"Nothing Ever Happens With Schools In the Summer"

Although it's true that with the advent of school I always feel like a Mack Truck has hit me, the idea that nothing ever happens with schools in the summer is completely deceptive.

It reminds me of a book we used to read to our kids when they were little:
Ellen Raskin's Nothing Ever Happens On My Block.

In that book, a kid bemoans that nothing ever happens on his block. Meanwhile...

STUFF HAPPENS!

Consider what has happened this summer in Ann Arbor alone:

1. Three high schools have new principals--Huron, Community, and Pioneer. Given that Skyline got a new principal last year (as did Pioneer, actually--twice), we can understand this as a major changing of the guard! Many more elementary and middle schools have new principals.

2. There were a lot of retirements (given salary cuts, I don't find that at all surprising) and a new World Languages Initiative, so it's not surprising there was lots of hiring of teachers as well. Even after all the budget cuts, Ann Arbor pays more than some school districts (like Ypsilanti) and is perceived as having more opportunities (because of its size), and so many of the teachers are coming from other schools or charters.

3. The new Ann Arbor STEAM school was. . . picking up steam and getting ready to roll. You can follow them on Twitter, if you do that, at @a2steam.

4. For the second time in two years, a big contingent of administrators and teachers went to Singapore. Jenna Bacolor, the Director of Ann Arbor Rec & Ed, blogged about it: post #1, post #2, post #3.

5. Jeanice Swift hit her one-year anniversary as Ann Arbor superintendent--generally, I think, to positive reviews. [And if you have an issue with something she does, or if you want to offer some praise, I suggest you email her directly at swift@aaps.k12.mi.us. I have found her to be remarkably responsive to emails. In fact, I'm not exactly sure when she sleeps.]

6. We have enlisted 10. Yes. TEN. candidates for Ann Arbor school board. For four positions. I think that's fantastic!

7. The school board began and intensified very serious discussions about annexing Whitmore Lake schools.

And then there's Ypsilanti: 

Meanwhile, Ypsilanti Community Schools--only a year old--has lots of new staff, including a new athletic director and band director (those two things, I think will make a lot of people happy); has a new superintendent (who was the old Willow Run superintendent, and the assistant superintendent last year)--Laura M. Lisiscki, llisiscki@ycschools.us ; has 18 candidates for 7 school board positions; reconfigured some schools, and had Holmes Elementary try a year-round "balanced calendar" schedule.

And statewide: 

1. The Detroit Free Press ran a blockbuster series of articles on charter schools. Really, it gives me hope for investigative journalism.

2. This caused the State Board of Education and Superintendent to finally promise to take some action on regulating charter schools--finally! You can look at it as "too little, too late" or "better late than never."

3. A new organization, Michigan Teachers and Allies for Change, got started. It is "Devoted to raising awareness & taking action to refocus our state's resources on our students and communities." This past week, they had a rally in Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor's own Superintendent Jeanice Swift, Representative Jeff Irwin, teacher Quinn Straessel, some Ann Arbor students, and several others were speakers. And several school board candidates were there. I had put out a call for someone to take pictures, and many thanks to Jack Panitch for sending me some! As it happens, I was able to stop by for a few minutes, and found a great spirit there. I also found they were giving out free ice cream sandwiches--and with that, they surely won over my heart (well, more like my stomach. . . )!

Photo by Jack Panitch

Quinn Straessel, Ann Arbor teacher and
one of the initiators of M-TAC. Photo by Jack Panitch.

I really like the context of the historic sign in the background,
"Residential Life in Mid-19th Century Ann Arbor," with the
"Public School=Democracy" sign. Photo by Jack Panitch.

Ann Arbor Superintendent Jeanice Swift promised in her job interview
that she would be willing to engage with the state legislature
to advocatefor adequate public school funding, and here she is
speaking at the M-TAC rally. Photo by Jack Panitch.

Photo by Jack Panitch.

Tomorrow. 

Tomorrow is the first day of school for many kids in Michigan.

