Where Does Medicine Come From?

The attention given to this spring's standardized tests has given many of us a glimpse into the world of standardized testing, and into the kinds of questions our children are being asked. It hasn't been a pretty sight.

I was especially intrigued by one parent's ruminations about one of the questions from CMS's new kindergarten test. Her observations get at the heart of the problems with standardized tests, and speak to why we as parents do not want "data" from such tests to "drive" our children's education.

Try to answer this question yourself, before seeing what she has to say.

Test Question: "Where does medicine come from?"

To answer this question accurately requires a basic understanding of science, manufacturing, and law. Medicine can be developed with synthetic or natural ingredients in a lab, produced in a factory, sold by the drug company to a pharmacy, sometimes requires a prescription written by a doctor, and is dispensed via the pharmacy to the patient (or parent in the case of a minor). And this is the simple answer, don’t get me started on explaining insurance coverage, R&D, clinical trials, etc.

Where along the supply chain should this question be answered?

Answers:

My children answered "plants" and "a Doctor." They are both correct.

My neighbor answered "the rainforests." She is correct.

Most frequent answer from kindergarten students in this class: "My Mom." They are also correct.

Other answers might be: a laboratory, a factory

However, according to the test – these answers are all WRONG. The test answer is "a pharmacist."

Do you really want to pinhole our children into an education that condenses this type of question into a one word response? I certainly don’t. Do you really want to reward the teachers that drill test answers in? You might overhear this next year in the classroom: “No Sam, drugs do not come from plants, they come from pharmacists. You have to answer it this way or I could get fired.” I certainly don’t want this. I want my children to be critical thinkers that enjoy learning and understand the bigger picture of the world around them. I think our teachers were doing an excellent job of this thing called learning, until testing, testing and more testing came along.

Test Season

This spring, along with the dogwoods and the pollen, Mecklenburg County has been hit by waves of standardized tests. It's the season of pay for performance, the latest fad in a long line of efforts to change American education from the top down.

State standardized tests already consume a good chunk of the school year, when you count the weeks of focused preparation, the drawn-out process of making sure that every child is tested and possibly retested, and then the time it takes for teachers, students and schools to recover from the frenzy.

And testing affects the entire school, not just the tested grade. Art teachers, music teachers, ESL teachers, EC teachers are pulled from their classes to proctor. Media centers close. Volunteer tutors take the week off. The whole school tiptoes around, in order not to disturb the testing students. It's the most frustrating part of teaching in a public school these days, or sending your child to one.

Now, CMS is ramping up this process, adding dozens of new local tests. At one CMS elementary, of the thirteen school weeks between March 7 and June 10, precisely five will be free of state or district mandated tests. How many times can you weigh a pig?

How did this happen? Let's take it step by step.

In national debates over how to improve American schools, a number of powerful players, most notably private entities such as the Gates and Broad Foundations, have argued that raising "teacher quality" should be the central focus of education policy. The U.S. Department of Education, alas, has gone along with them (for a pithy account of how this came to be, see Diane Ravitch's recent Newsweek column).

How do you raise teacher quality? The Department of Education has decreed, in typically soaring federal prose, that districts should assess teachers "using multiple rating categories that take into account data on student growth as a significant factor."

How do you get "data on student growth?" You measure how well students do on standardized tests from one year to another, or one term to another, and then calculate the effect in a variety of complicated ways. This means you have to give a lot of tests.

Pay for performance, another favorite of the foundation world, takes this idea one step further – making growth scores part of a salary scale. On the surface, the idea of pay for performance doesn't seem so bad. But if every teacher's pay depends, even in part, on "data on student growth," then every student, in every subject, has to take standardized tests.

At this point the educational value of the tests becomes a secondary concern.

It does not matter that standardized tests are more effective at measuring science than art; more suited to high school students than kindergartners.

It does not matter that teachers seem to have considerable influence over math test scores, and very little over English test scores.

It does not matter that testing pulls a first grade teacher out of her classroom for more than 25 hours a year, or forces an ESL teacher to spend a full month administering and proctoring tests rather than teaching his students English.

It does not matter that standardized tests, by nature, can only measure a small part of what parents want their kids to learn at school.

Pay for performance requires that every teacher have a growth score, so there must be a test for every subject at every grade, and all those scores must carry equal weight. As with Procrustes' bed, any piece that doesn't fit the system must be either stretched or chopped off, regardless of the consequences.

