Thinking about back to school...

School starts for my kids and their 23,000+ peers in the Providence Public Schools in a month, on August 28. Right now, we're deep into our summer routine, such as it is. Bedtime is a moving target. The guys are reading according to their own initiative (see this for the prickly relationship that our family has with required summer reading). Leo is obsessing about fantasy baseball and Henry about Legos. So their minds are at work. I am cool with them and they seem pretty cool with themselves. As Anne Lamott might put it, right now, most of the time, their minds are hospitable neighborhoods in which they are safe alone. I credit the laid back pace of summer for that.

Elias is at camp for nearly a month, totally out of my clutches. From his letters, we're getting little glimpses here and there but I don't need those to know he's learning big--about other people, life outside his family, how to take care or himself, self-reliance, coping without tv and other comforts of home, probably about archery and kayaking and I can't wait to find out what else.

The other guys are having fun at their camp (this week it's soccer, hence last night's late night scramble for shin guards). We're watching a whole lot of Olympics and pursuing the learning that comes from that, which includes frequent reference to an atlas and lots of conversation about the rules of various sports, competition, setting and achieving goals, world records, and more speculation than I ever thought possible on whether body hair really does slow someone down in the pool THAT much (if this topic fascinates you as much as it fascinates Leo, you are welcome to take it up with him and spare me another explanation of friction and milliseconds).

However, I've been in the game for long enough to know that now is the time to get our heads (mine, for starters) into getting ready for school. Because in one way or another this is an annual rite of passage for all of us with kids at school, during the coming days and weeks, I'll to share bits and pieces of our family's transition back to school during the coming weeks. What's on my mind now:

• establishing routines and rituals 
• setting up the house to encourage and invite learning 
• figuring out the best way to deal with the sometimes glorious distractions of tv and computers 
• getting our parental heads around their upcoming curriculum and learning expectations 
• school supplies, clothes, etc. 
• afterschool activities 
• figuring out schedules, buses, transportation, and babysitting/afterschool care

All that and more is on my mind, so if you're reading this, it's probably on yours too. So let's do this. Soon. Today, though, we have a sprinkler to run through.

PPSD middle school curriculum correction

I recently posted a version of my most recent East Side Monthly education column on Nathan Bishop Middle School. The blog post that reproduces the article is here. Since then, I heard from Theresa Fox, a seventh grade English teacher at Bishop, who wanted to share her thoughts and clarify a point that I made about middle school curriculum in the Providence Public Schools. I had stated

Clearly, it’s too soon to use long-term indicators such as high school graduation rates to determine whether the district’s newly implemented curriculum—which is the same at all of Providence public middle schools except for Nathanael Greene Middle School’s Advanced Academics program—will produce the results needed to close existing achievement gaps and propel all students to success in high school and beyond.

Ms. Fox corrected my statement that Nathanael Greene does not have a different curriculum than the other Providence public middle schools, and I am grateful for her clarification. Her entire response, which I believe will be printed in East Side Monthly's March edition, appears below. A few more thoughts from me follow her letter.

To the Editor:

I enjoyed reading Jill Davidson's recent piece about Nathan Bishop Middle School ("An Enviable Choice: A Look Inside Nathan Bishop," February, 2011) and her decision to possibly have her son attend next year.

I am thrilled to be teaching at Bishop and to be a part of such a vibrant and positive educational community.  Wonderfully supportive administrators, creative and energetic faculty and staff, supportive and engaged parents, and a diverse student body make for a truly exciting environment in which to teach and learn and it seems to get better each week.  At Bishop, I can help a student craft a piece of fiction that makes me wish I'd written it myself, watch excitedly as another masters his first "perfect paragraph," enjoy cafeteria table conversation in a mix of French, Haitian Creole, Arabic, and English with newcomers from Haiti, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Iraq, have a conversation a with student who reads The Economist for fun, and guide students through research about events they'd recently discovered in the history of their home country, the Dominican Republic.  In short, I agree with Ms. Davidson that it is an exciting addition to the list of school choices.

Before coming to Bishop, I taught at Nathanael Greene Middle School for 18 terrific years, half of those years in the Advanced Academic Program, and I served on the district's curriculum writing committee for a year, so I feel somewhat qualified to question one bit of her piece, however.

She mentions that the district's "newly implemented curriculum...is the same at all Providence public middle schools, except for Nathanael Greene's Advanced Academics program."  I did not know that this misperception was out there in the community, as, in fact, there is no special curriculum for the AA program--nor has there ever been one.  The curriculum is actually the same for all middle schools in all subjects--except for advanced math courses, into which students are scheduled according to placement test scores.  It is, and has always been, up to individual teachers or teams of teachers in the AA program (as in any classroom) to differentiate curriculum according to student needs, interests, and abilities.

Ms. Davidson's implication that a "policy-driven district program" exists with an AA curriculum at Greene is simply false and creates a false set of criteria for choice between schools.  I think parents should know this as they make decisions about their children's education.

Theresa Fox
Grade 7 English teacher
Nathan Bishop Middle School

Again, I am really grateful to Ms. Fox for her perspective and for correcting my misunderstanding. As I told her in email, I do think that that it's fair to say that Greene's Advanced Academics offering is a "policy-driven district program." It is offered to students as such. I need to understand more about the actual PPSD policy/policies that create the opportunity for academically advanced programs; I guess it's possible that such offerings exist in practice with no policy underpinnings. But Greene's program does exist and is promoted to students as a distinct experience, which I now know is the result of educator initiative within the standard curriculum framework.

Thank you, Ms. Fox! And thanks to everyone for the feedback I've received on the East Side Monthly columns. It's so valuable and much appreciated.

blog purpose? and PPSD PDK report

In the next couple of posts, I am going to think out loud about what the purpose of this blog should be. I am inclined in two different directions: activism and recruitment. 

Activism: Parents Talk about Providence Schools is an online space to engage current public school family members around the challenges and opportunities facing PPSD with the explicit mission of organizing us to play an active part in improving our kids' schools and the district as a whole.

Information-Sharing: Parents Talk about Providence Schools is an online space focused  on providing and exchanging information among family members whose kids are not yet in school. This blog helps them understand and learn more about their options. It also helps family members whose kids may be in school and who seek more information about alternatives or the next phase of schooling.

Is it possible to pursue both of these missions here? I will contemplate that, too. I'd love input from anyone reading (and I know a few of you are - thank you!) about what would be useful to you.

In more current PPSD news, today's Pro-Jo covered the recent Phi Delta Kappa International PPSD curriculum management audit, reviewing the key points of the audit and Superintendent Tom Brady's reactions. "Report details racial inequity in school achievement" is in the Metro section, but it's not online (why not???); I'll link to it when it arrives when the ProJo gets around to putting it on the internets. In the meantime, find the paper edition and read it. And weep. 

Brady describes the report as a call to action; yes, though more like a scream for action. PDK's findings show that significant numbers of African-American, Hispanic, and Asian PPSD students will not demonstrate educational achievement as measured by our state's standardized test (the New England Common Assessment Program, not Placement, as the story quotes PDK's report) that is on part with their white peers unless the district dramatically interrupts its reading and math instruction.

Here's the entire report. I haven't reviewed it yet. And here's a letter from Brady that lists the overall report findings and current actions the district is taking to change practices and improve student performance. Again, I am posting this to share; I will come back with more on the report, letter, and further actions the district is taking.

And readers, if you've gotten this far, please know that when I got this far, I realized that this should be two individual posts but cannot convince by computer to cut and paste a chunk of this text to a new blog entry! Well, we're all learning as we go; I'll figure it out.