With this essay, Ellie Herman concludes her year in the classroom — and sharing her observations and insights with LA School Report.

This year, I had the remarkable experience of taking the academic year off to visit high schools across the socioeconomic spectrum in L.A. in an attempt to understand better what we mean when we talk about education.

As the school year ends, here are the five biggest things I’ve learned:

1. A great teacher serves the needs of the community—not some pre-packed top-down agenda.

It’s axiomatic these days that “all effective instruction looks alike.” That may be true. But so-called “effective” teaching, or teaching whose primary intent is to produce test score growth, does not necessarily meet the needs of all students. The great teachers I’ve seen first listen to the students in front of them and then try to meet those needs, often in a variety of ways and in different styles. Some teachers are wildly entertaining and charismatic; others rely on clear, consistent routines. Some teach from the traditional canon; others teach from high-interest pieces. What all of these teachers have in common, though, is a deep understanding of the needs of the students in front of them and a willingness to balance high standards with the reality of meeting those needs.

2. Teaching in a high-poverty community is a far more complex and difficult job than teaching in a more affluent community—and should be at a higher pay scale.

I’m not saying that teaching is ever easy. But teachers in affluent or middle-class communities are primarily dealing with students’ academic needs. In high-poverty communities, first of all, students are often coming in with skills so far below grade level that the standards-based reading expected of them is inaccessible. To get students closer to grade level, teachers need to learn a variety of reading intervention tactics, along with strategies for working with English learners. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Students often have multiple symptoms of trauma related to poverty including hunger, chaotic living situations, abuse and violence. Teachers in high-poverty communities need to become experts in dealing with all of these issues. Their pay should reflect the higher complexity of their job.

3. If we’re serious about retaining quality teachers in high-poverty communities, we need to give those teachers sustainable working conditions.

Over and over, I hear the same thing from teachers who work in underserved communities: they love their jobs but they don’t know how long they can keep going. Yes, teachers need to be paid more. But nobody has told me they’re leaving because of the pay. A former colleague who’s leaving the classroom to go to medical school told me that he’d love to stay in teaching, but he can’t take the workload. If we want to retain great teachers in high-poverty communities, we need to treat them like the experts they are and offer them conditions that allow them to do their jobs well. We need to give them time to read student writing, learn new strategies and collaborate. Otherwise, the most dedicated people will continue to burn out and leave.

4. You can’t have a great school without a great principal.

Whenever I see a great school, whether in the wealthiest community or the poorest, it always includes a principal with a strong, clear vision and a plan for how to execute that vision. Great teachers won’t stay long at a school without good leadership; they’ll find a place where their work is valued and their contributions make sense. I have no idea why we as a society are so obsessed with evaluating teachers when we do not have an equal obsession with evaluating principals. Instead, incompetent administrators seem to be moved around like chess pieces.

5. Love may not be the answer, but it’s a really good place to start.

Every great teacher I’ve followed, from the strictest to the most touchy-feely, cares deeply, palpably, about every student. This caring doesn’t necessarily mean they’re hugging their students or declaring that they love them—although some do. Others give a continual stream of positive individual support, looking for opportunities to celebrate even the smallest successes. There are no miracle cures for the problems of education. Even in the most caring classroom, some students will continue to fail. But this most unmeasurable of qualities, love, is at the heart of any room I’ve seen where people are genuinely learning together.

More than anything, the word I’ve heard consistently from excellent teachers or excellent schools is “conversation.” Education is not a destination. It is a process, one we hope our students will continue all their lives. To all the teachers and students who have let me listen in on your conversations this year, thank you for all that you’ve taught me. I’ve had the best teachers anyone could ever want.

Ellie Herman is a guest commentator. Read more of her thoughts at Gatsby in LA.

By Larry Sand

Why aren’t we listening? Well, in fact we are. There are organizations whose members include current and former teachers. Teach Plus, Educators 4 Excellence and StudentsFirst take positions on education policy issues, exchange ideas with the likes of LAUSD honcho John Deasy and pile into Sacramento attempting to affect legislation.

Are they as effective as they should be? No. But blaming the likes of Eli Broad, Bill Gates and Wendy Kopp who have “little or no experience in the field” is way off target.

The real villains are much closer to home: the sclerotic, union-dominated state education code, school boards which are, all too often in the unions’ thrall, and strangulating industrial-style union contracts. Hence, there is realistically only so much that can be accomplished by straight-jacketed teachers in California and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, Ms. Herman indulges in shibboleths to make her case. For example, she bangs on the small class-size drum, taking Stanford’s Eric Hanushek to the woodshed because he “never spent even a single day facing down a classroom of squirmy, perspiring, cranky, hormonal children.”

As one who spent most of a 28 year teaching career in a middle school facing down squirmy, perspiring, cranky, hormonal children, I will tell you that Hanushek is right. A teacher’s job may be a bit easier with fewer kids – not as many papers to grade and parents to meet with – but typically, whether it was a class of 20 or 30, it really didn’t affect my teaching or my students’ success one bit. As Hanushek rightfully asserts, class size has no bearing – in aggregate – on student achievement.

Ms. Herman is also off the mark when she claims there is “no incentive for receiving an advanced degree in your field.” Fact is, teachers do get paid more for taking professional development classes and for attaining advanced degrees. Moreover, teachers get yearly raises simply for showing up in the fall. But due to most union contracts, that’s the only way for teachers to make more money. Unlike other professions, the quality of their work has no bearing on their pay.

And yes, there is a “career path” for teachers. Committed educators can become administrators. That having been said, I do think that it would be better to pay good and great teachers a lot more than the mediocre ones and keep them in the classroom. But again, for the unions – not Bill Gates – compensating excellence is a non-starter.

