Spring

The pair of white cabbage butterflies wheels in circles, spiraling up toward the cloud-streaked sky, descending to the green tangle of our emerging butterfly garden, tumbling over new-cut grass towards the school picnic benches, then veering back to the garden beds.

 

It's a gorgeous day – "abundant sunshine" as the weather reports put it, but not as hot as earlier this week. Winter-dormant plants are exploding from the ground, and the beds teem with life. The pussy willow we planted last year sports kitten-soft gray catkins and firework bursts of yellow. Robins, mockingbirds, chickadees and doves make their appearance, and the space around the garden rings with chirps and trills and snatches of melody. 

The wings of the cabbage whites have blurred gray edges, with black spots at the center. It's a little early for most butterflies, although I've spotted some tiny spring azures and a couple of yellow sulfurs in other beds. We don't have much in bloom right now, except the fourth grade's daffodil bed, and the cabbage whites don't seem interested in those. I wonder what they're whirling for – whether it's a fight, a mating dance, a frantic search for food or just a way to pass the time.

I've come to dig out cutleaf coneflowers, who have taken advantage of our good dirt and started to colonize our beds. The plants are already a good three feet tall, and if left to their own devices would overspill the beds in weeks. We have too many other plants to give them that much space, so out they go. 

It's the first day of spring break, so the pathways around the garden lie largely silent, bereft of their usual parade of children moving from one place to another. The birds and bugs will have a week of peace before school starts up again. The work goes faster without constant interruptions, enthusiastic questions and the customary stream of greetings and hugs, but I miss them.

As I prepare to sink my shovel once again into the damp, dark dirt, a flash of movement catches my eye. A tiny shape darts out of a birdhouse and is gone, too quickly for me to identify. 

The birdhouse – a small, wooden box with a sloped roof – has been in the garden for some time, hanging from a wrought iron hook that has patiently performed a variety of tasks over the years. I can't remember who put it there. One thing I like about our garden is the way it collects inspiration ­– a turtle box, a birdhouse, mystery plants, all of which just appear, and make themselves at home.

It's dark inside the house, and I twist my neck back and forth, trying to catch the light. Then I see gray feathers and, just barely visible in the darkness, three small, white speckled eggs. A miracle. 

Happily, it is a teacher workday, and two of our first-year science teachers, Robin Tench and Laura Howden, are working in nearby classrooms. When they emerge, I beckon them to look, and they light up with delight. A little later, when head custodian Grady Houston wheels a trash can round a corner, I call him over too. He leans down, peers back and forth, then smiles the biggest smile of all.

This is how we've built our school, one shared moment at a time. Even as we've piled up data and projects and assessments, this has been the glue that holds us all together. To create the kind of place Shamrock has been, people have to care about each other in ways that show, in moments that buoy spirits and cement bonds.

I like working in the garden because it makes so many of these moments possible – always something new to discover and to share. I remember the day that students gathered to marvel at our first spicebush caterpillar, the morning they discovered gulf fritillaries everywhere. I think back to all the wide eyes and open mouths as students got their first looks at baby rabbits, blue robin eggs, seed-snacking goldfinches and parsley caterpillars, bright green and yellow striped creatures which when poked rear up and shoot out small, orange horns. 

And of course our school is filled not only with the miracle of nature, but that of children, unfolding around us every day. I love the way our teachers revel in the dozens of individual miracles that parade through their classrooms, the way I hear them the hallways swapping stories and laughter and advice, searching for the way to touch each one of their students, building the bonds that nurture not only children but each other.

The six years I've been engaged in this endeavor have been among the most rewarding of my life, a day-by-day amassing of encounters and experience, one after another, much like the way we filled our butterfly garden beds.

When it came time to fill the beds we couldn't fit a truck into the courtyard, so we had to dump the dirt out back and bring it in one wheelbarrow at a time. We called it wheelbarrow day. Parents, teachers and neighbors descended on the school to dig, wheel, spread and haul. We cooked food, made paper butterflies, held a raffle and had a great good time. Wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow, the beds filled up. Moment after moment, we got to know each other better.

