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.

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.

He was also brilliant. If you define “intellectual” as a person who takes delight in the process of abstract thinking, Xavier was one of the most purely intellectual young person I’ve ever met. Faced with a complex question that would leave other kids stumped or bored, he would stare at the ceiling, a slow grin moving over his face as he contemplated the various possible answers he could give. Watching Xavier think was like watching him listen to music only he could hear.

Despite his brilliance, he did homework only sporadically, was absent a great deal of the time and was barely passing his classes. I met Xavier my first year teaching in South L.A. and, like many new teachers, was determined that I would be the one to reach him. The day he approached me after class to ask for a reading list, my heart leapt. He wanted to read more, but he had no books in his home. His parents, who started working as children and did not have much education, worked 12-hour shifts at factory jobs. But Xavier wanted a different life; he wanted to be a doctor. He wanted to write about his experiences. What should he read?

I compiled a list of my favorite books, making sure to include teen favorites, books about the medical profession and topics that might speak to a kid growing up in a high-poverty neighborhood. When I gave him the list, he contemplated it with his usual care, made a small check mark next to the books that looked interesting, and looked up. “Where can I get them?” he asked.

And that’s where our story stalls out. Because that’s when I realized that Xavier was living in a book desert.

Our school, like many schools in low-income neighborhoods in L.A., did not have a library. Except for small collections of favorites in the classrooms of English teachers, we had nothing to offer any student who wanted to read something other than the required class book. No place to browse, no place to touch books, no place to sit quietly and get lost in words the way I had as a kid, when I’d lie around reading until I was half-blind and nearly delirious from a day spent happily rambling around someone else’s imagination. And if Xavier couldn’t find books at school or at home, where could he read?

There are no bookstores in South Los Angeles. The few public library branches are tiny and far-flung. None is open on Sunday, and since Xavier worked on Saturday, he could only have gone during evening hours, which was also difficult for him because he babysat younger siblings and could not afford the bus fare to take them all even if his mother would have allowed it, which she wouldn’t because the streets were dangerous after dark.

All over the United States, we are demanding that our students have equal access to education and literacy. To be able to read is at the heart of this demand. But students will never achieve fluency in reading if they have no access to books other than the school’s required reading, on which they are tested, grilled, graded and required to write essays.

For years, school libraries filled this gap. But here in L.A., they have all but vanished. After the devastating funding cuts of the last few years, LAUSD schools have only 98 librarians left across 1,309 schools. Eighty-three percent of LAUSD middle schools don’t have a librarian and are prohibited from keeping the library open with volunteers. At charter schools, the problem is even more severe; for a variety of reasons having to do with limited facilities and massive funding cuts, most charter schools aren’t able to have libraries at all.

Many people believe we should hold off on funding school libraries because e-readers are going to replace physical books. But even if students in low-income communities all had tablets, lack of internet access makes reading outside of school impossible. And it is by no means clear that physical books are going to disappear any time soon. Right now, for our students in poverty, we offer access to neither books nor e-readers that can function outside of the classroom.

Instead, we spend and spend on new techniques to bring students up to grade level when they come into 9th grade reading at a 3rd grade level. We crack down on teachers, pouring money into byzantine, unsustainable evaluation systems to make sure they push their students every second to make up for all the books they didn’t read because they didn’t have any. We pour billions into new testing to show us what we already know: our students do not read very well.

But why should they want to read when we do everything in our power to devalue the act of reading and to remove or shut down places to read from low-income communities? What’s the real message here? Our students may not have high reading levels, but they’re plenty smart. They get the message loud and clear. Reading is for kids in Beverly Hills, in South Pasadena, at Harvard-Westlake. It’s not something we actually want them to do, and it certainly isn’t something we want them to enjoy.

All those years ago, I ended up buying Xavier a couple of books, which is what most teachers do. But I couldn’t give him a quiet place to read or browse or feel like he belonged in the world of reading. All across Los Angeles, our schools in underserved areas are full of students like Xavier who long to read and be part of an intellectual life but have no access to it. For our students growing up in book deserts, what are we doing to provide equal access to reading? How about if we start by demanding that every school in a book desert has a library?

