I don’t really claim a lot of Vegas things for myself since we were short-timers and I’m a Region Guy to the core. But there’s definitely a handful of Nevada/west coast things have snuck in and found a home.
Plus I do have a degree from UNLV (Class of 2003). And the student loans to prove it.
And to be honest, UNLV is kinda growing on me from a distance. I wrote a while ago about the Ándale 5k, a fundraiser by the Las Vegas Latino Bar Association to support students applying to the Boyd School of Law, and then this article shows up in the current issue of the alumni magazine.
I kind of dig getting the @unlv alumni mag and reading articles like this. When we lived there the joke was UNLV stood for “University of Never Leaving Vegas”. But maybe that’s the whole point. #BeARebelhttps://t.co/tn2IAuIN0b
I grew up in the Chicago area where post-secondary options are plentiful, and it always felt a little strange that UNLV was pretty much the only game in town (Community College of Southern Nevada was the other school). The joke when we lived there was that “UNLV” actually stands for “University of Never Leaving Vegas”. But university leadership is leaning in to that role and embracing the challenge of being transformational for the kids of the city.
Las Vegas native Beatriz Alcala grew up in an immigrant family defined by the hard work of her parents. They left Mexico’s Zacatecas state, found a new life in Southern Nevada and work in its service sector. Her late father, Juan Ignacio Alcala, was a cook on the Las Vegas Strip. Her mother, Eva, is at last nearing retirement from her work in housekeeping. Neither had much formal education, but they instilled its importance in their children.
“They were barely surviving, living paycheck to paycheck, but they always wanted me to do my best in school,” Alcala recalls. As she finished high school, she went to a college fair. “But there was no money for college.”
So, like many thousands of UNLV students of economically humble means, Alcala scraped together grant funding and got a big boost from the state’s Governor Guinn Millennium Scholarship. She saved money by living at home, bringing her lunch, and parking in the free lot. She applied the work ethic instilled by her parents and earned a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology and then a doctorate in physical therapy.
UNLV offered Beatriz Alcala an avenue to get her college degrees without leaving her Las Vegas hometown. She’s now a neonatal physical therapist at Spring Valley Hospital. (Josh Hawkins/UNLV)
She says she likely wouldn’t have gone on for that doctorate if it had meant leaving Las Vegas. Now she is a physical therapist in the neonatal intensive care unit at Spring Valley Hospital and one of the many UNLV graduates filling the high demand for high-skilled professionals in health care.
UNLV adds about 5,000 graduates to the workforce each year. And, according the Center for Business and Economic Research, alumni now account for a fifth of all bachelor-and-above degree-holders in Clark County.
The article goes on to point out: “More than 80% of students come from Nevada and about half will be the first in their families to earn a degree.”
One think tank places UNLV in the top 20% nationally for the economic mobilty the school provides its students who come from lower-income homes. (By comparison my alma mater, Indiana University, rates the second tier, while the IU regional campus in Gary where Mrs. Dull graduated is a Tier-1 school like UNLV. I mean, what else is a state university for?
And that emphasis on lifting up locals attracts the true belivers to the mission. Here’s David Damore, Political Science department chair at UNLV:
“When we’re interviewing for a faculty job, they get it right away. Everybody seems to understand the mission here.” But, he adds, pointing to UNLV’s status as a research university, “What we’re trying to do is really, really difficult: Be an R1 institution on an R2 budget while serving a population of students who have no reference point on what it means to go to college.”
That sounds kind of familiar in my building, both the attraction to staff of serving the families where we grew up or still live, but also trying to do transformational work on a shoestring budget.
But sometimes that just requires us to be a little more resourceful. Hammond schools received a grant to launch the Blueprint program, which for the last half-decade has helped students navigate what can be a confusing and frustrating process:
“The Blueprint course acquaints students with the multifaceted, sometimes complex process of applying to colleges, applying for scholarships and financial assistance, highlighting volunteer and work experience and various other aspects about what it takes to gain acceptance to college and how to succeed once the student arrives on campus.”.
