Comedian Steve Martin once said that teaching is like show business. Keeping this metaphor in mind, I try to approach each of my lectures like a live set. The idea is to keep my students present and engaged so that we can learn together in real time.

But what happens when the entertaining professor gets upstaged by a chatbot that can produce the lecture as well as write student papers and take the final exam? Does the college class become a meaningless joke?

Well, no.

There are people who fear that ChatGPT, Bard, and other generative AI bots will let students outsource their own learning. But I teach media history. I know that new media technologies do not make people obsolete. Video did not kill the radio star.

So rather than slip some language about ChatGPT in the policy section of my syllabus about plagiarism (which won’t stop students who know about the apps that can rewrite papers to evade detection), my plan this fall is to focus on creating interactive lessons that incorporate chatbots directly into my teaching.

Instead of letting chatbots change the learning process, I’ll show my students that anything that chatbots can do, they can do better.

Many of my students were already trying ChatGPT out last year. Because chatbots can be especially useful for performing routine tasks, one student explained that she had started to use ChatGPT at her job in customer service to generate quick responses to complaints, which she would then rewrite to improve.

While chatbots are able to do that kind of task well, more complicated tasks, such as historical essays, can be a disaster. But these limitations also open the door to teaching exercises that show students how to utilize this technology in their work.

Professors teaching writing skills can have chatbots generate outlines, drafts, and other lists of ideas. Then, the professor can direct students to work in small groups to rewrite the text for greater originality.

Chatbots also offer an opportunity to teach critical thinking and media literacy skills. ChatGPT is prone to making up false information out of the data-driven cloud—a phenomenon its handlers euphemistically call “hallucinations.” This means that students have to learn how to check facts and verify information, using citable sources and databases.

Professors can also teach students to be alert to the systemic racism and sexism that AI bots can perpetuate and amplify because of the source texts they’re drawing from. I once asked ChatGPT to write a list of some of the leading scholars of the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment. Its response only included white men—as if no person from another background, ethnicity, or gender ever studied the U.S. Constitution.

A solution to this problem? Show students how they can give the chatbot follow-up prompts that generate more complete answers—say, specifically to include persons of color, different genders, and diverse backgrounds. When I did this, ChatGPT readily listed Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ange-Marie Hancock, and other prominent constitutional scholars.

For my classes this fall, I’m also creating “AI Moments,” where my students will get a chance to see who does it better: the robot or the professor.

After I present a new lesson and talk about it with my students, I’ll prompt ChatGPT to give a lecture on the very same subject.

To test out this idea over the summer, I asked ChatGPT to rewrite my short lecture on the history of broadcast media. Unsurprisingly, the text it generated was horrible. Just one cliché after another. It was as cold and dull as that slice of ham still relaxing in my refrigerator from the Fourth of July. Now there’s an unexpected image for you—the kind of surprise turn that ChatGPT will never accomplish. The AI-generated draft also made bad word choices—replacing the word “media” with “platform” (not all media are platforms).  It also changed my question, “Did the emergence of broadcast TV mean the end of going to the movies?” and instead asked “whether the emergence of broadcast TV resembled the demise of cinema attendance caused by the rise of radio.” This word choice altered the meaning of the point, which is that new media does not replace the old.

When I recreate this exercise in my classroom, I plan to have my students search ChatGPT’s lecture for bad writing that they will rewrite, turning each cliché into original imagery and poor word choices into something more precise. I’ll also ask them to find and eliminate bias and fact-check for inaccuracies.

What I learned from my practice matches with ChatGPT is that I know more about teaching journalism, writing, and media history—even though the chatbot can draw from vast amounts of information on the internet. And more importantly, it cannot share ideas accurately or in a creative and engaging way.

This is the kind of realization I want my students to have this fall when we engage with the AI-generated text, openly and transparently. My hope is that they will learn to learn to use AI effectively since these tools will become ever more common and maybe even indispensable in workplaces and in education. But also that through this they realize that when it comes to the contest of students versus robots, they will always come out on top.

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But the discussion focused on a more specific query: How can rural education thrive?

In answering that, three veteran educators from different rural parts of California—Connie Stewart of Cal Poly Humboldt, Julie Boesch of the nonprofit California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, and Tim Taylor of the Small School Districts’ Association—offered several suggestions as they shared the stage at the Bakersfield Music Theatre.

The pandemic was a major topic of conversation, and the event’s moderator, Saul Gonzalez, KQED correspondent and co-host of “The California Report,” started by asking how it changed rural education.

Boesch, former superintendent of Maple Elementary School District in Kern County, called the past few years “a phenomenal learning experience.”

Yes, she said, it was difficult when, say, half of her small staff were out or exposed to COVID. But the “beauty of being small and rural” is that they also had “big opportunities to shift gears” to meet their students’ needs. With fewer than 300 students, she knew every child, and could figure out how to support them personally if they were struggling.