Three years later, the foundation laid that day endures, in the plants now springing up under the March sun, and in the friendships and connections that have grown as well. It's such a joy to share the results with newcomers such as Ms. Howden and Ms. Tench, to draw them into the circle of bird eggs and butterflies, moments and miracles, into the love that nurtures gardens and children and schools.

Breaking New Ground

On this warm winter evening, Shamrock Gardens glows with life.

Inside the bright-lit cafeteria, tables crowd with families of all sizes and descriptions, strollers fill the aisles, and the din of happy chatter reverberates around the space. Standing room only here tonight.

Up by the stage, students and siblings groove to a Michael Jackson dance game, shaking their hips and flinging out their arms to the familiar tunes. Volunteers dispense slice after slice of pizza, along with an abundance of brownies. Cars jam the parking lot. The stacks of empty pizza boxes grow steadily higher.

As families finish eating, many make their way over to the K-2 building, where community helper Jerry Gaudet, a steadfast fixture at Shamrock events for more than a decade, hands out sanitary handwipes.

Along the buzzing corridor, screens flicker in dim classrooms as kids toss virtual bowling balls, guide cars on digital tracks, try out new dance moves. Inside the gymnasium, basketballs hit the floor with satisfying thuds before taking to the air.

It took a lot of work to set up PTA Family Wii night. Volunteers had to be corralled, Wiis borrowed, pizza planned and ordered, brownies baked. It's the kind of event we could only dream of putting on five years ago, when we began to rebuild Shamrock's PTA. Back then we'd set a date for an event, send out a few flyers, and mainly improvise. If we'd gotten a crowd that numbered in the hundreds, we wouldn't have known what to do. In those days, with lots of time and effort, Shamrock's staff could pull off an occasional big event. Parents couldn't.

Now we can. 

The school's broadening appeal has drawn in planners, organizers and dozens of new helping hands. Growing interest among families has also brought in other volunteers, heightening the feeling that the school and its students belong not just to parents, but to the surrounding communities as well.

Being able to organize this kind of event means a lot to Shamrock. Our school gathers students from several neighborhoods, and from multiple racial and economic backgrounds. To build ties among our families, connecting them to the school and to each other, we need these face-to-face connections, this mutual enjoyment at watching kids cavort, the rush that comes with working side by side. The more events like this we have, the tighter our school community grows.

The best part of Family Night for me – I didn't do anything at all. I also didn't lift a finger for this year's Fall Festival, for the kindergarten or first grade dinners, for Beautification Day, or for Family Night Loteria back in October (being in Shanghai was a pretty good excuse). We've never had such a full event schedule, and each has been a success.

In our first few years at Shamrock, when most of the PTA planning fell to a tiny group, I worried whether other parents would carry on the work we'd done after we left. Now, as I walk the corridors and see familiar faces like Jerry Gaudet's joined by many, many others, that old anxiety eases. This year's Shamrock T-shirt proudly proclaims that we're "Breaking New Ground." It feels that way to me.

 

Note: Our Family Night, like the grade dinners of previous years, was generously sponsored by a Front Porch Grant, part of the Crossroads Charlotte program run by the Foundation of the Carolinas.

Shanghai Adventures

Hello all,

As I noted in the previous post, Peter, Parker and I are spending the fall in Shanghai, China, where Peter is a visiting professor of architecture at Tongji University and Parker and I are homeschooling and exploring. I'm taking a break from this blog, but you can check out Parker's (to which I occasionally contribute).

Have a great fall, everyone!

Parent Involvement

I wrote this post for the Mom Congress Back-to-School Blog-a-thon (I was the North Carolina delegate to the 2011 Mom Congress, sponsored by Parenting Magazine). You can read more Mom Congress blogs here.

As the letter notes, Peter and Parker and I will be spending the fall in Shanghai. Peter will be a visiting professor of architecture at Tongji University, and Parker and I will be learning and exploring. It should be quite an adventure.


Dear Parker,

Only three more days before we head for Shanghai. Four months to explore one of the world's great cities! I've already got a long list of places to visit together: museums, markets, neighborhoods, gardens. I'm so excited.