In addition, these are high-stakes tests. Because a teacher's rating – and thus salary – depends on student scores, the tests must be given under controlled conditions, and they must be proctored (hence the ESL teacher who has to stop teaching his students so he can watch other students take a test).

Elaborate systems must also be designed to ensure that student scores are credited to the "right" teachers – an especially complicated matter when students are moved from school to school, or from one classroom to another, or in any other situation that doesn't fit the standard one-teacher-to-a-single-set-of-students model.

All this time and expense is justified, we parents are told, because it will get us better teachers. And better teachers will mean higher achievement.

But we parents know better. It's not just that we know research shows that pay for performance isn't fair or effective. We know that a school is not a collection of graphs, statistics and fully aligned, thoughtfully integrated, optimally balanced learning progressions. It's a group of parents, teachers and children exploring a messy world that can't be compressed into a neat set of multiple-choice bubbles, where learning doesn't move along straight, upward lines, and where a test that on paper takes two hours in reality consumes far more time and effort.

We're not opposed to tests per se – there's material our children need to master, and that needs to be monitored. But we're opposed to blowing testing so far out of proportion that real children and real classrooms and real learning fade from view.

We know what happened with the last round of high-stakes testing: a narrowed curriculum, more teaching to the test, and lowered standards overall.

We also know that increasing high-stakes testing is far more likely to lose us our best teachers than to gain us better ones.

As parents, we want our children to have the best teachers possible. We want them to achieve all that they can. But we know that this growth in testing is not the way to reach these goals.


For a research-based account of why tying teacher pay to test scores will not improve either teacher quality or student achievement, please visit the website of Parents Across America: http://parentsacrossamerica.org/performancepay/

Achievement

The music spills out from the Ovens Auditorium stage and washes over the seated students in classic, staccato waves. Dum Dum Dum Dummmmmmmm. Dum Dum Dum Dummmmmmmm. Beethoven's Fifth.


A full-fledged symphony orchestra feasts eyes as well as ears. Stringed instruments, reflecting the stage lights, glow deep reddish-brown. Bows move back and forth in perfect time, while harmonies dance from place to place within the space the sound creates – first here, then over there, then back again.

The students, clapping with the beat, become a joyful blur of sound and movement.

True to the concert's theme – "Rhythm Around the World" – conductor Jacomo Rafael Bairos is guiding his audience through a landscape of waltzes, marches and classical tunes, illustrating beat and rhythm with pieces by Stravinsky, Grieg and Sousa, as well as Beethoven. The students moved cautiously at first, leaning forward to catch the unfamiliar rhythmic patterns. But confidence built quickly, and they now stomp and clap with gusto.

Bairos drops his hands and brings the music to a stop. Then he lifts his baton again, and the sounds pour out once more – still Beethoven's composition, but patterned to a hip-hop beat. The students quickly catch this more familiar rhythm, and began to move with even greater zeal, throwing hips, shoulders, heads and arms into their response.

When at last the music stops, the audience heads for the exits – all but the Shamrock students. All our students play in Shamrock's orchestra, and organizers have arranged some special treats.

Before the concert, the students got to meet Joy Payton-Stevens, a cellist who visited Shamrock back in the fall. Now, as the students from other schools reach the doors, Bairos appears in front of us, smiling and high-fiving and ready to answer questions. The kids beam, and shoot their hands into the air. When did he start playing music? Is it scary to be up in front of all those people? They learn he started out when he was just their age, and there is nothing he loves better.


Gerald Turner, a longtime member of orchestra sponsor St. Luke Methodist Church, happily photographs the scene. He's been to plenty of musical events over the years, he says, but he's never seen a symphony orchestra before. He can't get over how wonderful it was, how perfectly all the musicians played together. Amazing.

Back outside, the students chat and pose for pictures as they wait for the bus. It's been one of those school days that you don't forget – your friends, the sun's warmth, the way you clapped and swayed in the embrace of extraordinary music. What a great day to be young. What a sense of possibility. What an achievement to aspire to.


But as the glowing kids line up to board the bus, I think about the testing season that will soon be upon them, how pinched and sad those lists of carefully vetted questions will seem next to the marvel of Beethoven's Fifth. What slice of this experience could be mechanical enough to reduce to a multiple-choice answer?

How many beats per measure are in a waltz?

a. 4
b. 3
c. 7
d. 10

In what year was Ludwig van Beethoven born?

a. 1740
b. 1760
c. 1865
d. 1770

Is this achievement?

