It’s been just over a month since I stopped working at Manual Arts, the high school where I spent the past eight years trying to cut my teeth as a teacher; the place where I probably learned more every day than I was privileged to teach. And while I’ve been spending my time since packing­­–and later unpacking–boxes, standing in line at a new (though just as slow) DMV, and figuring out how to at least somewhat safely operate a circular saw, this primarily offline time has afforded me the opportunity to reflect on this final year at Manual Arts and what that school space has meant to me.

In many ways, leaving this school–particularly in light of this last year–has been filled with sadness-tinged relief. It makes me uncomfortable to say that, so let me explain where this feeling is coming from.

I should make it clear, though, that despite any of the challenges I’ve faced or dealt with at Manual Arts, I feel extremely, extremely privileged to have been able to be a teacher there. The students that I’ve worked with have pushed me in ways that this rant will not encompass. In a moment, I plan to share the more troubling challenges at Manual Arts but want to make sure that my gratitude to the abundant experiences of joy and enlightenment I’ve had from my students and colleagues is noted.

I’ve made it no secret that Manual Arts has had its fair share of challenges over the years. From truancy policies that essentially criminalize students to the fact that my eight years at this school has included eight different principals, Manual Arts, structurally is a persistent mess.

Last August, I met my eighth principal for the school. Robert Whitman was assuming his first head principalship at Manual having been an assistant principal at several other local urban schools prior. I want to stop here for a moment and note that this is par for the course of urban school leadership in Los Angeles: the schools most in need of strong leadership according to district metrics like standardized test scores, teacher turnover rates, and dropout levels act as training grounds for principals. The majority of the principals that have left Manual Arts while I was there spent little more than a year (sometimes less) letting the school coast while adding their new leadership position to their resumes and quickly taking a job at a less demanding school.

The new principal’s challenges were compounded by the fact that the school moved from a three track year-round schedule to a traditional calendar. While the three track system meant longer school days and is generally inequitable for all of the students involved, it was at least a routine students and teachers had learned to cope with for the decade plus that Manual Arts was a year round school. And while time was stabilized as a result of the move to a traditional calendar, all else was disregarded: class sizes shot up well beyond what teachers or classrooms were equipped to deal with. Across the board, students were packed 36-40+ students deep in core instructional classes. Strangely, our security and deans at the school were gutted. Here’s an equation for disaster at even the best of schools: too many kids with too little supervision equals dismal instruction.

Of course, the instability of varied leadership and strategies takes its toll on the students and teachers of Manual Arts. The Freshman Preparatory Academy–the school’s effort two principals before Whitman–was an effective effort in sustaining student interest during the year our students are most at risk of dropping out. With a new regime of administrators and a general lack of institutional memory to drive the decisions of the school this year, the majority of the practices that supported ninth grade teachers were decimated. The halls of FPA, where I spent most of my time helping teachers with technology challenges at the school became chaos.  Even the most collaborative teachers I was privileged to work with went into all-out-survival mode, trying to get through the overcrowded classes one day at a time.

The administration, like LAUSD’s superintendent’s phrase, shifted to a “laser-like focus” on skills and test preparation. The execution of this focus, however, was generally incompetent. My former guiding teacher and one of the most innovative educators I’ve been privileged to work with was subject to no less than a year-long procession of passive-aggressive administrators observing and encouraging him to volunteer to pilot the Scholastic Read 180 program in his classroom. The experience sapped him of the enthusiastic energy I typically got to see in him and seemed like a contract-protected form of administrative bullying. (I assure you I have no problem with being observed–under the best of administrators my practice has significantly grown from administrative observation. What this teacher underwent felt possibly retaliatory for the way he has been outspoken on the school’s campus.)

As a quick aside: as I type this, my former advisor forwarded me her emailed “word of the day” and it is fitting to today’s discussion.

Quantophrenia: “Undue reliance on or use of facts that can be quantified or analyzed using mathematical or statistical methods; inappropriate application of such methods, es. In the fields of sociology and anthropology.”

