What does Achievement look like?

This time last year, I was planning a combined English and social studies middle school course, and comparing it to kangaroos and joeys. This time last year, I hadn’t met my wonderful roommate. This time last year, I still had someone teaching the exact same course as me. This time last year, I was at Round Zero, the first in-region training that Teach for America corps members participate in. This time last year, I was still bright eyed and bushy tailed. Ha.

This year, I’m back at Peace College, helping guide new corps members through their R0 experience. It’s changed a bit since I was here. There is much more structured work time in content areas. English is trying a new pilot training program, so they’re not hanging out with the social studies crew. They’re not spending copious amounts of time on the goal setting assistant. I guess they figure we all know how to use it and can help the newbies, unlike last year when our second years were still using the old, arbitrary growth/mastery setting system. The biggest change though, is that the focus is no longer on passing the courses necessary to graduate high school, or meeting other grade-level standards. For this 2010 corps, the height of achievement is “college ready.” After one day here, it was a constant refrain from the moment I set foot on the Peace campus at 9:42 this morning.

On the one hand, I love it. College attendance and graduation is the final frontier of the battle against the achievement gap. It is the one last, highest obstacle keeping my students from having the same economic and social life opportunities that I have had and will have. It shifts our focus to critical thinking and soft social skills and the ability to express oneself. It injects our goals and plans with a new level of rigor that I longed for when I started this process last year. I spent hours lamenting its absence in these same classrooms a year ago. So, on the one hand, I started the morning so excited, energized and blown away by the work these new CMs were doing, the questions they were asking and the goals they were setting.

Then that afternoon, we started unit planning, which involves unit assessments and discussing what skills and knowledge students will exhibit at the end of your first unit. And suddenly this emphasis on “college ready” didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. How can we claim to be setting feasible (and rigorous) goals if we are also holding our students who are multiple years below grade level to “college ready” level work after one unit? Even in my private, suburban school, there was a sense that the work was going to get more difficult and the bar be set higher as we went through the year. That kind of growth and achievement doesn’t happen over night. It seems like our first unit should be merely a first step towards college ready, and college ready a goal that our work scaffolds toward over the entire year.

That is my concrete reason for becoming frustrated today; I have a more controversial, possibly less P.C. concern as well: Part of me feels that on some level it is rather presumptuous of us to come into a county where the only jobs are with the school system or a chicken processing plant and say that the only kind of academic achievement worth bothering with is the kind you get from a college education. Even Obama “the Socialist” allows for the idea of career readiness.

If I convince my students to go to college, there is a 99% chance that they will have to move out of the county to find work once they graduate - especially if they ever want to repay any loans they have. That means leaving their family and the only community most of them have ever known. That was not the choice I was facing by deciding that I was going to attend college. That is not the choice facing most upper and middle income people who chose to go to college.

The huge cost and long-term economic burden are also things that many upper and some middle income students don’t have to consider when deciding whether or not to attend college. And this isn’t NYC or LA we’re talking about here - there aren’t scholarships or charitable organizations to offer them or student friendly jobs in the area. There aren’t even any truly local institutions to pick from - any student who choses to attend college in our area would need to get an apartment, live in campus housing, or commute - all expensive options compared to living at home and walking or taking public transport in a city.

I don’t mean to say that we shouldn’t be teaching our students the skills they need to be successful in college. If we did that, we would at best be maintaining the status quo. But I think there is some value in being honest about the fact that not all Americans are going to want or need a liberal arts college education, and that we need to be addressing the knowledge and skills that will help our students become exemplary technical/vocational college graduates, reliable and competent workers and citizens - if for no other reason than “college ready” isn’t going to motivate all of our students, and may actually discourage some.

I say all of this and then feel like a horrible racist classist bigot, but I worked so hard last year to motivate students with the idea of high school and college, and they were so disconnected from that idea that it was like pulling out my own teeth with my bare hands to motivate them with that. Something a little closer to home - a job, money, a car, a good grade, passing to the next grade - that’s what matters.