It is also--sad to say--the last day of publication for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. I did have a few columns in the Chronicle (and experienced some wonderful editing at their hands), but that's not why I'm going to miss them. I'm going to miss them for their attention to local news. We need more of that. For a while they covered the Ann Arbor school board in detail, but then they couldn't do that any more, which was too bad, but really--we need that coverage not just for Ann Arbor, but for every school board and charter school in this nation. Awareness. Reporting. Transparency. 

Is it then that the Chronicle is the end? 

That 

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time? (William Shakespeare, Macbeth)

Don't count on it. Shakespeare could be a real killjoy. I believe that something new, and good, will come along. But Ann Arbor Chronicle, we will miss you!

It's fitting, to me, that on the penultimate day of the publication of the Ann Arbor Chronicle, David Erik Nelson--another Chronicle columnist--wrote a lovely essay about the meaning and need for our public schools, and about some Ann Arbor schools history. 

As a thanks to Mary Morgan and Dave Askins, take a few minutes to read David Erik Nelson's article, and remind yourself what it is, exactly, that teachers do--and why, though your child may say that "nothing" happens in school this year, something probably will. 



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Winter Tales: Reading for a Snowy Weekend

Today is March 1st, and although technically (and based on the weather around us!) winter goes until March 20th/21st, I learned recently that in Australia people say that the season has changed on the first of the month in which the season changes. In other words, I could say that today is spring (although if I lived in Australia, I guess I'd be saying that today is fall!).

This is Andersen's cut out (he was a
papercut artist) of the Snow Queen.

The Snow Queen, and Other Hans Christian Andersen tales

In any case, I fell asleep last night thinking about the story of the Snow Queen in a favorite book of mine growing up--Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales. I haven't seen Frozen (until I started this blog post I didn't know it was based on the Snow Queen), and I haven't seen any of the other movie versions of the Snow Queen, and it was one of my least favorite stories in the book (too long! seven parts! too difficult to read! and icy, icy, icy!). Probably it was the icy! icy! icy! part that made me think of it last night, but I found myself remembering one of the illustrations in the book I owned, in great detail.

Owl Moon by Jane Yolen

The cover of the book.

Dad takes his daughter out one night, owling. She explains, "When you go owling, you have to be quiet!"

Have you gone owling this winter? I did go looking for (and found) the snowy oils at Willow Run Airport on Christmas Day. And I did hear a screech owl. But that's about it, so far. March can be a good time to look for Great Horned Owls.

Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge

Taken from wikimedia. This is an illustration from the 1876
French translation of the novel. It is in the public domain
because the copyright has expired. Les Patins d’argent,
éditeur Hetzel et Cie, bibliothèque d’éducation et de récréation

It has been a long time since I read this book, where Hans and his sister Gretel are hoping to win teel bladed skates in a race, rather than the hand-carved wooden skates they have. I thought I would include it because--after all--we did just finish the winter Olympics, and it does give you some insight into how speed skating became a Dutch sport.

The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I wrote about this book once before. Reading it as an adult, I realized two things. 1) It is truly a tale of near-starvation. 2) It is very hard to imagine how isolated, and bored, we would be living in blizzard after blizzard, far from other people and with little to entertain us.

The Moffats by Eleanor Estes

Cover of the first edition.

Strictly speaking, this is not a book about winter at all. It is about the lives of four children and their mother, living in Connecticut. I love Eleanor Estes, and I love the Moffats series.
But there is one scene that is so vivid to me, when they run out of coal in winter and need to get more coal, that I thought I would include this anyway.

The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats

Cover of The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats.

Last, but not least, let's hope that in all this snow we are able to still enjoy, and wonder at, the snow--just as Peter does, in The Snowy Day.

"He walked with his toes pointed out, then he walked with his toes pointed in. 

