Grumpy Old Teacher

May 18, a hot Florida Saturday in the middle of the hottest May on record, saw more than 1,000 educators, parents, and advocates for public education (not as Ron DeSantis would define it) gather in Orlando for a day-long meeting known as Bringing Voices Together.

Last night, in a follow-up mass telephone call that put every old-fashioned party line to shame, Fed Ingram, the president of the Florida Educators Association, facilitated a discussion and shared the themes that emerged and recommendations of the attendees for moving forward.

What the attendees wanted: building relationships within our communities and tell people how they can help; directing funding to the schools that need it; ending toxic testing that is biased and overstresses students to the point of illness; providing the mental health resources and support not only to the students who need it, but also to the adults who work in the schools who need it; change.

Change in the false ‘failing public schools narrative,’ change in Florida’s elected officials who do not support public schools, change as listed above.

Many persons were able to speak during the phone call. All supported Florida’s public schools. From the Panhandle to the Keys, from the east coast to the west, from the conservative corners of the north to the liberal bastions of the south, all believed that Florida’s public schools were important in the development of the state and its people and that the schools would be essential in building the state’s future.

Among the recommendations were for future, regional events to bring voices together, which would train advocates in effective ways to bring these conversations to the community. Beyond one’s neighbors, participants want training in how to meet with legislators. It doesn’t take a trip to Tallahassee; in fact, relationship building with legislators in their local offices is far more effective.

Other thoughts were to find ways to share best practices for persuading the public, including providing bilingual materials to bring in Florida’s many immigrant communities.

It’s summertime. What are teachers to do over their long break?

Organize. Stay tuned for more gatherings and then actions.

Florida is shaking off its slumber.

#voices4ed

As we continue to understand who these self-appointed movers and shakers on the First Coast of Florida are, let us look at a brief history as captured by Wikipedia.

First a quote from the introductory paragraph: The entity is akin to a brain trust or think tank, but with influence and resources available.

Influence available: you don’t say … (Sarcasm warning.)

The precursor to this group was the Jacksonville Non-Group [sic], which formed in 1993 to support the Alliance for World-Class Education being pushed by the school district (Duval County Public Schools.)

From the beginning then, this informal coalition of the wealthy and politically-powerful elite was focused on the school system.

The actual Civic Council was formed in 2000 by then-mayor John Delaney, Pete Rummell, Lynn Pappas, Steve Halverson, and Hugh Greene, most of whom remain active in the Council today. It sat inactive until about ten years ago, when Chamber of Commerce members took a trip to Kansas City, saw what the KC Civic Council was doing, and thought, “We can do that in Jacksonville.”

The Jacksonville Non-Group decided to terminate so that its members could transition to the Jacksonville Civic Council (JCC) so that they could be a “more formal and public group.”

Let’s join them! No, they’re not having that. Membership requirements include three years of minimum attendance at meetings (how can anyone attend if they are not a member? Also, they don’t publicize their meetings and GOT doesn’t want to assume, but it’s a likely bet their meetings are not open to the public) and an invitation from one of the officers (like the Freemasons, to be one, ask one.)

Talk about an elite.

While it might be fun for GOT to solicit an invitation, the dues requirement stops that cold: a minimum of $1,000 up to $15,000, depending upon the size of one’s business.

Oops, so there’s another barrier to membership. You must be a business owner. GOT might offer up his side hustle, but then (sigh,) there’s a reason he has a day job. Grand Graffiti publishing is never, ever going to make their cut.

Before moving to the close, here’s another link that provides much of the fodder for the Wikipedia article.

From Wikipedia, one can learn that:

To determine what Jacksonville residents viewed as the most critical issues, the opinion research firm American Viewpoint was hired to design a poll and conduct a six-week study in March 2010. Five issues were identified:

1. balanced budget/fiscal responsibility
2. more jobs
3. better public schools
4. public safety/crime
5. Jaguars staying in Jacksonville

The Jacksonville Civic Council. They talk a good game, but out of their many concerns, it seems they only really focus on item 3: Public Schools.