I see another link between the UNLV model and what I think we are trying to do in Hammond as well:
Far beyond the bragging rights, the Third Way ranking helps provide a reminder of the importance of UNLV to a maturing Las Vegas. With 62% of its graduates remaining in Nevada, the university plays a key role in providing working professionals for the next generation of jobs.
(UNLV President Keith) Whitfield calls it “the economic piece.”
And UNLV’s diversity is appealing to future employers as the U.S. population, by 2060, is predicted to become as diverse as Las Vegas’ is now. “If you provide an environment that has a diverse set of voices and a diverse set of thoughts, you’re going to produce a better student. You’re going to produce a better graduate, who is able to innovate and lead in an increasingly diverse world,” Whitfield says. “Here on our campus, here under the umbrella of UNLV, we think our diversity is one of our strengths.”
I love seeing my former students go on and do incredible things wherever life takes them, but I’d be lying if I didn’t secretly hope that some of them stay close and make their stand in the Region. Hammond’s “College Bound” scholarship program is pinned to the tuition at the Purdue Northwest campus just a few miles from my school. They can start here, stay here, and help reshape Northwest Indiana.
Teacher movies feature unattainable heroics, they’re filled with stereotypes and tropes and white-savior figures, and all that said they make you want to run through a wall for your kids. Teacher books (the kind I read anyway) make you wonder why anybody does this job on purpose. Is there a sweet spot somewhere in the middle?
Or maybe the reality is there’s some truth in each extreme?
(Also: is it really a “One-Man Book Club” selection if one of my colleagues recommended it?
The book follows the travails of three teachers over the course of a school year, interspersed with essays on specific topics, and anecdotes from teachers telling the real story of what happens in school.
You will probably not be shocked to find that admins can be bullies, colleagues can be petty and clique-ish, ex-husbands can be infantile and controlling and vindictive and creepy, young (and not-so-young) co-workers hook up, students and family members can be violent and unreasonable, that self-care and work-life balance are foreign concepts, or that teachers sometimes drink their stress. Teaching is a job after all, schools and districts are organizations with a hierarchy, and humans are humans.
I was reminded of a line the author David Halberstam delivered about Jim Bouton’s Ball Four: “a comparable insider’s book about, say, the Congress of the United States, the Ford Motor Company, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be equally welcome.”
I don’t use that term “insider” lightly. Although Robbins shadowed her subjects for the course of the school year, she knows her way around a classroom. Four years before writing the book, she hired in as a sub in her local district. Robbins had read an article about the shortage of subs, which as she points out, “wasn’t a well-known issue to non-educators before the pandemic.”
And she was hooked:
“I’d intended to substitute perhaps once every couple of weeks, but the experiences with students and educators were so rewarding and the school system’s need so great that I accepted assignments much more frequently. In my first few months, I subbed for PE, music, and classroom grades from kindergarten through 8th. During one stretch back then, I subbed for seven different classes on six consecutive school days – and that was only at one school.”
Robbins is up-front that although she did not use stories of her students and teachers where she subbed as material for the book, the experience in the classroom helped her “speak the language” of the teachers she profiled for the book and gave her a deeper understanding of their issues.
You’ll read along as Miguel, a middle school special ed teacher, goes beyond the call to help his students learn, even when they are shunned by their general ed teachers. You’ll ache for Rebecca who desperately needs to make time for activities outside the classroom that feed her soul, but is overwhelmed by her job requirements that eat up all her waking hours. You’ll not-so-secretly wish for Penny and Ed to develop their friendship into something deeper.
You’ll wish some of their colleagues would find other jobs.
The essays interspersed through the book could only have been written by someone with a keen eye and a profound understanding of the profession. She tackles the disregard for teacher health many districts displayed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the violence that teachers endure in the classroom, teachers’ “code”, and the “Myth of teacher burnout”.
“What if the premise of teacher burnout is a myth, a convenient fiction that blames teachers for not being able to cope rather than faulting school systems that set both teachers and students up to fail? Instead of presenting the problem as ‘teachers have the highest burnout levels,’ we should reframe the issue: ‘School systems are the employers worst at providing the necessary supports and resources ofr employees.’
This line of thinking isn’t meant to diminish educators’ very real and thoroughly justified feelings of helplessness, stress, sadness, anxiety, frustration, and exhaustion. But let’s shift the blame to where blame is due.”
