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Other Duties as Assigned: Go to Honduras

Jan 28th, 2011
by Lily.
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As vice president of the National Education Association, it’s hard to explain to someone what I actually do.

Constitutionally I do “others duties as assigned by the President”. Fortunately for me, our NEA President, Dennis Van Roekel, assigned me to learn as much as I could about what was going on in the world outside the NEA.

Inside, we are all experiencing times that try educators’ souls as we struggle to make sense of some expert’s solution to fix education’s problems that were caused by some previous expert’s solution to fix education’s problems.

Some of our schools are able to survive the experts and are succeeding on every measure. Some of our schools are failing. Our kids are counting on us to find real ways to turn these schools around.

So I went to Honduras to learn the process that an amazing group of caring people at Heifer International use to turnaround rural communities in poverty.

You might think a poor village in the mountains of Honduras would have little to do with schools in inner-city Los Angeles or Denver suburbs or Broken Bow, Oklahoma. You’d be wrong.

(more…)

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We’re Not Waiting for a Comic Book Hero

Oct 28th, 2010
by Lily.
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(This post was also featured in La Plaza)

The producer of Waiting for Superman says he didn’t mean to imply that all Charter Schools were better than all Public Schools. He failed. That’s exactly what he seems to be saying.

But public school teachers and support staff are used to politicians and pundits ignoring their voices. Why would a movie director who needed a simple story of good guys and bad guys be any different?

If only he had asked us, “Show me something that works,” we could have shown him a story worth telling. There are so many Clark Kent heroes who are specifically focused on immigrant communities and the success of Latino and other students of color.

I would have loved to have shown him Las Vegas. It would have been a different movie if he had seen how the Clark County Education Association is working with their superintendent and school board on school empowerment projects. They are transforming public schools with the radical notion that when you bring the school community together to discuss what’s working and what has to change, they will be creative problem solvers.

(more…)

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Questions the Media Should Be Asking About Education

May 24th, 2010
by Lily.
2 comments

I knew what was coming. I knew from the pre-show questions the producer asked me off camera how “balanced” the Friends would be.

Q. Wouldn’t you say that the key to reform is to fire bad teachers, which is now impossible?
A. Well, I’m so glad you asked the question because a lot of people out there don’t understand that all teachers have is a fair way for a good teacher to defend herself if she is treated unfairly and that process is develo…

Q. Excuse me, but wouldn’t you say that it’s impossible to reform schools because unions protect bad teachers from being fired?
A. Again, there’s a lot of misunderstanding. Our unions reformed teacher pay and dismissal processes years ago to protect good people from being fired because an administrator didn’t like a teacher’s religion or wanted to pay men more than women or lay off black teachers before white teachers. We work to make sure good people are protected from discrim…

Q. Excuse me again, but wouldn’t you say that the problem with schools today comes down to bad teachers and the unions that protect them?
A. Oh fer cryin out loud are you totally out of your mi…

So, I knew what was coming.

I had my few minutes on Fox & Friends to discuss what needed to be done to help the children who live in our country’s most challenged neighborhoods and who come to school with every disadvantage imaginable.

I knew the questions would all be hostile. I knew that the guest on my right would blame our teachers. I knew the guest on my left would blame our unions. I didn’t want to blame anybody. I wanted to talk about Putnam City West High School. (more…)

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She So Gets It

May 20th, 2010
by Lily.
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There is a very smart new Member of Congress from California who gets it.

Congresswoman Judy Chu is tired of jumping on rickety legislative bandwagons of blame and shame and name the bad guys and all will be magically right with all of our schools.

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She’s an educator.  So she knows it’s complicated. So she knows as we start down that road to reauthorizing (read that:  getting rid of the Stupid Stuff in) No Child Left, what we need to leave behind are those gimmicks of abusing high-stakes tests and pretending they mean something they don’t.

She’s put together a compelling case for rethinking what real.

Today she presented her white paper (pdf).  There’s a little tear-stain of hope on my copy.   Because she calls for exactly what President Obama promised we would do first in reauthorizing a law that was supposed to give a leg up to children who face life’s greatest challenges and live in our most disadvantaged communities.

The President said, “We are going to stop doing things that don’t work.”

(more…)

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