Helping Others Get Involved in Educational Policy

Part of engaging in the larger conversation of educational reform and policy is helping to get others involved in that process as well. The greater the number of voices that speak out, the more impact they will have on getting things done!

As I think about the steps that I will personally take to enable stakeholders, such as parents, community members, and even students to become critically engaged in the policy process, I think about my previous blog post about creating relationships. To even begin to encourage others to become involved, I need to have a relationship with them first and foremost. Once that relationship has been established, we need to be able to engage in dialogue about areas that could use improvement, or aspects of current education policy that they would like to see change. This dialogue could be one that happens informally after school as they pick up their students from school, or it could be in a more formal setting such as a community forum, or parent-teacher-association meeting. Keeping lines of communication open, and sending informational pamphlets including current events, and current trends in the policy process to interested parties is another way of enabling stakeholders to become critically engaged.

However, often times, it’s not the grown-ups who make the most difference. Students can have a huge impact on the policy process. Their power to appeal to emotion and share their personal stories can truly make a large impact on educational policies. Helping students get involved at a young age is important. As for helping my own students to become critically engaged in the policy process, part of my job as their teacher is to make sure that they are learning how to clearly and openly articulate their own thoughts and opinions. Keeping them up to date on current events, and not being afraid to have courageous conversations with them about what is going on in regards to their own educations. Teaching them the ins-and-outs of learning to advocate for themselves.

I think about a video that I saw of a third grade student in CPS, who spoke at the rally protesting the Chicago school closings. His words were articulately spoken, and his passion was clear. His involvement in fighting for his own education had a larger impact than that which any teacher, policy reformer, union worker, or adult could ever have.

After watching that...what else is there to say? Did you get goosebumps? Because I did.

The Larger Conversation of Education Reform Policy: Let's Take Action!!!

As I seek to continuously engage in larger conversation about the shape of education policies and reform, including  those pressing national issues such as healthcare, I couldn’t say it better than Kumashiro as he describes his own plan to take action in regards to educational policy and reform. 

“ I [must be] meeting with partner organizations, facilitating workshops and public forums for various constituent groups, writing articles and speaking in interviews for the news media, blogging on the Internet, issuing press releases and other public statements, lobbying my elected officials, speaking with my own family and former classmates and neighbors, marching with signs in the streets, rallying with bullhorns at the capital, dancing in a flash mob downtown, painting in a public mural in the park, performing with an open mic, and of course, continuing to do my own homework and learning from others in order to resist complicity and self-righteousness.” (2012, p.87)

                Okay. Go ahead and take a second to think on all of that, because that was a lot. Not only as a classroom teacher, but as an American citizen, I have so much power to take action to impact decisions that affect my students. While I may not be facilitating workshops, or speaking in interviews for the news media, I can blog on the internet (which I am currently doing), I can speak with my own friends and family (one of whom is my cousin, who is working in Washington D.C. as an intern and is preparing to go into a career in education reform…….so I can start by sending her my marked up educational policy reform books from this class at the conclusion of the semester). I can march in rallies and protests downtown, and most importantly, continue to do homework on current events and policy issues that are happening, and learn from others by engaging in critical dialogue.

                Guiding my thinking throughout these larger conversations with those involved in the decision making process for education and reform, is my students. The 24 little faces who look at me with eyes, hungry for knowledge. What guides my thinking greets me in the morning with smiles, high fives me in the hallways, listens intently as I read, asks questions, engages in conversations, and gives me hugs at the end of the day with the promise to see me tomorrow. What guides my thinking when it comes to education and reform is people. So many policy makers have forgotten that people’s lives are being affected…that thousands of humans are at the center of each decision. In fact, I invite any policy maker into Room 401 before ever making another decision again.

Advocating for Educational Policies

Being an advocate for educational policy is part of the job when it comes to the teaching profession. Not only is my job based on current policy, but I feel as if part of my job is to also be an advocate for myself as to whether or not certain policies are working, or even fair. Most policy makers unfortunately have not spent much time in a classroom, so as a classroom teacher, I have to be vigilant about getting involved with the education policy and making my voice be heard.

                Educational policy is not as simple as it seems. Educational policy is not just length of school days, teacher contract hours, or even budgets for resources in the classroom. As author of Bad Teacher: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture, Kevin Kumashiro, puts it, 

“Educational reform cross-sects many other pressing national issues, which means that people concerned about war, or prisons, or welfare, or healthcare, or the environment, or the economy, or human and civil rights, and so on, should all see a link to educational reform,” (2012, p. 84).

         
 As a dedicated educator, I have recognized serious needs for policy changes in regards to many of these national issues. At the top of my list of policies to work towards to improve teaching and learning, is healthcare, including mental health care. Many of the students in my classroom lack access to nearby, affordable, high-quality dental and health care, including mental healthcare. Students come to school with injuries, sicknesses, or emotional and psychological concerns that make classroom learning impossible. As a classroom teacher, there is nothing I can physically do for a child who has sores in her mouth, has been bit by a German Shepherd on his head, or who is suffering from depression. Better access to healthcare would greatly improve teaching and learning in the classroom.