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

But to fire grossly incompetent teachers is not the same thing as to guarantee every child a quality education, which is at the core of this lawsuit. If it’s true that our failure to do that is unconstitutional, then even if this lawsuit is successful, we can’t just breathe a sigh of relief and relax. Even if we fire all grossly ineffective teachers tomorrow and hand out effective teachers like Oprah giving out cars, the far more serious problem is that schools in underserved communities struggle to retain effective teachers for very long.

That’s the deeper inequality we should be addressing.

Teacher turnover in low-income communities is high whether those teachers work at district schools or charters. It is naïve to think that eliminating seniority-based layoffs will solve this issue; a 2011 Berkeley study showed that turnover at Los Angeles charters in high-poverty communities was almost 50 percent per year. Some people now claim that this high turnover is not in itself a problem, as if the notion of effectiveness can be disassociated from a teacher’s relationship to the community.

If a teacher is “effective” enough, the claim goes, it won’t matter if she quits as long as she’s replaced by another “effective” teacher. Is that actually a serious claim? What is the “effect” on a student when every year there is a mass exodus of beloved adults from his school? How are we going to ask that kid to then invest emotionally in his education?

We need to look seriously at the reasons good teachers leave schools in low-income communities in such disproportionate numbers. It’s a common misconception that teachers leave because of the students themselves. But though the work can be challenging, it can also be also be uniquely, profoundly rewarding. When I taught in South L.A., I was so frequently moved by my students’ courage, dignity and persistence that my son asked me to stop telling inspirational stories that ended with “ … and then I cried.”

The problem is not the students. The problem is doing a deeply meaningful job in conditions that prevent you from being effective. If I’m in a classroom of students from a high-poverty community who come in at very low reading levels, many of whom are still learning English and some of whom have behavioral or attentional deficits due to the chronic stress of poverty, it’s delusional to think that I can be effective when I’m facing down as many as 50 students at once, which many LAUSD teachers do. I don’t care if Eric Hanushek testifies until he’s purple in the face that I’ll be effective regardless of class size, that’s insane. Not every child in that classroom has access to an effective teacher; it’s physically impossible.

You can’t be effective without basic resources. Despite the urgent needs of students in high-poverty communities, funding has been slashed for security guards, counselors, nurses, deans, assistant principals and office staff. Everyone knows that schools need new resources to support students who have behavior issues; but with staff cuts, nobody has time to develop, test or implement them. Many teachers I talk to are serving over 200 students. That’s not sustainable.

Finally, real change can only start at the top. It astonishes me when people in business talk about installing “effective” teachers as if they were changing light bulbs when anyone in business knows that every organization takes on the characteristics of its leader.

I recently visited the classroom of a great, experienced teacher who had just moved to a very chaotic school in a high-poverty neighborhood with a brand-new principal, the third in five years. There was no school-wide plan or support for kids with serious issues; if a kid acted out in her class, all she could do was urge him to stop. In her first period class of almost thirty, only five students were there at the start of school. If I taught at that school, my class would be pandemonium.

So yes, every child deserves an effective teacher. But school is a complex culture of relationships that define and shape us. We need to create the conditions in which talented and committed people will invest years of their lives to the fundamental right of educational equality. It will take time. And patience.

And money. If Students Matter, Eli Broad and the others behind the Vergara lawsuit are really serious about the constitutional rights of children and not just union-bashing and questionable state policies, I’d love to see them demand that we get the resources we need to do our job. We live in a state with the largest concentration of high-wealth people in America—and also the highest poverty level. It’s a disgrace that states like New York and New Jersey are investing nearly twice what we invest in our children’s education, even after Prop 30.

So I agree from the bottom of my heart that every child deserves a good teacher. But the fight for every child’s right to a quality education is going to be a lot harder and cost more than just firing people. Are we ready for that fight? I hope so. To shy away from it, as the Vergara plaintiffs point out, is unconstitutional.