The union-tainted state education code victimizes good teachers in other ways. Due to tenure, the inability to fire the bad actors has an effect not only on kids but on teachers too. When I taught middle school, if a student had an incompetent teacher in the class before mine, I had to expend a good deal of time and energy just getting the kid into learning mode. Seniority, another union favorite, is also having a devastating effect on the profession. Few college students are going into the field now because they know that if layoffs come, no matter how much better they may be than the teacher in the next room, they will be out of work. So why bother.

Perhaps the greatest irony in Ms. Herman’s piece is that she is an outsider proposing policy recommendations at the same time as she is criticizing outsiders for proposing policy recommendations. As a former “insider,” I recognize that in a perfect world, the problems in education should be solved by educators. But given the power of the teachers unions, it ain’t gonna happen. As such, outsiders should be embraced, not damned.

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.

Wait—no. I’m going to be Surgeon General. Sure, I’m not a doctor, but I’ve seen a million of them! You should have seen the pair of “specialists” who nearly killed my grandma. It’s time for me to roll up my sleeves and set some standards. Patients first, dammit!

No, you know what? I think I’m going to be a Rear Admiral in the Navy. I grew up right near Lake Michigan, a large body of water, and with my business experience . . .

Okay, all of these ideas are preposterous. Common sense and business savvy are no substitute for a lifetime of training and expertise. What’s crazy, though, is that in education, the opposite view prevails. I cannot think of another profession in which major policies are set by people with little or no experience in the field.

Look at who’s driving education policy these days: Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Wendy Kopp. None of them has ever been a teacher. Three years ago, I participated in a roundtable discussion led by one of the U.S. Department of Education’s Deputy Secretaries. His years in the classroom? Same as everybody else high up in the DOE: zero. He had an extensive background in . . . improv theater. That was gonna be your next guess, right?

The Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, who is continually testifying that he has evidence that it doesn’t matter how many children you pack into a classroom because an “effective” teacher will just keep raising test scores, has never spent even a single day facing down a classroom of squirmy, perspiring, cranky, hormonal children.

The Broad Residency, which places people with business backgrounds in administrative positions at urban schools and state departments of education, does not require any classroom experience. In our era of rampant teacher layoffs, TFA’s entire raison d’etre is based on the belief that an energetic person of no experience from an elite university is better than an experienced teacher who, implicitly, is regarded as burned out and, well, less elite.

And, in case you’ve been under a rock for the last two years, the Common Core standards were developed by a consortium of 60 people that included only one teacher.

Why do teachers have so little voice in our profession? I suspect it’s a relic from pre-feminist days when teachers were young women who took low pay and unprofessional working conditions that most men with post-college degrees would find unacceptable.

The image of teachers is still suffused with a sexist disdain that regards working with children as inherently demeaning. To this day, a surprising amount of a teacher’s labor is menial: photocopying, creating filing systems, mechanical low-level grading, picking up students’ garbage, moving furniture and an absolutely mind-numbing assortment of mechanical procedures that, depending on where you work, may dictate everything from how your students enter your room to how and where you write on your whiteboard.

There is no career path. There is no incentive for receiving an advanced degree in your field. Because of the overwhelming class load, there is no time in the work day for study, reflection or collaboration with colleagues on anything other than how to handle the fallout from the most recent state-mandated change in standards.

Teachers are not victims here. We need to start demanding professional working conditions, professional pay and power in policy decisions. The real work of teaching is creative, challenging and rewarding. It is enormously complex, as complex as every student in the classroom, and teachers need to demand the respect we deserve for mastering this work.

But as a country, we need to treat teachers as people whose experience we trust and whose wisdom we seek. Real education reform starts with valuing teachers. If we want to improve the quality of our nation’s teaching, let’s listen to the seasoned experts who are actually in practice.

Ellie Herman is a guest commentator. Read more of her thoughts at Gatsby in LA.

That the test will be a disaster.

Here’s the thing: I haven’t talked to anybody—anybody!—who objects to the actual Common Cores Standards. The Standards are incredibly vague; basically, they value the processes of analytical reasoning, reading, writing, speaking and listening. In other words, the Standards are like the education version of Peace, Love and Understanding. Who could possibly object?

The problem is that we are about to test the standards—and people do not like the tests. The teachers on the East Coast who are protesting, the children fleeing classrooms in tears, the parents forming an “Opt Out” movement are not a bunch of ideological clowns. They are angry because this new Common Core test, which has been implemented sight unseen by almost any teacher or principal, may have enormous power over their future without any serious public discussion. What are these tests, exactly? Do they even measure the standards?

Here in California, where the launch has been much slower, teachers across Los Angeles are administering a field test version of the Common Core test this month. There are two versions being rolled out nationally — here, it’s the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium test.

This morning, I took the online practice test for 11th grade English. Here’s a breakdown of what it is, what it isn’t and whether it measures the standards:

First, it’s not only multiple choice but it does have some multiple-choice elements. As on the California State Tests or the Verbal SAT, students are required to read short passages and answer multiple-choice comprehension questions. The content tends to be grounded in practical real-world concerns: whether a city should fund public art, whether teenagers should have a curfew, whether water should be fluoridated.

Sometimes students can pick more than one correct answer. The emphasis is on identifying the author’s main argument and analyzing the text for evidence supporting the argument, picking out sentences that support the main thesis and eliminating those that are irrelevant. Will this help our students read more deeply? Maybe—as long as it doesn’t become a mechanical search for related elements, without the deep intuitive thinking that makes ideas coherent.

Second, the test has some short answers and some longer written responses. In some places students have to construct short answers, which they type into boxes. In other sections, they have to write a persuasive letter or a short opinion piece based on an analysis of one or two texts. Though this option would seem to be much better than multiple choice questions, the effect may be similar depending on how these answers, letters and essays are graded.

