Teacher, Revised

By ALISTAIR BOMPHRAY

If you missed it, the East Bay Express recently published a fairly damning article by Rachel Swan on the small schools movement. Here’s a snippet:

While these new small schools were created to level the playing field between students, the evidence suggests that they may be exacerbating the very problem they were supposed to solve.

For one thing, the lottery system used to determine which students went to which school didn’t work. That left Berkeley High’s four small schools about almost twice as African American and half as white as its two large schools. Thus, Berkeley High is now more separate than ever.

But it’s also less equal. Small and large schools use completely different teaching methodologies. They have different grading standards. And Berkeley High has failed to produce the data to show that small schools actually close the achievement gap. If all that were not enough, two weeks ago the Berkeley High Jacket reported that teachers in charge of small schools are pressuring the science departments at Berkeley High to inflate the grades of small school students.

In short, Berkeley High has taken a leap of faith into a giant, piecemeal reform project whose efficacy it can’t prove.

To read the rest, go here.

As a fifth year teacher who has spent his entire career in small schools—two years in New York City, and three in Hayward—I feel compelled to respond. 

My first bone to pick is with the limited scope of the article. There’s the implication that what is bad about small schools at Berkeley High is bad at all schools. But what no one mentions in the article is that Berkeley High is kind of an anomaly. Due to the size of its student body (over 3500 enrolled students) and the unique racial and economic diversity of Berkeley itself, it’s really a tale of two schools. This is a school where you’ve got doctors and lawyers and professors’ kids going to school with kids whose parents didn’t finish high school.

This isn’t to say that tracking doesn’t happen at my school—it does—but that the economic disparity at Berkeley High is so pronounced that there’s a real risk of slipping into an educational apartheid—a school where you’ve got the kids from affluent backgrounds taking AP calc, and the kids on free or reduced lunch taking Algebra I for the third time. 

It’s also the reason why I think the case of Berkeley High is a little misleading. It’s just really different there. And the fact that small schools at Berkeley High have made no progress in the way of integration speaks more to the complicated nature of one school’s situation than to the failings of the small schools movement in general.

My other bone to pick is with Ms. Swan’s assertion at the end of her article that teachers in small schools are “lying” to their students about how well they’re doing. If I have a student who has to work two jobs to support her mother and younger siblings, whose father dropped out of school at sixteen and is doing 15-20 in San Quentin, whose friends are all pregnant or “caught up,” who stays up until two in the morning to finish her homework despite all of this—if she writes a paper that is merely okay and I tell her it’s good, is that lying?

Seems to me it’s seeing the whole student; in other words, good teaching. To call that “lying” makes me think that Ms. Swan just doesn’t get it. The goal, after all, is to keep kids in school. Constantly reminding them of how bad they’re doing—i.e. talking about their test scores—will only push them out.

Speaking of which, why doesn’t Ms. Swan place more stock in the small schools’ graduation rates, all of which are above ninety percent? Instead, she points to declining test scores—which could be the result of any number of unrelated variables—to detract from the small schools’ successes.

Whenever non-teachers start to quote test data, I start to get skeptical. 

[For a lengthier and more researched rebuttal to the Swan article, have a look at this from a fellow teacher blogger.]