtually ignored. The city celebrates its version of Italian cuisine while ignoring soul food and Delta delicacies. Whether conscious or not, St. Louis distances itself from its southern roots, denies the influence of the great migration, and buries the history of many of its people. By attending “The Most Southern Place On Earth” workshop, I hope to reconnect my students with their community’s through music, food, and past to empower them participate in its future.

Fun in the Classroom

Introduction

Homework and rigor chafe me like a pair of 40-grit sandpaper underwear. While homework has been around since I was in school it is now a conscript in the war on children. In response to a perceived everyone-gets-a-trophy culture the educational world has responded with rigor and grit. Terms that are better suited to describing corpses and crime dramas than education.

A few years ago I started referring to homework as homefun, but my resolve soon wilted in the face of the pervasive work worship of the American educational system. When our district was trying to adopt a learning management system, the administration kept touting the gamification aspects. I was intrigued. How could we make school more like a game? Unfortunately the instruction consisted mostly of the tech guy standing at the front of the room with a SmartBoard saying, “badges and leaderboards” on an infinite loop. The idea has also been the topic of breakout sessions at the Midwest Educational Technology Conference, but every time it was presented I kept hearing the same thing, and that was not how I viewed gaming or fun. My idea of fun involved solving puzzles, discovering treasure, and hiking to a mountain overlook. I decided to research gaming and see if there was a way to integrate their design framework into project based learning.

During my research I came across references to the fourteen types of fun and realized that on every curriculum document and lesson plan that I have ever read there was not a box for fun. There was a box for the alphanumeric stew of standards. There was a box for homework. And that is about as far as I got because I usually started to doze off. Inside every board game box, often printed on the underside of the lid is a set of instructions. Every game from Axis & Allies to Candyland have similar sections called the object, contents, setup, and gameplay all of which have obvious parallels to unit plans, so why are games fun and schools rigorous and gritty?

Methodology

One possible answer is that educators, students and the school system value different types of fun. In order to collect some data on this question I developed a ridiculously unscientific and informal survey in which I asked teachers and students to pick their top types of fun. Basically if science was health food, it would be a kale and quinoa salad and this survey would be a bowl of ice cream topped with Cap’n Crunch. I thought of the idea on the drive to work and without much forethought immediately sat down at my computer to create a Google Form full of typos to send out. It was sent to educators through all school email, Twitter, and Facebook. The student survey was given to my students in class who were offered extra credit to complete it (more on this later) and passed along by other educators. I did not collect email addresses or demographic data because I did not want to broach privacy concerns or make it difficult for people to answer. Again, this was not science and did not meet any standards of ethics for using human test subjects. I am working under the assumption that participants willingly took the right survey and only responded once. In total eighty-nine educators and ninety-four students responded.

Below is a list of the fourteen types of fun as described in the survey.

Fourteen Types of Fun

• Beauty - That which pleases the senses. You enjoy art galleries, scenic overlooks, concerts, and dining out.
• Immersion - You enjoy role playing or escapist literature. You like getting lost in another world.
• Intellectual Problem Solving - You enjoy finding solutions to challenging problems and situations that require thought.
• Competition - You enjoy proving your superiority in. It is good to be first.
• Social Interaction - You like doing things with other human beings. You like social media and hanging with friends.
• Comedy - You like to laugh. You enjoy stand-up comedy and funny movies.
• Thrill of Danger - Activities are inherently more fun if the stakes are high. You are an adrenaline junkie.
• Physical Activity - This is kind of self-explanatory. You like to play sports.
• Love - Deep meaningful relationships and affection towards others. Romantic.
• Creation - You like to make things, build things, write things, and paint things that have not existed before.
• Power - You enjoy have a strong effect on others. You are an influencer.
• Discovery - You enjoy finding out what wasn't know before. It can be exploring the physical world or uncovering secrets.
• Advancement and Completion - You like achieving levels and finishing tasks. You were an excellent scout earning many badges and ranks. Eventually you earned the top rank.
• Application of a Skill - Using one’s physical abilities in a difficult situation. You take pride in your skills such as hand eye coordination or reflexes.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/227531/fourteen_forms_of_fun.php

Predictions

My assumption going into this was that there would be a disparity in the types of fun that students and teachers reported liking. My students were quite adamant that I had no idea what fun was, and I assumed that this relationship was similar to what other teachers experienced. It also seemed intuitively obvious that the school system valued competition, advancement, and completion by awarding class rank, letters for athletics and extracurriculars, grades, and diplomas. It is my belief that emphasizing these types of fun over the twelve other types can have a negative impact on students’ and teachers’ enjoyment of education.



Table 1: My predictions of responses Predictions

Teachers	Students
Intellectual Problem Solving	Social Interaction
Creation	Competition
Discovery	Comedy
Advancement & Completion	Thrill of Danger
Beauty	Advancement and Completion

. Obviously, this reflects my bias about teachers and students. I invite you to make your own predictions prior to reading the results.

Results (Too late. If you didn’t make your own predictions it is too late now.)

Table 2

Educator (89)		Students (94)
Beauty	65.2	Comedy	71.9
Social Interaction	61.8	Creation	48.3
Comedy	57.3	Social Interaction	44.9
Love	42.7	Phys. Activity	43.8
Creation	40.4	Competition	40.4
Int. Problem Solving	37.1	Beauty	39
Discovery	36	Power	38.2
Immersion	34.8	Application of Skill	36
Phys. Activity	32.6	Discovery	36
Application of Skill	19.1	Love	32.6
Adv. Completion	18	Int. Problem Solving	31.5
Competition	14.6	Immersion	29.2
Thrill of Danger	12.4	Thrill of Danger	27
Power	8	Adv. Completion	21.3

Table 3: Similarity Score (smaller number = more similar. Positive numbers indicate a teacher preference; negative numbers indicate a student preference.)

Table 2

Type of Fun	Difference in percent
Power	-30.2
Beauty	26.2
Competition	-25.8
Application of Skill	16.9
Social Interaction	16.9
Comedy	-14.6
Thrill of Danger	-14.6
Phys. Activity	-11.2
Love	10.1
Creation	-7.9
Int. Problem Solving	5.6
Immersion	5.6
Adv. and Completion	-2.2
Discovery	---

Observations (or the point in the report when you say to yourself, “Does this guy have a life?”)

At first I was only looking for similarities in ranking and was surprised to find out that teachers and students share three of the top five; Social Interaction, Comedy, and Creation. They also share two of the bottom five; Advancement and Completion and Thrill of Danger.

I was going to compare relative rank to see which types of the fun show the most disparity between teachers and students, but then I noticed that the students were a more heterogeneous group. This makes sense because all students are required to go to school, but teachers are a self-selected group that would likely have similar characteristics, or as popular opinion would have it a group of those that “can’t.” With the exception of Comedy which is a clear favorite with 71.9% of the students choosing it, all of the types of fun fell between 21% and 48 % selection showing a fairly even distribution amongst students. Teachers show a steep decline after Physical Activity which was chosen by 32% of the teachers. Next on the list was Application of Skill at 19%.

