These are tough times for education, especially in California where the state is about bankrupt.  It drives me crazy because the schools will be hit with budget cuts again and they’re about as close to bare bones as it can get.  As is always true when finances get tight, people start feeling insecure and try to find a scapegoat–we need to establish blame because unfocused anger is just too scary.

Fear is prevalent throughout our country–neighbors turn against neighbors, colleagues against colleagues; life-long friends on different edges of the political spectrum dare not talk about the upcoming elections for fear of saying something that will end the relationship.  Everybody has a frustration, everybody has a solution, everybody is a little bit right and more than a little wrong.  Especially when it comes to national or world politics, we cannot possibly know the facts first hand.  We rely on the news to research and summarize the truth, then give it to us straight.  That is not happening right now.  Everything has a spin.

The LA Times ran a series of articles in September to expose teachers in the Los Angeles school district who were not improving their students’ test scores satisfactorily.  It’s believed that a young teacher who worked for years in one of the poorest schools with some of the most challenging students killed himself when his name was listed in an article as “less effective” based on standardized test scores–madness.  My students and I have spent a great deal of time talking about the difficulty of evaluating effective teachers.  They were all for publishing test scores until they wrote all of the qualities that they felt made an effective teacher on our white board and noticed that not one of the 38 qualities listed had anything to do with curriculum or test scores.  All of the adjectives they listed had to do with traits like patience, motivation, intelligence, a sense of humor, an interesting personality–qualities that will get you a job in any business.  To attract the best, we have to treat teachers like valued employees and make sure our schools reflect our pride in this business of educating our country’s children.

I was looking at a photo the other day taken in 1926 of a group of school children sitting on a lawn with handmade crowns on their heads, obviously getting ready for a festival or celebration of some kind.  Their faces are so open, so hopeful, so trusting–I see these same faces every day in our classrooms.  We don’t want to let these kids down.  We don’t need Superman to rescue us–our schools are filled with remarkable adults who do extraordinary work every day.  We need to take care of them.  Let’s restore the sanity, treat other people’s children like we would like our children to be treated, and embrace some good old common sense.  We can do this.