“In a small district like mine, I know everything going on,” said Boesch, who recently became the assistant director of services at California Collaborative.

Boesch said Maple was fortunate to get Chromebooks within a week of COVID, speeding the transition to distance learning. But this change wasn’t easy for many rural school districts, whose students ended up offline for quite some time.

Taylor, executive director of the Small School Districts’ Association, which represents and assists districts of fewer than 5,000 students, said when “March 13, 2020”—the day when schools were shutdown statewide by COVID—hit, it “exposed the whole digital divide issue.” “Our institution worked with the Department of Education to figure out how many kids didn’t have a device—let alone internet, let alone a hot spot,” he said. The answer was “hundreds of thousands.”

Stewart, executive director of initiatives at Humboldt, the newest Cal Poly campus, called the pandemic a necessary wakeup call. One of the changes it spurred was California’s recent $6 billion investment to expand broadband infrastructure. “The nice thing about COVID was it was all hands on deck—and it brought to light some of the issues around technology.”

“I’m very hopeful in the near future,” she continued, in a decade or so, “we’ll solve the digital divide.”

But equity issues run far beyond broadband for rural schools. Panelists agreed that, though one in four students in the United States today attends a rural school, state and federal lawmakers are not spending one-fourth of their time thinking about these kids, much less visiting their schools.

“Rural doesn’t go to Sacramento enough, and Sacramento doesn’t go out to rural,” Stewart said.

Boesch recalled how, when she first arrived at the Maple district eight years ago, the rains were so bad that there was water coming through the walls. It took years of lobbying officials outside the district, and the building of bipartisan support in the legislature, to fix the issue.

“I put 40,000 miles on my car advocating for my communities. That’s what it takes,” Boesch said.

More attention is required because the challenges in rural districts are different, panelists said. And getting more attention requires behaving more like urban school districts that go to the media, and to court, to make sure their needs are addressed.

“We need to follow the blueprint of urban schools to tell their story for what their children are up against,” said Taylor. “We don’t do that. And we don’t litigate.”

Panelists say rural schools have to get creative to provide services. Boesch shared how she was able to afford a school psychologist by splitting their salary with a consortium of other rural schools. That required negotiating a memorandum of understanding between each school, and finding an employee who was willing to serve everyone.

Rural schools don’t just lack supportive services; they also lack access to courses that help students prepare for colleges, such as AP classes.

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

But schools can compensate. “I came here to talk about solutions,” said Stewart, who encouraged high schoolers to dual enroll in community college in their areas. “Wouldn’t it be fabulous if every high school student graduated with some units at a community college? Wouldn’t it be fabulous if they all graduated with a head start?”

Students should also be encouraged to try a trade in high school, so they get to do “something they love” and learn about future job prospects.

What if there aren’t enough kids to run a school, asked Gonzalez, the moderator. When does it make sense to consider a closure or consolidation?

Students’ needs, not financial ease or consolidation plans, must come first, Boesch argued. “We have to serve all children,” no matter where they are, she said. If schools are closed permanently and the only choice left for students is to bus three hours to the nearest school district or solely virtual learning that’s putting barriers in place for their education when “it’s incumbent on us to remove barriers,” she said.

Stewart agreed, arguing for great care in such decisions. “We have to be smart about how we consolidate schools,” she said. If schools must be closed, then the next question becomes what we do with them so they’re still a benefit to the community. There are other educational needs that can be served, she said, citing successful second lives as community centers and bilingual centers.

Gonzales asked the panelists if they think there’s “a cultural bias against rural education.”

Yes, they said, but the nature of the bias may be changing. That’s because it’s no longer inevitable that people will move to urban environments. The pandemic saw people leave urban environments.

Climate change, Stewart added, is also shifting the conversation. She cited her employer—and its transition from being California State University Humboldt to Cal Poly Humboldt, with the resulting emphasis on science, technology, and the green economy— as proof of that. As a Cal Poly, Humboldt can encourage students to come not just to study but also to make lives and careers for themselves in rural Northern California.

But making space for people in rural parts of the state will only be a successful strategy if new arrivals can afford to live there.

Once upon a time, educators who moved to rural school districts were able to afford to buy their house on their salary. Now, housing prices having risen so rapidly that that’s no longer the reality for many, panelists said.

“The American dream is slipping from people in education, and we have to address that as Californians,” said Stewart. That’s why, she said, her organization is working to invest in workforce housing “so we can try to keep teachers” in the communities they serve.

Near the event’s end, Gonzalez asked the panelists to talk about the joys of small-town education. We’ve talked about the hardships, he said, but “what rocks about it?”

All the panelists spoke up at once.