The online math community I’ve hung around the fringes of makes a cameo appearance as well. One California middle school math teacher told Robbins, “My online community has taught me all the best things I know about being a teacher and most of the best things I know about being a person.” Way to go, #MTBoS.
The book is organized chronologically through the school year. Late May and early June bring a unique mix of exhaustion and joy and wistfulness, of beginnings and endings. Robbins got that part right too.
My emotions were a tangled mess leaving school on Friday – it’s been a busy, fulfilling, occasionally successful year. I had a couple of encounters after the final bell that filled my bucket.
Things that make me smile on Friday:
1⃣ Student (who I don't know) passes my room at dismissal and goes "Nice Jordans gang."
2⃣ Bumped into a student I had for algebra II (remote) & geometry (in person) after school. He says "I'm passing all my classes and got all my credits."
The look on his face was priceless, a mix of joy and anticipation and pride. He earned it. Every bit of it. That’s going to be a moment when he walks across the stage at Wolf Lake on graduation night.
The June chapter closed with anecdotes from teachers, appropriately titled, “Why I Love Teaching”. This one from a high school English teacher in Georgia maybe sums up “The Teachers” best:
“I love my colleagues. Many adults view their high school years through a blend of nostalgia, embarassment, and occasional revulsion. Teachers are adults who have gone back to school. We’re weird that way. All teachers are slightly weird, but you won’t find a more brilliant and entertaining group of people. And if there’s a trivia night at your local bar, we’ll absolutely crush it.”
It was Election Day in Indiana last week. It’s an off-year election and there were very few contested races of any consequence, so turnout by me was extremely low. I did keep an eye on three local school referenda, including one in my hometown.
Munster passed by a 3-1 ratio. But Highland was voted down in a narrow defeat and Lowell (Tri-Creek) was not close at all. The Lowell schools didn’t waste time – they didn’t even wait for the ink to dry on the print before announcing they would cut $1 million from the budget.
I was selected for the Indiana Teach Plus Policy Fellowship this school year and my working group focused on equitable funding. As part of our research we looked at how Texas (with the support of the state teachers’ union) recently reformed its school funding model for high-need schools. We met with legistlators both virtually and in person and tried to convince them to make adjustments to Indiana’s model. As part of our work I was asked to present a side-by-side comparison for several districts using both states’ models. I tried to duplicate what I understood to be the Texas formula using publically-available Indiana demographic data.
I wasn’t really even close but I was able to locate the proposed funding for the districts I focused on and put that side-by-side with my cobbled-together model.
Here’s the school run for my district and the two of the districts holding referenda released by the Indiana GOP during the legislative session:
Highland gets a bit more support from the state from the complexity formula, Munster’s got a deeper property tax base and higher per-capita income. Hammond got a significant funding boost in the first year, acknowledging the varied needs of our students.
So, you know, for what it’s worth.
So the state did make some adjustments to how districts get funded, especially districts of need, not really the way we had hoped but you take what you can get.
Indiana went all-in on school reform back in the 2010s, promoting charter schools as an alternative to struggling traditional public schools, and instituting a voucher program to promote school choice.
“But the new biennial budget for fiscal years 2024 and 2025 makes three significant changes to charter finances.
It increases the bonus Charter and Innovation Network School Grants they can get to $1,400 per student — up from its current level of $1,250.It includes $25 million in new capital grants for brick-and-mortar charter schools to access for facilities costs.It funnels a portion of property tax operations funding growth to charter schools in Marion, Lake, Vanderburgh and St. Joseph counties.
In addition, lawmakers drew the greatest pushback from Hoosier school officials and traditional public education supporters with a provision in Senate Bill 391 that would force school districts in those four counties to also share referendum funding with charters.”
I’m not really even mad at the state for pushing more dollars to public charter schools that don’t equally share in property tax revenue. In Gary and some of the other urban areas in Indiana, that’s how roughly half the students in a city are being educated, and the state probably has a responsibility to make sure charters are fairly funded. It’s an equity issue.
But the voucher expansion that was passed this year should really irk school folks in areas where referenda were voted down.