And many dispute that they want better schools as opposed to privatized schools. The two are not the same as they seem to believe.

*A/k/a the Jacksonville Civic Council.

They’re only trying to help, the Jacksonville Civic Council, which recently sent a letter to the Duval County School Board, to question and criticize the school district’s master plan to upgrade, rebuild, and consolidate schools that will require tax support in the form of an extra half-cent sales tax.

Who are these people, our best friends with only our best interests at heart, and what is their agenda?

From their website, they introduce themselves:

The Jacksonville Civic Council leverages the combined talents, experience and influence of a diverse group of business and civic leaders to accomplish goals that no individual or organization in our community can achieve alone. Established in 2010 as a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, the Civic Council brings together chief executives from the nonprofit, business and government sectors to make Jacksonville the best city it can be.

Working transparently and with no agenda, for the good of our community, the Civic Council strategically identifies crucial issues, conducts research, and identifies — and advocates for — solutions that will result in positive change. Our members deploy their collective resources throughout the process, remaining focused on the goal of a Jacksonville that is vibrant, growing, sustainable and responsive to the needs of its people.

Even in their own words, we find a contradiction. How can they work with “no agenda” when the Council “advocates for–solutions that will result in positive change.” Change as they define it.

GOT has no problem with the Civic Council developing policy goals and working to implement those goals; the problem is their pretense of being disinterested, of having no agenda.

But they are our ‘best friends,’ who only want to talk to us as man-to-man or son-to-son, lyrics that imply an equality of rank, social status, or position that many question the sincerity of. For example, Nate Monroe, Florida Times-Union columnist covering Jacksonville’s local government:

The business and civic establishment have thrown their lot in with charter schools. Indeed, the Civic Council — a private group of downtown CEOs and civic leader types — seems interested in using this opportunity to lift charters at the expense of traditional public schools.

In a letter to the district, the Civic Council complained that some of the proposed new school buildings the sales tax would finance are too expensive. The group argued the district should stop using state building standards for public schools and adopt more relaxed, cheaper standards used by charters.

This is a tone-deaf recommendation, and an unfair one.

The Civic Council wants the public school system to take one of its strengths — that its facilities must meet high-quality minimum buildings standards — and diminish it so charters can compete. And which of these CEOs will send their children to a public school built with these cheaper standards?

The School Board should only consider the Civic Council recommendations if — and only if — each and every Civic Council member signs a public pledge committing their support and personal money to financing the half-cent sales tax campaign.

What are the critical areas in which the Civic Council focuses its efforts? Again, from their website, they have five: A Great and Healthy City, Great Schools (K-12 and beyond), A Growing Economy (with a varied base of growth industries), A Standard of Operational Excellence (at all levels of local government), A Fun and Energetic Community (with a strong downtown, arts, recreation, cultural, and sports environment.) [GOT note: the parentheses are their, not my, additions.]

While the website offers no elaboration on those “five pillars,” it does offer what the Civic Council considers as its values:

The Civic Council was established to provide leadership on issues critical to the community’s long-term success. Although the organization’s structure, priorities and approach to addressing issues may change over time, the following values consistently guide us.

COLLABORATION:

LEADERSHIP: Addressing critical needs and issues when no other organization has the capacity or the will to do so.

FOCUS: Creating an effective civic-leadership model that minimizes inefficiencies and focuses on a few critical priorities at one time in order to solve complex, long-term issues affecting Jacksonville’s quality of life and economic competitiveness.

BROAD CONSTITUENCY: Seeking solutions that will benefit residents and businesses at every level of our community.

ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY: Supporting economic opportunity across race, gender, ethnic and other barriers that limit our potential as a world-class city.

HUMILITY: Sharing ownership of ideas and credit for accomplishments. As a founding member once said, “It is amazing what you can accomplish when you are not worried about who gets the credit.”

TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY: Using knowledge and research-based decisions to reach measurable outcomes.

ADVOCACY: Achieving lasting policy change through education and advocacy with policy makers and stakeholders at the local, state and federal levels.