But I'm nervous as well. Not of a temporary move to a city with 23 million residents, terrible drivers, some of the world's worst air pollution and a language I don't read or speak. I'm nervous about this homeschooling thing.

Every summer, I joke that I can't wait for school to start again, so I can return you to the capable hands of trained professionals. I laugh, but I mean every word.

I've got a list of fancy degrees that show I'm pretty good at learning. But they don't mean I can teach. Although I pick up concepts fast, I don't have the patience or dedication to devise four or five ways to teach them to someone else, much less to design lessons engaging enough to draw in restless ten-year-olds.

As you well know, if we were here this fall I wouldn't spend much time in your classroom. Other parents would do the hands-on work of tutoring, helping with class projects and organizing parties. I'd be crunching numbers, writing articles, speaking at school board meetings and sending countless e-mails.

I'd be working to get our teachers the resources they need to succeed, such as small classes and decent libraries. I'd be doing my best to shield them from policies that get in their way – most recently the flood of enervating standardized tests that our school board has unleashed on our classrooms. I'd be spending quality cybertime with my friends at Parents Across America, as we work to engage parents around the country in national education issues.

You might ask why parents need to be doing this work. Don't teachers have the right to free speech? Aren't they the ones who're always telling you to speak out, to confront bullies, to stand up for yourself? And aren't they the ones who really know what's happening in schools and classrooms? If policies like testing or inflated class size aren't helping students learn, why don't teachers lead the fight against them?

Welcome, son, to the worlds of work and politics.

When you get older, you'll understand how much it means to have a job that pays the bills and perhaps supports a family. And when you do, you'll understand how hard it is to publicly criticize your employer. Some teachers have the courage to speak out. Many are too afraid – afraid of losing jobs or of having dissatisfied administrators make their lives miserable.

As you learn more about politics, you'll also learn about the attacks launched when people stand up against powerful interests. Many of the policies I and my friends have challenged are marketed as corporate-style "efficiencies." Essentially, they promise to get more bang for educational bucks by using tests and other measures to make the educational workforce more "productive." They're backed not only by the federal government, but by a lot of major private-sector players, including wealthy private foundations.

When teachers challenge these policies, they're quickly accused of being lazy, of not wanting to be held "accountable" for their performance, of caring more about themselves than about the children they teach every day. It can get very ugly very fast.

We parents are in a stronger position. No one can fire us. If we work together, in fact, we have the power to deprive elected officials of their jobs. And no one has a greater stake that we do in good schools and good teaching. No one can accuse us of placing the interests of adults over those of children. We're in it for our kids.

Given these political dynamics, as well as our hard economic times, if we parents want our children to get the kind of education they deserve, we have to look beyond what's happening in our individual schools and classrooms. We have to be the ones who stand up and speak out.

I'm starting to run long here, and I can almost feel you tugging on my arm, the way you do when I get into one of what you call my "endless chats." Your pleas echo faintly in my head. "Mom, Mom! No more chats! We have to go!" And it's true that we're not nearly finished packing.

So one last thing. Please bear with me on this homeschooling business. I won't be able to "deliver" the material with anything like the competence, creativity or patience you've grown used to at Shamrock. But I promise that if you'll do your best to focus, we'll get through what we need to do as quickly as we can. Then we'll go out exploring. I can't wait.

Love,


Mom

Democracy Revisited

I'm standing on Washington's Ellipse, at the Save Our Schools march, when the chant starts from the crowd.

"This is what democracy looks like!"

"This is what democracy looks like!"

From where I'm standing, democracy looks like the backs of a lot of people's heads, punctuated here and there by an umbrella raised against the relentless sun. But I get the point. There's a lot more to democracy than election day.


Textbooks teach kids that we elect officials who pass laws. But that's only the beginning. The SOS march is a great example. Many of the parents, teachers and scholars at the march worked hard to make Barack Obama our nation's 44th president. But we've been deeply frustrated with his education policies. So we're here to press for changes. And we are indeed a marvelous mosaic.

As we depart the Ellipse and head for the White House, democracy looks like 74-year-old Jonathan Kozol, marching in suit and tie despite the 100-degree heat.