Are students being graded on grammar? Spelling? Complexity of sentence construction? Correctness of the response? Are these responses being graded by a computer or a human being? If they’re being graded by a computer, what kind of sentences is the computer programmed to find acceptable? I’ve read that computer-graded essays (yes, in some places essays are being graded by computer) give higher scores for longer words regardless of context. Will teachers be pressured to coach their students to fill their essays with preposterous words?

Most likely, the essays will be graded by moonlighting teachers using a rubric, or chart, of the desired qualities. Is this a good thing? I don’t know—how good is the teacher? And how is this test actually any better than the SAT writing test that was just thrown out because, according to the College Board, it was “not predictive” of student success? How is it better than the California State Exit Exam writing test taken by all students for graduation? Or the EAP writing test they all take for college placement? Our students already take writing tests up the wazoo. Nobody seems to think it has helped them write, and a lot of teachers (including me) think it has made their writing worse.

The problem with standardized tests is just that– they’re standardized. In other words, preparing for them tends to produce formulaic writing, reading and thinking, the very writing, reading and thinking that caused us to despair that our students couldn’t write or think, and made us adopt the Common Core in the first place. These new tests definitely rely more on the seeking of evidence and the analysis of arguments. Studying for them will, at the lowest level, probably inculcate the mechanical production of those skills, which is better than not having them at all.

So if I say I’m underwhelmed, I hope I’m not being a clown. Yes, the practice test embodies some aspects of a reductive form of analytic thinking, in that Flatland two-dimensional sense that seems to dominate so much of educational thinking these days. But does it really measure what we want our students to learn? Take the online practice test yourself. What do you think?

Maybe the best test of Common Core skills will be our ability to have a civilized public discussion of how they measure up to our ideals of what an education should be.

Ellie Herman is a guest commentator. Read more of her thoughts at Gatsby in LA.

As a teacher who worked in a high-poverty high school and is now spending a year observing classrooms across the socioeconomic spectrum in L.A., here’s how that funding could help:

Giving teachers time to plan multi-level lessons for each class.

One of the biggest differences I’ve seen between classrooms in affluent communities and in high-poverty communities is the range of skill levels. In affluent communities, students generally read at or near grade level and have a history of positive or neutral experience with school, as well as at least one parent at home always available for help.

In high-poverty communities, in any given class, you’ll probably have a handful of kids who fit that description and who need and deserve all the challenge and stimulation of a fast-paced class to compete for spaces at top colleges alongside more affluent students.

But right next to them, you’ll have kids who are still learning English.  Those kids need “scaffolded” lessons with shortened readings; they also need writing assignments with fill-in-the-blanks support so that they can learn academic phrasing.

Right next to them, you’ll have kids with serious behavior issues, sometimes from growing up in multiple foster homes.  All over the classroom you’ll have kids who, in the absence of libraries, bookstores or books at home, have never read a book. And you’ll have several empty seats because of the kids who, despite your pleas and phone calls home, are truant for large chunks of time.

I once had a 12th grade student who read “The Golden Compass” as part of an in-class reading program and told me it was the first book he’d ever read.

Lowering class size and reducing teachers’ class load would help enormously in allowing teachers time to plan multi-level lessons. It would also give us time to read our students’ work with care and give prompt, thoughtful feedback, something we all know is essential for writing growth but which you never have time to do if you’re planning every moment of every lesson at multiple levels — and you have to, or students will get bored, check out and act out.

Giving in-class support to kids who are way ahead or behind.

Most of the canonical texts on any syllabus will be incomprehensible to English learners and other high-needs students unless a teacher slows down to define words in nearly every sentence, then checks to make sure everyone in the room understands what’s going on, an essential practice that will bore the gifted students out of their minds.

Having a classroom aide who can pull out small groups and run enrichment lessons for struggling or highly proficient kids would be a godsend.

Giving extracurricular support to struggling students.

In-class support will help, but the truth is, when students come in several years below grade level, the time they actually spend in class is nowhere near enough to get up to speed. When kids read at, say, fifth grade level, it doesn’t just affect their understanding of a text, it affects the speed at which the whole class reads that text, which in turn affects how much everybody learns.

Kids in poverty, certainly kids in foster care, often do not have a place at home to read and many times live in chaotic, stressful situations; for many English learners, the text has too much unfamiliar vocabulary to access independently.

If kids way below grade level are going to get up to speed, they need to be making up for lost time by reading after school and in the summer, too. Funding for reading intervention programs outside the school day would help bump boost literacy while still allowing teachers to support kids in class with close reading.

Giving support to kids with behavior issues.

Children in high-poverty communities, especially kids who live in foster care, are often suffering from trauma that can cause them to act out in class. This acting-out inevitably has a ripple effect on everyone else in the class, intimidating or demoralizing other students. If I can’t persuade that student to calm down, I need someone who can help, such as a classroom aide who can take the kid out for a walk or a counselor who can dig deeper.

I’m hearing very positive reports about Restorative Justice circles, groups working to help kids heal from trauma and handle their issues constructively. Frankly, as a teacher, I’d love to get that Restorative Justice training myself, which currently costs $500; if that’s not possible, I’d love to see at least a couple of people on every campus trained to administer these circles and train staff in understanding the practice so we can better collaborate to help our most at-risk students.

In other words, what this money might give is the gift of time—time for students to work closely with a trusted adult and for those adults to collaborate to better serve their students. We have a generation of students in poverty who have grown up in an era of funding cuts, overcrowded classrooms and testing gone wild. We need time to rebuild, time to learn, time to get to know families and communities. We need time to listen.

That’s not shiny and fun like a gadget. But it may be the most valuable commodity of all for the money.

Ellie Herman is a guest commentator. Read more of her thoughts at Gatsby in LA.