GOT takes note that the collaboration value is blank. The Jacksonville City Council has nothing to say, nothing that represents a core value, regarding collaboration or working with others, say an elected school board or the local citizenry that does the living, taxpaying, enrolling their children in local schools, and dying in the city.

Did they just tell on themselves? That they don’t really care about your opinion? Or is it some website glitch they need to fix?

*Because kids are hungry in the summer, too.

It’s been a two and a half week hiatus for Grumpy Old Teacher, an unintentional one, which GOT hopes to explain soon in a post titled “Butter Scraped Over Too Much Bread.”

In the meantime, some publicity is in order for the program that fills in during summer recess when schools are not in session and the free/reduced lunch program is not available.

You can hear about the program here via WJCT (NPR Jacksonville, FL) and their First Coast Connect program. Or you can visit this website and look up all the sites where children 18 and under will receive lunch.

To find the nearest location where a child will receive a meal at no cost, visit the website, text “FoodFL” to 877-877, or dial 211. In Jacksonville, you may learn which libraries are providing meals (and reading/enrichment programs) by calling 630-BOOK.

This is not a Jacksonville, FL only program. The website is able to direct other persons wherever they live in the state to a location where the meals will be provided.

May no child go hungry this summer.

Update: Here’s a link to the USDA, which organizes the program. (Thanks to a BAT, Badass Teacher, who responded with the link when I posted in the Facebook group.)

These days, it seems that those of us fighting to save public education are living in the novel, The Lord of the Rings.

Yesterday, public education advocates, teachers, parents, activists (Opt Out Florida, Parents Across Florida among many others), pastors (Florida Pastors for Children), AFT and NEA (Randy Weingarten and Becky Pringle respectively), Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (Keron Blair), a few politicians (legislators, school board members, and superintendents), and other policy groups gathered in Orlando for the purpose of “Bringing Our Voices” together.

In a follow-up post, GOT will report what took place in the World Cafe format. But given the reaction so far, let’s look at who was and was not at the summit, the Council of Elrond.

Gandalf was not there. As Federick Ingram, a/k/a Fed, opened the conference by saying this: there’s no silver bullet. There’s no wizard from the world beyond who has the answers and the strategy. No one is working behind the scenes to move all the players into the right positions.

The Council met to discuss the problem of the RING, the evil it represents, and how it works to get back to the one who will destroy all that we hold dear.

The RING was there, not physically, but in the minds of all: the policies into which the enemy, the privatizers for profit, the politicians who are getting their cut, and the publicans who support them, poured all their malice and cunning. The RING that would return to the hand of Sauron (Betsy Devos or perhaps DeSantis, Corcoran, Diaz et alia, but maybe I’m reaching here) to finish the overthrow of Middle Earth (public schools.)

Aragorn was there with his Rangers. These are the people who do not work in public schools but long have kept watch and fought the efforts of our enemies to overrun them. They lobby in Tallahassee every year, they organize parents and communities, they push opting out of the destructive testing that is at the heart of all that is wrong with how we teach our children … they came. Like Aragorn, they will journey with the quest as long as they have the strength to do so.

We felt the presence of the dwarves, who are now reacting to posts about the day with criticism. Gimli cried, “Never trust an elf!” The naysayers are crying, “You can’t trust Fed! FEA is useless! We have been talking about the RING forever and nothing happens!”

What would you have us do? Sit within our borders until all is overrun by Orcs? Until no school remains, only charters and private schools, supported by a direct diversion of FEFP tax dollars?

We are to do nothing? Let’s hide the RING away? Until the enemy comes for it in numbers we cannot resist?

In the end, Gimli joined the Fellowship of the Ring. Let’s hope others do as well. In the words of Gandalf (slightly altered), “We must unite or we will fall.”

The elves. Yes, the elves, who are leaving Middle Earth. That brings up the slow-moving walkout of teachers as they give up the profession to undertake new careers.

