Good Schools: Stories to Inform Public Education Reform

By Anderson Neal de Andrade

Have you ever wondered, what it means to be a "good" public school? 

Good Schools: Stories to Inform Public Education Reform, examines this qu

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781636760223

Book preview

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Good Schools

Good Schools

Stories to Inform Public Education Reform

Anderson Neal de Andrade

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2020 Anderson Neal de Andrade

All rights reserved.

Good Schools

Stories to Inform Public Education Reform

ISBN

978-1-63676-504-4 Paperback

978-1-63676-021-6 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63676-022-3 Ebook

This book is dedicated to my first teachers:

Mom, Dad, Jordan, Ronnie, Jo Ann, Grandmother, and Grandma

As well as to my students—current, past, and future.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1.

A Good Public School and How It Came to Be: The Story of International Community School

Part 1.

Examining the Current Public Education Landscape and How We Got Here

Chapter 2.

The Recent Teacher Strikes

Chapter 3.

How Are Schools Funded?

Chapter 4.

A Very, Very Brief History of Public Education in the United States

Part 2.

Good Ideas for Good Schools

Chapter 5.

Rethinking Data

Chapter 6.

Early Childhood Education

Chapter 7.

Post-Secondary Support

Chapter 8.

New School Buildings

Chapter 9.

Mental Health Resources

Chapter 10.

Technology in Schools

Chapter 11.

Culturally Relevant Curriculum and Project-Based Learning

Chapter 12.

Diversified Staff & Desegregating Schools

Part 3.

Steps You Can Take to Make and Maintain Good Schools in Your Community

Chapter 13.

For Parents

Chapter 14.

For Community Members

Chapter 15.

For Teachers

Chapter 16.

For Principals

Chapter 17.

For Students

Chapter 18.

For Policymakers

Chapter 19.

Conclusion

Appendix (Alphabetized)

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I remember getting the text message and feeling numb. It was the fall, November the thirteenth to be exact. At the time, I was a junior at Georgetown University.

Jo Ann passed away. I’m sorry, Anderson.

I sat down on one of the wooden benches in the library that looked out on the campus quad, where the trees were leafless and their branches twisted. I pulled my laptop from my bag, quickly opening it to Facebook. It took only a moment to see the text confirmed by Jo Ann’s daughter, Robin Petersen Webster:

I’m sorry to reach Mom’s friends in this manner, but I don’t want to exclude those which I can’t reach otherwise. My mom passed away earlier today. I will post arrangements once I complete them.

Unable to grasp the idea of Jo Ann being gone, I stood up and walked out into the cool November air—jacket in hand. I remember staring at my feet as I walked back to my dorm room, where I sat down on one of our old couches for what felt like hours. My roommates were not yet home and I sat very still. The door opening hours later broke the stillness. It was my roommates—Richie, PJ, and Noah. They did not notice me at first, but quickly realized something was wrong.

Jo Ann died, I said to them, as the feelings of loss hit me . . . .

***

Jo Ann, in many ways, was one of my first teachers. Having worked for my family since before I was born, she was a caretaker for my brother, Ronnie, and my sister, Jordan. It was with her that I wrote my first stories about a man who wore giant cowboy hats and that could speak to animals. She would sit with me at the wooden coffee table in my family’s living room and help fold the paper so that my stories could have multiple pages. As I wrote she would ask me questions about the characters I created. I would answer by describing them to her how I pictured them in my head.

I loved Jo Ann like a grandmother. She was always there for me. She would come to my soccer games, take me out for dinner, and let me stay over weekends when she moved down to rural North Carolina. When I graduated high school, she was there to take a picture of me in my cap and gown. Our picture from graduation hung in her house with those of her other grandchildren.

Throughout my first years of college, I would talk to Jo Ann on the phone every few days. She always took a genuine interest in the courses I took and supported me as I struggled through tough classes and decided a path for post-graduation. It was Jo Ann who had encouraged me to apply to work for the Summer College Access Mentorship Program—which would be my entrance into a career dedicated to education. I will forever be grateful for that encouragement.

***

College Access Mentorship Program

It was Tuesday, which meant it was my day to pick up the students from the Latin American Youth Center (LAYC). I would need to get to the front gates earlier so that I could get into the Center for Social Justice (CSJ) office in time to get the keys for the twelve-passenger Ford I would be driving to Columbia Heights. The drive took about fifteen minutes. I took out my phone and glanced at the screen: 8:02 a.m., I was still on time. Grabbing the keys off of my supervisor’s desk, I hustled out the door toward the parking garage in the middle of campus, where the CSJ staff parked the vans.