And, of course, in true TFA style, the program director I was discussing this with had a comeback vision of taking our students to visit colleges, because as mentioned above, part of their ambivalence is not understanding what college is or why it’s good; visits would help expose them to the culture and experience of college and possibly make it a more concrete reality. Right. Now let’s remember the educational system, generally, that we are working in: there’s no money for transportation; systems are beholden to standardized tests that have nothing to do with whether or not a student understands why they should go to college and anything not relevant to the tests gets cut. Yeah. A district is really going to support this idea of trips to colleges - something that increases costs with no direct impact on AYP except maybe a negative one due to lost instructional time.

I don’t know. I think college ready could be a good piece of a Big Goal “vision” but I don’t think I’m sold on this emphasis. It will be interesting to see what ubiquitous TFA data says about it at the end of the year. I hope I’m wrong and that this new approach leads to wildly successful corps members, because that will mean wildly successful students. I really hope it works - and not just in NYC, but ENC as well, but I have a bad feeling about it. It just feels too far up the rigor line, not at the intersection of rigorous and feasible.

I believe in myself and my ability to do my best.

This post is the second in a nine-part series analyzing the Power Pledge.

I believe in myself and my ability to do my best

I can almost hear some of my kids.

“‘I believe in myself’? If you mean I believe that I can whoop all these n***as here? Then, yeah, sure I believe in myself.”

“Right. Not after failing the last three grades twice.”

“Do my best at what? What does that even mean? What if my best isn’t good enough?”

What does it mean to believe in yourself? One needs a sense of self-worth, self-confidence, trust in yourself and in others. Believing in yourself is not safe. Believing in yourself means you are going to take risks, you gamble that you won’t embarass yourself and hope that others will respect the fact that you tried and gave your best effort.

Believing in yourself relies on that belief being validated from time to time. Some people take this for granted. I know I did. Why shouldn’t I do well in the science fair? I’m smart, I understand my project and the results my experiments generated. I got an A on that research paper? Well of course I did, I always get As.

Would I have believed in myself without this history of success? Would you believe in yourself if you had failed an assignment? A test? A grade? Many of us wouldn’t. Continuing to believe in yourself, take those risks, gamble on yourself and others - it would only open you up to more failure, more ridicule, an increasing sense of worthlessness.

This is the understanding of self my students combat each and every day. We demand them to reclaim their belief in themselves, by making them say it. By saying it ourselves, by believing in them, by believing in each other.

And then we push them further. Not only must they believe in themselves, they must take it a step further and believe that they can do something than a half effort. They have to believe they are capable of something called “best.” Not good, not better - best. Each morning in that warehouse-turned-school-building we make them say not only are we able, we are capable - and not only are we capable, we are capable of “best,” of greatness.

But it is absent the pressure of THE. We do not demand THE best. We demand your best. We promised our boys we would meet them where they are and this is a reflection of that promise. This does not mean that we have lowered our standards; we believe in you and expect that one day you will be The Best, but for now we need to see your best and want to watch that grow.

An analysis of the Power Pledge

Each morning, just before becoming a shuffling stampede on their way to class, our Hivesmen recite the Power Pledge. In a series of nine posts, I'm going to try to convey what this set of words - beliefs and promises reforged each weekday - means for my students and what it means for me.

Our Power Pledge

Our. Collective ownership. This word implies that we have something in common. Something shared. But how can that be? This "we," this "our," the collective owner is a disparate group of black and white, north and south, rich and poor, young and old, actually grown and think they grown, bloods and crips and clueless, haves, have-nots, hopeful and a hair away from giving up. But there it is - Our. Our Power Pledge. It is a reinforcement of our common mission each day we enter that building; we're here to learn, to teach, to challenge and grow. It is a reaffirmation of the promise we made the first time we walked in the warehouse doors; to leave the outside, outside and transform ourselves within those walls into Team Hive. Collective, community. Our.

Power. Energy, enfranchisement, empowerment, ability, strength, confidence. Power.

Pledge. A promise to self and comrade. A creed. Shared prayer of beliefs and convictions. Failure and doubt have no meaning here. Promises do carry the possibility of being broken or unmet, but there is unfailing trust in good intentions. The path created by the pledge is there, and we know that each may stumble, but not for lack of trying. And each day is a chance to re-pledge, re-commit and promise to try again.