The leader is unequivocal: the vision will be executed. His team shrugs, then proceeds in accordance with the original plans. There will be no compromise on the dream.

Moments later, the tower of wooden blocks teeters, then comes crashing down on their heads. “I told you so,” yells one girl accusingly. But there’s no time for argument; they need to start over. They decide what went wrong and begin again, more carefully this time. It’s clear that the base needs to be broader and the blocks need to be stacked more carefully, with less airspace in between.

It’s 9 am in the Woodpecker Room at the Harry Pregerson Day Care Center and these three year olds are hard at work. In the last five minutes, they’ve learned about gravity and balance, set a goal, collaborated, discussed expectations, learned from failure and demonstrated persistence.

Throughout, their teacher asks them gentle questions, coaching them to analyze the situation and understand what might have gone wrong. Are they sure they need to build their structure on top of a wagon? If it didn’t have to roll across the room, wouldn’t that make the project easier? Or is motion important for their vision? Are everyone’s ideas being heard?

I’m sitting in a corner, blown away by the amount of learning that’s going on here every minute. It’s been a long time since I’ve spent time with a group of toddlers, and I’ve forgotten how eagerly and relentlessly they learn. Every waking moment, these toddlers are negotiating with each other and with themselves as they come to find words for their emotions and learn to control their bodies.

Preschool is on everyone’s minds these days as California contemplates a new bill that would add Pre-K to the public school system, something that, if fully implemented, would cost $200 million in the first year and possibly $1.46 billion over five years. Naysayers object to the cost and voice concerns about quality. Governor Brown has not expressed support for the bill.

I hear the objections. And I think the naysayers are dead wrong. The fact that a good idea might not be implemented well is a preposterous reason not to try it; the argument could be made about absolutely anything, including school in general or, for that matter, democracy. Certainly that same argument could be made about standardized testing — which is currently being implemented disastrously, has shown few positive effects for over a decade, is not used by any other nations with successful educational systems and will cost us more in the next two years than this Pre-K measure might cost even at its most expensive.

Studies have proven the benefits of preschool over and over, especially for children from low-income families, who by the time they are four, have experienced 30 million fewer words than more affluent children and are far more likely to have heard words of discouragement than praise.

A major longitudinal study from the University of Chicago shows that children from low-income communities who attended preschool were four times as likely to graduate from college as their peers who did not attend preschool. They were also significantly healthier, less likely to start drinking before age 17 and less at risk for hypertension, stroke or diabetes.

And yet California has slashed HeadStart more radically than any other state in the nation. In 2011-12, we cut state preschool and child care programs by 15 percent. Recent statistics show that over 70 percent of California 3-to-5 year olds do not attend preschool for at least 10 hours a week.

Having taught for years in a very low-income community, I was struck as I watched these three-year-olds by the overt learning of socio-emotional skills that some of my high school students had not mastered: self-control, confidence, persistence, empathy, planning, communication, self-awareness, behavior management and ability to trust a teacher. Children in preschool learn every day that the classroom can be a safe and caring place in which to take creative risks, fail, try again and grow. These skills are foundational; it’s absolutely useless to talk about holding students to high academic standards without them.

More than anything, preschoolers learn the habit of finding language to match their experience. “Use your words,” the teacher urges them over and over, and they try, though it’s not always easy. But isn’t that the essence of what it means to be human? Isn’t that really what education is, a way of learning to name the world in all its dazzling complexity, and in doing so, to find our own place in it?

Watching these three year olds learning so exuberantly, adjusting their understanding of the world every minute, I sit here and wonder—how in the world could we decide that all children should not have this kind of education at this critical point in their lives?

Ellie Herman is a guest commentator. Read more of her thoughts at Gatsby in LA.

Photo: Take Part

California has just suspended the calculation of API scores until 2016—and that’s cause for celebration by those of us who believe in meaningful accountability. I know, many people are freaking out because they believe this suspension of scores will leave schools in low-income communities free to go down the toilet for two full years while corrupt administrators and bad teachers merrily cash paychecks, accountable to no one.

Here’s why I think that logic is wrong—and why I believe this temporary suspension is a great opportunity to create a better system.

First of all, over a decade of API scores doesn’t seem to have done much to stop corrupt administrators and bad teachers. Schools that were terrible before we started testing are still terrible. Where schools were declared failing and taken over by the Partnership for L.A. Schools or other charter management systems, results have been underwhelming no matter who is in charge.

I have heard not a single story of a miracle takeover, but have heard many stories of schools that are as bad as before. In any case, test scores are not the best measure of whether these takeovers have been successful; the first measure is safety, followed by attendance and student attrition rates. Very high teacher turnover rates or large numbers of long-term subs are also serious red flags. We don’t need test scores to measure dysfunction. I wish it were that hard.

Test-driven education may have significant negative consequences for students even in success. Schools in underserved communities with impressive test scores often need to use extremely authoritarian, compliance-driven educational models to produce those scores.

“Our students love to sit and bubble in answers,” a teacher once said to me approvingly as she watched her class dutifully bend to a practice test. But this eagerness to please adults and get the “right” answer may have unintentionally been rendering our students less competent in college and in their future careers, where there are no boxes to check, no directions and no clear right answer. “My students can’t think” is a continual refrain among my teacher friends who bemoan days and weeks lost to tests and test prep.

Test-driven education helps create a two-tiered, unequal education system. As I visit schools across Los Angeles, I’m struck by the fact that schools in more affluent communities are far less driven by test prep—students often come in already at a fairly high level for a variety of reasons: parents with more education, less stressful home conditions, preschool that began when they were toddlers and a lifetime of access to summer school, arts enrichment and individual help as needed. These students will often test relatively high no matter what the teacher is doing. In fact, in affluent communities it seems to be a point of pride among teachers to have no interest in state testing because it would impede their ability to create rich, meaningful curriculum.