Yet many elves remain to fight. That was the bulk of the attendees, teachers. Teachers who will not go; teachers who want to remain in Middle Earth. Teachers who came to reinforce and support the dawning of a new age.

There were a few Boromirs, those who came with their own agenda. Boromir’s heart was in the right place, but always he sought to put his own city at the forefront. In the end, he turned out right and GOT is sure that the Boromirs in the room will do so as well.

In the end, the Council of Elrond decided upon a daring deed.

In the end, the summit demanded that attendees commit to action. Most did.

This is Florida. In LOTR, at the worst moment, a captain of Rohan lamented, “We cannot defeat them.”

Theoden, the king, responded, “No, we cannot. But we will meet them in battle nonetheless.”

We are not at the moment. We can defeat them. Let’s rise to the battle. But even if you don’t think public education can win, join us. We will meet them in battle nonetheless.

PS: Always the Hobbits get overlooked. Frodo is the solitary hero, but he did get noticed. GOT is not Frodo, maybe he is Merriadoc Brandybuck. Overlooked, unnoticed, not among the movers and shakers who had to be at the summit but he showed up anyway, GOT is okay with that and will do his part so that, when he joins his forefathers, he will not be ashamed.

PPS: #Voices4Ed. Follow it on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms if you want to keep up.

With the oldest school buildings in the state, Diana Greene, Superintendent of Schools for the Duval County Public School district (Florida), commissioned an analysis of its buildings, including condition and capacity. What resulted was a report with recommendations on consolidation, renovation, and replacement. The price tag? Two Billion Dollars.

(That’s before the charters begin demanding a piece of the action.)

The need is real. Few would question it. The boldness of the plan is that it would tackle more than one issue; not only would it renovate or replace outdated facilities, it would also address issues of under-capacity that hamstring the district from building new schools in the developing areas of the county.

That, of course, was going to cause community pushback like what immediately came from the alumni of Raines and Ribault High Schools.

It’s hard to close a school in Jacksonville. That is why many remain open even when it is obvious that consolidation is needed. The advantage to the plan is that, where consolidation is needed, it proposes to merge the schools into a new location so nobody has to feel that somebody won and they lost.

The hard question is how to pay for it. The School Board would like Jacksonville citizens to agree to pay an extra half-cent in sales tax for 15 years.

And now we enter the bizarro world of Florida school politics where power is everything, there’s a whole lot of public dough available for profiteers, and everyone’s scrambling for a piece of the pie even as a lot of Dudley Do-rights try to stop them.

There’s a lot of fodder for many blog posts, this is Jacksonville, Florida after all, but we do have the inimitable A.G. Gancarski of Folio Weekly and Florida Politics fame to do the muckraking. What GOT wants to focus on is the timing.

The timing is terrible. The ink is barely dry … oh, let’s refresh the cliche for our techno times … the characters are hardly typed on the screen when the school board rushes ahead to schedule a referendum for November.

The reasoning is simple even when not stated. The legislature passed a new law, taking effect on January 1, 2020, that all future tax referendums must be placed on a general election ballot. If the November referendum does not happen, the voters will not get to decide for a year and a half, which will delay the new funding for at least a year, maybe two.

Then again, the legislature did not approve a proposal that a two-thirds supermajority is needed to pass local tax referendums, but most experts expect that this idea will resurface in next year’s session. If that happens, no additional tax proposals will ever pass. Two-thirds is a threshold too high. It has never happened even for the Better Jacksonville Plan.

If the vote doesn’t take place now, it never will.

Thus, GOT understands why the School Board is moving ahead even as the details of the plan are not final.

Yet, GOT also understands why the city’s politicians are reluctant to get on board until more is known and the details are worked out.

It’s a mess and thanks to the Florida legislature and the politicians that dominate state government, the School Board is playing a game of Calvinball, a game where the rules are made up and change on a whim so as to produce the desired result.

(Spoiler alert! That’s not to take care of the needs of Florida’s public schools. For those of you confused by the current governor’s doublespeak a la the novel 1984, those are the schools also known as traditional or neighborhood.)