Comparing percentages between students and teachers, Discovery shows the most similarity with both groups coming in at 36%. The biggest disparity is in the realm of Competition with 40% percent student approval and only 15% of the teachers expressing an affinity for competing.

What I find most interesting is that Advancement and Completion were ranked near the bottom for both groups with only about one out of every five participants selecting it as part of their top five. Yet the school system is entirely constructed on advancement and completion. Students literally collect credits like on an old school upright Pac Man machine at Aladdin's Castle in the mall in order to complete a level and power up. After completing the twelfth level, education designers create a secret leaderboard and anoint the top point earner the valedictorian. We might as well give the kids a trackball and have them enter their monogram for posterity. Any student earning a perfect score is enshrined as an educational deity to whom all other students are compared. There is an obvious disconnect between education design and human concepts of fun.

Conclusions (The part most of you skipped to after looking at the tables)

Schools and education have not been designed by students and teachers. Somehow the one-fifth of the population that ranks Advancement and Completion as one of their favorites has taken over the system. Perhaps one reason is because this is one of the easiest types to quantify. Subjective data driven design for Love, Discovery, or Comedy is virtually impossible unless you install arcade style love testers and laugh-o-meters in the classroom. We often describe students who enjoy the hard to measure qualities as being intrinsically motivated and we consider this somehow better than the other types.

There is room for all types of fun in the classroom. It seems as if almost everyone values so called intrinsic motivation while at the same time demanding numbers to justify pedagogical choices. We should compromise and make room in our planning to consider how fun factors into our design. Obviously, given the heterogeneity of the student population we cannot please all of the students all of the time. One hundred percent engagement is a mythological beast worshipped by a small cult of wide-eyed sycophants intent on punishing non-believers, but we should analyze our own view of fun and recognize that it does not always match our audience’s expectations.

For example, it seems that most teachers, including myself, are not fans of competition. This may be because we are a bunch of nerds that were emotionally scarred by a particularly bruising bout of dodgeball, but the fact remains that students value it significantly more. We should examine our preconceived notions of the harm it might do the losers. Recently, while having a discussion with students about how to improve my lessons, a student suggested using Kahoot. I was familiar with the word from different conferences but mostly as something that I dismissed as too juvenile to use with my students. Many of the students agreed that Kahoot would be a great idea. I even asked my son, a sophomore at another school, and he said that his Spanish teachers use it. I went to the website and analyzed it in terms of the types of fun.

It is a quiz site with no more capabilities than Google Forms or Quizlet, but it does appeal to at least four types of fun. First of all it has colors and music which appeals to the students desire for beauty (This of course is in the eye of the beholder). It also incorporates a thrill of danger by having a time limit for answers, and the competitive aspect of a leader board allows students to rank themselves with their peers. Finally, it includes the application of skill and the minimal physical activity of tapping a button on their device as quickly as possible. The challenge for teachers is how to use Kahoot in way that actually promotes higher order thinking and not just recall.

I attempted to create a “serious” game for my mythology unit. One of the highlights of this school year was when I beta tested this text-based game I made about Joseph Campbell’s heroic cycle (Here is a link). Students that had not engaged in the texts, Gilgamesh and Star Wars, excitedly leapt from their chairs to make decisions about which characters to “speak to” and what objects to “pick up” for their inventory. I had assumed that the students would not be interested and offered it as an one day extra credit opportunity, I was surprised when they came back two days later asking if we were going to keep playing.

Fun is not a cure all. Those students asking to keep playing the game did not go home that night and login. They didn’t all of a sudden develop the chimeric love of learning we so desperately desire. Obviously teachers can’t be expected to be game designers or required to use websites like Kahoot. We can start to question the role that fun plays in our lessons and incorporate elements of the game design framework into our own plans. How can we structure our lessons so that students can gracefully fail? Can we effectively balance difficulty and win conditions? Can we incorporate other types of fun that cushion the blow of failure and encourage repetitive play? I don’t know all of the answers, but I am going to have fun trying.

Works Cite (Where I don’t use MLA or APA because it is fascist pitfall meant to check a box on a scoring guide.)

Heeter, Carrie & Chunhui, Kaitlan & , Chu & Maniar, Apar & Winn, Brian & Mishra, Punya & Egidio, Rhonda & Portwood-Stacer, Laura. (2004). Comparing 14 Plus 2 Forms of Fun in Commercial Versus Educational Space Exploration Digital Games. (Download the PDF here)

Matching Computer Game Genres to Educational Outcomes

MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek

The Design, Play, and Experience Framework Brian M. Winn

Mitgutsch, Konstantin & Alvarado, Narda. (2012). Purposeful by design?: A serious game design assessment framework. Foundations of Digital Games 2012, FDG 2012 - Conference Program. 12. 10.1145/2282338.2282364. (Download the PDF here)

Foundations of Game-Based Learning Jan L. Plass CREATE Lab New York University Bruce D. Homer Program in Educational Psychology The Graduate Center, City University of New York Charles K. Kinzer Department of Computing, Communication and Technology in Education Teachers College, Columbia University

Fourteen Types of Fun by Pierre-Alexandre Garneau [Design]

Rules for Axis and Allies

Rules for Candy Land

A Response

The following is a response to the comments and video found here:

http://www.garynorth.com/public/12032.cfm

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree."  -Thomas Jefferson

Moore’s  Law applies to information, and education is an informational enterprise which is why I have been calling using the term Classroom 2.0 for the past several years. I encourage the use of cell phones in the classroom. It is amazing that we have access to the world’s knowledge.  There is more processing capability in a cell phone than NASA used to get to the moon. (This last statement has been repeated to me so many times that I have accepted it as fact. I have not, and am not so inclined, looked this up.)

Textbooks (information delivery) are antiquated. Classrooms, while fun, are not necessary. Teachers (while some of them are antique) are a vital part of education.  Today, for example, a student made the claim that this has been the “coldest winter ever.” Much to his frustration, I took this as a teachable moment.  First we had to define terms. Were we only talking about St. Louis? If so was it only years that they have experienced or are we talking about all years that have reliable data? What do we mean by coldest? Is it the average high temperature for the days between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox? (This last one met with confused stares) Is it the greatest number of days below 10 degrees Fahrenheit? 

Once the parameters of our inquiry have been established, we must devise a plan to uncover the answers. A number of students immediately went to Google and were able to bring back information about today’s weather and some even found the record for the coldest day (-17), but no one found the answer to the question.

Sensing their frustration, I decided that even if they could not support their argument then they should be able to state it in a more interesting way. Most of the decided that they would just say, “It’s hella cold.”  After some more less than stellar suggestions such as “It is freezing cold” or “It is colder than the North Pole”, I finally stepped in with examples. (“It was so cold that I pissed icicles” or “It was so cold that a polar bear went outside and said ‘hell nah.’”)