It looks like the purple-clad member of Omega Psi Phi, in town to celebrate his fraternity's centennial, who breaks into a few impromptu dance steps in support of the marchers.


It looks like our Parents Across America group, whose members came from communities all across the country.


As the march proceeds down Pennsylvania Avenue, the sights and sounds around me summon up other images from a long year of democratic engagement.

I remember the November evening I spent on the second floor of Charlotte's government center, surrounded by high school students fighting to keep their school. The Board of Education had targeted nine schools for closure, and anxious citizens had filled the chamber hall to overflowing, sending many of us to an auxiliary room upstairs. The room was dominated by supporters of Waddell High, a school with low test scores and a problematic reputation, but where students had found a home, and friends, and teachers who cared deeply about them.

One by one the students who had signed up to speak were called to tell the board why Waddell should be spared. The room filled with smiles and high fives as their classmates wished them well, applause when they appeared on the closed-circuit television screen, and warm welcomes as they returned, beaming from the rush of standing up in front of a packed house and saying what they wanted to say.


I remember a sunny, windswept afternoon outside that same government center, spent with a motley but enthusiastic group of people willing to look like fools to make a point.

CMS had launched a massive expansion of standardized testing that disrupted learning and angered parents across the system. In an effort to get the school board to pull back, a group of us had organized protests, petitions and letter-writing campaigns.

Although the school board was scheduled to take a crucial vote that evening, the public wouldn't be allowed to speak. So we had decided to dance in protest, stepping to Greg Gower's marvelous "Test Teacher Anthem." The wind scattered our posters and buffeted our sound, but we had fun anyway.


Most of all, though, I remember the May morning when several dozen Shamrock fourth graders, clutching backpacks and pillows, climbed aboard two chartered buses to head to Raleigh, our state capital.


Although a fourth grade Raleigh trip has been a North Carolina institution for generations, no one at the school could remember a time when Shamrock's students had gone. It takes time and effort to plan the trip, as well as a good bit of cash, and no one had been able to muster the energy or the funds – until this year.


The students had been looking forward to the trip for months – the bus ride, the nature museum, the planned stop at a Golden Corral restaurant on the way home. They knew they would have fun. They also had a purpose. It was budget-cutting season, and we had just learned that our beloved media center specialist, Margaret Hollar, had been handed a pink slip. Along with cameras, snacks and cash for souvenirs, the students carried letters to our state representative, calling for more funds for schools.

Once we reached the capital, the students made their way over to the old Capitol building, fronted by statues of the three Presidents North Carolina claims as native sons.


They trooped up the marble stairs of the current legislative building to see the chambers where members of the House and Senate make the laws.


They marveled at tarantulas and dinosaur bones and photographs of children who had worked in textile mills a hundred years before.


But for me, the highlight came when they met Becky Carney, our state representative, and crowded eagerly around to hand her their letters, their first foray into the democratic fray.


Democracy, of course has never been easy. It's full of combat and compromise, winners and losers, and fighting hard can make losing that much more painful. And these days it seems the deck is often stacked against folks at the grassroots, stacked by cash from billionaires and corporations, by a reeling economy and by a powerful federal government that seems more interested in rhetoric than reality.

In that regard, it's been a tough year.

As the long night of November 8 faded into the early morning of November 9, the satisfaction of speaking out gave way to weary despair when a grim-faced school board voted to close every school on its list, including Waddell High. When school opens next week, Waddell's building will be occupied by the students of a language immersion magnet. Waddell's students will be scattered across several schools. Eight other schools will have closed for good.

Although our testing fight helped stall a crucial piece of test-related state legislation, and brought the issue to the forefront of public debate, we lost two crucial school board votes, each by a one-vote margin. In June, when the superintendent who had pushed the testing suddenly left for a plush job with Rupert Murdoch, we hoped that his departure would slow what we had come to call testing madness. But we were disappointed. The interim superintendent is pressing doggedly forward, an approach backed by our Chamber of Commerce, the Gates Foundation, the federal Department of Education, and many companies that stand to benefit from a testing expansion. So there's a long haul ahead.