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This Week's Observations: Banned Books, Technology, and Charters

Plymouth-Canton Schools (which actually do draw a small number of students from Washtenaw County have banned two books from an AP English class. The books? Toni Morrison's Beloved, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and which the New York Times called ""the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." The second book is Graham Swift's Waterland, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
This whole kerfuffle came about because a couple of parents complained about the books. It's unclear to me whether proper procedure was followed. Did the interim superintendent follow procedure? Is there procedure? (I don't know the details though, so I can't say for sure about that. I understand that some of the school board members are very conservative.) In any case. . . speculation aside. . . the ACLU of Michigan has written the district a letter. According to the ACLU's press release,

the ACLU of Michigan reminded the district that although schools have broad discretion in setting curriculum, the U.S. Supreme Court has held repeatedly that banning books because they offend some runs afoul of the First Amendment. While parents have the right to guide their own child’s education, that right does not extend to restricting other students’ educational opportunities. (Emphasis added.)

In addition, I'll just note the tremendous irony of banning books in a high school AP class because of "mature subjects." I mean, AP classes are supposed to be like college. College is all about reading books that challenge us! In case you're wondering about the reasons that we shouldn't be trying to create colleges out of high schools, I think you just saw one reason in action--it makes some parents too uncomfortable.

Christine Stead, Ann Arbor school board member, has started a blog of her own. I'm planning to link to it in my blogroll, and you should take a minute to check it out at k12christinestead.com. She tells me she's new at blogging, so if you have ideas of subjects that you hope she will cover, or reflections about what she writes, feel free to let her know in the comments. (Bloggers love comments. :)  By the way, do I think it is competition? No. I'm a parent, not a school board member. It's more like have several restaurants on the same street--the more the merrier--that way you can choose if you want Chinese or Italian. There are, by the way, a gazillion education blogs out in the world. I've only linked to a few of them on my blogroll.

The Ann Arbor schools have joined the twitterverse! Follow them at @a2schools. Follow Saline schools at @salineschools. Follow Dexter schools at @dexterschools. And follow Ypsilanti schools at @ypsischools. Saline schools also have several sub-twitter feeds (the high school principal, the athletics department, etc.) Oh, and follow me at @schoolsmuse.

Some interesting things have been going on at the first charter school I ever profiled, Ann Arbor Learning Community, and they illuminate some of the issues around charter schools, even for schools that are locally organized, non-profit charters. Annarbor.com has an article, Parents fight for reinstatement of teacher at Ann Arbor Learning Community, which describes how a well-liked teacher was put on administrative leave. In examining this issue, let's leave aside the question of whether the administrative leave was the right decision--I don't know anything about their personnel matters.
The first thing that struck me has to do with teacher turnover--something that is often mentioned in critiques of charter schools. Not only has the "dean" of the school, Ticheal Jones, just left (in the middle of the school year!) for "personal" reasons, but according to the article, "Parents say the teacher’s forced absence is the third instance of this nature that the school has experienced in less than a year."
The second thing that struck me has to do with control of hiring and firing. In a typical public school district, the ultimate authority for hiring and firing would reside with the superintendent's office, but there would generally be a human resources department. And really, what is more important than the personnel you have teaching and working with the students? Here, it turns out, the hiring and firing is done by a group called Michigan Educational Personnel Services.

Carlie Lockwood, the vice president of human resources for MEP stressed that MEP works very closely with the dean, who is responsible for conducting teacher evaluations. But wait. . . didn't the dean just leave? I'm not sure why, or where that leaves things. There is an interim dean, and he was also recruited by MEP.

According to the article,

While AALC is a self-managed charter school, it contracts with Brighton-based MEP for its teachers and staff, said Malverne Winborne, director of Eastern Michigan University’s Charter Schools Office.
“MEP hires and places the employees,” Winborne said.
EMU is the authorizer of AALC, a K-8 school that was founded in 1997.

This is a typical arrangement for charter schools, particularly smaller charter schools--the schools hire someone else to do the hiring and firing of teachers (the teachers aren't really working for AALC, they are working for MEP) because the school (board) doesn't believe they have the skills or resources to do the hiring themselves. And by outsourcing this critical role, the school board gives up much of the local control that they ostensibly wanted in the first place.