Knowledge is amazing, but critical thinking is the goal. The inquiry process is ingesting new knowledge, analyze it, combining it with previous experience and knowledge, and through this synthesis creating something entirely unique. This process needs a guide or you may become lost in an interminable morass of websites selling tennis shoes.

The “granny method” is basically the same as the Socratic method.  Questioning or refuting a hypothesis in order to constantly improve it.  Again this requires a teacher. Whether  that teacher is in the classroom or on the computer is irrelevant. 

I used the quote from Jefferson at the top to point out that education is not intended to churn out automata for the bureaucratic machine. We are creating citizens eventually capable of self-governance, self-education, and self-actualization.  The coldest winter ever was in 2009/10 with an average high temperature of 30.5

Something for Nothing

Yesterday I was talking to my students about taking pride in their work. As we were going over a quiz some the students claimed that others had cheated off of them and received a higher score. From personal experience I know that strategic cheating can lead to just such an occurrence, but it is rare. In fact, I take a certain amount of pride in being able to game the system. It is my Kobyashi Moru. However, since I teach sweathogs my references to James Kirk settled into a holding pattern just above their heads and the conversation quickly devolved into students complaining about grades. Somehow we got to the point where students just wanted grades handed to them.

I have succeeded where Kirstie Alley has failed.

Two things we can learn from this picture. 1. All of my cultural touchstones are  at least 20 years old. 2. Gabe Kaplan could rock the stache. 

I facetiously agreed with them and asked each student what grade they wanted. Most of them of course chose an "A". One of the more criminally minded student asked for a "C" because it was more believable. Only one student gave the answer right when she said that she didn't want to play my game. The answer I really wanted to hear was, "I want the grade that I earned."

Since I did not get that answer, it was time to break out the sports analogies. One of the students played football so I asked if he would take credit for stats that were not his. He responded with a rambling amorphously mumbled, "maybe," that stunned me into silence. I couldn't believe that students are okay with, and even take pride in, numbers that don't truly represent them. They were equally stunned that I would not take advantage of false statistics.

In order to prove their point they hauled out the steamer-trunk of improbable hypotheticals and a boat-load of cliches. "If you think about it, it would be like if somebody just came up to you and handed you $1000, you know what I'm saying?"

I conceded that if the financial incentive was large enough I might understand some claiming numbers that aren't theirs, but no such financial incentive exists when it comes to high school grades. Perhaps if there was a scholarship on the line or you were 1/1000th of a  point behind the valedictorian, I could understand a little scheming.

You know when I was talking about scheming students, this was the picture you had in mind you racist.

Enough of my students were familiar with golf that I was able analogize the heck out this agrument. In golf you keep your own score, and unless there is a large financial reward at the end of the tournament, I could not think of a decent reason to alter my score. The modest increase in respect from my fellow players would be squashed by the amount of respect I lose for myself.

I hope that beer is worth it Tim.

So when politicians and society create high-stakes tests and try to motivate students with high paying J-O-Bs all it does is create a damp dark fecund environment for the fungus of fraud. If a society wants highly educated students, then we should stop incentivizing the masquerade, and if students want respect from teachers and employers, they have to respect themselves enough to not participate in these self-delusions of grandeur.

White Flight? Affluent Fluidity

Three districts in the state of Missouri failed to meet standards.  St. Louis Public, Riverview Gardens and now Kansas City have lost accreditation, and according to state law students from those districts can attend other schools. This morning on the radio a spokesman for the Missouri Education Reform Council stated that he favored open enrollment. After my initial throat scorching scream, I reconsidered and still thought it was a horrible idea.


The exact quote that set me off was this:


“I’d ask that you think of the plight of these students and parents that are kind of trapped by their zip code 
into these unaccredited or so-called failing schools, and hopefully a solution can be found for that," Knodell said.


Trapped? Such an obvious pathos move conjuring images of students peering at education through locked bars or snared in a net dangling just above a pile of textbooks. I thought, "This is a man that has less support for his ideas than my students do for their sagging pants."


Knodell is Joe Knodell. On Joe's linkedin page I learned that, well I learned absolutely nothing. Joe is a lobbyist with no prior jobs or interests.


I did learn a little about his rhetorical skill at the Columbia Business Times. Apparently he doesn't like to waste time with facts and figures. He merely states that unless you are an intellectually stunted recluse, then you already know them, and they must support his point of view. 


"I could list the statistics that show Missouri lags behind in student achievement and how the United States stacks up against other developed countries in math and science — but these facts have been in front of us and in the media for quite some time." Columbia Business Times


As a supporter of anecdotal evidence Joe would also like you to know that teachers are slackers.

"Joe Knodell, the state coordinator for the Missouri Education Reform Council, said he has seen teachers’ performance change after they earn tenure.

'They go into what I call ‘cruise control,’ where they won’t be the teacher they were for the first five years,' said Knodell, who is a former school superintendent."

Oh so now we know that he was a former superintendent, but I am even more concerned now with his rhetorical style.


When a pitcher is "cruising" we are happy. It means that he is being successful without struggle. Even cruise control in a car is designed to take over the mundane task of moving one's foot from the accelerator to the brake and back again, a task that though vital probably uses more computing cycles than necessary. If a teach has become so good at their job that the lower level tasks have become automatic then we should applaud those teachers. We have developed muscle memory. The repetitive tasks of our profession are now second nature.


Joe Knodell must be right, however, because he was a superintendent, and most superintendents I know spend a majority of their time observing all of the teachers in their district. I am sure he has extensive data to back up what appears to be a poorly fleshed out anecdote.


Joe lobbies on behalf of  Missouri Education Reform Council, which as far as I can tell is a blog. MERC doesn't even think they are that much. From their own "about" link we learn that, "The Missouri Education Roundatable Council’s mission is to promote improvement in Missouri’s K-12 educational system, including increasing performance, accountability and transparency." 


It's as if they took the mission statement formula and created that sentence.


[name of organization] + [linking verb and positive infinitive]+
[parallel structure of catch-phrases and jargon]=Our Mission


And they even got the name of the organization wrong. From the time of their creation to the time they wrote their mission the word "reform" changed to "roundtable."


From this same website we learn that Joe's curriculum vitae includes a litany of rural schools that come no closer to St. Louis, or any of the unaccredited schools, than Poplar Bluff.


Concerned educators, students and citizens will be happy to know that Joe bases his decisions "on what is best for the student, and what will further their educational goals." As a reformer this is a distinct break from the stated goal of most educators.  Perhaps that is the reason MERC recently changed to a roundtable instead of a reform.


I am going to ask for a seat at this table because just from a logic and logistical point of view I don't see how open enrollment would help anyone that isn't part of the entitled class. If we are in this for the students as Joe says then we should consider that some students won't have access to open enrollment because trap was designed by our whole society and its economic structure and not by a bunch of teachers on "cruise control." These students will be left behind in economically depressed districts with nearly empty classrooms and a disheartened and unappreciated staff.