We did have one bright spot, though. A campaign to raise education funding at both state and county levels helped lift budget allocations high enough to restore a number of proposed cuts. So just before school let out, our school board voted to restore the jobs of all the pink-slipped media center specialists – including Ms. Hollar's.

On the last day of school, one of the fourth graders who had carried a letter up to Raleigh ran over to Ms. Hollar, grabbed her in a hug, and happily exclaimed: "We saved your job!"


That's what democracy ought to look like. A fourth grader lit up with the joy of having stepped into the democratic fray and made a difference. It's a faith that can be hard to hold onto. But it's the faith we need.

Is This Democracy?

The first clue came when the phone rang at the house of my friend Carol Sawyer. At the other end was a pleasant woman who said she was conducting a survey on education in our school district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Carol doesn't much care for phone surveys, but she's interested in anything that has to do with CMS. She said yes.

A few minutes in, she realized that this was no ordinary survey. Question after question sought her opinions on key aspects of CMS policy: strategic staffing, weighted student funding, pay for performance and more. She could give free responses, which the surveyor typed up. Someone had spent a lot of money.

When she asked who had commissioned the survey, the woman wouldn't say, beyond a vague reference to a "foundation."

A survey about CMS wasn't really a surprise. Knowing what members of the public think about CMS policies definitely matters these days.

It's been a rocky year, with a set of school closings that deeply angered the affected communities and a massive expansion of standardized testing that disrupted learning, infuriated parents and teachers, and drew national attention.

On the heels of this turmoil, our superintendent left to go work for Rupert Murdoch. Now, we're about to elect three new school board members. The new board will pick the new superintendent, who will then set the course for the next few years. It's a crucial time. The survey made sense.

The question was: who wanted to know?

Her curiosity piqued, Carol phoned our school board representative to see if he knew anything. The survey was news to him, he said, but he'd ask around. One thing led to another, and we turned our attention elsewhere.

Until yesterday. The headline said it all: "Bill Gates funds CMS PR Blitz." Turns out that Gates money had funded the survey as part of a $200,000 PR campaign – being handled by Charlotte's Chamber of Commerce – to "inform" the public about district policies.

"Although change can be intimidating," the endeavor's website reads, "reform in the classroom means continuous improvement to better students, teachers and the community at-large." It defines "reform" as "to put or change into an improved condition."

(Don't guess Bill got his money's worth on those ungrammatical mouthfuls but that's his problem.)

Of course, we looked first for a statement about CMS's standardized testing expansion – the 52 new tests that packed school board meetings, sparked countless letters and e-mails, and barely survived two 5-4 school board votes.

Unsurprisingly, the Chamber's spokesperson denied that the effort, which bears the unwieldy name of "Educating Change Now," was designed to change people's minds about testing. "This is not an advocacy campaign," she stated, adding that all they were trying to do was inform the public about CMS's current operating blueprint, known as Strategic Plan 2014.

But the educatingchangenow website clearly states that "effective teaching can be defined as more than a year’s worth of content in a year’s time," and that a key strategy for strengthening teacher effectiveness is to "develop a measure for a year’s worth of growth for every subject and grade level." If it smells like a test (or actually a whole lot of tests) . . .

My thoughts immediately turned to the news stories back in March that detailed a Gates Foundation effort to spend more than $3 million to "win over the public and the media to its market-driven approach to school reform" by seeking to create “strong ties to local journalists, opinion elites, and local/state policymakers and their staffs,” as well as supporting local groups willing to advocate for the test-driven "value added" calculations of teacher effectiveness.

Is this democracy?

Clearly, in this country, people and organizations are free to state their opinions. But as a friend of mine frequently reminds me, while we are all entitled to our own opinions, we are not entitled to our own facts.

The educatingchangenow website and its in-your-face video urge folks to "take a closer look at the facts." But they don't direct them to any of the many studies of districts where high-stakes standardized tests and pay-for-performance schemes have failed to produce any growth in student achievement. They don't even suggest that a debate exists. They make their statements about "effective teaching" as though they were gospel truths, and offer links to CMS and Gates Foundation sites.