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.

a) a new set of nationwide standards that will encourage deep thinking instead of rote memorization

b) a new round of edu-crap, like No Child Left Behind

c) replacing state standards in 45 states including California

d) causing surprisingly large numbers of students to freak out and start weeping uncontrollably during initial tests all across the East Coast

e) causing Arne Duncan to infuriate opponents by dismissing them as “white suburban moms”

f) going to push fiction out of English classrooms

g) going to have no effect on the teaching of fiction

h) going to change everything

i) going to change nothing

j) going to make testing companies billions of dollars

If you picked any number of the above, congratulations! Whether you know anything about Common Core or not, you’ve grasped one of the central notions of this new set of national standards: the embrace of ambiguity and the possibility of multiple, contradictory correct answers.

Reality is, after all, a shape-shifting beast whose very existence is a matter of opinion. In other words, if you are an idiot, you may be onto something.

Which is an idea I wholeheartedly support. Still, I would say that at this point, I would check all of the above on my mini-quiz. I have extremely mixed feelings about Common Core for a variety of reasons.

The first thing you need to know about Common Core is that it is already happening. If you don’t like what you’re about to read, you’re too late. If your child is in public school here in L.A., he or she is going to be learning under the new standards.

The second thing you need to know about Common Core is that it is intended as a radical re-envisioning of education. From the beginning of public education in America, low-income students of color have been disproportionately relegated to underfunded schools that were accountable to no one. A variety of measures, beginning with desegregation and going through No Child Left Behind, attempted to redress this imbalance. But No Child Left Behind quickly devolved into a further hot mess of inequality. Different states had different tests. Schools cheated. The entire state of Texas has been accused of fraud.

On a deeper level, there was a creeping concern among just about any teacher I knew that our students, however proficient on tests, did not know how to think.

The Common Core standards are a response to this concern. What’s radical about Common Core is that unlike No Child Left Behind, which measured the accumulation of skills and information, the Common Core standards value process. Under Common Core, it matters more how you think about something rather than what you already know. Instead of reams of state-produced standards for every subject, CC has a compact national list of four standards: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language.

Sounds great, right?

Well, yes. In theory. I mean, if what was actually about to happen was that students across America were going to learn to think critically, synthesize knowledge and communicate clearly, I’d be dancing in the streets.

The problem is that all of this is coming awfully close to magical thinking. Yes, our kids need to learn to think critically. We knew that before. I guess it’s a good thing that we’re making it official. You have to state a problem before you can solve it. Analytical thinking is a complex web of painstaking logical procedures and the vocabulary necessary to manipulate abstract concepts. It is not innate in even the most brilliant students. I am not aware of anyone who has unpacked it to a teachable level.

So in theory, it’s great that we’re shining a light on this need to figure out how to teach critical thinking. But…

The final thing you need to know is that Common Core is not just a theory — it’s a test.

Even though we don’t yet know how to teach critical thinking, we’re going to be testing it. Soon. And at enormous, almost inconceivable expense. Right now, California is playing chicken with the U.S. Department of Education over whether it has to hold schools “accountable” for their test scores on the new Common Core tests, which are still under construction.

And the tests for California are not yet very good. First of all, the company creating these tests is called “Smarter Balanced.” Yes, you read that right. No, there is no noun. But does that make any less sense than spending billions of dollars on testing when we’re so broke we’re cramming 45 or 50 kids into a classroom?

The sample test I took online seemed only a slight step up from the SAT, with computer-graded short answers rather than multiple choice questions. So did the so-called “performance task,” which requires internet access but is really not dissimilar to the SAT Writing section in terms of measuring skills.

Even if we use these tests only experimentally for the first couple of years, LA Unified is going to need to spend an estimated $3.6 million this year just to pilot them. That’s on top of the billion or so we may be spending on iPads—since Common Core tests are computer-based, students without access to computers will bomb the test from lack of practice unless this imbalance is redressed immediately.

I could not agree more that all the district’s students deserve equal access to technology. But this need would not be a five-alarm emergency if they were not about to be held accountable for their lack of access to it.

In another five-alarm emergency, since nobody knew how to teach Common Core skills, companies purporting to know how to do it are now selling these untested systems to desperate schools for billions of dollars—on top of the estimated billion we’re paying for development of these tests.

Meanwhile, across Los Angeles, I frequently visit classes that cannot afford books for their English classes. Some schools ration photocopies because they can’t afford paper. Teenagers have stunned the district by breaking down firewalls to access social media and by losing stuff. Who exactly needs to learn critical thinking here?