White flight (affluent fluidity, in our post-racial era) is not reform. It is a return to the lunacy of the Topeka school board, racially motivated tracking, and classic classism.

Gen Y, Generation Next, The Net Generation

I am not a big fan of generalizing about an entire generation. It feels too much like racial or linguistic profiling which may have its uses for the FBI, CIA, and NSA, but is relatively useless when it comes to one on one relationships.

Of course I wouldn't be telling you that I hated it if I hadn't recently decided that there is something to it. I am a member of Generation X, the Dazed and Confused Slackers that stumbled around lost and convinced that Reality Bites. I never thought that any of this applied to me. It never did. I thought most of these people were whiny little babies.

So when it comes to generational generalizations I am often suspect, but I have recently met a couple of people that fit the stereotype. A pervasive sense of entitlement leads them to believe that they deserve trophies for just showing up.

I don't want to sound old, mainly because I am feeling it, but these young people today need to learn their place. In order to get your voice heard you need to earn the respect of those that you want to listen. However, they will walk into meetings with a belief that the system is broken and that anyone that has been there for a while is the cause.

This horribly myopic considering that all systems that have ever been devised by humans are broken from the outset. Systems, like writing, must be constantly revised. Rarely do they need to be dismantled and its leaders deposed.

I have been working on technology committees for different schools for the last 15 years. I have been pushing for the use of technology in the classroom. I have trained other teachers. I have pieced together labs out of discarded Macs and Pcs. So when a noob shows up to his first meeting and starts talking about all of the problems how can I not feel personally attacked.

If you want to get something done, the shut up and get to work, but whatever you do don't whine and don't expect a trophy.

Donors Choose Beggars Lose

Whenever I hear someone suggest that I, or any teacher, try using donorschoose.org this is the image that jumps into my mind. Why is donorschoose perfectly acceptable and standing on a street corner with a piece of cardboard proclaiming, "District Out of Money. Will Beg For Paper," would be considered shameful. It is demeaning and ridiculous.

But, since it appears to be necessary lets come up with a few tips that will make it more successful, some creative signage so to say.

1. Mention as many times as possible that your students want to succeed.

"Please help my girls succeed "

"they need to be successful in higher-level math courses"

"we are getting more excited about receiving contributions so that our students have the necessary tools for success"

"Your help will help our students "unlock" their potential to succeed in middle school."

Why do these quotes work? Because as is intuitively obvious to any one that has ever seen a teacher at work, we do not care about student success. Therefore it is imperative to emphasize that you are different from the majority of teachers that have decided to dedicate their lives to student failure.

As you may have guessed, American "free" education is actually a plot of the Illuminati meant to keep the masses ignorant at best.

2. Make sure to mention that your students are minorities. (Include a picture if possible)

Nothing makes moderately successful white people feel better than to help a minority. You get more money if you manage to perpetuate stereotypes. At the beginning of each paragraph you should remind potential donors that your students face drugs, gangs, hunger, gangs, drugs, abusive parents, gangs, and drugs. The next couple of sentence that appear in successive paragraphs manage to mention success and fulfill the white guilt quota.

"Students face gangs, drugs, hunger and many other issues on a daily basis. However, they choose to succeed."

"Urban students face many challenges: gangs, drug abuse, violence, poverty. Yet my athletes continue to succeed."

This way if you don't have permission to use photos of the students you have successfully create one in the mind of the donor.

Baby needs a new Glock!

3. Check you self respect at the door.

Seriously, find your self-respect, wherever you keep it, and just leave it like a pair of musty sneakers by the door of the Kick-Me-In-The-Nads Dojo.

It's not bad enough that those that can do and those that can't, teach. It's not bad enough that each night on the news we hear that the primary problem with American schools is the teacher. It's not bad enough that Michelle Rhee wants to fire every teacher in the nation's capital. It's not bad enough.

Put the teachers on the street with a bucket, and if they are lucky, and orange reflective vest and have them beg for school supplies. We could even have the students make our signs.

"A Pencil For My Thoughts"

"Paper, paper everywhere, but not a drop of ink"

"It was the best of time, nah who am I kidding?"

"Why Can't Johnny Read? He doesn't have any books."

With ample doses of pathos, guilt, and humiliation our nation's public schools will once again be competitive. I still feel like I am taking a goat away from an African village.

Fear over Free

I just read a sentence in the prologue of Free The Future Of A Radical Price by Chris Anderson that made me angry. Of course I'm not angry about things that are free. Hell this blog is free. I am angry about the same thing that always gets my dander up. (My dander has been down lately.) Education.

The sentence in question describes the web as "the greatest accumulation of human knowledge, experience, and expression the world has ever seen." I agree it is. And the wonderful thing about it is that so much of it is free. So riddle me this. Why would cash starved schools decide that they should not take full advantage of its wonders.

Answer, schools are afraid. Fear trumps free every time. Even in districts that are relatively lax in their internet policing fear of social networking, fear of predators, fear of cyberbullies, and a dash of ignorance leads to some of the most useful tools of the web being blocked from student access.

Sites such as Blogger, YouTube, Goodreads, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and about anything else that might lead to productivity have a various times been blocked in my district. For the most part we will let students access knowledge, unless of course it is a video, or happens to be on a Facebook page, or is a tweet, or a game.

That is the good news. The bad news is that they can not "experience" or "express" much. We are much to worried about getting sued and not about teaching.

Damn it Jim, I'm a teacher not a record keeper.

So I figured out why I don't like data driven decisions. Actually it is not the data, the driving, or the decisions that bother me. I hate the collecting and recording. Whenever you deal with data you have to get it first. If I was any good at this, then I would have been a researcher. I am good at teaching.

I enjoy baseball stats, but if I had to wade through the piles of data created every game, I would go insane. I let the statisticians and sabermatricians compile all of that for me. Then I make a decision about who should be on my fantasy team. If we are going to do this then districts should hire researchers and statisticians instead of conscripting TEACHERS to do it.

I was recently written up because I failed to record a reason for each and every D and F. I honestly believed that the ones that I left blank was because I didn't have adequate data to determine a cause. Perhaps if I had a research assistant I would have been better able to fulfill this duty.

Oh well!

Recent Study Finds Link Between Work and Success

At a press conference today educational researchers released the results of a decade long study looking at the link between turning in work and high GPA. The study took into account every variable and was able to isolate the effect of turning in work.

Lead researcher Dr. Obvious told reporters, "A lot of students thought we were crazy. They would point to the fact that the teacher hated them or that they were racist. We took that into account. And with the help of a relatively simple questionaire we were also able to determine if the teachers just made up the grades."

Students were pessimistic about the results and cautioned that the study only found a link and it has yet to establish causality. Mya Effingrade commented while stuffing stacks of unused spiral notebooks in her locker, "I mean you gotta be trippin'. Like for real, I think that those lames with good grades are just sucking up and turning in work. To me in my opinion I think that if I turned in work it wouldn't do no good."

