Tag: Hill Day

The Last Dog At The Bowl

Billy Beane (or at least the Brad Pitt Moneyball representation of Billy Beane) has been in my head quite a bit as of late.

(If you don’t know the movie, Beane is an executive with a small-market, poorly-funded baseball team. He doesn’t have the resources to compete for high-priced talent with big-market teams, so he needs to find a way to assemble an affordable competitive roster out of players no other team values. Part of his job is to convince the old-school baseball guys to adopt a new strategy.)

“We are organ donors for the rich – the Yankees have taken our heart, the Red Sox got our kidneys… we are the last dog at the bowl. You know what happens to the runt of the litter? He dies!”

The analogy to public schooling isn’t perfect but I can see its reflection.

As a tactic to bring his scouting staff around, Beane repeatedly asks “What’s the problem?” until the conversation reaches a boiling point: “Is there another first baseman like Giambi? And if there was could we afford him? Then WTF are we talking about?”

It helps to understand the essence of the problem first.

A new billboard went up on my route home from school last week.

Gary Community Schools Corp. billboard at the intersection of Ripley and Central in Lake Station

Gary Community Schools Corp. has been under the financial direction of the state for the last seven years and faces stiff competition from a number of charter schools. The birthplace of progressive education in the United States is down to one public (non-charter) high school. Literally fighting for survival. But due to financial distress in a neighboring town, GCSC leaders apparently saw an opportunity to market themselves as an upgrade and rebuild its enrollment numbers.

So here’s where we are in public education in the Region: Gary schools recruiting kids from a border suburb, a community that when my mom was born there was known as East Gary. Lake Station residents voted down a referendum by 14 votes last November, and now it’s time to pay the piper. The district is cutting bus service and going to a three-day in-person/two-day remote school calendar.

Maybe the location of the billboard is a coincidence, but it feels like Gary senses an opening here. Parents get one chance to get education right for their kids, and when your district is being stripped for parts, the next town over that has school in-person five days a week starts to look pretty good.

My district is in financial distress as well and nearby districts are also recruiting famlies and teachers.

East Chicago has billboards, Calumet Township used its social.

Hammond has advertised its College Bound scholarship program on billboards throughout the Region. (And on water towers in the city). That at least involves families moving in and buying property.

So here’s all these urban districts dealing with disinvestment and declining enrollment and maybe they can’t keep kids’ families from leaving or get new families to move in, but instead entice new students with an open enrollment policy. Find the weakest district and pull their kids over. At 8000 bucks a student in state money, the incentive is powerful.

It’s cutthroat. A zero-sum game. There are most definitely winners and losers.

You can guess who loses.

When we open the doors on August 12 we are going to have to provide educational services to our kids in all our buildings, no matter how many students are here or how many long-term subs we have to hire to fill classrooms. With however much funding we have. The fewer kids, the less funding.

It’s a problem. And I don’t have the answers.

We finished this school year with 15 long-term subs and 15 emergency permit teachers on a staff of 78. Roughly 38% of our classes were taught by a non-certified teacher. What does that mean for our kids?

What would parents do in more affluent communities if that were the case for their kids?

What I do know is that school isn’t a game and this ain’t no movie. And districts in the poorest communities in the Region shouldn’t be reduced to fighting each other for students.

We’ve got a Teach Plus Hill Day coming up next month. Twelve teacher leaders from across the country will spend a week in Washington, DC, continuing to advocate for policy that will strengthen teacher recruitment and retention. We will be holding a legislative briefing for congressional and senate staffers, and I just got off a planning call with my colleagues and directors. It’s going to be a powerhouse week and we have a ton of work to do between now and July 9. Reading and studying and setting up meetings and rehearsing our presentation and breakout session is going to dominate my free time for the next two weeks.

But I have the privilege to be in a position to meet with policymakers and advocate for my students and colleagues. And I’m gonna take it. That seems like a more appropriate way to fight for kids.

You Were On The Hill, Huh?

I’ve always known intuitively that Washington, DC is a company town.

So the reaction from the gate agents at DCA Wednesday evening wasn’t all that surprising. Traffic pushed back the start of dinner at Mi Vida on The Wharf following Day Two of our Teach Plus Teacher Appreciation Week Hill Day. Watching the clock, just past 7:00, while we enjoyed fabulous appetizers and a a gorgeous view of the Potomac, one of my directors looked across the table and said, “Your flight leaves at eight? You should order your Uber.”

An hour till takeoff, a 15-minute ride on a good day, probably I’m OK, right? Not my favorite way to do air travel but hey, we’ll make it work.

Source

A motorcade delay later (DC, right?) I glance at my watch and see my rideshare is scheduled to pull up to Terminal 2 at 7:38. Yikes. Of course I got held up at TSA. Got wanded and since I gambled on not taking off my Miraculous Medal they had me pull up my tie and pull my chains out of my shirt. Ugh. Oh yeah, and they ran my laptop through twice. My mind is racing. I know they have a moving walkway in the terminal. I hope my gate is close. Nobody’s getting souvenirs. I’m not exactly sprinting but this is more than a brisk walk. I get to the gate with eight minutes to spare to see two agents asking, “Are you Steve? Do you have like 5 missed calls? Because we’ve been calling you.”