But don’t take my word for it. Take the sample test yourself and decide whether it’s worth billions. Together, we’ll decide who’s an idiot.

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

First of all, thank you for asking my advice. I am no expert on burnout except that I personally experienced it. For truly professional advice, I highly recommend a book by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter, “The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It.” It’s filled with concrete steps for individuals and organizations.

But since you asked, I’m going to give my personal, unscientific recommendation. I call this piece “10 Steps to Avoid Teacher Burnout” because that’s what I wish I had had. Ten easy steps: do one a week, and by March you’re back in action, frisky and clear-eyed and filled with purpose. Amazing! Next stop: rock-hard abs!

The thing is, “10 steps” is an illusion. Teacher burnout is enormously complex and probably different in every case. I think a huge problem in education these days is the belief that we can come up with simple 10-step solutions, or rubrics, or accountability systems for anything. We are human beings trying to pass on all that we know to the next generation. There are no easy answers, only messy human answers.

So I only have one step. It’s what I didn’t do; it’s what I wish I’d done.

1. Listen.

Listen, first of all, to yourself. Are you exhausted, drained, cynical, hopeless? Do you write things in your journal like, “I can’t keep going” and “I hate my life”? When a student says, “I’m worthless,” do you have to bite your tongue to keep from saying “That makes two of us, bucko?” Do you no longer take pleasure in anything, even things you used to love, like family, friends, hobbies? Does the mere idea of “hobbies” make you seethe with resentment at the thought of that people who work less hard but make more money actually have them? When was the last time you exercised? When was the last time you ate a good meal, and by “good meal” I do not mean an energy bar wolfed down over a stack of papers to grade?

If any of this rings a bell, stop right now. You’re burned out. Take a day off. You may need two days off. I know your workplace may have incentives not to do this; you may have a school culture that prioritizes attendance every single day. That’s great. For superheroes. You are not a superhero. You are a wonderful human being who really needs a day in bed with all eight seasons of “Breaking Bad” and a mountain of deli food. You don’t have a sub plan? Photocopy a great article in your subject area and have the kids read it, then write a response. A friend of mine who’s a great teacher takes a personal day every month. Teaching is a marathon, not a sprint. No one will remember that you took a day off. They will remember if you quit.

Listen, second of all, to your colleagues. (If you hate your colleagues, start looking for a new job.) Listen to them professionally: what’s their experience at school right now? What could change that might make things better? If there are concrete issues, maybe it’s time to raise them with administrators. What was your original vision, why are you all here? I was often inspired by my fellow teachers, which reminds again of why I was lucky to work with motivated idealists. I wish I’d taken the time to really see the great things my friends were doing for students and to tell them personally because I see now that teachers don’t always know how good they are.

Finally, listen to your students. I don’t just mean doing one of those activities where you ask for their feedback, though that can be helpful. I mean long-term, looking back over the years, what have you done that’s really helped your students? What are you proudest of? As your students go out in the world, what do they come back and tell you? What is it they needed from you that you gave them? Remember: this is the essence of your job. On a really bad day when you’re living on re-microwaved coffee and Cheez-Its from the snack machine, when your to-do list grips your head like a fever, when you have to throw your top student out of class for cheating, how can you get back to your core work—to the long-term vision of what you do that makes a difference in a young person’s life?

I hope this is helpful. Remember, I’m the opposite of an expert. I speak as somebody who did burn out and is currently sitting at home. No one should ever give teaching advice unless they’ve taught for at least a decade. Including me. With that in mind, I hope you’ll consider this not as advice, but instead as a wish for you. No matter what anyone tells you (and by the way, you’re probably harder on yourself than anyone else is), you’re doing the most important work in the world. Here in L.A., 50 percent of all inner-city teachers quit within three years. If you’re at an inner-city charter, 50 percent quit per year.

So thank you for being one of the people who stayed. Take care of yourself. We need you.

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.

Can we tone down the rhetoric a little? It’s getting hard to hear in here.