Researchers hope that their findings will have an immediate impact in the classroom. They are optimistic that once students learn of this link they will exploit it.

One local district has already promised several days of professional development for their teachers so that they may more effectively get the word out.

Teaching and Baseball (Statistics)

In baseball there is an epic battle between new wave statisticians and old style "heart of the game" types. Of course by epic I mean a lot of guys are blogging about it. There are a core group of baseball researchers that believe that through the study of the immense amounts of data surrounding baseball that we can better predict and evaluate a player's performance. On the other side is a bunch of guys saying, "Nuh-uh."

I find myself siding with the stats mainly because the other guys always want to talk about grit and determination. They also refer to people as gamers. However, in the classroom I can't seem to get behind the data as firmly as I do on the diamond.

Data driven decisions in the classroom are a lot trickier, kind of like defensive statistics in baseball. It obviously works on things like attendance and graduation rates, but in other areas I feel that there are too many variables.

First of all we need to take into account park effect. Baseball stats are often adjusted for the players home park. For example pitching stats are often inflated in Colorado and the Green Monster obviously offers and advantage to right handed hitters in Fenway. I propose that when we get testing data that it should be adjusted to reflect the home effect and the school effect.

For instance if a student scores lower on a test but they come from a home with parents that just barely graduated high school then those scores should be adjusted to reflect that. By the same token a student that have their own little study oasis at home and private tutors to help them along should also have their test scores normalized as well.

Secondly, much of the data that we use is subjective and like the defensive statistic that I mention earlier, there really is a way to objectify them. Every teacher will grade differently no matter how many PD sessions we have. Every student will perform differently depending on how much sleep they got the night before and whether they ate oatmeal or Fruit Loops for breakfast. Furthermore we are often compare players from the low minors with All Stars. Hitting in the Carolina league is nothing like facing a Mariano Rivera in Yankee Stadium and a player that makes that jump will look foolish every time.

Finally, if we are going to use data to drive our decisions we should realize that a .200 hitter will never win a batting title and no amount of steroids will turn a pitcher with 3.4 K/9 into Nolan Ryan.

Each district should hire a statistician to analyze and compile the data just like every major league club relies on at least one come draft day.

Eliminate Rigor

The best definition of rigor I can find as it applies to education is "strict precision". I am trying to decide why of all of the words that we could have chosen to use as an adjective to describe the curriculum. Other denotations of the word rigor include harsh and inflexible, severity of life, a tremor caused by a chill, and a condition that makes life difficult. I am praying that when the buzzword committee of The Education Cabal were deliberating they were merely focusing on the strict precision definition.

Perhaps the English language is so limited in its lexicon that there just wasn't a word that sufficiently described what the committee was aiming for. Though this may be the case, I would still like to make a suggestion. Instead of academic rigor we should strive for academic (wait for it; wait for it).

Play

One possible definition is unimpeded scope or opportunity for action. Granted that is pushing the connotation of play, but hey if Merriam-Webster says it, then it must be true. I think however that we could all agree that when we hear the word play we definitely think of the "spontaneous activity of children." Why not work with this spontaneity and make children spontaneous learners.

Good teachers do this anyway, but because of NCLB and our ridiculous obsession corporate and global economies we are forced to talk about education with words that bring forth images of stiffening corpses.

So abolish rigor. Abolish work. Abolish the animated corpse that has a stranglehold on education. Abolish homework. Establish homeplay. Abolish worksheets. Establish playsheets. Establish playbooks. Establish group play.

When a child says that their favorite part of school is recess they should be referring to American Lit., Algebra II, Chemistry, and World History.

Documentary Document

I didn't write about the last break-out session yesterday so I will get to it now. I was impressed that a teacher was willing to present an assignment only one year after her first try. I have been doing my poetry CD for 6 years and still don't want to present. I don't know if that is because I don't feel prepared or if I am just lazy.

Anyway, I was impressed. Almost every question I had was answered in the course of the presentation and it definitely got me excited about possibly doing it in my classroom. That was until the presenter played some testimonials from the students. It was at this point that I realized that it just wasn't going to happen.

During the presentation she had mentioned that she had a class of 20 that showed up regularly. I thought to myself maybe these students are like mine. She made a joke about their attendance, and mine hardly ever show up. But when she played the videos and the students actually talked about how excited they were and all of the things that they learned I realized that they were nothing like my students.

I am currently working on the school's web page and newsletter and none of the students can meet deadlines and none of them remember how to write a story. They seem irritated when I give them the independence to write and are unwilling to brainstorm any story ideas.

I would love to make documentary films, but I don't want to set myself up for disappointment.

Rhee, hee, hee

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1862444-1,00.html?iid=perma_share

Okay I know that this is long, but this article irritated me so much that I had to do it. The following is an article from Time magazine. My comments are in red. If you want to read a comment free version go ahead and click on the link above.

In 11th grade, Allante Rhodes spent 50 minutes a day in a Microsoft Word class at Anacostia Senior High School in Washington. He was determined to go to college, and he figured that knowing Word was a prerequisite. But on a good day, only six of the school's 14 computers worked. He never knew which ones until he sat down and searched for a flicker of life on the screen. "It was like Russian roulette," says Rhodes, a tall young man with an older man's steady gaze. If he picked the wrong computer, the teacher would give him a handout. He would spend the rest of the period learning to use Microsoft Word with a pencil and paper.

The problem with this is that he is in the 11th grade learning Word.

One day last fall, tired of this absurdity, Rhodes e-mailed Michelle Rhee, the new, bold-talking chancellor running the District of Columbia Public Schools system. His teacher had given him the address, which was on the chancellor's home page. He was nervous when he hit SEND, but the words were reasonable. "Computers are slowly becoming something that we use every day," he wrote. "And learning how to use them is a major factor in our lives. So I'm just bringing this to your attention." He didn't expect to hear back. Rhee answered the same day. It was the beginning of an unusual relationship.

As far as I can understand it the relationship looks liked this. Rhee approaches student and says I need some good P.R.. Student says, "What's P.R.?"

The U.S. spends more per pupil on elementary and high school education than most developed nations. Yet it is behind most of them in the math and science abilities of its children. Young Americans today are less likely than their parents were to finish high school. This is an issue that is warping the nation's economy and security, and the causes are not as mysterious as they seem. The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research. And Washington, which spends more money per pupil than the vast majority of large districts, is the problem writ extreme, a laboratory that failure made. (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)

First of all in a global economy why are we still concerned about nationalistic pride. Secondly, why are we worried about a percentile ranking instead of meeting certain standards. Is it really so important to squash the young minds of India and China?

As for the incompetent teachers, it is a viscous cycle. Bad teachers make bad students that become bad teachers. Oh the insanity. Perhaps we should import teachers from Mumbai.

