Monthly Archives: July 2008

(NOTE: As the Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) goals continue to accelerate, more and more US schools will be categorized by the pejorative brand: “Program Improvement School”.  NCLB’s kiss of death.  By 2014 as many as 90% of America’s schools could be categorized as underperforming “Program Improvement” schools.  Perhaps it provides a handy label for politicians to rail on public education in general… but inside our schools, where we know our children’s names and faces, it is a different story.

This is the FOURTH POST IN A SERIES as Mueller Charter School awaits its test results from the 2007-08 school year. Look for the SERIES every Monday as we get our results, assess the trends, and make strategic adjustments for the coming year.)    

 

It’s mid July in San Diego. The Padres are 13 games out, there are 200,000 bizarre movie characters taking over downtown for Comic Con, and the purest athletic tournament on the planet has just come to an end.  That would be OMBAC’s world renowned Over-the-Line tournament. 

Never heard of it?  Check out the website.  Baseball without bases… you hit line drives for base hits on a field about the width of a milk truck.  Hundreds of three-person teams play in multiple divisions, age groups and genders.  The hot sun on Fiesta Island bakes the sand and near-naked spectators.  The Corona flows…as do the team names that are constantly read over the loud speaker while the tournament organizers manage games on 24 simultaneous courts.  You can’t repeat the names but you can remember them.  They are creative and obscene and it is hard to stop laughing at them.

“Next up on Court 12… Three %$#$# with Hard %$*&^$  versus %$%$, #@#%$# and One Bouncing *$#$^%%^$.”

The names never stop coming and neither do the games.  For two solid weekends.

It’s part of the summer tradition.  And right about the time that Over-the-Line ends Mueller Charter School begins.  And so, as sure as the sun will rise on the now freshly-abandoned back stretch of Fiesta Island—the 2008-09 school year has begun.

In fact, today, nearly 1000 children arrived for the first day of school.  If it seems awfully early to be starting school– it is.  But our students go 200 instructional days instead of 184 and this is when we start.  And we are serious about it.  We will be full “go” by the end of the week and you would think that it was mid-October.  We had some absences today– but no more than we will have the first time it rains hard and parents fear their children will somehow melt if they send them down the street to school. 

I never like to acknowledge that we had a smooth opening.  I’m too superstitious for that.  It’s like mentioning that the starting pitcher is throwing a no-hitter.  I don’t care when you do it or who you are or where you are sitting in the stands– if you mention that the pitcher has a no-hitter going– it is over.  The reason why no-hitters are rare in Major League Baseball isn’t just because the hitters are so good.  It is because there are so many people watching the game in the stadium and on tv and the internet.  It is just a matter of time and odds that some nimrod is going to blurt it out:  “Hey… I just realized… Maddox has a no-hitter going.”  CRACK! A double down the line and into the corner.

Holy smokes.  Don’t they know the rules that govern the baseball universe?

So we opened the school year today and we’ll just say that everything went… ok.  

Except the test results still haven’t come in.  The teachers are dying to see them.  They want to know how we did.  I do too.  But we have to wait.  That’s part of the summer ritual too.  Padres and Comic Con and obscene Over-the-Line team names and opening day and us waiting here and making decisions based on data we haven’t seen.  

Earlier this week my daughter stood in the very tracks of Claude Monet on the outskirts of Paris.  She took one look at the famous lily pond next to his house and declared that if she lived here– she would paint too. 

Do you get it?

My Kira, high school graduate from 21st Century, suburban San Diego, breathed in the air of Monet’s natural muse.  For the rest of her life she will understand who Monet was, and what he painted, and perhaps more importantly…why he painted.

The next time she takes a standardized test and stumbles across a random question about Monet you can bet she’ll get it right.  When she reads an excerpt from a New York Times article about how one of Monet’s rare waterlilly paintings called Le Bassin aux Nympheas fetched $80.4 million at Christie’s, she will hang on every word.  When a class debate rages on whether Monet would have been a better tagger than VanGough… she will weigh in with authority.

There is really no substitute for experiential learning.  Kira learned more in ten days about Monet, French culture, world travel, international politics, economics, and air travel than she learned in 13 years in the K-12 schools in which she otherwise excelled.

Perhaps this is obvious… particularly to those of us who have had similar experiences of real, authentic learning in the world. 

So what about the kids that don’t get to go to France on their summer vacation?  What about the kids whose parents have never heard of Monet and could care less about collecting art pieces because they are too busy providing food for their families in the face of a troubled economy?  What about the kids who don’t have art books at home or any books for that matter?  What about kids who don’t have the resources to Google the Louvre? 

For that matter, what about kids whose teeth are rotting in their heads because they have never seen the dentist or kids who can’t read three words of this post—not because they can’t read—but because they can’t see and have never had their eyes examined? 

What about kids who have simply not had very many authentic learning opportunities?

The  “Achievement Gap “ is not just a gap in school achievement that is measured in outcomes.  It is a gap in school readiness, that can be measured in the assets and risk factors and life experiences that children carry with them into the classroom.

Kira’s pictures from the waterlilies remind me of how schools like El Milagro are obligated to somehow bring Monet to children if not  children to the Louvre.

(NOTE: As the Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) goals continue to accelerate, more and more US schools will be categorized by the pejorative brand: “Program Improvement School”.  NCLB’s kiss of death.  By 2014 as many as 90% of America’s schools could be categorized as underperforming “Program Improvement” schools.  Perhaps it provides a handy label for politicians to rail on public education in general… but inside our schools, where we know our children’s names and faces, it is a different story.

This is the SECOND POST IN A SERIES as Mueller Charter School awaits its test results from the 2007-08 school year. Look for the SERIES every Monday as we get our results, assess the trends, and make strategic adjustments for the coming year.)    

 

In “Good to Great” Jim Collins uses the metaphor of a flywheel to describe the buildup of organizational momentum:  the first three, five, fifteen, hundred turns take exceptional effort, but once the flywheel is turning, the momentum makes it easier for each turn to go faster with less effort. This pattern within “fast” organizations creates sustained excellence—  an accumulation of visible results.  People become energized by those results, the flywheel builds momentum, and the process creates its own fuel and its own fire.

For schools, the force of the flywheel is exactly the same.  Getting to extraordinary academic results is about forward momentum, organizational learning, strategic adjustments, and picking up speed.

At El Milagro we have never missed an AYP goal and our Academic Performance Index has gone up every year. So the flywheel lurches forward and fosters more growth.  

But we also know that our growth is occurring too slow–  too slow to stay ahead of AYP, too slow to reach 90% within this lifetime, too slow for that 3rd grader sitting in his desk with that familiar and bewildered look of a second language learner.  

Every year we grease the flywheel.  We now have standards-based curricula, state of the art technology, a powerful formative assessment system, targeted staff development, shared leadership… and every other “best practice” that has been vetted and launched in schools.  

For all the energy and focused effort that we have collectively applied to that flywheel, you’d think the freakin’ thing would have broken free and gone airborne by now.  But it hasn’t.

So we feed the momentum even if momentum is all we have to show for our efforts.  In two weeks or so… we’ll get our CST results and know what sort of energy we have produced.   

We are prepared, regardless of the outcome, to keep pouring on the gas for all we’re worth.  If we let up—even just long enough to lament the disappointing test results from the year before– the flywheel will begin to lose momentum, and we might never get it back again.