Dear friends,
Many of you are teachers of some kind, and if you teach in NYC public schools, this is the last teaching day of 2020.
Thanks to my best student, @zealousobserver, I saw this powerful story about a teacher on Twitter. Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 project, tweeted:
If you’ve heard me talk about the genesis of the #1619project then you know I first came across the date 1619 in a one-semester high school Black studies class. That teacher, Mr. Ray Dial, sent me my class project from nearly 30 years ago and it blew my mind in so many ways.
Hannah-Jones went on to discuss the texts she read and what she learned in her 10th grade class, and the power of being taken seriously by Mr. Dial. Read the whole thread. This hit me where I live, because I know that a few teachers did this for me — Mr. Epstein in 5th grade, who taught an experimental curriculum called Man: A Course of Study (MACOS), and Mr. Hamingson, who changed my life by asking the question “So what?” until I learned to make a point.
Hannah-Jones also addressed the importance of having a Black teacher. Segregation and the dearth of Black teachers have been enduring problems in NYC’s schools. Last week, as part of an overhaul of school admissions policy in response to the pandemic, the city eliminated academic screening, including the use of test scores, from middle school admissions.
Schools that don’t have enough seats for all applicants will base admissions on a lottery. There is precedent for such a move: Brooklyn’s District 15 recently eliminated screening at its middle schools in favor of a lottery. The aim was to create more diverse schools, and early data show progress towards that goal.
The city will also eliminate a district-based admissions preference that has allowed some of the city’s wealthiest ZIP codes to carve out a set of its own elite high schools.
The district-based preference has allowed Manhattan’s District 2 to maintain schools that have almost four times the enrollment of white students than the citywide average. It is somewhat heartening that principals at a number of District 2 schools have pushed to eliminate the preference because they see it as an obstacle to creating more diverse school populations.
Diverse classrooms are healthier places, and the health of our education system has direct bearing on the health of our students and communities.
On Monday, the mayor announced an expansion of the city’s community schools program next year, with the addition of 27 schools to 260 in the program.
That will allow them to partner with local organizations to address unmet physical and emotional needs that can get in the way of learning. The program provides extra resources, like providing family counseling, access to medical services, or help getting food.
While it isn’t clear where the funding will come from, the plan is to add 150 social workers in schools that have been hard-hit by the pandemic. The ratio of school social workers to students, citywide, is about 1 to 1,045. No…that’s not a typo.
The next city budget will call for cuts to everything except city-funded hospitals and NYCHA. When the city puts nearly $11 billion on the table for policing, we will need to talk again about the meaning of defunding the police, because unmet needs are breaking the spirits and undermining the efforts of too many New Yorkers.
This brings me back to teachers, who have been wrapping students in quilts they brought from home, delivering groceries to families, and comforting students as they grieve, all while trying to take their students seriously as learners. Many have been spending hours and hours to master the educational technologies that give online schooling some variety and texture. I have two amazing young friends who love to muse about the most useful superpowers. The teachers I know need the power to stop time, so that they can sleep, maintain their health, and try to keep up with the enormous demands of their work.
In an ordinary school year, the period from Thanksgiving to Christmas was — for me, at least — the most challenging stretch of the calendar. Before a much-needed school vacation begins, I want to take a moment to acknowledge and celebrate teachers. They have been doing arduous work under extraordinary circumstances.
I’m taking the rest of the week off (mainly to give you a break). Celebrate anything you can. Back on Monday.
with love,
L