Teachers in underserved communities do not have this luxury; their school’s survival depends on producing high test scores, turning schools in low-income communities into high-test-score-production factories. Charter schools are often bashed for their obsession with test scores, but in fact, our test-score-driven system has left them no choice.

API scores are not the only form of accountability. What percentage of that school’s graduates attend college? A solid indicator of school rigor is the number of students enrolled in courses required for UC/CSU admission—if that number is not close to 100 percent, that school is not serious about preparing all students for college. Any of these measures can be ascertained with a phone call from a concerned parent.

In addition, students already take a boatload of tests. I’m perplexed when people argue for the CST’s because “an imperfect test is better than no test.” We have plenty of imperfect tests on deck already: the CAHSEE, the EAP writing and math tests for college placement and of course, the SAT, which is free for students from low-income families. Any of these could be a rough, imperfect measure if you crave the sight of digits.

Finally, Common Core is a radical shift in education. Observing teachers in classrooms across the city, I’ve seen some exciting changes happening. I’m seeing richer discussions and logical, evidence-based answers when students are asked to synthesize multiple texts and justify their own interpretations. Teachers are free to experiment, learn and collaborate in a way they would not if their schools were forced to demonstrate high scores on old tests that are focused on bubbling in the right answer.

Right now, Common Core tests are not ready for prime time—and schools are not ready to take them. Take a practice test online and see for yourself; there’s some promise in the idea of reading and synthesizing texts, but they still seem similar to the just-scrapped Writing SAT, and they’re nowhere close to being “adaptive” or set to a student’s individual level. These tests are designed to measure, among other things, a student’s fluidity with online research, but right now only about a quarter of LAUSD schools have the bandwidth to administer the test, much less teach students the internet skills they’re being asked to demonstrate.

So let’s all breathe and use common sense. Whether we wanted to or not, we’re now participating in a nationwide experiment in education. We know the old system didn’t work. Let’s stop clinging to it. If we’re going to give Common Core a shot, let’s give teachers and schools a chance to build something that will really work. And if you’re really concerned about your child’s school, ask her what she thinks of her teachers. If she complains that they push her too hard and there’s too much reading and writing, chances are, she’s at a pretty good school.

Ellie Herman is a guest commentator. Read more of her thoughts at Gatsby in LA.

It’s called “Principal for a Day.” I know, back when you were five, it used to sound so fun to follow the principal around, issuing commands—Extra recess for everyone! Free donuts in the cafeteria!—but thanks to years of budget cuts, the game is no longer any fun, unless you really love crying over a pile of spreadsheets.

After the passage of Prop 30, though, some people are saying the game might regain its original luster. With the Local Control Funding Formula channeling fresh funds into the district budget, maybe we won’t have to stock up on Kleenex as we plan how to keep our doors open next year.

So let’s pretend we’re the principal of All-American High, an imaginary but typical school of about 550 students—a “small learning community” formed by dividing up a large public high school in south Los Angeles. Let’s say 95 percent of our students qualify for free and reduced lunch, 65 percent are English Language Learners, 15 percent are in Special Ed and 10 percent are in foster care. The school is in a high-crime area with significant gang activity. Many of our families are seeing food stamps cut this year, which means kids sometimes come to school hungry.

Whew! It’s exhausting being a principal. But now comes the fun part.

We’re going to get a significant influx of money for 2014-15—we hear a different report every week, ranging from about $500 more per student to about $1,500. Under LCFF, we’ll be getting additional funds because we’re a high-poverty community. What this means in terms of actual money we can use is still unclear, a moving target nobody seems to fully understand.

What it sounds like is that we may be able to hire three to five people to replace some of the staff we laid off over the last few years. Here are the layoffs we’ll be trying to replace: one of our Assistant Principals, one of our two counselors, all but one of our security guards, our nurse and our librarian. We’ve also had to lay off a large number of our newer teachers, leaving the remaining teachers with enormous classes.

So whom do we bring back? I’m going to say—with pain, because it hurts to make impossible choices—that the first thing I’d fund is teachers.

First, I want to give our teachers a raise. We’ll never bring talented people into the profession if we don’t pay a decent wage. I know teachers who have two children and live in one-bedroom apartments in high-crime neighborhoods. That’s not a lifestyle that will attract anyone into the job. Last year a third of our teachers quit. Four of them did so in the middle of the school year, leaving their classes covered by a rotating fleet of substitutes. Our remaining teachers have not had a raise in five years. Our first priority needs to be attracting and retaining excellent teachers, the core of our school.

Second of all, I’m going to lower class size as much as possible. With students coming in far below grade level, teachers need time for individual attention, especially now with Common Core as we try to teach abstract analytical thinking, which will require the close reading of our students’ work. I’d add a teacher in every core subject.

That’s four; we’re almost out of money already. Now is when things get ugly.

Since we cut our second Assistant Principal, we have no school-wide discipline plan. We’ve also been hemorrhaging students ever since we cut summer school, which left students unable to take a class over if they flunked. I’d love a parent coordinator from the community to reach out to families. But if we can only fund one more person, I’d hire a second counselor. Many of our students are growing up in chaotic situations that leave them in an emotional state close to PTSD. Others have no idea what classes they need to take in order to graduate. More than anything, our kids need someone to talk to.

And then I’m out of money.

As a former drama teacher, it kills me to say that we can’t afford to add an arts class. I desperately want to send our teachers for training in the new Common Core standards. I’d love to have after-school intervention classes for the 30 percent of our students who are still far below grade level. I’d love to train our staff in the promising new Restorative Justice circle method of group talk therapy with students who have behavior issues. We also need an industrial-strength photocopier, healthy food in the cafeteria and school-wide wifi access.

But all of that will have to wait.