As I made it to the garage, I realized that I had forgotten to check which set of keys I had taken. Taking them out of my pocket, I looked down at them. Right below the Ford insignia, a scratched-out letter meant that I would either have the G van or the C van. I could already feel the beads of sweat forming at my temples, hoping not to have van G—the one without air conditioning. Today was one of those DC summer days, so humid you questioned the entire idea of having attended a university on top of what was once a swamp.

As I hit the ignition, I immediately reached toward the air conditioning button…looked like today’s drive would be a hot one. I rolled down the windows, hoping that by some miracle a bit of coolness might still be in the early morning air, and started on the morning drive.

Every other day, I drove a twelve-passenger van from Georgetown University to the LAYC in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC, to pick up the students that were a part of the College Access Mentorship Program run by the CSJ and the LAYC. The drive took me through skinny streets with doubled-parked cars and sidewalks lined with red-brick townhouses reaching toward blue skies.

The morning drive to the LAYC was always much easier. Less cars, less stress, less humidity, and, most importantly, no students. I would drive with the windows down and my hand on the side, knowing that once I arrived at the LAYC, things would get tougher due to the number of students I was tasked with transporting.

Have you ever tried driving a soccer-team’s worth of twelve- to eighteen-year-olds in DC morning traffic? What about trying to drive while listening to seven different songs playing over cellphone speakers while half the vehicle is having a competition to see who can make the most realistic animal noise? It’s not easy . . . . But is it enjoyable? I probably wouldn’t be writing this book if I didn’t think so.

Once we arrived at the gates, after what felt like bumper-to-bumper traffic each day, I would attempt to parallel park the massive transport vehicle about five or six times (ultimately choosing to be about a foot from the curb), before walking my students through the main quad of the campus and into Healy Hall. There we would sit in the wooden desks, writing about music, sports, movies, and things students asked to write about, until lunch time; then we would eat pupusas, a delicious Guatemalan dish (that all should try) brought in from the owner of a local pupuseria—a man my boss had been friends with since moving to DC several years before. Afterward, we would spend an hour playing pick-up soccer on top of Yates Field House, laughing and enjoying everyone’s companionship until it was time to start heading back to the LAYC. The days went by quickly.

The drive back was always much quieter. The students were tired, I was tired, yet conversations never stopped. We shared the things we liked, and talked about the news and what was going on in the world, as well as about ourselves. The conversations were insightful and felt like a two-way street. I felt as though my students were learning, as I learned with them.

During one of these drives, I began to consider a career in education.

***

After graduating, I moved out to the Bay Area and began teaching fifth grade through Teach for America. I have now been a teacher for four years. Throughout these years, I have met hundreds of students and their families. Our conversations and interactions have inspired this book and the way I see public education. In addition to my experiences in the classroom, this book has been inspired by my participation in organizations like the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), University of California Berkeley History and Social Science Project, Teach for America (TFA), Loyola Marymount Graduate School of Education, and (Knowledge is Power Program) KIPP charter schools, each providing the opportunity to broaden my understanding of the policies behind public school education.

Interviews with teachers, administrators, students, parents, politicians, professors, and journalists—about the state of public education and each interviewee’s hope for its future—have been instrumental in the creation of this book. These individuals’ stories have provided more meaning to my own and have helped shape my views on what it will take to make and maintain quality public schools.

Having now been in the classroom longer than about 50 percent of new teachers who started in the same year that I did (i.e., 2017), I have started to see the political and structural factors that will influence my decision to stay in the classroom or leave to join an alarming statistic that has helped create numerous teacher shortages throughout the country.¹ Current projections show an increasing divide between enrollment in teacher preparation programs and the demand for new teachers—a sign for additional future teacher shortages that are already plaguing public schools across the country.²

Researchers have begun to address the need to attract new teachers and hold on to those who are in the beginnings of their education careers. Current research into teacher attrition has helped drive this conversation and has revealed working conditions and salary as primary forces behind many teachers’ decisions to leave—forces that have, in part, brought me to write this book.³

With the recent Red4Ed nationwide labor movement, teachers have begun improving conditions of public education by highlighting many of the issues that public schools face. Some examples of these key issues highlighted include class sizes that have continued to grow in size in many large urban school districts; school districts mandating new, expensive curriculum hailed as the silver bullet to solve achievement gaps that are then replaced the following fall; and the expectation for teachers to supply their students and classrooms with materials in low-income school districts as supplementary funds are cut and reallocated to the creation and adoption of standardized tests; all while teachers’ salaries remain stagnant and 20 percent less than those with similar levels of education (i.e., a master’s degree).⁴

According to a Gallup Poll in 2020, 70 percent of parents with school-aged children think that nationwide schools are failing; while at the same time, 70 percent of parents with school-aged children think that their local public school is doing a good job.⁵ These numbers are perplexing. Although reviews of local public schools are generally good—a fear of public schools as an idea nationwide continues to remain bad.