It’s great to be well-known in your community, said Boesch: “We’ve seen generations of families go through school.”

It’s the ability and freedom to innovate, said Stewart: “All of us have wonderful stories of how we can quickly make change and that’s the beauty of being able to work at a rural school.”

And it’s the intimacy, said Taylor: “The school is the town. You’re part of this incredible loving, warm safe environment.”

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As the pandemic worsens, California parents, teachers, and students have been distracted by a bitter war over how to reopen education. But as a combatant in the conflict—and the father of three public school students—I’ve learned that reopening education is a war that can’t be won. None of the outcomes that people are fighting for—the full reopening of schools, a shift to distance learning, or a hybrid of in-person and online education—will work. In fact, all three threaten to weaken the educational system and leave our children further behind.

Reopening schools while society fails to respond to COVID’s spread could be a disaster. Yes, pediatricians make a compelling case for return, and some working parents don’t feel they have a choice. But many teachers and students, understandably wary of health risks, won’t show up for school, creating short-term chaos on campuses and deepening long-term educational problems, from enrollment collapses to teacher shortages. And as a political matter, reopening this fall is impossible, because of the opposition of California’s powerful teachers’ unions and because of the support of President Trump, whose demands for reopening have discredited the whole idea.

Unfortunately, distance learning—which is how many school districts must start the year under state guidelines—is unlikely to produce real learning. State officials and teachers’ unions have imposed limits that rob online instruction of any potential value.

Instead California’s children, under distance learning, are going to fall further behind or slip away from school all together. Many kids lack the technology and resources to participate in virtual schooling. Worse still, distance learning forces parents and other family members to serve as in-home educators, adding stress for people who are fighting to hold onto jobs, or look for new ones, in the most rapid economic collapse of our lifetime.

The third major option, hybrid plans that the state and many districts are promoting, could be even more disastrous. These hybrids fuse all the problematic aspects of in-person and distance learning into unmanageable messes, with kids on campus some days and not others.

Hybrids are so costly, both in money and personnel, that it’s hard to understand how the state and districts would pay for them. You’d need COVID testing capacity and protective equipment that California lacks for in-school time, and technological investments—in laptops, internet, teachers, and tech support—that California hasn’t produced for distance learning. You’d also need more teachers. Look for school districts that adopt hybrids to fall apart, creating massive enrollment losses as students who are better off flee for private or home-school options, and students who are poorer flee school entirely.

All three unworkable options have another huge cost: the time and money that educators, administrators, parents, and students are devoting to try to make them work. It’s a crime against society to waste dollars and hours on faux education when we don’t have enough people or resources devoted to our biggest problem, the pandemic itself.

So why don’t we all ditch school now?

The logic is straightforward. Since we can’t or won’t get back to safe and effective schooling until the pandemic is under control, the fastest way back to school is to repurpose the education system to control the pandemic.

There are so many opportunities if we make California’s top educational priority the pandemic. Billions could be pulled from California’s $80-billion education budget to supplement all aspects of COVID response, from testing to the development of treatments. The schools also could provide personnel for the fight. To manage the virus, California needs an army of contact tracers—estimates range from at least 40,000 to maybe as many 100,000.

And California has more than 300,000 teachers.

Teachers and school staffers, as trusted members of communities, are ideal for contact tracing work, which requires intimate conversations with all kinds of people. They also could help staff up the additional testing sites we so desperately need, and fill other emergency roles in the strained health system.

Students, too, have an important role to play. State officials have maintained that they don’t have enough people to enforce rules on masking and social distancing, but that’s because they haven’t tapped California’s approximately 6 million school-age children. Give the kids authority to accost anyone without a face covering, and I expect you’d see compliance approach 100 percent. (I recently saw this practice in action, watching second graders successfully guilt adults into wearing masks.)

I don’t make this suggestion modestly. And it’s hardly radical. Moving educational resources to the pandemic response wouldn’t be an abandonment of education. Our state officials, our school districts, and organizations representing school employees have already given up on any real education for the 2020-21 school year. They just haven’t been honest enough to admit it publicly.

The state has reduced the number of instructional minutes (by an hour a day, for grades 4-12) and suspended assessments of student learning. Requirements for live instruction under distance learning are loose and hard to enforce. Worse still, the state budget has been changed to ensure that schools are funded—and teachers are paid—whether or not students show up.

This departure from the standard policy of tying school funding to student attendance is sometimes called “hold harmless.” It means that a school will receive the same funding it had based on attendance back in February before the pandemic. This creates incentives for schools to abandon—or just “lose track”—of hundreds of thousands of poor, special-needs, and hard-to-reach students across the state.

The same “hold harmless” provision hurts responsible and public-spirited schools, districts, and charters that step up to serve needy students in a crisis. Those schools will not get additional funding to cover additional students.