Nearly all of the teachers I’ve come to work with closely and that I’ve learned from are voluntarily leaving Manual next year. Most of them have helped co-design the Schools for Community Action and are trying to make these new schools (just down the street from Manual Arts) a more humane alternative to the bureaucracy that has plagued Manual Arts this past year and long, long before.

I say “voluntarily” in the previous paragraph somewhat uncomfortably. None of these teachers want to leave the students at the school. As is the case in school after school, Manual’s problems are adult-driven.

Perhaps what’s driven me to this reflection more than anything else is an announcement that was made during my last week at Manual Arts: the school has been awarded a School Improvement Grant for next year as a “turnaround model.” What this means is that the school is being reconstituted. “Reconstitution” is fancy ed-speak that essentially means that everyone at the school is being fired and needs to reapply for their jobs. Everyone, that is, except that in this single instance the principal will be keeping his job without reapplying. Wait, what? Yeah, that happened. Oh yeah, one other thing: in this particular concoction of reconstitution, the school will only hire back 50% of the teachers that choose to reapply at Manual Arts. This is clearly an opportunity to clean house and ensure that the bad apples in the eye of the nascent principal and less-than-effective management company, LA’s Promise don’t come back.

Here’s the fancy color-printed handout that teachers received notifying them of the reconstitution. Sure looks expensive to have printed out the school’s logo in color: a sound decision, I’m sure.

I should make it clear that money is great: the million plus dollars that the School Improvement Grant can bring to the school can make a real difference in the outcomes of the students at Manual Arts. But you know what else can make a difference? Positively driven, motivated teachers that know and have been involved in a school community. I should note, too, that even when working on school wide reforms in the past and reconstitution was invoked, I could not find significant research that it leads to positive academic outcomes.

So: sadness and relief. The work conditions at Manual have become untenable in a way that has made such an archaic word to me feel positively spritely. I’m genuinely saddened that the school I’ve invested so much time and energy in and that has rewarded me again and again with happiness and the best of my teaching experiences has been denigrated by inconstancy and poor management. I’m saddened that I left the school under these conditions. And, as awful as it may be for the students there, I am relieved not to be there next year. Even if they would have hired me back.

I want to talk a bit about time at Manual Arts. Our school’s use of time denigrates students in ways that can be read as classist, racist, and apathetic towards the needs of urban youth. I would argue that they define “colored people’s time” in a way that’s as equally racist as the original definition. Let me explain.

Turns out our school’s schedule will change next week – it’ll effectively be the third schedule students have had since the school year started last month.

Why is our schedule changing next week? Oh, because our school is unable to count properly. And even though we had the entire summer to calibrate the schedule for students, it was only now that the school realized it was short of instructional minutes:

Due to a mishap last Spring with the district bell schedule design software; our current schedule is 18 minutes too short for our regular length days. 2 minutes will be added to each passing period and 1 minute will be added to each class period.

I particularly appreciate that our new schedule–to emphasize instructional minutes–adds six total minutes for students in class.

This week there was a vote from our faculty regarding minor tweaks to the new allocation of school minutes. Here are the details:

Please find the NEW Bell Schedule attached. Please Note that since staff voted to eliminate Advisory on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday; there are 6 minutes added on to Period 4 on Monday & Wednesday and 2 minutes added on to Period 4 on Tuesdays to allow for school announcements. On Wednesday and Thursday announcements will continue to be at the end of Advisory after lunch. Please remember this new bell schedule will not start until a week from Monday on October 17, 2011.

In case you’re wondering, “Advisory” is the space for students to gain mentoring support from teachers, to share their learning experiences, gain study skills, and prepare for post-secondary plans. At least in theory. Our school has absolutely floundered with any kind of clear articulation of how to use the advisory time. And now, by cutting advisory to a two-times a week situation, is essentially killing advisory all together*.

Finally, in regards to time: our school has a problem actually ringing bells at the right time. It shouldn’t be difficult, right? I mean, you ring the bell when it’s time for the class to end. End of story, right? Except that­–since day one–our bells are hugely erratic. They will ring anywhere from 1 to 7 minutes from their actual time.

This may seem minor, but teachers plan for the consistency and depend on bells ringing correctly in order end class in an orderly fashion.