Building Strong Relationships

Charles M. Payne, Author of So Much Reform, So Little Change, says that, “In Chicago, students attending predominantly African American schools are much less likely than students in integrated schools to be in environments where teachers trust parents (about 42 percent of teachers in predominantly African American schools report strong trust as against 72 percent of teacher in integrated schools) and less likely to be in places where teachers feel a strong sense of collective responsibility," (2011, p.101). This lack of teacher-parent trust is a huge hindrance to the teaching and learning that is happening in the classroom, so it is with the utmost diligence on my own end, that I make it a point to form strong, trusting, and collaborative relationships with parents, families, and the community to set not only my students up for success, but myself as a first year teacher-of-record.

Building and maintaining strong relationships with parents and families is critical to my success as a classroom educator. Having continual communication with parents is going to be a goal of mine from day one. Whether it is through a weekly newsletter, a quick text message, a friendly note, a phone call, or a brief chat after school, being in constant communication in good times and bad is going to be essential for building strong relationships. Trusting that my students’ parents are on my team, and treating them as such is incredibly important. As parents, they know their child better than anyone else, so I need to come to them open and willing to learn from them.

In Moll’s article, Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Families, "The typical teacher-student relationship seems ‘thin’ and ‘single-stranded,’ as the teacher ‘knows’ the students only from their performance within rather limited classroom contexts,” (2001, 134). Strong teaching and learning can’t occur in a classroom where relationships are thin and single-stranded! It is important that I am getting to know my students outside of their academic work, as individuals. Being involved in after-school activities, and being present at students’ sporting events to show them support is a great way to build relationships with them.

Also, when thinking about forming good relationships with students, I can’t help but think of Thomas Knestrict, author of Memoriesof the Other. Teachers made him feel stupid, and fleeting comments about his academic abilities have stayed with him all throughout his life. He mentioned that even still when he is at a store counter trying to add up numbers on a receipt, comments made by a teacher long ago about his lack of ability in math come back to haunt him (Knestrict, 783-784).  It is of the utmost importance that I recognize that every comment I make has the potential to change a student’s life for the better or for the worse. It is imperative that I am constantly building students up, noticing where they are struggling, and supporting them through their difficult times academically or emotionally.

One way that I have found to be beneficial when building strong relationships with those in the school and surrounding community, is to always focus on the positive aspects of a community when talking about it to others—even one that is so ridden with violence, poverty, and drugs because despite the difficulties of the community, this is where our students come from. If we focus on those negative aspects, we risk losing any progress we’ve gained. In addition, being open to spend time in the community in which I teach after school hours, attending local functions, and getting to know the local people is essential in relationship building.

As a teacher in a turnaround school where the teacher turn-over rate can be high, there may be some distrust about my intentions, where my loyalties lie, and how long  I plan to stick around. With this, could come some resistance which is only natural and to be expected. However, should I meet resistance along the way, I will continue to work to build trusting relationships by proving myself to the students, the school, and the community through my dedication, and by fulfilling my commitment to educate. By taking a proactive stance to initiate and maintain relationships  throughout the year, I will set myself up for success.

To see more on how I have worked to build relationships in my classroom, school, and neighborhood community this year, and my plans for continuing to build community next year, please see the community section of my Master's Defense Portfolio.

Beliefs, Values, and Ideas that Shape My Identity and My Work as a Teacher

"Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental … The freedom to learn … has been bought by bitter sacrifice. And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn... We must insist upon this to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them…to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be."

- W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Freedom to Learn” ([1949] 1970b)

One of the biggest ideas that shapes my identity as a teacher is the idea of educational equality. Too many students are damned to receive a poor education because of the place that they were born, and the location in which they reside. Today in our country, students’ families’ financial statuses determine the type of education that their children will receive. Rich families send their children to wealthy schools with boundless resources and inexhaustible funding, where learning is effervescent—while poor families send their children to the poor schools, where often times a lack of funding and scarce resources makes it difficult to learn.

 Today, much of the educational inequality in our country is a result of the “opportunity gap,” which Linda Darling Hammond says in her book, The Flat World of Education is, “the accumulated differences in access to key educational resources—expert teachers, personalized attention, high-quality curriculum opportunities, good educational materials, and plentiful information resources—that support learning at home and at school,” (2010, 28).  

Darling-Hammond also goes on to list the five factors  that create the major building blocks of unequal and inadequate educational outcomes in the United States:

Unfortunately, the students in the school district that I work in experience all of the factors that Darling-Hammond talks about, and they will continue to experience for many years to come. In turn, this shapes much of my work as a teacher. It is my job to make up for whatever missed opportunities my students may have in the classroom that I teach in, through an engaging curriculum, through culturally relevant teaching, and through knowing my students and the funds of knowledge that they bring with them into the classroom. While my students may have not had parents who practiced fact fluency or phonics with them before entering school, these urban students bring with them a “substantial knowledge base” (Donahue, Richert& LaBoskey, 2008, 649) and have “acquired a multidimensional depth and breadth from their participation in household life” (Gonzalez et al., 1995,456), which is my job to draw upon to help bring them to high levels of academic success.