It’s better than last year, but we’re still not even back to 2008 levels of funding. Prop 30 saved us from a total meltdown, and it’s definitely a step in the right direction to give high-poverty communities additional funding. But let’s be honest: it’s still a baby step. Now that we’ve opened the door, now that we’ve admitted that we need to fund schools adequately, let’s look at what it will really take to make our schools great, instead of getting them to survive. Let’s talk honestly about what our students really need, then find funding to meet those needs.

Then, and only then, the game of education will be fair for everyone.

Ellie Herman is a guest commentator. Read more of her thoughts at Gatsby in LA.

I feel much better. I was starting to think I was the one who was insane.

To understand how LAUSD’s billion dollar commitment to Apple iPads makes any sense, I’ve consulted a panel of experts: seven tech-whiz high school students from an after-school program called UrbanTxt, along with the program’s founder, Oscar Menjivar.

The highly competitive after-school program, whose mission is to teach coding and entrepreneurship to male high school students of color in South L.A. and Watts, is home to some of the sharpest young minds in the city. In addition to their tech expertise, they also happen to be the target audience of LAUSD’s massive purchase. Over pizza and soda, these brilliant teenagers patiently explain the complexities of the problem at hand.

“The thing is, these iPads are probably gonna be obsolete in three years,” says Amir. “Haven’t these LAUSD guys ever heard of Moore’s law?”

Gordon Moore of Intel advanced a theory in 1965 that the capacity and speed of semiconductors will double every year and a half or so, causing gadgets to become exponentially smaller, faster and cheaper, a prediction that has held true for nearly 50 years. It’s why your iPhone 3, which you used to think was so awesome, is now something even a toddler would throw away in disgust.

LAUSD belatedly discovered that the Pearson software installed in these iPads at somewhere between $50 to $100 per device will expire within three years. But the kids already feel that the software is laughable; Jesus test-drove it a couple of months ago for KPCC and was actually bewildered by how bad it was. “It was like a powerpoint,” he says, incredulous. The kids agree that good software would enable them to create, design and explore instead of meting out drill and kill practice tests.

Though Pearson’s apparently uncontested monopoly over this software raises gigantic ethical questions, as does the lack of transparency about what this software costs or what it even is, this is the first time I’ve heard that the iPads themselves will soon be dinosaurs. “They’ll be left behind soon,” Amir says, as if stating the obvious.

But the choice of iPads is not really what concerns these tech whizzes. They’re far more preoccupied with the larger educational implications of the purchase. “What I’m struggling to see,” Amir says, “is how the tablet can be a learning platform as opposed to a laptop. There are a lot of apps that can’t be downloaded onto an iPad. They’re gonna get left behind by the netbooks that are making iPads obsolete.”

At this, a raging discussion breaks out. Some of the guys favor these netbooks, which are light, cheap devices that function like laptops at a fraction of the cost because they have minimal internal memory. The most popular of these devices, a Google Chromebook, costs a little over $200 and is in use at many schools. Others in the group disagree. Jacques favors laptops because they can run memory-heavy programs like Photoshop. Xavier and Jesus favor a mix of computer labs, laptops and netbooks.

Not a single one of them would have gone with iPads. Not that they don’t like them; the group is unanimous in their enjoyment of tablets, which they agree are extremely fun for games and movies. But for real school work?

Nobody sees any advantage for classwork. After all, the iPads don’t even have keyboards, something the LAUSD only recently discovered were essential, causing them to need to purchase them for an additional $38 million.

They agree that they might be useful for test preparation if the Common Core test is designed to be taken on an iPad. But a purchase of this unprecedented scale, exclusively designed for test prep? If the test were designed so that school districts across California have to spend billions on a new gadget by a single corporation every three years for students to take it, who made the decision to design the test this way? And who will profit by it?

Because what these students really see underneath this massive purchase is an enormous, almost incomprehensibly vast branding opportunity, the chance to build loyalty to Apple products in an entire generation of students. And since 80 percent of LAUSD students live below poverty level and almost all are minorities, we’re talking about building brand loyalty for an entire generation of young people of color living in poverty, a population that Apple’s marketing doesn’t always reach because its products are unattainably expensive.

Apple itself is keenly aware of the branding opportunities afforded by schools, something the company exploited in the ‘80s when it was desperate for credibility and aggressively giving schools free computers. Now, one of the most profitable companies in the world according to Fortune magazine, Apple is notorious for its complete lack of philanthropic outreach to underserved communities (or anyone). Why is LAUSD handing Apple a monopoly on the chance to market to the children who can least afford its products?

The group agrees that with this pricey iPad purchase, LAUSD isn’t addressing what underserved communities really need first.  “Access,” says Oscar. “Many schools don’t even have internet access. That’s the real digital divide. It’s who can get online. Families here in South L.A. don’t have $50 a month for internet access. If we’re gonna spend money, we should be putting a wifi hotspot in every school and extending it so that the whole community can have access at home.”

The whole group agrees that the best solution would have been to test out various options in different communities to see what worked best, but the guys are still arguing about laptops, Chromebooks and computer labs as I leave. I understand now that there are no easy answers.

But what the kids at UrbanTxt have made me see is that what really matters is the questions you ask. After all, that’s what the Common Core is supposed to be about.

If education is all about essential questions that are so obvious to these teenage tech whizzes, why didn’t LAUSD ask them?

Ellie Herman is a guest commentator. Read more of her thoughts at Gatsby in LA.

Ellie Herman is a guest commentator. Read more of her thoughts at Gatsby in LA.

I’ve spent the last three months talking to teachers across Los Angeles about their jobs. They’ve met with me as they swilled coffee getting ready for an early-morning class, as they spooned up a lunch of peanut butter from a jar while helping a kid study for an exam, as they sipped coffee re-heated in the microwave late in the day over papers they were grading. Not one teacher has ever complained to me about making too little money, which is astonishing especially because, as we all know, teachers do not make anywhere near enough.