If you’ve got a few minutes to kill, I videotaped my watch this week while waiting for the bell to ring. The class is supposed to end at 12:00. You can see my clock tick three additional minutes before it actually rings. You can hear the principal announce lunch changes, presumably because he thinks the bell is about to ring. In turn, you can hear Peter concluding his class because he thinks the bell is going to ring. And then: there’s a whole lot of time for students to be restless. [That really is the extent of what happens in the video, but feel free to experience it if you really want.]

Watching the Clock from Antero Garcia on Vimeo.

The above examples of disregard to consistent learning time have significant impact on how students perceive their schooling as valuable and important. For the urban youth at Manual Arts, these inconsistencies tell students that adults don’t care enough about running a school properly. They reinforce messages of shoddy schools perpetuated in the media and stereotypes about urban communities. This is the way our schools define a new and even more racist understanding of CPT.

*In an slightly related note, an upcoming PSAT for all 10^th and 11^th graders is extending advisory for a day to 180 minutes. That’s three hours. In a class that our school is at least symbolically saying is worthless. How many 9^th and 12^th grade teachers are going to be showing movies during advisory for three hours: probably most of them. [10/17/11 This footnote was edited per clarification from Ben in the comments below.]

In an effort to get all of the students to fit on campus, my school has converted our former woodshop into two different classrooms: a biology and a history class. Originally, one teacher was supposed to teach upstairs and one downstairs.

Both teachers agreed that the second floor alcoves felt too prison-like to actually conduct classes in.

I think these forgotten materials are pretty much all that’s left of the woodshop classes. So much for shop class as soulcraft.

Here’s the view from the top of the stairs walking into the main classroom space – you can see the history teacher’s desk at the bottom of the stairs and the biology teacher’s student desks in the background.

The high ceilings, walls lined with wires, and mysterious HVAC unit on the ceiling make it a little difficult to decorate and personalize the space. I imagine it’s got to feel like taking a class in an abandoned Costco.

That’s the history class in the small corner – they had to make use of the small space to offset the noise when both classes are in session.

I find the yellow lines left from the woodshop class fascinating. If I were a student here, I know they would be endlessly distracting to me.

I want to conclude this tour by briefly addressing the way that Manual Arts has been discussed in public lately. As much as I feel like I helped accurately represent the teacher concerns at school in Saturday’s column, today’s follow up column by Sandy Banks is disappointing in how little it actually says.

I’m also disappointed in Mike McGalliard’s response to all of this. While I’ve heard from many incensed teachers about the lack of respect and navel gazing that he accomplished, I don’t want to waste energy pointing fingers, sniping about details of what’s happened at the school, etc. However, I want to address being called a “whiny” teacher.

[First of all, really? Is this really what Mike is bringing our level of discourse down to? Really?]

When classroom conditions are clearly beyond what is equitable and are now a civil rights issue, I think it’s time to make sure you are whining in public. 22 extra days won’t do anything when teachers cannot work within an environment. I see the critical lens I am trying to shape on this blog as a way of advocating for a profession that is continually portrayed as “whiny” and the perpetuation of the label by the former head of an organization that teachers brought on campus via a grassroots campaign is saddening.

It all makes me wonder if Mike and the people that “want to see the needle move” ever feel like there is an okay time for teachers to whine?

Should my colleague that has had a leak in front of her classroom with overflowing buckets sit idly? (The leak’s been their since May.)

Should the students be wondering why we don’t have a librarian?

The students that haven’t gotten lunch because they don’t know where the line is for students without meal tickets and haven’t gotten the applications be allowed to whine?

Can I whine that I’m given overhead projector transparencies as an instructional aid even though we’ve spent hundreds of thousands on smart boards?

What about the signficant number of teachers still subbing for themselves?

You see, it’s not that any one of these is a dire problem in-and-of-itself, necessarily. However, when these different challenges (and the many, many more that have arisen this year) are compounded, they create a pretty dismal learning experience for students and a soul-deadening outlook on work for even the most leveled teachers. If Mike’s hoping to lead with the dollars of “corporate America,” maybe he should also think through his own recognition that he should be listening to why I am whining and for whom I am advocating.