Lowell is cutting a million dollars from its budget. Highland teachers put on a brave face and went back to work on Wednesday knowing they wouldn’t have the financial support that their district leadership felt was needed to educate the children of the town over the next two years.
But a family of 4 making $200,000 can get a voucher from the state to pay for private school. That seems excessive. If not obscene, based on facilities horror stories I’ve heard from teachers in urban districts this year.
At some point the state has to decide what its role is in funding public education. Education in any flavor is not cheap. During my years on my parish’s pastoral council I had a chance to see the numbers for our parish school. The cost of running the school literally tripled in five years. The school (via tuition and fundraisers) is responsible for a third of its budget, the parish provides a third, and a foundation set up for this purpose has the other third. But when your group’s third is what the entire school budget was when the current eighth grade was making First Communion, what do you do with that?
In my Catholic grade school days (back before cable TV) the entire school budget was paid out of the Sunday collection. My parents paid zero dollars for me to attend Our Lady of Grace. But we also had a sizeable corps of nuns as part of our teaching staff.
Things have changed dramatically since then. I understand Indiana’s GOP supermajority is committed to school choice, and that probably will not change except by degree. But it seems reasonable to place a cap on eligibility somewhere below the 90th percentile of household income in the state. When it comes to using state dollars to fund education, the students and families of public schools should come first. Period.
My former pastor was a numbers guy and a realist. He used to say that at some point there would be regime change in the governor’s residence and vouchers would go away. He stated flat out that of the 17 diocesan schools only about six could survive without voucher students. He named them, and they were all in white suburban areas.
I hate that kids in Hammond, East Chicago, Gary would lose out on a chance for a Catholic education.
But you can provide that tuition support for a lot of families in need without offering vouchers to folks making 400% of the lunch-support eligibilty level.
I’ve got my last monthly Fellows session tomorrow night where we will think about how to present a summary of our work for the year to our incoming cohort of fellows. It will be an interesting discussion.
It will help to keep in mind the advice of our Executive Director who encouraged us from Day One to play the long game. To understand that we may not see significant changes this year but we should consider that we may be laying the groundwork for a future cohort’s success.
It doesn’t require a degree in psychology to find the common thread. There are a lot of nutritional plan changes happening in my house and I’m glad to help people reach their goals, and willing to do the work on my end to make that happen. We’re tearing a wide swath through the Skinnytaste recipes in this house, for real. Folks who have intentionally decided on changes to their plan are more receptive to that help than other folks who haven’t, obviously.
For example, I’ve been fighting an uphill battle to engage my students out loud in class, a holdover from pandemic-era remote learning. Dream-Me was laying out my POV of geometry class on the daily and pleading with my students to please please please just answer a question out loud, or at least take out your Air Pods?
It’s also NFL Draft season which is a shared area of interest with my O-lineman son and me. We both love giant bad-intent dudes who can move the guys in the other color jersey out the way. Especially the guys who do that but feel a little overlooked.
Did the Bears find a hidden gem in UDFA? 👀
Bears Lineman Gabe Houy from Pitt is a MEAN S.O.B. He uploaded this sick highlight real of himself. pic.twitter.com/rt5KM8bXN7
The Bears used their first-round pick on a highly-regarded offensive lineman to protect their franchise quarterback. But not before doing their due diligence. Because jobs are on the line when you’re picking a 22-year-old to help your organization reach its goals:
Full breakdown of the private workout the Bears hosted with Darnell Wright at Tennessee that Ryan Poles and OL coach Chris Morgan attended. They wanted to push Wright physically to the brink and see how he responded and focus in on his ability to retain/absorb information. pic.twitter.com/NMHE9LvZS3
We definitely ask our kids to do that in class. Hey, here’s how to find area of a rhombus. What if instead of the diagonal length, you know half of one diagonal, and then one side length? Can you find the area now?
So maybe they aren’t going to be NFL offensive lineman. They’ll probably have to show what they know to somebody at some point. They’ll probably have to think on their feet. When they are too tired to think.
I appreciated the Bears staff giving me backup.
I’ll keep processing the world around me through a Math-Teacher lens, and hopefully it will continue to help me help my students make sense out of whatever we do in class that day.
Tweaking For No Reason 