One very cynical way of thinking about our educational reality is that the education system has used the crisis to protect its funding while relieving itself of its core responsibilities. I think such a judgment is too harsh. Teachers unions’ resistance to reopening schools in a pandemic, and to participating in our poorly designed distance learning, makes sense.

What does not make sense is to keep funding schools—the biggest piece of our state budget—when our pandemic response is starved for public resources. The best solution is to shift our teachers and school employees to an all-out effort against COVID.

It won’t be easy for teachers and school staff to switch to work for which they’ve not been trained. But such a shift is necessary for more than fighting COVID. The shift should provide justification for continuing school funding and educator salaries. And in the longer term, shifting school staff into emergency response will answer a mounting political criticism: Why are scarce California tax dollars supporting diminished education and closed schools, especially when pandemic response is lagging?

Requiring schools, teachers, staff and even students to focus on the pandemic would also provide some educational lessons. We might show ourselves, and our kids, that we can move beyond conflict and debate in a crisis. We might demonstrate that our state can successfully address huge challenges with flexibility and shared sacrifice.

Our schools will need those lessons, and that sense of unity, when it eventually becomes time to go back to school safely, and educators face the daunting challenge of making up for all the lost education that COVID is costing us.

The post Californians, Let’s Talk About Ditching School This Fall appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Don’t squeeze your kids too hard as you send them off to another school year, because the state of California is already squeezing your kids hard enough to hurt their future.

Call it The Great California School Squeeze. The state is stuck in a nasty school funding paradox: Even though our school districts have never had higher funding levels than they do right now, many districts face financial peril.

Why? Because The Squeeze is a torture machine with three ratchets.

First, escalating payments and obligations for retirement benefits are growing so fast (more than 100 percent in this decade in many districts) that they gobble up most of the rising education funding all by themselves. That leaves little for today’s students and teachers.

Second, with California’s birth rate at a record low, the number of students is stagnant in some districts and declining in others. Since school funding is granted on a per-student basis, fewer students means less funding, even at the higher rates.

Third, the state is pressuring schools to take expensive new measures to address major social problems—including shortages of college graduates and systemic inequality that leaves poorer young people lagging. Elaborate new state measurement systems for schools go far beyond test scores to assess everything from equity to school discipline. A new funding formula that gives more money to poorer schools has created pressure to eliminate achievement gaps.

So The Squeeze, in essence, requires producing millions more educated California adults from a smaller student population, even as retirees grab bigger shares of available funds. California’s famously complicated legal barriers to cutting pensions and raising taxes may make breaking free of The Squeeze politically impossible.

But a failure to escape The Squeeze threatens what was once the essence of California: our leadership in knowledge and technology.

For the past half-century, California has been steadily giving away the lead it once held over the rest of the country and the world in education. In 1970, according to a new Chapman University report, Californians were better educated than the average American. The state had a higher percentage of adults with college degrees—and a lower proportion of adults with less than a high school education—than the nation as a whole.

But California now has the second highest percentage of adults with less than a high school education in the country (and had fallen, as of 2012, to 14th in the percentage of adults with college degrees). California was one of only four states to see an increase in the number of people with less than a high school degree between 1970 and 2012. By comparison, the large, diverse states of Texas and New York both have seen declines in their numbers of adults without high school diplomas.

Reversing such trends would be a monumental task for California even in ideal conditions. But in the midst of The Squeeze, it seems impossible. School districts, rather than adding programs, are freezing budgets, laying off teachers, and forcing school closures.

This process may be ugliest in Oakland, where the school board members have publicly declared, “We have too many schools.” What Oakland really has is rising retiree costs and much lower student enrollment, putting the district in danger of returning to state receivership. In Southern California, my hometown of Pasadena has announced plans to close five schools starting next year, including the last two public schools in the neighborhood where I grew up.

The Squeeze also limits California’s instructional hours, despite research showing that more time to learn is essential for making educational gains. We might live in the world’s fifth largest economy, but I’m about to send my youngest child to my local elementary school where he will only have a half-day of kindergarten because that’s all that our state funds.

It’s obvious that California needs to give its schools more. But from where? Today’s kids and teachers are already taking hits from The Squeeze. And even if it were possible to claw back pensions from retired teachers, it wouldn’t be fair. Teachers don’t get Social Security and their pensions are reasonable, averaging just over $50,000. This reflects the Penis Rule of Pension Abuses; scandalously large retirement payouts, like the $1.27 million recently given to L.A.’s police chief, usually come from predominantly male professions like fire and police.

Unfortunately, there is no way to get the money from those most at fault: previous state and local politicians who made retirement promises without properly funding or disclosing them. Much of The Squeeze on California schools today comes from efforts to recover from years of underfunding of pensions by accelerating school districts’ contributions to the two state pension funds that cover school workers and teachers.

