Malaise

Last week my school was evaluated "objectively" by a jury of our peers.

This week we are in a funk. We knew we had our problems, but we have spent so many years comparing our work to that of the other urban schools in our district, that we started to think we were doing a good job. Thus it was difficult to hear that our instructional strategies (which we thought were pretty good) were not up to snuff.

Different segments of the school population are handling this funk differently. Teachers are looking for professional development to improve instructional strategies (which were found wanting), or trying to form informal groups designed to provide the instructional leadership that is missing higher up the pay-scale. Students are being a bit hostile (which is a typical teenage reaction to adults when the adults are less forgiving). And the Administration is planning to solve our instructional difficulties with more administering. That means teachers will be receiving more emails about being rigorous, with more links to poorly written doctoral theses in education, but little in the way of observations or suggestions for improvement.

We all know what needs to happen, teachers must make more of what time they have. We need to spend less time on simple recall of facts, and we need to spend more time on the complex evaluation of those facts. Most of my colleagues take no issue with this. Our funk does not stem from the fact that there is room for improvement in our performance. It stems from the fact that our cheese has been moved again. For years we were told that to do well, our students had to do well on the state mandated tests. We worked hard to improve their performance, and we were broadly successful. Now we receive this evaluation, and the principal, the superintendent, and a broad swath of district administrators all say "DO BETTER" while offering little to guide us. They all begin the process of instituting some sort of minor change at their level that is meant to fix the problem, but they offer very little in the way of actual leadership. Each of my many bosses heard this news and focussed in on some tiny facet of the larger problem to beat into the ground.

Our funk stems from the fact that we have little faith that these efforts will help us become better teachers. We are worried that lots of new paperwork is in the offing, that we are not doing a very good job, that the students aren't getting all they could out of our classes, and we aren't exactly sure how to solve the real issue of improving the quality of what we do every day.

Returning for Accreditation

And thus we return. After a long summer, and a long September, I have returned on the first day of our accreditation visit to discuss the process of proving that your school is still educating kids.

Every 10 years a group of teachers and administrators from nearby schools form a committee to assess our school based on 7 indicators of success. The indicators are complex, and don't bear summary. Suffice it to say, these 7 indicators break down every aspect of a school, and set standards for success or failure. We have been working on our evaluation report for the last 3 years, and as co-chair of the steering committee, I have been partly responsible (without any power) for herding our staff into evaluating ourselves.

In the past month, my co-chair and I have spent all of our free time fielding questions from everyone from the janitors to the Assistant Superintendent of schools. In the past three weeks, every broken ceiling tile and every water stain has been covered up. Bushes that have never been trimmed in all the time that we been in this building, were cut down and replaced. There are literally posters placed over holes in the wall. On a personal note I have had no fewer than 30 conversations in which someone above my pay grade tells me "We take this very seriously." when they haven't even thought about the success or failure of our school since our last visit 10 years ago.

Amidst all of this craziness, with a whole district worth of administration (and that's a lot of administration) putting up tiles to cover leaky pipes, and dragging out tablecloths to cover beat up tables, I am very proud. I am proud of my colleagues. While everyone above us is trying to spruce up a C+ school, my colleagues are trying to actually improve our score. I have been impressed on a daily basis by all of the little ways that our teachers have sought to improve their practice, all of the paperwork they have completed and all of the meetings they have attended above and beyond their contract to ensure that our school comes out of this visit having earned high marks.

More to come...