The median national salary for a teacher is $52,270, which puts them below almost anyone else with a post-college professional degree: lawyers, doctors, college professors, psychologists, computer systems analysts, nurses, speech pathologists, pharmacists, loan officers and dental hygienists. There are people with a job called “compliance officers” who, whatever frightening thing they do, are making more than teachers.

I have two teacher friends in their thirties who live in the homes of relatives because they are still paying off college loans. I used to carpool with one of my fellow teachers because she could not afford a car. The fact that teachers with advanced degrees can barely even afford to rent an apartment should be a national scandal. But when I talked to teachers about what mattered most to them, money didn’t come up.

I am not saying this to perpetuate the destructive notion that teachers are missionaries and martyrs. It continues to bewilder me that many people outside of teaching are actually inspired by the low pay of teachers, as if it were some kind of merit badge without which the job would not be honorable. To which I say: “Yeah, you try raising your kids on that in Los Angeles.” We live in the wealthiest nation in the world. To claim that education is a national priority and then pay teachers less than virtually any other profession is a disgrace.

Still, money did not seem to be foremost on teachers’ minds, which is especially striking to me because in my previous job as a TV writer, making more money was a major topic of discussion. It was a primary drive for most of us, along with creative expression, having fun and getting all those jerks from your high school class to realize they were making a big mistake when they shunned you. I definitely felt the same way. When I was in TV, I wholeheartedly wanted to make as much money as possible as long as it didn’t impact the time I got to spend with my children

So if teachers are not driven by the desire to make money, why do they teach?

Over and over, their responses are similar. “I get to change lives,” Laura Press from Hamilton High told me; after over twenty years, she is still in the classroom, despite having been invited multiple times to take a higher-paid administrative job. Kristin Damo, who teaches at Locke High school in one of the lowest-income communities in Los Angeles, said: “98 percent of the time it may not feel like I’m making a difference, but when you hit that success, it doesn’t feel like anything else. The kids come back after they graduate and they tell me, you changed my life.” Hearing her, I remember a student from my first year, an exceptionally gifted boy whose grades were in the toilet, who was rumored to be gang-affiliated and who frequently ditched school. I struggled with him all year to try to motivate him, without success. I figured I’d failed, but at the end of the year, he scribbled on a good-bye card “thank you for the countless times you’ve given me hope.”

I still have that card. Every teacher has something like it. Sometimes it’s a letter or an email or a text. No matter what the form, teachers cherish them. It doesn’t seem to matter whether they teach in the wealthiest community in L.A. or the poorest. A teacher in Watts named Barbara who did not want her last name used to tell me she thanks her students every day for coming to school. “I feel honored to be part of their lives,” she said.

“Teaching,” said Jeremy Michaelson at Harvard-Westlake, “requires me to be my best self every day.” Watching these teachers, I feel lucky to see them at their best. People often say that teachers are selfless, but selflessness, in my opinion, is neither sustainable nor healthy. What motivates these teachers seems more like generosity, a belief that no matter how much or how little you have, you have more than enough to give.

It sounds sentimental to say that teaching is a spiritual practice, but watching these teachers enact generosity to their students over and over — for low pay and often under very frustrating circumstances, in a culture that demands the most and provides the least, continually demanding physical evidence of the mysterious and intangible process of human growth, all I can say is that I’m humbled. And inspired.

And thankful. To the teachers that I’m following, and to my teacher friends at my former school who are still in the classroom, I’d like to take this moment to say thank you for reminding me why a life lived in a spirit of generosity is deeply worth living. Thank you for reminding me why teaching matters. Thank you for the countless times you’ve given me hope.

Ellie Herman is a guest commentator. Read more of her thoughts at Gatsby in LA.

Image: Edutopia.org

I burned out after teaching for five years at a high school in a very low-income neighborhood. What made me burn out was not that so many of my students came in with reading skills several years behind their grade level. Nor was it that many of them also came in with a history of negative experiences in school.

No, my work in the classroom didn’t burn me out. Classroom work was always engaging and sometimes unbelievably rewarding.

What finally pushed me out the door was a monster we called La Bestia — “The Beast.”

La Bestia was a photocopier, the size of a Prius. On a good day, she could spit out 150 copies of an entire SAT practice test, all sorted and stapled. On a bad day, though, even if you just wanted 32 copies of a two-page Junot Diaz story, she’d throw a hissy fit, with flashing red lights and shrill beeps before stalling flat.

The day I definitively and conclusively gave up, it was after six o’clock and I was making 100 copies of 11 different scenes for my Drama class. I’d been at work since before 7 a.m.; it was dark when I arrived at school and dark now. Since our school was mainly windowless, and we were always too busy to leave the building during the day, I had not seen sunlight for three days. I want to say, in case you think I am a total slacker, that I came to teaching in midlife, having spent 20 years as a TV writer-producer. I am no stranger to long working days and, in fact, am something of a workaholic.

But teaching at a high-poverty school was different because no matter how fast or long I worked, I could not get everything done. I developed a body memory of exactly how much I could accomplish in five minutes, in one minute, in thirty seconds. I was always in a panic because I had limited control over my circumstances: if a kid threw up in the corner or no one could find the cart of laptops even though I’d booked it for the day, I had to make it work.

Everything felt like an emergency. And there was never enough time — to re-tool the grading system because a third of the class was failing, to call parents of kids who did not show up for after-school help, to do a fill-in-the-blanks version of the assignment for the English Language Learners and to find a great extra-credit reading for the brainiacs. There was no time to think. If I had to name the one thing that surprised me most about teaching, it would be how utterly unintellectual it is, or becomes, when you have so many students with so many needs all coming at you at once, and you don’t have the time each of them deserves.