What’s most scary about The Squeeze is that it’s likely to get worse. The Squeeze has hit hard even as the stock market has risen and the economy has expanded; a recession and stock market decline would make The Squeeze so bad that school districts could be forced into massive cuts and bankruptcy.

If you’re surprised to be reading all of this, that is by design. School districts often hide the growing size of their retiree obligations deep in budget documents. Many districts ask local voters for additional taxes which delay the reckoning but don’t fix the problem. Diminished local media don’t have resources to cover it. And powerful teachers’ unions have tried to shift blame for The Squeeze to their favorite bogeyman, charter schools, even though they are a small piece of the public school system.

You also aren’t hearing about The Squeeze during the campaign season. The endless state media celebration of Gov. Jerry Brown’s tenure has obscured the crisis. Political candidates have offered few ideas for tackling The Squeeze, because, well, there are few ideas for tackling The Squeeze.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.

Addressing The Squeeze starts with clearer disclosure: making it plain the ways in which retiree costs and enrollment declines are hurting today’s kids and teachers. While retired teachers must have their pensions protected, cost of living adjustments should stop. And districts should stop giving retired teachers separate health benefits; they should rely on the same public programs—Obamacare, Medicaid, and Medicare—that the rest of us do.

The savings from such changes won’t be nearly enough to escape The Squeeze, but they should make it possible to do more for today’s teachers. As David Crane of Govern for California has shown, school districts from San Francisco to Fresno are now devoting less than half of their revenues to compensation for today’s teachers.

But breaking the grip of The Squeeze will require more from California taxpayers—and not just small tax increases on the local level.

The state has two big dysfunctional systems that hurt today’s kids. One is a complex tax system, built around Proposition 13, that protects older homeowners. The other is a complex education funding system, built around Prop 98, that ties education spending to the budget and economy, rather than to students’ needs. It has effectively acted as a cap on education spending since Prop 98 was adopted 30 years ago.

Both systems need replacing. The Prop 98 funding formula should die, and education funding should be tied to educational needs. Doing that would require tens of billions of new dollars each year, which in turn would necessitate a massive tax reform.

Of course, even such difficult and transformational reforms might not be enough for schools, now that state Democrats want to grab new tax dollars for a single-payer universal health care system. That might be a worthy goal. But California first needs to rescue the kids from The Squeeze that’s crushing our single-payer education system.

The post California Sticks Its Schoolkids’ Futures in a Vise appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I decided to build the class around the idea of sanctuary, and to have the kids depict their safe places through art. I wanted to distinguish sanctuary as a special zone, where they would be free and safe to be who they want to be, no matter what. I wanted our class to be a springboard to help the students create sanctuary in the world outside our class. I hoped my students would collectively envision an America where all of their sanctuaries would exist, together, in peace. What I didn’t expect was that the kids would teach me so much about my own American sanctuary. Through them, I realized that the America that makes me proud depends on the ability of people other than me to create homes and thrive culturally, strengthening communities.

Courtesy of Ben Hamburger.

I worked with two groups: a small group of teenagers from Myanmar, and a class of seventeen elementary schoolers from the other countries. The first group of students was contemplative, took great care with their artwork, and wore a thin cloak of teenage angst. The younger kids were a rambunctious ball of energy and emotion. Rana, from Iraq, was sensitive and always eager to express her feelings through drawing. One day, frustrated after being bullied during the school day, she embellished a previously-completed pencil sketch of her sanctuary—a house—with ferocious lightning bolts. Fithawit, a 12-year-old from Eritrea, assumed a leadership role in the class, earning access to the materials closet and helping the younger kids.

It was no coincidence that the students ended up in Baltimore. Waves of immigration and industry once made Baltimore a thriving port-town, with a population topping out around 950,000 in 1950. But since then, the city, like so many struggling industrial centers, has lost about one-third of its people. Former mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake sought to rebuild in part by increasing the number of refugee families resettled here. Today, in addition to established, culturally rich neighborhoods like Greektown, Little Italy, and Highlandtown (the flourishing Latino hub where I live), Baltimore is becoming home to Nepali, Burmese, Sudanese, Eritrean, and Middle Eastern enclaves.

Rana, Fithawit and the others had arrived in a place that would welcome them, but I worried about triggering traumatic memories. So in class, at first, we didn’t talk of wars or government. We made a bird and tree sanctuary. Crafting colorful creatures and plants with oil pastels and water colors, the kids conjured a place where their birds and trees could grow and enjoy productive lives without facing danger from hunters, lumberjacks, or developers. Nishan, from Nepal, drew a majestic bird with intricately drawn feathers. We eventually used it in a collage, swooping over Fithawit’s spiraling tree. In our sanctuary, the children’s bird families thrived, and their trees grew tall and strong.