I’m an English teacher. Though I taught at a charter school for five years, I’ve been reading Diane Ravitch’s work for a long time and think she’s raising some very important concerns about the at-risk kids left behind by the charter school movement, the testing industry and the push for privatization by some of the foundations funding some CMO’s. She raises points that were by many accounts ignored by Education Reformer Michelle Rhee at her Town Meeting in September; because Rhee had not-very-helpfully scheduled the meeting on Rosh Hashanah, I was unable to attend. Apparently Rhee pre-screened questions and skewed the evening toward the views of her organization, StudentsFirst, whose name itself lobs an implicit insult at anyone who disagrees with her.

So when Ravitch spoke recently at Occidental, I went hoping to hear rational discussion. But it was hard to hear what she was saying over the din of overheated metaphors.

Her new book, “Reign of Error,” was originally entitled “Hoax”; Ravitch’s central idea is that the American public education system has been the victim of a series of hoaxes and lies perpetrated by the government and large corporations. If the central narrative of the Ed Reform movement is that the educational system is broken and entrepreneurial ingenuity can fix it, Ravitch’s central narrative is that the forces of corporatization are colluding to take over public education for their own profit. “We’re back to the age of the robber barons,” she said at one point, positioning herself as a tiny David against the Goliath of the corporatocracy. “I don’t have money,” she said. “I don’t have a foundation. I have words.”

Now, I am no fan of the corporatocracy; unlike Ravitch I actually do not have words to describe how distraught I am at the widening income gap in this country and its devastating effects on children in poverty. But I get off the bus at conspiracy theories. I mean, I have no doubt there are greedy bastards out there in some gleaming office tower scheming to make money off of education. And hell, they might pull it off some day, which would be horrible. But I actually don’t believe that right now, when we look at charter schools and standardized testing, what we’re actually seeing is evidence of a series of deliberate, long-running malicious hoaxes designed by oligarchs.

Prove me wrong and I’ll get back on the bus. But conspiracy theories in the absence of evidence instantly make me stop listening. Conspiracy theories are the low-hanging fruit of rhetoric. They make people angry and self-righteous and more than anything, passive. Why fight when the forces of evil are allied against you? All we can do is sit home, curse the other side and eat popcorn. My students sometimes didn’t bother to vote even though many of them were 18-year-old citizens. Why? Because the Illuminati rigs the election.

What distressed me was that beyond the amped-up rhetoric, Ravitch is raising a lot of crucial concerns. My friend Dennis Danziger, who teaches English at Venice High, tells me that nearby charters and magnets have eviscerated his student population, drawing out those students with parents who can advocate for them and leaving behind the most at-risk students in a system drained of resources and morale.

To contemplate his point, though, is not to say that charters are a hoax—a deliberate scam perpetrated against the American people. It’s to say that we’re in the throes of some very painful, not entirely successful efforts to improve a profoundly unequal educational system that both reflects and entrenches the racial and economic inequity in this country. Ravitch herself, at the end of her speech, admitted that charters could be a whole lot better if not for the public’s continual demand that schools demonstrate high test scores in to survive.

I feel it’s an important idea when she says that we need to balance our need for accountability with an understanding that when we demand swift, measurable results from schools that are serving our most at-risk children, and we don’t even really know what these results mean. (Seriously, raise your hand if you actually know how an API score is calculated.) We do this while also saying these schools need to produce results without our giving them any additional resources, we may be putting untenable pressure on schools that are stretched to the limit. The casualties are our most fragile students. And all of us, in our impatience for quick fixes, are complicit.

Unfortunately, you had to be listening really hard to hear this point. It came around the end, along with the short list of excellent suggestions she also made in her Op Ed in the L.A. Times, a list that a charter advocate, commenting pseudonymously as “mindopened,” mocked as crazy dreams (“why not just demand world peace?”) But her suggestions are not crazy. And they are not that dissimilar to a lot of what’s being developed at some good charter systems.

My friend Ben asked Ravitch at the end of the speech if she could see anything positive in the Ed Reform movement. She thought a moment and said no. “I’ll write about it if I think of anything,” she said, dismissing him. But the truth is that both sides have some good ideas and both sides have flaws; both sides have had their fair share of corrupt bad apples and big egos, but also of dedicated people who are devoting their lives to the same crazy dream. What’s crazier than believing that it’s possible to give all children an equal opportunity in life?

But we’ll never be able to hear that if we can’t stop yelling.

Read more by Ellie Herman at gatsbyinla.