If some children mark more of these answers right than others, what does that tell you about them? And in this era of pay-for-performance, what does it say about their teacher?

Later, I try to imagine the kind of question a good teacher would ask her students.

Which word best describes the way you felt while listening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony?

a. Exuberant
b. Tempestuous
c. Funky
d. Wakazoo! (this last courtesy of Parker)

In the standardized test world, of course, a question like this would never make the grade. Sadly, none of these marvelous words is the one right answer. It depends on the person, on the performance, on a hundred other variables. It calls on students to discuss, explain, weigh different points of view. Just like in literature. Just like in life.

But these days, when achievement has become an educational obsession, standardized test scores seem to be the only thing that matters. They determine which students pass, which schools are closed, which teachers are rewarded. When someone talks about achievement, they are almost always referring strictly to test scores. We seem to have forgotten how remarkably limited they are, what a small slice of education they represent.

Of course, these tests have one, powerful advantage that fits them to the Darwinian conditions of today's educational surroundings – an advantage has allowed them not merely to survive, but to thrive and multiply.

Unlike a great symphony, or a marvelous piece of writing, the bubble patterns test-takers create can be turned into numbers.

Once you have a set of numbers, they take on a life of their own. You can line them up in impressive columns, top to bottom. You can extend them out to multiple decimal places, creating the illusion of ultimate precision. You can set numeric goals for schools to reach – or face the consequences. You can create salary scales that slice your teaching staff into neat quartiles of "effectiveness."

And after a while you can forget that at the heart of this quantitative extravaganza lies a child sitting in a classroom, penciling circles in answer to the limited range of questions that can be pressed to serve the multiple-choice format. You learn something from the scores those patterned circles generate, but not as much as everyone around you imagines that they signify. Lost in the chase for just the right array of calculations, the magic matrix of accurate assessment, you have ceased to notice just how little this mathematical emperor is wearing.

It's time to stop and take a closer look.

Shakespeare and Standardized Tests

"Can you give us a quote from Shakespeare?" the girl asks.

Her classmates crowd around, notebooks and pencils in hand, eyes expectant.


Ms. Pavelecky's third grade class is on a quest. They've been reading The Green Book, a science fiction novel about a group of people who have fled a dying Earth for a new planet. One of the travelers has brought along the collected works of Shakespeare.

Ms. Pavelecky wants her students to understand why this old dead white guy means so much. So they're traipsing through the school, asking everyone they meet to give them a quote. They've cornered me in the butterfly garden. Their pencils hover. I'm on the spot.

A quote from Shakespeare.

I think first of the four great words with which Lady Macbeth laid bare her unhinged mind. They have possibilities. Strong, single-syllable Anglo-Saxon words. A swell example of a grammatical "command." The kids would love to hear me say it.

But . . . maybe not.

I shake my head. "I'm thinking of something, but I don't think I can say it."

Ms. Pavelecky laughs. Ms. Bunting thought of that one too, she says, but settled for "Romeo, Romeo."

As my mind's gears keep turning, complications pop up everywhere. A phrase that contemplates suicide? One that pegs life as "a tale told by an idiot . . . signifying nothing?" Hmmm.

As the students grow restless, I latch onto Julius Caesar: "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." This one will do. I love its call to self-reliance, despite the less-than-admirable motivation. I say it slowly, spelling out "fault," "Brutus" and "underlings."


As I say the words, they seem to call for explanation. So I start with something I figure will be easy –stars and destiny.

What zodiac signs are you? I ask.

The kids look blank. I feel suddenly old. Has astrology become a relic of the past? Do kids no longer know that crucial piece of information – the sign that they were born under? I look at Ms. Pavelecky. She shakes her head. I don't want to think about how long the Age of Aquarius has been over.

I feel little more successful with explaining "underlings." The idea of a social system placing some people beneath others is unlikely to go out of fashion any time soon.

The kids walk away, and I think about how what they've just done will never show up on a standardized test. They're learning about people, about culture, about the world around them. My halting explanations may have left them with only murky inklings about astrology and underlings, but they've seen someone they know get excited about Shakespeare and the words he wrote. And they have a couple of new ideas they might explore.

Her students have really taken to Shakespeare, Ms. Pavelecky says later. They love his stories, so full of drama, humor and humanity. She's worked hard to help them understand how the power of words can turn tragedy into a thing of beauty.

When they sit down to take that test, in contrast, it will ask them to draw painfully narrow sets of conclusions from badly written stories full of tired clichés.