Courtesy of Ben Hamburger.

We decided people might benefit from sanctuaries too. The students began to define what sanctuary meant to them. We listed elements that make homes safe, fun, and free. “You should need a password to get in,” one boy said. “It should be able to fly,” another thought. “Your whole family should live there too,” a girl mentioned. We talked about the things that made us who we are: our languages, our hobbies, the food we eat, our personalities, and our values. The students chose colors, shapes, and patterns that spoke for their personalities and cultures, and designed symbols to represent their identities. Two inseparable Eritrean girls drew beautiful multicolored floral patterns. A Burmese teenager drew a cross, representing her faith.

Our art room was often boisterous, a frenzy of cardboard and glue and glitter and bright-colored paint. Neither the kids’ artwork nor their behavior reflected the trauma that they had endured. They were generally happy. Gradually, they opened up and started telling me about their experiences prior to coming to Baltimore—things they missed about their home countries and cultures, as well as violence they had witnessed, separation from family members, and the grim circumstances of living in refugee camps. They began to contextualize past experiences as “not sanctuaries.” Mustafa, one of the Iraqi boys, told me about men with big guns who entered his home, and about kids without parents being forced to work and fight. Those people needed sanctuaries, too, we agreed.

Our final project was building our own sanctuaries out of cardboard, tape, and glue, and covering them with elements that represent who we are and who we aspire to be. Mustafa’s sculpture was bright yellow and had a roof deck and swing. Fithawit’s younger sister Zebib built a sanctuary bedazzled with gemstones and glitter, with pink walls with plenty of windows. Yousif’s was equipped with wings so that it could, indeed, fly. When I put the sculptures together on tables, they transformed into an alluring colorful town. Each structure was a monument to the artist that created it, but together they built a neighborhood. Mayor Rawlings-Blake invited us to exhibit our work in a gallery in Baltimore City Hall, hosting an opening reception where refugee families and friends joined City Hall employees and politicians to celebrate the students — affirming that their unique voices are cherished in a country that celebrates its diversity. The kids had a blast, smiling ear to ear as they ran up to guests to tell them about their work.

Courtesy of Ben Hamburger.

Art, I have found, has the unique capacity to bridge barriers. Together, my students and I developed a deeper understanding of what it means to be American—and I gained a new perspective on my own sense of ownership and responsibility to the American ideals that resonate with me. As a white man born in the United States, my sense of belonging, shelter, family, and freedom to think and act have never been at risk. I knew vaguely that I felt at peace when I wandered, at home and abroad, spending time in communities filled with colorful languages, smells, tastes, and traditions.

Looking at the kids’ sanctuaries on display at City Hall, I realized that sanctuaries are ultimately personal, but can come together to form a community greater than the sum of its parts. I would have loved strolling through the neighborhood my students created with their art. The real-life sanctuaries my students will build here in America, I now understand, are what make America a sanctuary for me.

The post For Refugee Children in Baltimore and Their Teacher, Art Is a Safe Zone appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today, we’re still here—we’re assistant principals (and a little sick of each other, we joke)—in a very different Santee and a very different South L.A. Over the past 11 years, we’ve learned a lot about how to build and improve a school, and a community.

The biggest lesson is that a school doesn’t have to have a special status—as a magnet or a charter—to be academically challenging. Santee is a comprehensive neighborhood high school, and this year, 251 out of our 297 graduating seniors are on their way to two and four-year college. This is in contrast to when we opened, when nearly three-quarters of our students didn’t graduate at all.

Santee’s dedication to the neighborhood is part of what has drawn us to it. Both of us are from South L.A. Terri grew up right near where the school sits now, land that was then a dairy farm. Pablo is from the Florence-Firestone neighborhood and went to Fremont High School.

Before Santee opened, both of us were worried that South L.A. schools weren’t producing enough college-ready kids. Pablo had worked as an admissions recruiter for UCLA, his alma mater, and he saw how few South L.A. kids got in. He wondered if it was because few teachers in South L.A. understood the area. When he worked at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights, he was impressed to see that many effective teachers there were also Roosevelt alums.

Pablo took a teaching job at Santee precisely because of the possibility of building a similar cadre of South L.A.-savvy teachers. Terri also was attracted by the possibilities of a new school, including the opportunity to write a new English curriculum. She wanted to keep working with the principal of the middle school where she was teaching, who had been hired by Santee. Pablo saw similar curricular possibilities in economics.

But Santee got off to a slow start. Some of it was just the hiccups of any start-up, but we also had serious student challenges. Many of our students came from a badly overcrowded nearby high school, and Santee was being used as a dumping ground for high-needs students that other schools were struggling to serve. Few of the students we got were on track to graduate—which made our graduation rate just 27 percent.