This campaign is being funded by private money given to a private entity which didn't seem to feel the need to inform all members of the school board that the campaign was about to launch. What should we make of that? Should the future of our public schools be heavily influenced by the actions of wealthy private organizations, acting independently of our elected representatives?

The 2014 plan includes a range of endeavors, some of which I agree with. But I don't think a slick, privately-funded publicity campaign is the best way to go about building support for them. For one thing, I don't think it will work. But more important, it doesn't foster the debate and honesty needed to move a divided community forward.

A couple of weeks ago, I met Chamber of Commerce president Bob Morgan for the first time. We were at the grand opening of a Plaza-Midwood branch of Rita's Italian Ice. He cut the ribbon and I accepted a much-appreciated donation to the Shamrock PTA. We talked about our kids. We toasted each other with paper cups of mango-flavored ice. We didn't mention testing.

I don't think Morgan or the other Chamber folks wish our schools ill. But like Peter Gorman, Arne Duncan and plenty of other would-be "reformers," they haven't chosen a path – educational or political – that will take us where we want to go.

Wheat

As I lean over to fill the butterfly garden fountain, I hear rustling and voices. I put down the watering can and pick my way around towers of ironweed and sunflower, emerging to see the wheat bed full of students. Harvest time at last. The golden bed has become a blur of color and movement as the students examine the ripened heads, pull them with quick, sharp tugs, and then move to the next group, half a dozen conversations going on at once. It's great to see them there, working so happily together.


It's been a tough year. The slack economy has taken its toll on everyone at Shamrock, cutting into family incomes, fraying nerves, threatening the jobs of some of the school's most beloved staff members. Death and illness have struck unusually hard at our staff's extended families, depleting the condolence fund for cards and flowers. For several years we've celebrated rising test scores, but this year we're fighting just to hang on to past year's gains.

And in the middle of it all, Parker's teacher Ms. Bonasera, departed for two months of pregnancy leave.

Until Ms. Bonasera left, I had no idea how much a teacher mattered to her students. For the past four years, from kindergarten through third grade, Parker's class had been the students who could do no wrong. All their teachers had raved about how close they were, how much they cared about each other.

But once Ms. Bonasera left, as Parker put it, "everybody started to go crazy." The substitute could not get the class to settle down. The first two weeks, they sat through silent lunches and cancelled recess. Then even model students began to misbehave. Students talked back. They walked out of class. Worst of all, they started fighting among themselves, sparking shoves, tears, insults and suspensions. Staff members tried class discussions, group-determined norms, individual conversations. Nothing worked.

After four weeks of trying to get the class on track, the substitute gave up. Three more weeks of substitutes followed, until Ms. Bonasera decided to come back from leave a week early. By then, the class was far behind where they should have been, and the next few weeks saw a mad rush to catch up before state tests. It wasn't the year that anyone planned for.

Still, through all that turmoil, the wheat kids sowed back in the fall kept on growing, unhindered by pests, outstripping all the weeds that, in the chaos that followed Ms. Bonasera's departure, no one thought to pull. They can see this project through to completion.

On a small scale, I feel the way I did in the months after 9/11. Parker was a baby then, and even a tragedy of such monumental proportions made no difference in his life. It was tremendously comforting to watch him grow and develop like any other child, untouched by the event that had shaken everyone around him. Babies, wheat. Things happen. Life goes on.

Tops done, the students start to pull the stalks, faces clenched as they heave, laughing as the roots give way. The heat from earlier in the week has broken and the sun feels good. "I think this is the best teamwork we've used all year," one of them remarks. They'll put the husks in a pillowcase, beat out the grain and, if all goes well, end the year with bread, just like they planned.

As always with kids, you don't know what all these experiences will mean. You'd like to see them in terms of the neat lessons so often found in books, to think that because they came through a troubled time together, they'll value each other more. But in real life, that's hard to describe or to explain. You just don't know.

Summer is upon us, and will pull all of them in different directions. There's a lot of uncertainty ahead – a new principal, a new superintendent. A year closer to the turbulant seas of middle school and adolescence. But for now, they are together, playing, laughing. They have weathered this particular storm. I can't wait to taste the bread.