There are a lot of good points on all sides. But the School Board should take note that many on the City Council, who are in charge of scheduling an election, aren’t opposed to putting a referendum on the ballot, but they want more details and a firm plan in place.

Even the mayor, whom many suspect (possibly correctly) is hostile to additional taxes, wants the schools to fail so he can take control, is controlled by the wealthy forces privatizing the nation’s schools, or all three, is right to say he cannot support a tax measure until more is known.

We are rushing ahead.

Even GOT, who is looking for assurances that charter schools won’t grab all the new funding, either by court decision or legislative fiat, before he supports a new tax, is willing to pay new school taxes if the revenue is used for the designated purpose of renovating and replacing obsolete or crumbling buildings.

No one wants to be the new Detroit.

It’s important to get this right. It’s important for the community to get behind the schools. That means taking the time needed to make the case.

It can be done. November is too soon.

Slow down, School Board, and build the community support you need to make this happen.

It’s that time of year: testing. For GOT, it’s the most boring time as he must watch students work without actually seeing that work, maintain a hawk-like scrutiny of computer screens to make sure students are not exiting the test to look up answers without actually observing what is on the screen (strictly forbidden for a proctor to actually read a test question), and otherwise spend hours doing absolutely nothing except reading a sentence out of the test manual at the prescribed times.

GOT has some observations to share:

• Based on the number of students GOT has to wake up, there is something soporific about sitting in a hard plastic chair staring at a screen. If tests are ever eliminated, the manufacturers will find a new market in the sleep aid category.
• Teachers can fix their low salary problem by selling pencils to students. The number who show up unprepared! And it’s not only for tests, it’s every day that children arrive in class without the supplies needed: pens, paper, and the like. In the moment, it’s a seller’s market.
• Deafness will mark this new generation. After listening to ear-pounding music every second they are awake, they won’t reach 40 with their hearing intact.
• States make many graduation requirements. Most of them are unnecessary, but GOT would like to add one. No student may graduate without going into the wilderness to experience silence. Off the grid, off the net, no phone, no music … silence. It would be a profound experience.
• GOT is a good actor as he is able to read the part of the script that admonishes students they must never, ever at the cost of their first-born child talk about the test after it is over, including Snapchat and Instagram, without laughing. Kudos to test manufacturers for somewhat keeping up with preferred social media platforms, but based on actual experience with teenagers, the manufacturers would do better to demand that they must share about the test. Teenagers seldom follow directions.
• We have a test today?! GOT would like to give one test without hearing that. He’s only mentioned it for the past two weeks, had it posted on the whiteboard, sent an alert to parents the week before, and done everything he could short of streaking through the classroom to draw attention to the fact that a test has been scheduled.
• Computer testing is awful. Many students simply read the screen and take their best guess. If they had to mark an answer on a paper medium, they would take the time to think about a problem and try to work out an answer. There’s something about technology … that suppresses critical thought.
• The public needs to learn that a READING test is not a reading test. That’s not what is being tested at all. The reading test actually attempts to measure critical thinking skills and how well they can express those thoughts.
• What’s up with the computer system locking students out of their accounts? It never happens at any other time of the year.
• BTW, no pencil ever said to a student that they had attempted to erroneously pick it up too many times.
• God bless test coordinators who must explain to teachers why they lose their planning time to testing.
• God bless test coordinators who somehow make it all work when teachers take a leave day without warning because they don’t want to administer a test. I’m not talking about those who protest (God bless them for taking a stand and acting on it); GOT has in mind those teachers who are uncooperative.
• God forgive all teachers who participate in the system knowing it is wrong, but must do what they have to do.
• God forgive administrators who never drank the kool-aid, but have to do the same.
• In closing, let’s bless the hearts of all lawmakers who congratulate themselves that they are improving the lives of kids. Well, that would be true if their kids were the dollars in their bank accounts.

One week ago, GOT noted the discrepancy between a press release of his school district and the website maintained by the creator and sustainer of the Challenge Index, Jay Mathews. Original post here.