Rhee took over Anacostia High and the district's 143 other schools in June 2007, when Mayor Adrian Fenty named her chancellor. Her appointment stunned the city. Rhee, then 37, had no experience running a school, let alone a district with 46,000 students that ranks last in math among 11 urban school systems. When Fenty called her, she was running a nonprofit called the New Teacher Project, which helps schools recruit good teachers. Most problematic of all, Rhee is not from Washington. She is from Ohio, and she is Korean American in a majority-African-American city. "I was," she says now, "the worst pick on the face of the earth."
But Rhee came highly recommended by another prominent school reformer: Joel Klein, chancellor of New York City's schools. And Rhee was once a teacher--in a Baltimore elementary school with Teach for America--and the experience convinced her that good teachers could alter the lives of kids like Rhodes.

Lets be perfectly clear. She has no experience as an educator. Let me put that another way she has no idea what she is doing. TFA is an entitlement for the entitled. Created to make them feel good about surviving in the inner city for a couple of years. In fact not only do they get their graduate school paid for, but they can also list the experience on their sainthood applications.

Rhee has promised to make Washington the highest-performing urban school district in the nation, a prospect that, if realized, could transform the way schools across the country are run. She is attempting to do this through a relentless focus on finding--and rewarding--strong teachers, purging incompetent ones and weakening the tenure system that keeps bad teachers in the classroom. This fall, Rhee was asked to meet with both presidential campaigns to discuss school reform. In the last debate, each candidate tried to claim her as his own, with Barack Obama calling her a "wonderful new superintendent."

I knew I shouldn't have voted for him.

Each week, Rhee gets e-mails from superintendents in other cities. They understand that if she succeeds, Rhee could do something no one has done before: she could prove that low-income urban kids can catch up with kids in the suburbs. The radicalism of this idea cannot be overstated. Now, without proof that cities can revolutionize their worst schools, there is always a fine excuse. Superintendents, parents and teachers in urban school districts lament systemic problems they cannot control: poverty, hunger, violence and negligent parents. They bicker over small improvements such as class size and curriculum, like diplomats touring a refugee camp and talking about the need for nicer curtains. To the extent they intervene at all, politicians respond by either throwing more money at the problem (if they're on the left) or making it easier for some parents to send their kids to private schools (if they're on the right).
Meanwhile, millions of students left behind in confused classrooms spend another day learning nothing.

We don't need to revolutionize our schools. We need to revolutionize our country. For some reasson we think that unqualified individuals who talk like backwoods hicks can change the world by making the tough choices. I'm the decider.

A Teacher from Toledo
ONE DAY IN AUGUST, I SPENT THE MORNING with Rhee as she made surprise visits to Washington public schools. She emerged from her chauffeured black SUV with two BlackBerrys and a cell phone and began walking--fast--toward the front door of the first school. She wore a black pencil skirt, a delicate cream blouse and strappy high heels. When we got inside, she walked into the first classroom she could find and stood to the side, frowning like a specter. When a teacher stopped lecturing to greet her, she motioned for the teacher to continue. Rhee smiled only when students smiled at her first. Within two minutes, she had seen enough, and she stalked out to the next classroom.

I'm sure we all look back at the best teachers we had and remember how they "stalked" the hallways never smiling and "frowning like a specter." I always thought of my teachers as hags, but I guess specter will work.

In the hallway, she muttered about teachers who spend too much time cutting out elaborate bulletin-board decorations or chitchatting at "morning meetings" with their third-graders before the real work begins. "We're in Washington, D.C., in the nation's capital," she said later. "And yet the children of this city receive an education that every single citizen in this country should be embarrassed by." (See pictures of teens and how they would vote.)

I definitely prefer prison gray walls, windows with bars on them and a warden teacher that gets right to business. Maybe if we are good we can go out to the yard.

In the year and a half she's been on the job, Rhee has made more changes than most school leaders--even reform-minded ones--make in five years. She has shut 21 schools--15% of the city's total--and fired more than 100 workers from the district's famously bloated 900-person central bureaucracy. She has dismissed 270 teachers. And last spring she removed 36 principals, including the head of the elementary school her two daughters attend in an affluent northwest-D.C. neighborhood.

Change is good. Change is always good. If something is 15% different then logic demands that it is 15% better.

Rhee is convinced that the answer to the U.S.'s education catastrophe is talent, in the form of outstanding teachers and principals. She wants to make Washington teachers the highest paid in the country, and in exchange she wants to get rid of the weakest teachers. Where she and the teachers' union disagree most is on her ability to measure the quality of teachers. Like about half the states, Washington is now tracking whether students' test scores improve over time under a given teacher. Rhee wants to use that data to decide who gets paid more--and, in combination with classroom evaluation, who keeps the job. But many teachers do not trust her to do this fairly, and the union bristles at the idea of giving up tenure, the exceptional job security that teachers enjoy.

Tenure oh how I love thee. I know that is why I got into teaching to begin with. So let me get this straight. The reason schools suck is because teachers would not like to be fired unless there is just cause. We want to be protected from the whims of any random Korean-American that happens to become chancellor. What are we insane?

Rhee grew up in a nice neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio, a middle child, between two brothers. Her parents immigrated from South Korea several years before she was born so that her father could study medicine at the University of Michigan. He became a specialist in rehabilitation and pain medicine, and her mother owned a women's clothing store. Education was highly valued in the family, as was independence. After Rhee finished sixth grade, her parents sent her to South Korea to live with an aunt and attend a Korean school, a harrowing experience for a child in a strange land with limited skills in its language. When she returned a year later, her parents sent her to a private school because they found the public schools lacking.

After Rhee graduated from Cornell University in 1992, she joined Teach for America. She spent three years teaching at Harlem Park Elementary, one of the lowest-performing schools in Baltimore. Her parents visited and were stunned by the conditions of the neighborhood. "The area where the kids lived reminded me of a scene after the Korean War," says her father Shang Rhee.

Rhee suffered during that first year, and so did her students. She could not control the class. Her father remembers her returning home to visit and telling him she didn't want to go back. She had hives on her face from the stress.

Fire her. Fire her now. The kids are suffering. Damn it! Fire Her.

The second year, Rhee got better. She and another teacher started out with second-graders who were scoring in the bottom percentile on standardized tests. They held on to those kids for two years, and by the end of third grade, the majority were at or above grade level, she says. (Baltimore does not have good test data going back that far, a problem that plagues many districts, so this assertion cannot be checked. But Rhee's principal at the time has confirmed the claim.) The experience gave Rhee faith in the power of good teaching. Yet what happened afterward broke her heart. "What was most disappointing was to watch these kids go off into the fourth grade and just lose everything," Rhee says, "because they were in classrooms with teachers who weren't engaging them."

Did ya see that part in parenthesis. The part where it says that she has absolutely no data to back up these claims. I love parenthesis. You can say whatever lie you want as long as you subtly deny it in parenthesis.

Lets accept that she did do well. Do we get any detail on how she was so engaging. Was it the hives that got the kids attention?

