TeachersTopic

TeachersTopic is a periodical feature about a subject of interest to the teaching community written by a prominent expert in the field. This month, Dan Brown answers questions about charter schools. You can learn more about Dan at the end of the interview.

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Charter Schools

Answers by Dan Brown

1. You work at a very unique charter school, The SEED School of Washington D.C., could you offer a brief description of your school, how it selects its students, and what is unique about its curriculum and mode of teaching?

SEED has a unique niche; it's an urban, non-selective, college-prep public boarding school. Students are admitted by lottery, unless they already have an older sibling at SEED. Up until this year, SEED served grades 7-12 and seventh grade was the only entry point. This year is SEED DC's first year with a 6th grade, so we accepted 6th and 7th graders. In future years, only rising 6th graders will be able to enter the lottery.

Lots of students enter SEED with below-grade-level skills, but well over 90% of the ones who make it to graduation are accepted to 4-year colleges. This is my second year at SEED, and the school is making a successful effort to retain more students and teachers.

The school has two full staffs: the academic faculty (day time) and the student life staff (afternoon/evening/ overnight). The academic faculty is led by our principal, who is a co-equal on the org chart with the Director of Student Life. We have a Head of School who is the leader of the whole operation, and the SEED Foundation, based in downtown DC, handles development, alumni support, and other administrative logistics. A SEED School of Maryland opened with a 6th grade in Baltimore County last year. Plans are in the works for other SEED Schools around the country.

ISEED DC is by no means impervious to the challenges of city schools, but we don't have issues like rampant fighting or abysmal attendance that plague other DC schools. Since the kids live on campus during the week, attendance is great. Class sizes are also small; I teach five sections of English 11, English 12, and AP Lit, and my class size ranges from 11 to 16. Last year I had one class with seven kids. It was amazing. I receive great support from the administrators, and significant autonomy in designing curriculum so long as I tie my instruction to DC standards.

Because of SEED's unique model, we've received quite a bit of attention, most notably President Obama's bill signing of the Edward Kennedy Serve America Act in April of this year, where he called SEED "a true success story." In the last year, we've also been profiled in Time Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, and 60 Minutes.

2. Your book, The Great Expectations School, highlights your experiences at an elementary school, P.S 85, in the Bronx. How did you come to write your book and what prompted your move from a NY elementary school to a secondary public charter in D.C.?

I never intended to write about my rookie year while I was living it; I was in survival mode, just trying to get by week to week. Also, I planned on returning to PS 85 for at least a second year. However, the way the year ended made that impossible. After the last day of school, I went from being intensely busy to having a ton of time on my hands.

At first, I wrote for the eyes of my compatriots. I felt like we had been through something dramatic and important together, and I had the tools and the time now to set it down on paper and tell the tale. I banged out 60 or 70 pages in less than a week. My fellow Fellows were so positive about it that I convinced myself that this story could find a readership. For one thing, it had all the ingredients of gripping high drama and it was all real. Also, I could find very few teacher memoirs in the bookstores. There are very few book-length unfiltered accounts out there of what it's really like to teach.

It took me a year of obsessive writing (padded by delivering flowers) to pull together a draft that was ready to send out. I solicited notes from everyone I knew who was willing to read. My then-girlfriend (now-wife) Colleen read it 5 or 6 times. My mom probably read 20 or more drafts. I was rejected by 80 agents over a span of 9 months until I signed with Linda Langton. Then we received 55 rejections from publishers over the next 6 months before Arcade Publishing signed on. But now it's a happy ending!

As far as changing jobs and cities, they are two different issues for me. After teaching 4th grade at PS 85 and the Collegiate School, I realized that, although I loved my 4th-graders, I was more passionate about the content of literature and higher-level writing than I was about the fourth grade curriculum. I get more fired up discussing Richard Wright than I do for Louis Sachar.

The move to DC was for family reasons. I now teach in a charter school, but not for any ideological reasons. My school just seemed the most interesting and offered me the job I wanted. I get to have small classes (11 to 15 students) and a lot of ownership over my curriculum.

3. After working in both charter and non-charter public schools, what would you say the pros and cons of public charters are generally?

Every public charter, by definition, is its own little bubble universe. Of course, all publicly funded schools share state standards and the state exams, but otherwise I see charters as individual, self-contained environments. This can be wonderful or terrible. For example, some charters are started up by people in over their heads, and you've got bedlam. It's unbelievably hard to build a successful school. Other charters are great ideas when conceived, but they can't draw students or a workable site.

I love my charter school, because I see the school environment as liberating and an improvement over the DCPS norm. My classes range in size from 11 to 15 students; that alone is a ringing endorsement. I also get a lot of autonomy in shaping my curriculum. My colleagues are great and the atmosphere of the school is generally positive. However, despite my positive experience, I don't see charters as a panacea for education reform; they're an alternative option for some parents. Across the country, the regular public school system still serves the overwhelming majority of students and that's not going to change.