The biggest challenge in improving Santee was that the school didn’t have a common culture. There were two structural problems that proved to be big barriers. First, Santee was on a three-track, year-round calendar to accommodate all the students sent our way, so everyone was on a different schedule. Secondly, the school was split up into SLCs—“Small Learning Communities”—and each had a different academic focus, from arts to business. So students were taking different classes, and different subjects.

Change came slowly, but it came. In 2008-09, Santee joined the Partnership, a sort of district within the school district. Most of the Partnership schools were in South L.A., and other schools included elementary and middle schools that fed into Santee. That made it easier to create cohesiveness and continuity. After that, we got rid of the multi-track, year-round calendar. We also moved away from the Small Learning Communities, as it became increasingly difficult to maintain them as purely separate and individual entities with the right amount of teachers. We also got a new dynamic principal, Dr. Martin Gomez, who didn’t see any limits to what was possible.

The fact that South L.A. itself was changing made it easier to envision change at Santee. Voters had approved school bonds in the previous decades, and so other new schools and school facilities were opening, taking some of the pressure off Santee. In addition, enrollment was down in district schools as the number of children declined and charter schools opened.

A smaller, more cohesive school was easier to manage. We found we could offer students more access to a variety of courses, since they were no longer limited to their small learning communities. We were able to focus more on college readiness, and we started to offer more and more Advanced Placement classes, which can be used for college credit. This past year, nearly 500 students took at least one AP class at Santee.

We’ve both seen how pushing kids into one rigorous class inspires them in the rest of their classes. Students who are doing college work begin to ask about preparing for college, paying for college, and how they can excel in college. We also think this greater cohesion and rigor help explain improving test scores and graduation rates at the school; the unofficial rate for this just-concluded school year is 87 percent.

Under the newer structure, we’ve also done more for teachers. We’ve invested heavily in what we call Professional Learning Communities, which give teachers the opportunity to collaborate with each other to build instructional plans and common assessments, as well as lessons that meet the needs of individual students.

And with the support of the partnership, we’ve gotten better at attracting nonprofit and corporate partners to support the school, including Fox Sports West (student internships), Ernst & Young (student mentoring), and Cal State Los Angeles (which offers our students one of their math classes right here on our campus).

Like it or not, public schools compete with each other these days for both faculty and students. In L.A. Unified, students and families can rank the schools they want to attend, and Santee wants to make sure that we continue to be the top-ranked school among students in our area. So we’ve become more student-focused, drawing on every resource we can find. We hired two pupil services and attendance (PSA) counselors, who advocate for the students both inside and outside schools. (Too many California schools don’t have any counselors.) We also invested in two psychiatric social workers, and two Diploma Project counselors, who keep students on track to graduate. And we have a dedicated intervention coordinator, who gets involved when students get off track.

These investments have helped us build a more compassionate culture. Since we’re a comprehensive school, that’s essential. We have more than 300 special education students, and more than 75 of them have moderate to severe disabilities. We’re also the only school in South L.A. with an American Sign Language class.

We’re proud that we haven’t had any bullying incidents, and this spring, the culture here allowed us to become the first high school in LAUSD and the first public high school in Southern California, that we know of, to open a gender-neutral bathroom, so students can use the bathroom without fear of judgement.

Even with all of this, we need to keep doing more. Pablo, who oversees the AP program, has made it a priority to increase the number of kids who pass the tests, not just take the class. Next year, Santee will be launching a new School for Advanced Studies. We’ll have to be careful to make sure that it doesn’t become a place apart from the rest of the school, but we have to do it in order to remain competitive.

At the same time, we need to do better by our special education students and our English-language learners. We’re in the process of creating common assessments among all teachers for special education, and adding more rigorous instruction. We’re encouraging our disabled students to take more regular classes. And we’re reevaluating how we work with the Santee students who are new to the country. How do we give them English language support and make sure they graduate at the same age as other students?

The two of us often talk about changing the reality of Santee (we want 100 percent of students ready to go to college) as well as the perception of the school and the community. We want to correct the misconception—still all too common—that students and parents in South L.A. don’t care as much about education as their affluent counterparts. In our experience, South L.A. parents are even more driven about getting their kids to college.

We want people to know that kids in South L.A. can get a great education at the school down the street—and that they will receive a quality education from teachers and administrators who were once South L.A. kids themselves.

The post How South L.A.’s Santee Education Complex’s Graduation Rate Jumped Nearly 60 Percent in 11 Years appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the 2013-14 school year, the state suspended the Academic Performance Index, or API, the chief tool Californians had for seeing how their kids’ schools stacked up among schools across the state. API wasn’t a perfect measure, but it offered a clear and consistent language for judging schools that could be understood by anyone in your neighborhood—from parents to real estate agents. And, for the many communities and schools that hung API banners boasting of school improvement in the rankings, the index provided a point of pride.