The summer after her second year of teaching, Rhee met Kevin Huffman, a fellow Teach for America member. They married two years later and had two daughters, Starr and Olivia, now 9 and 6. They moved to Colorado to be closer to Rhee's parents, but the marriage faltered. Huffman and Rhee separated, agreeing to joint custody of the kids. And then Rhee got the offer to run Washington's schools. Huffman, now head of public affairs for Teach for America, had no illusions about the challenges Rhee would face. But when he heard about the job offer, he decided to follow her to D.C. "Even though moving didn't sound like a whole lot of fun," he says, "the reality is that I genuinely believed that she had the potential to be the best superintendent in the country. Most people think about their own longevity, about political considerations." He adds, "Very few people genuinely don't care about anything other than the end result for kids. Michelle will compromise with no one when it comes to making sure kids get what they deserve."

If she only cares about end results can we assume that she doesn't care about the kids?

Scorched Earth

Excellent name for a school reform program.

WHEN THEY ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON, Huffman and Rhee anted up. They enrolled Starr and Olivia in Oyster-Adams, a public elementary school. Although the school is considered among the best in the city, Rhee quickly concluded that it was inferior to the Colorado public school her daughters had been attending. Among other things, the homework was sporadic and unchallenging, she says. Rhee dismissed the principal before the school year was out, a move that sparked outrage across the city and in her own home. "That," she says, "was probably the decision I got the most grief about."

So the fact that the homework was not regular and challenging led her to this conclusion. Despite the fact that there is no evidence to support the efficacy of homework in elementary school. Of course she is probably looking at the same studies that schools are failing because of bad teachers.

Rhee is, as a rule, far nicer to students than to most adults. In many private encounters with officials, bureaucrats and even fundraisers--who have committed millions of dollars to help her reform the schools--she doesn't smile or nod or do any of the things (that human being do?)most people do to put others at ease. She reads her BlackBerry when people talk to her. I have seen her walk out of small meetings held for her benefit without a word of explanation. She says things most superintendents would not. "The thing that kills me about education is that it's so touchy-feely," she tells me one afternoon in her office. Then she raises her chin and does what I come to recognize as her standard imitation of people she doesn't respect. Sometimes she uses this voice to imitate teachers; other times, politicians or parents. Never students. "People say, 'Well, you know, test scores don't take into account creativity and the love of learning,'" she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. "I'm like, 'You know what? I don't give a crap.' Don't get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don't know how to read, I don't care how creative you are. You're not doing your job.

Ah finally her qualifications. She is a Grade A Bitch, rude, inconsiderate, and feels that it is perfectly acceptable to mock others. She would never mock students just teachers because you know we're stupid. We are not interested in learning. Apparently all adults stop being students once they graduate from high school. I don't give a "crap" about a "love of learning." I mean it stops at the school door, unless you have regular and challenging homework.

Oh by the way did you like my use of parenthesis? I think I will do it some more.

Rhee's ferocity has alienated many people--even those who (are human beings?) support her ideas and could be helpful to her. This summer the chair of the Washington city council called dealing with Rhee a "nightmare." There has been talk of passing legislation to rein her in. "Michelle Rhee believes in scorched earth," says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a national union that has become unusually involved in local matters in Washington. "I am not saying that D.C.'s school system doesn't need a lot of help. But I have been part of a lot of reforms, and the one thing I have never seen work is a hierarchical, top-down model."

Rhee is aware of the criticism, but she suggests that a certain ruthlessness is required. "Have I rubbed some people the wrong way? Definitely. If I changed my style, I might make people a little more comfortable," she says. "But I think there's real danger in acting in a way that makes adults feel better. Because where does that stop?"

Okay, enough of this bullshit. Does anyone really think that she doesn't talk to the kids like this. I mean, what is the difference. Does she magically transform into a sugarplum fairy when ever she encounters someone under the age of 18?

The Data
ON RHEE'S TOUR OF SCHOOLS DURING the first week of classes this year, a parent stopped her to praise her accomplishments so far. Rhee listened with a small smile while systematically cracking each of her knuckles with the thumb of the same hand. Then she got back into her SUV and began furiously e-mailing. When she calls her staff, she does not say hello; she just starts talking. She answered 95,000 e-mails last year, according to her office.

Qualification number two: Insanely fast typing.

She frequently sounds exasperated. "People come to me all the time and say, 'Why did you fire this person?'" she says. The whiny voice is back. "'She's a good person. She's a nice person.' I'm like, 'O.K., go tell her to work at the post office.' Just because you're a nice person and you mean well does not mean you have a right to a job in this district."

No where does it say you have to be nice and caring in order to be a good teacher. Whatever you do don't smile before Christmas. Don't smile at all if possible.

The data back up Rhee's obsession with teaching. If two average 8-year-olds are assigned to different teachers, one who is strong and one who is weak, the children's lives can diverge in just a few years, according to research pioneered by Eric Hanushek at Stanford. The child with the effective teacher, the kind who ranks among the top 15% of all teachers, will be scoring well above grade level on standardized tests by the time she is 11. The other child will be a year and a half below grade level--and by then it will take a teacher who works with the child after school and on weekends to undo the compounded damage. In other words, the child will probably never catch up.

So let me see if I got this study straight. If you give a student to an effective teacher as judge by test scores, then the student will get good test scores. Good got it. Makes perfect sense. An effective teacher can teach to a test.

The ability to improve test scores is clearly not the only sign of a good teacher. But it is a relatively objective measure in an industry with precious few. And in schools where kids are struggling to read and subtract, it is a prerequisite for getting anything else done. In their defense, Washington teachers and principals, like educators in many of the country's worst school districts, talk about trying to teach a seventh-grader who is eight months pregnant; about being assaulted by students; about holding meetings for parents, replete with free food, and no one showing up. Washington Teachers' Union leader George Parker worries that test-score data cannot take all this into account: "I don't think our teachers are afraid of demonstrating student growth, but you have to look at the dynamics of the children you're dealing with. If I'm teaching children who have computers at home, who have educated parents, those students can move a lot faster than kids whose parents can't read."

Typical whiny ass. Assume that I have raised by chin and am writing in a mock voice. The students are pregnant and don't have computers blah, blah, blah.

Rhee says she does not expect all kids to move up the charts at the same rate(the president does); the important thing is to demand that most do move up. "This is a cultural shift," says Kaya Henderson, Rhee's deputy. "For years, there were no data, and you were a good teacher because the parents or your principal told you so. And so this is a scary thing."

The most glaring example of the backward logic of schools is the way most teachers receive lifetime job security after one or two years of work. As Larry Rosenstock, CEO of eight California charter schools, noted at an education panel last spring, we don't give that kind of job security to pilots or doctors--or any others who hold our children's fate in their hands: "What is it that is so exceptional about teachers that they should have this unique right?"

Lets get this straight. Nobody has ever given teachers lifetime job security. Let me repeat that, Nobody has ever given teachers lifetime job security. Get it? Good.