Then they look up. I’m still dressed from meetings all day.

“Oh, you were on The Hill, huh? You can still make it. Last one. We’ll hold the door. Go.”

Not gonna lie, I ate that up. I look like somebody important enough to be on The Hill.

I had family in DC growing up and as a young dude we made a couple of summer vacations to the Nation’s Capital and touristed ourselves senseless. Learned how to take the Metro, visited every branch of the Smithsonian, the monuments, Mount Vernon, White House tour, Arlington National Cemetery, sat in the gallery for a session of the House, all of it.

So, there was plenty of nostalgia these couple of days, but no time for sightseeing. We got work to do.

Teach Plus is a non-partisan group of teacher leaders who advocate for issues in the education space. I spent last school year as an Indiana Policy Fellow, then had an opportunity to join the Teach Plus National Policy Advisory Board for the 2024 cohort.

Since January I’ve been studying specific appropriations and pieces of legislation and meeting virtually with staffers for my representative and senators. Teach Plus does a Hill Day every July, and that was the target for us, but with the appropriations window closing and Teacher Appreciation Week near, our directors called for an “emergency Hill Day”the first week of May.

Which is how I ended up in a hotel room in Union Market on a Monday night studying for face-to-face meetings with staffers and planning a course of action.

Our group ened up having almost 60 meetings, including a couple of meetings with our actual senators.

And if you are wondering, yes that was exactly as cool as you think it might be. I’m not a star-struck individual just in general which served me well this week. Oh, that’s Cory Booker walking across the ground floor of the Hart Senate Office Building? Cool. We got work to do.

I joked often in the week leading up to our Hill Day that we were the mop-up crew. The state teachers of the year were in DC last week (way cooler than us), had a White House dinner and ceremony and everything and I’m like “well obviously everyone here is sick of talking to teachers”.

But you’d be surprised. Everyone we spoke with was open to a conversation. It helped that we had already built relationships, and also our director laid out kind of a four-square strategy: Republican/Democrat on the x-axis, House/Senate on the y. The plan for each meeting was based on quadrant. It helped that the Teach Plus NPAB Fellows are a passionate, smart group of teachers who came to do more than tell stories.

We showed up to every sit-down with mastery of the topic, handouts, and report language to influence policy.

We all felt like we got the job done this week. Cool of the evening, and all. There’s seven months left of this fellowship, and there is plenty more work to do, but a meeting late Wednesday afternoon energized us all.

Our group spent an hour with Secretary of Education Dr. Miguel Cardona. He thanked us for our work, outlined his vision for education, then turned the floor over to us. He asked two questions, then had us reply one by one around the massive conference table. I gave my remarks some thought as others responded. Here’s what I had to offer:

“I’ll start in the same place Tess and Fran and Perla did, with “how do I feel”. This year has been rough. I teach in an aging Rust Belt city that is losing population, in a district that is losing students and is financially distressed. We are closing three elementary schools at the end of this year and cutting teachers. This has weighed upon all of us, from administrators to teachers to students. Everyone is walking around under a dark cloud and waiting for the next bad news to drop.

But, in keeping with several other teachers’ comments today on the need to reimagine what school looks like and how we assess kids, my school is in the third year of a transition to project-based learning. And being from the Region, I have sharp elbows so I took that bad news and turned it into a project.

I gave my students access to the last 20 years of enrollment data, which is publicly available. One of our math standards is to take a set of data, model it mathematically, and use that model to make projections. Which my students did, and then presented their findings at our project showcase for faculty and community members.

So not only did we cover the math we needed to cover, my students also learned they could use math to help them understand what was happening in the world around them.

What I have found is that when we give students a chance to do real work with real tools to solve real problems that really affect their real world, incredible things happen. 

I glanced up as I mentioned “the standards” and “modeling mathematically” and I saw eyes light up around the table. There might have even been snaps.

Source

But that was the group that went to DC this week. Acknowledge that it is tough. Then dig in and do the work. Powerhouse group of people right there.

Dilan and Kira and some guy from the Region and Alisa and Emily and Hamilaat and Fran and The US Secretary of Education and Laura and Lorelei and Tess and Ralph and Emma (the fellow Rebel) and Silvia and Perla and (in spirit cuz they were already in the air) Barquita and Melina. Or as Laura called us in the group chat today: “The Dream Team”.

So, Teacher Appreciation Week.

My union came through with breakfast this morning and my admin team provided pizza, salad, chips, and drinks at the faculty meeting. I felt appreciated.

It’s good to be home. But I’m ready to go back in July. Because for 48 hours in DC I felt pretty damn important. Not only because what I did this week matters. But because what I do every damn day matters.