And what does EMU's Charter Schools Office have to say about this? Not much, at least not publicly.

As much as we complain about the "transparency" issues with our local public district school boards, next to the charter schools they look crystal clear, and the charter school boards' transparency looks very muddy. In fact, that may be because as it turns out, those local charter school boards have precious little power or control. At least, right now, that's the way it seems to me.

Bookishness

I was standing at the counter at Nicola's Books, and I heard someone ask a staff person, "I'm looking for a book for an eight-year-old boy..." which just set me off onto a rumination of kids' books.

Fantasy
This past year, I discovered two fantasy series I liked. I'm not pretending they are new, just that I hadn't read the Charlie Bone series of books (Jenny Nimmo) or the Garth Nix series Keys to the Kingdom.

Mystery
Just a couple of weeks ago I discovered a new kids' mysteries author: Diane Stanley. (Try The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy.) They are different, but almost as good as, Wendelin Van Draanen's Sammy Keyes mystery series, or Blue Balliet's art and architecture mysteries, like Chasing Vermeer. (Calling them art and architecture mysteries makes them sound lame, and they are so seriously the antithesis of lame).

Classics
Then I started thinking about The Secret Garden, The Moffats, and the book I read about fifty times in high school, The Hobbit (yes, a book can be a classic and fantasy too).

Historical Fiction
I was standing in line at Nicola's buying Avi's The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle for my 11-year-old, who said, when I gave it to him, "I heard that's a good book." (I wonder who he heard that from?)

You could also try Avi's Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway? (a lighter story about the radio), or Linda Sue Park's book about the Japanese take over of Korea during WWII, When My Name Was Keoko.

Realistic Fiction
If you liked Harriet the Spy (which I will confess I did not), you will probably like Madeleine George's book Looks. At least, my husband told me the characters reminded him of the characters in Harriet the Spy. It is called realistic fiction because it has that real middle school/high school feeling--in other words, not everybody is nice...

Poetry
Ever and always, Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses.
Or if you want a really great anthology, try A Child's Anthology of Poetry, edited by Elizabeth Hauge Sword.

Why am I telling you this? In case you end up at Nicola's like me, looking for that perfect book...

Books, Books, Books: Racing to the Top, Middle, Bottom

Hat Tip to Assorted Stuff, who pointed me to Diane Ravitch's column in the Washington Post, where she comments on the Race to the Top, and suggests three books about education reform, from different points of view, that people might find thought-provoking.

Here is the column.

And while we're on recommendations, maybe we should be reading Ravitch's latest book (I have not read any of these books): The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

12%

I learned today, listening to NPR's Here and Now, that "At least 12% of all children in the U.S. have disabilities – or special needs."

They then broadcast some parents reading excerpts from the book, My Baby Rides the Short Bus: The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Disabilities.

It's the May 12, 2010 edition of Here and Now, scroll down to the bottom (it was the last segment), Reflections from Parents with Special Needs Children, and click on the Listen button. Or--go buy the book.
The essays are very moving.

What I'm Reading

A favorite professor in graduate school advised my class to "read widely," advice I try to take. He also advised us to keep a journal, which is something I don't do (yet).

What I've been reading recently:
The Klipfish Code by Mary Casanova: An upper-elementary adventure book, focused on the resistance of the Norwegian people against the Nazis during WWII. I actually stayed up late reading it.
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely: Dan Ariely is a regular commentator on NPR's Marketplace. He writes about behavioral economics--why, for instance, is the idea of "free" merchandise so compelling, even when an overall discount might save us more? Teachers and students should all read the chapter about procrastination.
Tee Time in Berzerkistan by Doonesbury: Honestly, Doonesbury seems even more prescient when you read the cartoons looking back in time.

Also, I've been reading several mysteries--I'm enjoying a series set in Maine by Sarah Graves--as well as the fabulous monthly "newsmagazine," Funny Times.