I'm glad that teachers like Ms. Pavelecky don't spend all – or even most – of their time teaching to those tests. But I can't help worrying about what's ahead, given CMS's current pay for performance obsession. Officials claim that standardized tests won't be at the center of teacher evaluations, but I don't believe it. And if teachers' pay depends on how many test sheet bubbles children can fill in correctly, the pressure to dispense with Shakespeare and focus on test-taking skills will grow.

It seems time to stand up. Perhaps Cassius wasn't so wrong after all.

Herrin Avenue

It's a big night at the quarterly Plaza-Midwood Neighborhood Association meeting, held in the fellowship hall of Kilgo United Methodist Church. All the folding chairs have filled, and board members are busily setting out new rows. A TV crew films residents as they arrive.

Crime tops the agenda. The neighborhood's had some break-ins in recent months, and residents are looking to beef up their crime-fighting efforts.

A CMPD officer comes to the front of the room, and begins to detail crimes, arrests and courtroom proceedings. Most of the news seems to be good. The police have arrested a number of key people, he explains, including the "cell phone bandit" and the four young men who recently burglarized a home just down the street.

The woman who owns that home is sitting on the front row. She has a number of questions, which the officer does his best to answer. As he talks, he mentions that the young men in question live on Herrin Avenue.

Herrin Avenue.

Herrin Avenue is an L-shaped stretch of street that starts at Shamrock Drive, crosses The Plaza, and then peters out a few blocks later when it meets the railroad tracks. On the Shamrock side, it's lined with small brick duplex rentals, most of which have seen better days. A lot of Shamrock students live on Herrin Avenue.

The street doesn't have the best reputation. When we take Parker's friends home, especially at night, it has an eerie feel, with young men standing on cracked curbs and walking up and down the street under dim lights. It's not a place I'd go to if I didn't have to.

But tonight, when I hear the policeman mention Herrin Avenue, I don't think of crime. I think of Lisa Tuggle, a 39-year-old mother who died from carbon monoxide poisoning just a few days ago. The hot water heater in her rented Herrin Avenue duplex had malfunctioned, and she died in her sleep.

Two of her daughters, who had spent the night next door with their grandmother, came home in the morning and found her dead on the couch. Both the girls had gone to Shamrock. When I saw the article in the Observer, I recognized the name, and my heart sank. Yet another tragedy our students would have to come to terms with.

A little later in the meeting, it's time to talk about the school. I'm there with fellow parent Sarah Gates, and we describe all the things we're doing at Shamrock. It's a happy subject these days, because we have so much going on. The audience catches our enthusiasm, and the good feelings reverberate around the room.

As we finish, though, I feel I have to say something about Herrin Avenue. There's a lot more there than crime, I say. Then I talk about Lisa Tuggle and her daughters and all the other families that I know who live there. Our kids are good kids, I note. But their lives are tough, they have to deal with more than their fair share of tragedy, and enticements to crime and drugs often stand waiting just outside their doors.

Shamrock Gardens, in contrast, is a place of growth and hope, where kids are introduced to other worlds and other possibilities. The stronger we can make the school, I note, the stronger that positive pull will be.

The meeting ends, and Sarah and I stay to mingle, talking about programs and property values, handing out volunteer and donation forms. After a few minutes, the woman whose house was broken into comes up to me. She doesn't want that bad experience to leave her hating people, she says. She wants to see the other side of Herrin Avenue. She'd like to work with a Shamrock kid.

It's one of those moments when everything comes together. This is what our efforts at Shamrock are all about. Our kids need her. But she needs them as well. If we can connect with each other, we'll all be better off.

I don't think that volunteering is enough, though. Volunteering helps individual children, which is wonderful. We want every volunteer that we can get, and they should all feel great about what they're doing. But we need more as well. We need more Plaza-Midwood kids to go to Shamrock.

Over the years, we've had a number of neighborhood parents who have come in every week to tutor Shamrock children, while sending their own kids to more privileged schools. Every time I see them, I can't help but think that if their kids – and thus their hearts – were here at Shamrock, we could be accomplishing so much more.

If we can build a broad-based effort, one that brings our neighborhood's families to Shamrock and combines that move with the active support of neighbors who don't have children, then the connections we are trying to build will strengthen.

Instead of touching for brief moments – a morning of "beautification" work, the hour that a tutor and a child sit reading together – our disparate worlds will be linked by broader, more resiliant ties, strengthening the pull away from the dark side of Herrin Avenue. Helping the many parents like Lisa Tuggle, who want so badly for their children to succeed. Helping ourselves as well.