I'd prefer DCPS schools to come down to 20 pupils per class while providing teachers more freedom (with fair accountability) and a less punitive environment. Then we wouldn't need as many charter schools in DC. I'd also prefer to be part of a union (I'm not, as a charter school teacher) so that I'd have some leverage in collective bargaining. My wages and benefits are competitive, but benefit cuts or termination could occur at any moment and without any recourse or due process because charter school teachers are at-will employees.

Charter schools can be excellent platforms for innovation, but they shouldn't be viewed as candidates for supplanting the entire public school system. Only for-profit corporations (like Edison Schools, Inc.), salivating at the possibility of raking in all of those per-pupil allotments, would benefit from that kind of revolution.

4. You have taught in both an elementary and a secondary school with large numbers of "disadvantaged" students. Based on your experience, what are your views on the "achievement gap" and the dilemma of schools serving larger populations of students in poverty?

The opportunity gap (my preferred term) starts at birth, where, typically, lower-income babies are read to less and learn fewer words than wealthier babies. From there, they fall further and further behind. There are a zillion reasons for this. One is that access to educationally supportive day care and quality pre-K are unequally distributed along social class lines. By the time kids start kindergarten; most lower-income children are entering a formal learning environment for the first time, while their wealthier counterparts have, for years had more opportunities to be steeped in academically stimulating activities.

When students start the race several years behind, frustration follows. That frustration can manifest in oppositional behavior ("I don't care about school!"), fear of failure and lack of trying, and low self-esteem. Then the students can't catch up because they're really down on themselves and on school in general. Even if they were fired up, they may also have lousy access to the resources needed to make such an intense academic leap

Of course, this is not at all the case for all students, but I think the large-scale effect of unequal access (based on income) to academically supportive environments for young people foments an opportunity gap.

Many of my students struggle with poverty. Many of my students do not, but they still live in Washington, DC, where there are plenty of environments outside the school walls that are hostile to academic achievement. My school advocates "code-switching" as a term for seeking to succeed in both school and neighborhood environments. It's hard, and low-income neighborhoods can devour young people. However, this kind of code-switching awareness of a need to overcome the street by mastering a new language (Lisa Delpit's "language of power") is, I think, the right approach to opening up new opportunities and boosting achievement.

When students can understand a road map to college that is tangible and attractive, without demanding they renounce their roots, motivation and achievement can soar.

5. What are your thoughts about the current policy discussion around teacher quality and effectiveness?

I'm worried that policy-makers are out of touch with the realities of classroom life. If you don't spend time in classrooms with students and teachers, it's too easy to push an ideology of more and more high-stakes testing, which is what's happening. It's gotten to the point where "test scores" and "student performance" are used interchangeably.

Teachers ought to have more of a voice in crafting accountability tools. Unfortunately, our culture does not respect teachers enough to demand that they receive this seat at the table. I hate for my final note here to be an angry one, but some of the test-centered mandates forced on public school classrooms are just madness. Teachers' unions--- ideally the major conduits for teachers' voices in ed policy--- seem to elicit uninformed, reflexive scorn from a critical mass of Americans. Nobody's listening to what's really going on. I love TeachersCount, but its very name rings of protest. The notion that teachers count (and for a whole lot!) must be built into the fabric of our society.

I'm on the fringes of the ed policy scene in DC, and there is a genuine absence of teachers' voices in this conversation. The route to improving schools comes via partnerships with the on-the-ground educators; this thing is all about people. As a country we can't get where we need to be when election-cycle-driven, self-styled "reformers" (like Michelle Rhee) seek to reinvent education through deifying testing and mass-firing teachers.

It takes a village to truly boost student achievement, and teachers have a major role to play in that, and they should be held accountable for their work. Regrettably, it's not so easily quantifiable to measure short- or long-term teacher effectiveness once accepting the truth that test scores only don't equal the sum total of student achievement. We're nowhere near figuring out that kind of authentic measurement. For the foreseeable future, the political winds are with high-stakes testing, even if its results are distorted and inaccurate.

6. What do you think federal, state and local policymakers should do to ensure that children in high-needs schools have effective teachers?

IMore diversified and authentic assessments to measure student achievement, better pay for educators, better student loan forgiveness, lighter teaching loads with more support for rookies, more residency programs to ease the initiation process, more time built into the school day to collaborate with colleagues, caps on class sizes, more mental health support services for students...

If these elements are in place (and they are in many successful schools), you'll have a talented and effective teaching force.

About Dan Brown

Dan Brown teaches at the Seed School of Washington D.C. He is the author of The Great Expectations School and blogs for the Huffington Post. He is a member of the Teacher Leaders Network (TLN), you can visit his TLN blog here .