Neuroscientists have identified a condition they call executive function overload, during which your brain, over-stimulated from continual crisis management, becomes unable to think clearly or feel emotions. I can see now that this happened to me. By the end of each day, I was numb. At night, I’d dream I was suffocating. I could not remember what joy felt like.

On that day at La Bestia, she jammed somewhere in the middle of my job and I just stood there. All I could think was: I can’t live this way. And when the time came to renew my contract, I didn’t.

Here in the United States, we continually examine teaching data to understand why other countries are doing better than we are. One thing nobody ever talks about is that teachers in the U.S. have a larger workload than teachers in almost any other country. According to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, the average secondary school teacher in the U.S. puts in 1,051 instructional hours per year. Instructional hours are the hours spent actually in front of kids—in other words, about half of the job, the other half being time spent planning, grading and collaborating with other teachers. In Finland, the average teacher teaches 553 instructional hours per year. In Korea, 609 hours. In England, 695. In Japan, 510.

When teachers in other countries are not in front of students, they can do the other half of a teacher’s job: planning curriculum, grading papers, calling parents, conferencing with students, creating assignments that meet every student’s needs, meeting with other teachers, innovating, thinking, learning. Here in the U.S. we do not give teachers that time. With Common Core on the horizon for LA Unified, we’re planning to blow through at least a billion dollars to train teachers in an entirely new philosophy of teaching. I have to wonder exactly when this training is going to happen. There were literally days when I did not have time to go to the bathroom. What else could I cut out of my day? Breathing?

I miss my students every day. Despite everything, I loved teaching. For every dark day, there were moments of immense pride at what my students had accomplished. I plan to go back. But I’m terrified of burning out again. If the United States is serious about attracting and retaining good teachers, the first thing we need to do is give us the conditions we need to get our jobs done right. Just about every other country in the world does. Why can’t we?

Ellie Herman is a guest commentator. Read more of her thoughts at Gatsby in LA.

I’m an English teacher. This year, I’m taking time off from the classroom to observe high school English teachers across the socioeconomic spectrum in Los Angeles. As I do, I’m stunned to find that teachers in LAUSD high schools often have classes of 40, 45 and 50 students. Dennis’s and Cynthia’s classes are not weird aberrations—these days, classes of over 40 are common, not just in the classes I observe but in any class I hear about from other teachers. Current official averages are difficult to find, but whatever the official numbers may be, I’m here to tell you that LAUSD high schools often are packing so many kids into classrooms that it’s amazing anyone’s learning anything at all.

This overcrowding is a shame in middle-class neighborhoods, where parents sometimes have to fundraise to pay personally for additional teachers and aides. But in low-income neighborhoods, it is a scandal. How can we talk about narrowing the achievement gap between low-income minority children and upper-middle-class children when we pack at-risk kids into classes where no teacher, however excellent, could possibly get to know them, much less work with them closely?

In the neighborhood where Cynthia Castillo teaches, which has the highest level of violent crime in the city and where homicide is the most frequent cause of premature death, around 20 percent of the students have spent time in foster care. Some are gang members, struggling to stay in school so they can make a new life. In Dennis’s class, one boy, a terrific poet who writes harrowing pieces about his crack-addicted mother, has recently gotten out of juvie and is working to turn his life around. But Cynthia and Dennis will get little time to work individually with any of these students. After all, they teach 5 such classes a day. Though officially, student load per teacher is capped at 200, I’ve heard of teachers with as many as 230 students across their five or six periods a day.

Currently in education, there is a delusional belief—I simply have no other description for it—that class size doesn’t matter if a teacher is good enough. I could cite you studies refuting the thin, unpersuasive evidence bolstering this delusion, and I could point you to studies showing the impact of generational poverty on children and how essential it is for at-risk kids to have a relationship with a caring adult in order to learn, but really, anyone who’s ever been a human being knows that cramming low-income children of color into classes of 45 or 50 and then claiming that we’re going to close the achievement gap is just nonsense. Nobody could possibly believe this.

And yet we do. Because, every day we politely, or not so politely, debate about how exactly to implement the Common Core standards, on whose rollout California will spend a billion dollars, or about when our students will take the Common Core tests, on which California will likely spend another billion dollars, or about how to make better firewalls for the iPads on which Los Angeles alone has already spent a billion dollars. It’s as if, in showering all this money on products, we’ve developed some kind of terrible shopping disorder, the kind that fills a need so desperate we’re afraid to face it.

But it doesn’t matter how much we spend on new protocols or tests or gadgets that we fantasize will do the complex, time-consuming, idiosyncratic and fundamentally human work of teaching another person to think logically and critically. If we care as much as we claim to about closing the achievement gap, we need to stop warehousing our most low-income students of color in outrageously overcrowded classrooms and start creating the conditions in which a student might be able to learn. We need to lower class size in LAUSD middle and high schools. Drastically. And immediately.

Otherwise, everything else is noise.

Ellie Herman is a guest commentator. Read more of her thoughts at Gatsby in LA.

Ellie Herman

Ellie Herman is a writer and English teacher, who taught Drama, Advanced Drama, Creative Writing, English 11 and 9th grade composition at Animo Pat Brown Charter High School in south Los Angeles. A career union member, she is now immersed in a year-long journey, spending time in teachers’ classrooms at schools across the socioeconomic spectrum in L.A. to learn how to become a better teacher.

“The only way I’m going to get better at teaching is to watch real teachers in action–not to mock bad teachers, but to closely observe good ones and learn from them,” she says at Gatsby in LA, her blog, where she is chronicling her experiences.

Ellie joins us at LA School Report as a guest commentator, with periodic observations of public education in Los Angeles. Her first appears today.