Teachers got tenure rights in the early 20th century to protect them against meddling politicians and school-board members who treated their jobs as patronage pawns. But the rationale is plainly antiquated. Today dozens of federal and state laws protect teachers (and other people) from arbitrary firing. But most teachers still receive tenure almost automatically. In fact, even before they get tenure, they are rarely let go. (In fact most of them quit, like Ms. Rhee, before they have even taught the five years required to recieve tenure.)Schools spend millions of dollars evaluating teachers, but principals have little incentive to shake up their staffs, and so most teachers end up scoring near the top. "What I'm finding is that our principals are ridiculously--like ridiculously--conflict-averse," Rhee says. "They know someone is not so good, and they want to give him a 'Meets expectations' anyway because they don't want to deal with the person coming into the office and yelling and getting the parents riled up."

Right now, schools assess teachers before they teach--filtering for candidates who are certified, who have a master's degree, who have other pieces of paper that do not predict good teaching. And we pay them the same regardless of their effectiveness.

By comparison, if we wanted to have truly great teachers in our schools, we would assess them after their second year of teaching, when we could identify very strong and very weak performers, according to years of research. Great teachers are in total control. They have clear expectations and rules, and they are consistent with rewards and punishments. Most of all, they are in a hurry. They never feel that there is enough time in the day. They quiz kids on their multiplication tables while they walk to lunch. And they don't give up on their worst students, even when any normal person would.

Yeah, you can't give up on them until they are adults. And they should be regular with the rewards and punishments how else will be get the dogs to drool at the sound of a bell the students to learn.

Students know this instinctively. Acquirra Carter, 14, attends Washington's Cardozo High School, where, she complains, kids walk out of classes when they get bored and certain teachers talk on their cell phones when they are supposed to be teaching. But there are exceptions, and Carter knows them when she sees them. "Some teachers find a way. Mrs. Brown, they would not dare walk out of her class. She has total control. Mrs. Lawton, nobody leaves her class. This boy whispered, and she knew it!"

IN THE VIEW OF RHEE AND REFORMERS like her, the struggle to fix America's failing school system comes down to a simple question: How do you get the best teachers and principals to work in the worst schools? In her quest to figure this out, Rhee has already suffered a major setback. Earlier this year, she proposed a revolutionary new model to let teachers choose between two pay scales. They could make up to $130,000 in merit pay on the basis of their effectiveness--in exchange for giving up tenure for one year. Or they could keep tenure and accept a smaller raise. (Currently, the average teacher's salary in Washington is $65,902.) The proposal divided the city's teachers into raging, blogging factions. This fall, the union declined to put Rhee's proposal to a vote, and its relationship with her has become increasingly hostile.
In October, Rhee vowed to purge incompetent teachers through any means necessary.(You go Teacher X) She has brought on extra staff to help principals navigate the byzantine termination process and says an unprecedented number of teachers have already been put on notice. But she cannot give teachers the huge raises she proposed unless the union agrees to a new contract. So this approach will be slower, more litigious and less inspiring. In other words, it will be all stick and no carrot. It's hard to say if anyone else would have been able to persuade the union to trade away tenure for cash bonuses, but Rhee's sometimes dismissive attitude made it harder for some teachers to trust her.

I assume the extra money for salaries grows on the freaking genius tree she fell out of.

For now, Mayor Fenty says he still has full confidence in Rhee, and he claims that Washington residents share his enthusiasm. "Regular people love the fact that for once someone is making tough decisions for D.C. schools," says Fenty, who attended the district's public schools. But the disconnect between Rhee's confident, sweeping rhetoric and the tortured reality is sizable, and it is most apparent at ground level, in the schools she is trying to save.

Again regular people and tough decisions to hallmarks of every great age of humankind.

Rhee likes to tell the story of how Rhodes got in touch with her. She recounted it on TV on The Charlie Rose Show in July: "A student sent me this e-mail and said, basically, If you really want to know what's wrong with our schools, you should come and talk to the kids because I'm afraid that by talking to the adults, you might not be getting the real story."

Just like I got the real story about who was smoking marjuana in the mens room last week.

Rhodes has a more nuanced version of the story. After their initial meeting, they met for a second time at Anacostia High, in a room off the library. Rhodes had invited eight fellow students, and they gave Rhee their typed agenda. They talked about the need for better teachers, as Rhee emphasizes when she tells the story. But Rhodes says he also told her about the holes in the floors, the lack of supplies and the fact that most classes did not have enough books for the students to take home. Rhee listened but did not offer many specific solutions. "She was vague," Rhodes says. "I got the sense she didn't want to make promises she couldn't keep."

Then one day last May, Rhee dismissed Anacostia's principal. Rhodes was devastated. He sent Rhee a furious e-mail. "My principal is a mother, mentor and a teacher to us all," he wrote. "I refuse, NO! we refuse the students of Anacostia to let her go." Rhee wrote him back. "She told me not to worry about it," Rhodes says quietly.

No worries.

One of the things that make school reform so wrenching and slow is that schools become embedded in people's hearts.(Like a stake in a vampire) This is true in rich neighborhoods and poor ones, with good schools and bad. Rhodes talks about his school as if it were an extension of himself. He talks about "my teachers" and "my staff," and he refers to other students as "my colleagues." "I love Anacostia High School," he says. At the same time, he is dismayed by his school. He walks through his halls, pointing out the litter on the floor and the broken lockers. Rhodes is 6 ft. 8 in. (2 m) tall, so he has to look down to talk to almost everyone. He wears white tube socks under his black Nike flip-flops and carries his large frame deliberately, like a gentle overseer. "You see all these lockers? None of them work," he says. "This classroom over here is supposed to be for home economics, but it's never been fixed up."

But if they can't read I don't care if their lockers work. I don't care if they can cook, sew, or balance a check book. Those little Chinese kids are good a math, and we are falling behind.

Plus as research has shown if lockers are broken, and bathrooms are filthy, and textbooks are missing it is because of failing teachers.

Rhodes did not contact Rhee again. This year Anacostia has a new principal, and Rhodes admits that the school is functioning better. "All the children are wearing their uniforms," he says. "No kids are in the hallways." If you come to school without your uniform on, a security guard or an assistant principal will "snatch you up and just send you home." All the computers in his Microsoft Word classroom now work.

But on Nov. 19, Rhodes had to evacuate his school when fights broke out in the hallways and three students were stabbed. And he still doesn't use the school bathrooms, which are filthy and sometimes unsafe. He waits until he returns to his grandmother's house, where he lives.
Now that he is a senior, Rhodes spends much of his time worrying about getting into college. As we stand on the front steps of the school one autumn evening after class, I ask him what he wants to study. He answers quickly: "Public administration, with a minor in English." I ask him how he can be so sure. "Because someone told me that's what I have to do to take Chancellor Rhee's job," he says matter-of-factly, watching his drum corps practice and his baton twirlers twirl in the twilight.