The Gift of Reading

It's two days before Christmas break, and Shamrock's media center buzzes with excitement. Piles of books spill across the counters: hardcover novels that weigh heavy in the hand, bright-covered picture stories, paperbacks with brittle, browning leaves. Kids cluster eagerly around them, thumbing through the pages, examining the illustrations, looking for just the right one.

I love our media center. Like most of our school, it isn't much to look at – beige cinderblock walls festooned with a scattering of posters, and the usual collection of chairs, tables and plants. But it's where the school's books reside, presided over by media specialist Margaret Hollar, reading evangelist extraordinaire.


This may be the age of the Internet, of Smart Boards and of Angry Birds, but books still lie at the heart of our school. At the start of every day, before the first bell rings, a steady stream of students pours through the media center doors, bringing in completed books to exchange for new ones. Transactions continue at a brisk pace all day long.

As students scour the shelves for new material, Ms. Hollar is always ready to consult. She doesn't believe in telling kids what they should read, or in limiting them to the narrow range of titles that lie within the boundaries of their "official" reading level, but she's happy to offer advice, and to prod gently when someone keeps picking books that seem a bit too easy.


She loves stories and characters and humor and has little patience for the books that seem designed simply to pound a few new words into a struggling reader's head (an approach that unfortunately infuses many of the works the federal government provides to schools like ours). She talks about books like they're people – they can be friends or enemies, she tells the kids, depending on what lies inside.

Every year, when she makes out the lists of books the PTA has agreed to buy, the total always comes to several dollars more than the amount that we've agreed on. The kids have asked for all the books on the list, she explains, and she just can't decide which ones to cut. She'd rather we do it. Of course we can never decide either, so we always buy them all.

Thanks to Ms. Hollar and the rest of our staff, Shamrock students see reading not as a chore, but as the journey and adventure that it's supposed to be. Two of the school's most exciting events are our fall and spring book fairs, when the media center fills with brand-new titles, and kids come through the door clutching bags of change, or a few precious bills.




Parents join in as well, such as the mother of a fifth grader who snuck into this fall's fair to buy her son's Christmas presents, glowing with anticipation as she imagined how delighted he would be to find the books he wanted underneath the tree.

A week ago, we held a drawing for the students who participated in our cookie dough sale (in which our kids astonished us by selling $7,000 worth of double chocolate brownie, white macadamia nut and other exotic concoctions). When I announced that first prize would be a bicycle, the gathered students smiled politely.

When I held up the second group of prizes – book fair certificates – every face lit up.

But now, two days before Christmas break, the book fair books are being packed away, and the kids have turned to the new ones on the counters. They are one of Ms. Hollar's pet projects, which she calls "Give the Gift of Reading." She doesn't just want kids to read for themselves. She wants them to talk about books, share their experiences, pass the fire. So each year, she collects several hundred books – enough for every Shamrock student to give one to a classmate.


This hasn't been a simple task. As we've learned over and over, doing something for every student at a school, even a small one, is never cheap, at least not by our standards. But Shamrock's staff is a determined bunch, and each year, they've made it work, hunting for sales, collecting donations, paying for a lot of books themselves.

This year, though, that changed. When Bobbie, one of our new Plaza-Midwood moms, heard about the program, she thought we should ask the community for books. She and a P-M friend, Patty, put in the legwork we'd never been able to muster, contacting local businesses, placing collection boxes, spreading the word. And the books flooded in, filling box after box after box, enough for this year and probably next as well. A glorious abundance. The more books, the more choices, the more opportunities for each student to find a perfect match.


Later in the day, I stop by Parker's classroom for a gingerbread house extravaganza. At the back of the room sits a stack of books, each neatly wrapped and decorated, with a message from one child to another. The gift of reading, and much more.





Thanks to the local businesses who put out boxes: Book Buyers, The Common Market, Georgetown Day Spa, Foskoskies, No Grease, Pike's Pharmacy, Shamrock Gardens and Zada Jane's. Thanks also to the members of charlottemommies, and everyone else who gave.

Partial Magnet

The students cluster at the base of the glittering Firebird outside the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, giggling and squirming as they pose for a picture. William, Lawrence, Philip, Niko, Dakiya, Asha, Jessica, Kaylyn, Noemi, Filberto and of course Parker (cap over his face, always the clown). The shutter clicks, and they head inside to look at art.