At the time the API was first suspended, our state’s leaders said they would give us a better, more useful index of schools. Three years later, they haven’t given us anything at all—except a promise that a new index will be in place for the 2017-18 school year. And there are reasons to doubt whether a useful index will ever be produced.

I am trying not to take this personally. The oldest of my three sons started kindergarten in our local elementary school in 2014. Under the current schedule for the new index, he’ll be heading into fourth grade—and his two younger brothers will be enrolled as well—before I can see how the school stacks up.

To be fair, state education officials had plenty of reasons for creating a new method for measuring schools and their progress. The old index was far too dependent on test scores. The federal government is transitioning out of its No Child Left Behind regime for a new accountability system. Charter schools, many of them founded by parents, are spreading. And California schools are adopting the new Common Core standards and adapting to the state’s new Local Control Funding Formula and its accompanying Local Control and Accountability Plans—which give parents and communities the new bureaucratic burden of developing school goals and monitoring school progress

Given all these changes, our leaders asked, shouldn’t there be a new index aligned with this new education universe?

Of course, there should be. So where the hell is it?

The state’s answer: these things take time and we’re making progress. Last week, the State Board of Education approved new metrics that it wants to include in the new system—including test scores, graduation and suspension rates, college and career readiness, and school improvement.

Which is great. But no changes and no process justify three years—and counting—of keeping Californians in the dark about their schools.

The state had better options than having no index at all. It could have kept the old index alive until it was ready to switch to a new one. Or, even better, the state could have used the previous years to experiment by compiling and releasing to the public a new draft index each year.

This public development of an index—a real-time, rolling rollout, if you will—would have drawn broad feedback each year, and kept parents and communities in the loop. Instead, the state chose to stay dark—keeping the conversation about any new index for school accountability contained in the usual silos of education insiders.

Which is why the darkest, most cynical view of this transition is almost certainly the right one. Is the real goal of state leaders less accountability for themselves and for California’s public schools?

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson used the suspension of the old index as justification for his failure to publish a legally required list of the state’s 1,000 lowest-achieving schools last year (he finally did so this January under threat of lawsuit, but built his list from 2013 data). And state officials have eliminated half of the standardized tests students are taking; they also have suspended the High School Exit Exam. Such steps have been taken in the name of leaving more time for actual instruction. But that’s hard to take at face value, given how low a priority instructional time has been in California schools. The number of school days was cut during the budget crisis and the state hasn’t added to the length of the school year since, even as charter and private schools, following research showing the benefits of more instructional time, do just that.

Then there’s the California Teachers Association, the state’s most powerful teachers’ union, which has been arguing against having any index that can be used to rank schools (and, they fear, punish laggards). In a recent letter to the state, CTA president Eric Heins protested against “a single one-size fits all numeric goal”—an API-style index simple enough for parents to understand—and argued in favor of a “locally based, iterative process of district review, reflection and improvement.”

What would the local iterative process look like? CTA has cited the Local Control and Accountability Plans—which were supposed to include meaningful input from communities and produce useful documents for the public—as models for what a new accountability system could be. But an index that looks like those accountability plans is exactly what we don’t need—those plans are monstrously long and confusing documents that run hundreds of pages.

The union’s “statewide ignorance is bliss” logic looks even uglier in light of Governor Jerry Brown’s recent comments that Californians shouldn’t expect the state’s work to close the achievement gap between black and Latino students and other students. “The gap has been pretty persistent,” Brown told CALmatters, so his educational reforms shouldn’t be judged on closing it.

Such educational fatalism isn’t just dispiriting—it’s at odds with California’s own record of educational progress. In 2013, more than 80 percent of schools scored above 700 on the API; only 31 percent had scored that high a decade earlier. The same decade saw big declines statewide in the dropout rate, big advances in the number of students taking challenging courses (especially math and science), and significant increases in the school performance of English-language learners, migrants, special education students and kids from low-income families.

Some of the children’s and educational groups who pushed for that progress are now putting forward legislation—AB 2548—to guarantee that the current process produces a coherent index that parents and communities can understand. But the teachers’ union and some politicians are dismissing this legislation as premature. Their strategy seems to be delay—and then try to get away with producing an index so complicated it isn’t really an index at all.

State officials will object that this assessment is terribly unfair. But after three years, they’ve lost the benefit of the doubt. If they want to restore their credibility, the state should take on a make-up assignment: Produce an index of all California schools for each of the past two years—the academic year now ending, and for 2014-15. The state has testing and the other data to do it. And we parents sure could use the information, even belatedly.

But I bet they won’t. They’re too busy coming up with excuses for keeping Californians in the dark.

The post Why California Keeps Failing to Grade Its Schools appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.