As a result of subsequent confusion regarding the actual rankings (it seems there was an additional website providing the erroneous information), GOT contacted Mr. Mathews to clear the issue up. Mr. Mathews confirmed that his website was correct.

He then contacted the school in question about the press release. That kicked off a flurry of activity, quite hilarious by the way, but in the end, it turned out Mr. Mathews had received incorrect information from the school district.

Those corrections being made, the school’s ranking changed from 26th on the list to being 5th on the list.

While the website will not be updated for a few weeks, GOT will end with a quote from Shakespeare: All’s well that ends well.

In my school district, we are very proud of our academic magnet programs and the high rankings they receive each year. Recently, Team Duval News congratulated the high school generally regarded as the county’s best for placing in the eighth position.

Except they didn’t. The Challenge Index is produced by the Washington Post’s education columnist, Jay Mathews. If you check his website, you find that the school is actually in the 26th position and another district high school placed higher in the 23rd position.

So what’s up?

GOT doesn’t know why the news release doesn’t agree with the actual rankings on the website. But GOT realizes that we are in challenging times for school districts and traditional public schools in Florida.

If you have missed what’s going down in Florida, you will find no better summary than this: Florida Really Is the Worst. The only thing missing is that Florida has also decided to allow public (but do we even know what that adjective means anymore?) universities and colleges to authorize charter schools. School districts will have to share their funds but will have no say over whether a charter is ready to open in their territory.

How do schools compete? They have to market themselves. If you’ve been wondering why schools need more money today than they needed decades ago when you passed through the classrooms, one huge reason is that schools, traditional, charter, and other, all need marketing budgets with lots of dollars for advertising.

Truth-in-Advertising laws be damned, everyone pushes the boundaries in this Darwinian struggle for survival.

(How ironic that the Florida legislature, determined to remove all mention of evolution from science classrooms, justifies their ongoing demolition of the public school system as allowing the marketplace to determine the survival of the fittest.)

Some puffing here, some misrepresentation there, shoot, the privatizers do it, don’t we have to fight fire with fire?

Actually, firefighters fight fire with water.

There’s no better water in the public school system than delivering an outstanding chance to learn in the classroom.

The phony baloney is not needed.

When parents are asked, most of them say they think the school that actually educates their children is excellent; it’s only that those other schools are terrible.

But all those other schools also have parents who say they are pleased with the school and the education their children are receiving.

When do we realize that there are no other lousy schools?

As for the marketing, schools need to be full of integrity. Isn’t that the lesson we want to teach children? Character education has been around for a long time.

What do we model? Exaggeration, hyperbole, a little lie here or there is okay because it furthers an important purpose?

Eight does not equal 26.

Or do we show children that the truth is important and should be clung to? No matter how embarrassing it may be.

The challenge index for public schools? It’s not about how many AP exams are taken. The challenge is to turn out young adults with integrity who will change the world.

(And these days, our world does need changing.)

UPDATE: I contacted Jay Mathews, the creator of the Challenge Index, who confirmed that the ranking of 26 is the correct one for the 2019 index that he released a week ago.

SECOND UPDATE: GOT set off a minor kerfuffle in his district by this post. Go here for the rest of the story.

May is the time of testing. Now is a good time to be reminded that there are more important things in life than a particular test score.

Darian Locklear was living the life of a teenager. Everyone remembers those awkward days: worrying about pimples, social status, grades, popularity among peers, and the hormonal changes of transforming to an adult.

Wanting to be unique, but wondering if anyone thinks we are special.

It wasn’t the major acts that defined her life; it was the many small acts of kindness that Darian is remembered for. A tragic accident took her life, but her memory will live on in the lives of others whom she helped.

The boy who never ate lunch alone because she would bring all her friends and sit with him.

The peer-ostracized children whom she would talk to.

The teenager she believed even no one else did regarding an assault.

The girl she helped through a dark time.

There are many stories.

In a world full of choices, choose to be kind.

You will be remembered for your choices.