It's kids' day at the Bechtler, where we're members, so we've invited Parker's class. It's a spur-of-the-moment affair – we saw the announcement the previous Saturday, sent an invitation home on Monday, and by Tuesday more than half the class had signed up. Their teacher, Ms. Bonasera, and a couple of parents volunteered to drive.

The caravan arrived downtown about noon, and the kids spent the day exploring the museum, checking out Amelie's bakery, and marveling at our city's gloriously transformed arts district, where almost none of them had been before.


They stuck together, as friends do, heads bumping, arms draped about each other, whispering and poking and teasing. They made postcards and collages, shared root beers, played tag on the Green.


Parker's classmates have been one of Shamrock's greatest joys. Many of them first met in kindergarten, a clutch of tiny strangers who eyed each other warily. Then friendships sprang up, and by the time they graduated to first grade, they were inseparable. Every teacher since has marveled at their connection, at how quickly they tune into each other's feelings, at how much they care.

If an asthma attack threatens, the class picks up on the symptoms right away, often long before the teacher notices. If someone's feeling down, everyone worries. The few new students who have joined the class each year are drawn right in.

I remember when, in second grade, Parker missed several days of school right around Christmastime. The day that he returned, his classmates stampeded toward him, faces lit up, hugging him in welcome and pressing on him the present that had arrived while he was gone. "Open it, open it," they chorused, more excited than he was. He had only been out a few days, but they had all missed him.

This doesn't, of course, mean that every child or every day is perfect. Rivalries break out. They get on each other's nerves from time to time. One day on the playground, as Parker was reeling after being hit by a soccer ball, one of his best friends had the bad grace to laugh. Parker promptly slugged him.

But it's been extraordinary to watch them grow, to quarrel and to make up, to shift from one best friend to another and then back again, to get taller and smarter and more self-assured. I never tire of looking at their pictures. They are such beautiful children.

It would be easy to chalk this closeness up to being at a magnet school. Shamrock is a partial magnet with a "gifted" program, and Parker has always been in the designated magnet class. Parents interested in magnet schools often talk about the advantages of being with a group of people who have chosen the school and the program, who are all on the same page.

But Parker's class complicates that view. It's always hard to get a magnet started, and his was Shamrock's first magnet kindergarten. When it didn't fill in the lottery, neighborhood kids were shifted in. Of the fifteen students in that class, perhaps four had come to Shamrock for the magnet. The rest would have been at the school anyway.

That turned out not to matter. Some students have come and gone over the years, but the class has always shone. They all came into fourth grade having passed their EOGs, and all of them are reading above grade level. Create a real opportunity to push higher, and plenty of students are ready to rise to it. And while most of their parents don't have a lot of money, they help out where they can, and leap at any opportunity to expand their kids' horizons.

This wouldn't have happened if Shamrock hadn't been a partial rather than a full magnet. The beauty of a partial magnet is that it offers the excitement of a magnet program in a neighborhood setting. It's not limited to those kids whose parents have the ambition and resources to seek it out (or those who have the luck to be accepted). The scores at partial magnets can look less impressive than those at full magnets, and the demographics can seem less promising as well. (for an example of the consequences this difference can have, click here.) But parents like Peter and I can make a far greater difference for kids at a partial magnet than at a full one.

Most partial magnets have been deliberately placed at high-poverty schools, because those are the ones that need the infusion of academic excitement, as well as the boost from parents who have the connections and resources to do things like invite a class to an art exhibition, write a grant to build a butterfly garden, or help raise money to send the fourth graders to Raleigh.

And when we do these things, we're not just mysterious, benevolent strangers. We're Parker's mom and dad. They see us all the time; they've visited our house; they know our son has all the strengths and foibles that they do. He may live in a 1,600 square foot house, the biggest many of them have ever set foot in (the first thing most of them remark on is the space; the second is how many books we have). But they know that he still struggles in math, he still gets mad when someone laughs at him, he still thinks "Billie Jean" is the greatest pop recording ever made. And he knows all of them equally well.


So much that's done these days in the name of charity is a drop-in, drop-out affair – people reaching out to low-income children while remaining rooted in their own, comfortable schools and neighborhoods. Being at a partial magnet is different. It's like helping to build a street of houses, then moving into one of them and helping to shape a neighborhood that works for everyone. When I walk into Ms. Bonasera's class, and see her desk festooned with postcards from the Bechtler trip, it's hard to describe the feeling. But one thing I know. Being part of Shamrock Gardens is the most satisfying thing I've ever done.