This may be due in part to news of poor standardized test scores: with headlines that say something along the lines of Eighth Graders in the United States Rank 39th on International Math Test, or a headline like Only 37 percent of Graduating Seniors Read Proficiently. ⁶ Articles with these types of titles can be quite alarming, and have a right to be, based on the data that they collect, observe, and perceive to be valid.

I feel confident, however, that public education is poised to radically improve over the next decade if we continue to broaden our understanding of what it means to be a good public school and implement the ideas that have already begun to take root in public schools across this country.

This book seeks to examine the question, What makes a public school good? through the stories of teachers in rural and urban America, students that like school and those who do not, families with resources and those without, new principals and old principals, professors that have spent their careers in trying to better understand the issues faced by public schools, journalists that have spent their lives on the education beat reporting school board meetings, nonprofit leaders that have taken to thinking about educating the child outside of school walls, and to many others fighting to make and maintain good public schools.

Public education is large and complex, with over 50.8 million students that attend one of over 100,000 public schools in the United States, where they are taught by one of 3.7 million teachers that have had a life’s worth of experiences before entering the classroom.⁷ Talking about it on scale has become quite difficult, often coming off as misinformed or short-sighted, making finding equitable and just solutions rare.

In order to address this challenge, public schools have taken steps toward using data-driven research—which can create better schools but can also harm them. This book, although including aspects of data-driven research, promotes dialogue around issues that big data may miss or misconstrue while pushing our collective thinking of public education through the stories and research of individuals from a sea of experiences and realities within the classroom.

This book is for many types of people: for those who, like me, are in the beginning stages of a career dedicated to improving public education; for teachers who have already dedicated years of service to the profession and those who have decided to leave; and for students and parents who attend our schools, and for those who once attended. This book is for those interested in bringing happiness, creativity, and learning back to the classroom and ensuring that public education is a right provided to all children—an education of quality that all people deserve.

---

1 Alexandria Neason, Half of Teachers Leave the Job after Five Years. Here’s What to Do about It, The Hechinger Report, July 2014.

2 Anne Podolsky, Tara Kini, Joseph Bishop, and Linda Darling-Hammond, Solving the Teacher Shortage: How to Attract and Retain Excellent Educators, Learning Policy Institute, September 2016.

3 Leslie Ann Beaugez, A Study of Factors Related to Teacher Attrition (EdD diss., University of Southern Mississippi, 2012).

4 Grace Chen, 2011 Classroom Size Update: Are Classes Still Growing Larger? Public School Review, May 2011.; Anne Podolsky, Tara Kini, Joseph Bishop, and Linda Darling-Hammond, Solving the Teacher Shortage: How to Attract and Retain Excellent Educators, Learning Policy Institute, September 2016.

5 Education, Gallup.com, accessed August 2020.

6 Drew DeSilver, US Academic Achievement Lags That of Many Other Countries, Pew Research Center, May 2020.

7 National Center for Education Statistics, Back to School Statistics, Ed.gov, 2019.

Chapter 1:

A Good Public School and How It Came to Be: The Story of International Community School

She sat at the kidney-shaped table toward the back of the room, watching her classmates as they continued their lesson. She could almost recognize a word in every other sentence her teacher said. The teacher began:

Imagery is when an author paints a picture in their reader’s head.

Head. The girl had heard that word before. She thought back to a lesson on the parts of the body that the other teacher had taught her.

Cabeza. Head. Cabeza. Head. The girl repeated to herself. The words in English felt clunkier, less smooth than how she spoke at home.

This girl’s name was Jael Muñoz Lainez. She was born in Nicaragua and moved to Daly City, California, only months before an earthquake killed 120 people and left over 16,000 homeless where her family had lived.⁸

Her thoughts went to the country that had once been home, a place where she would not have had to sit at the side of her class, feeling the way she felt now—as if she was missing out and being left behind. The other teacher poked her arm, bringing her back to the translation lesson that she and one other student, who could not speak the clunky language, were tasked with completing. Jael’s experiences at