It's Madison, and you'd expect the
local school superintendent to be au courant with the verbiage and techniques of inclusion.
A lot [of] people in Madison are wondering what the hell is happening in our schools. Even Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham has called it a “trying year."
Cheatham, however, remains upbeat about the trajectory of the district and her goal to close the stark achievement gap between kids of color and their white peers. She says the district is on a path towards “transformational change.” But she won’t be around to see that change through. On May 8, Cheatham announced she would be leaving Madison in August to teach at Harvard Graduate School of Education. The Madison school board is expected to select an interim superintendent in June.
Cheatham has championed reform in her six years leading the district. She spearheaded the creation of a Strategic Framework in 2013, a detailed mission statement that sets goals to guide district policy. The framework was updated after listening sessions with the public in 2018 to include a focus on “black excellence.” It now has three core goals: “Every child is on track to graduate ready for college, career and community. The district and every school in it is a place where children, staff and families thrive; African American children and youth excel in school.”
Cheatham also ushered in a major policy change regarding discipline. The Student Code of Conduct was replaced by the Behavior Education Plan in 2014. The plan states it is “a progressive and restorative approach to behavior and discipline” as opposed to “zero tolerance policies relying on punishment and exclusionary practices to correct misbehavior.”
It's well known that easing up on discipline for fear of having a "disproportionate effect" on students
doesn't work.
It's a surprise when
The Isthmus runs such a story. This is a paper in the style of Milwaukee's
Shepherd Express, with Tom Tomorrow cartoons, guest columns by
Progressive staffers, and a classified section full of watering holes offering exotic entertainments.
Cheatham says the plan has an “explicit equity imperative” and is evolving.
“What are we doing as educators to see students for all of who they are, to not make assumptions about them, to deeply inquire into who they are so we know how best to meet their needs,” Cheatham tells Isthmus. “How do we use additional supplemental supports, as appropriate and needed, when a student needs more than a classroom teacher can provide?”
But the transformation has been a rocky one and disparities persist. Isthmus collected over 30 hours of interviews with dozens of Madison educators over the past two months. Teachers from three elementary schools, five middle schools and three high schools shared their experiences in the classroom. Most requested anonymity because of fears of retribution and were given pseudonyms.
Some teachers are frustrated by the changes they see: few consequences for disruptive and disrespectful behavior; a lack of trust from administrators; and concern that recent reforms aren’t actually helping kids of color. Others believe their colleagues need to embrace the cultural shift brought by Cheatham’s time as superintendent. They say that white teachers might need to feel uncomfortable in order to purge the schools of systemic racism.
Adding to the tension are several highly publicized incidents centering around race that have sparked renewed outrage over the achievement gap. The cumulative result is that many teachers feel stressed, unsupported and disrespected.
Let the constructive self-criticism continue!
Leah is a special education teacher at a Madison middle school. She blames Cheatham for what she calls “an extremely rough school year.”
“She is more interested in seeming woke than supporting teachers. Downtown [administrators] just want to look a certain way and when they don’t, teachers get blamed,” Leah says. “There’s no recognition that the daily grind is just unmanageable. I suspect we will see another exodus of teachers at the end of this year. That’s at least what I’m hearing.”
Leah supports the Behavior Education Plan’s principles, but calls its implementation “a complete failure.”
“What’s changed is kids have the mindset that they are in charge now. You walk into the school and there are just kids everywhere. Walking the halls. Leaving the classrooms whenever they want,” says Leah. “I do believe in restorative practices. I also believe in holding kids accountable. If we don’t, we aren’t preparing them for the real world. Cheatham really thinks she can close these achievement gaps by just loving and hugging them all.”
Well, yeah, if you enable dysfunction, are
you really surprised when you get more of it?
Is anybody surprised that where the parents demonstrate dysfunction and the schools enable dysfunction, dysfunction is what you get? And teachers quit?
Surprise me. Crack down on the administrators who enable.
I'm afraid kicking an administrator upstairs to Harvard, even if it is to a college of deaducation, isn't cracking down.
Ultimately, though, bourgeois convention is the absent referent.
Lauren, an administrator at a Madison middle school, says teachers need to get out of the mindset that they can ignore the racial disparities that plague the district.
“It’s a cop-out. The kids that can conform and can code switch into the predominant white supremacy culture, they are successful. Kids shouldn’t have to do that,” says Lauren. “The blame game gets you nowhere. Just forget it. Teachers need to get it into their heads that they have to be co-conspirators in the work of justice in our schools.”
Some teachers see themselves as allies in that fight, but say the district’s rhetoric isn’t holding up to reality. Karyn Chacon worked at East High School for more than a decade with some of the most high-needs youth in the district. She says she has forged lifelong bonds with students despite cultural differences.
“When you do get through to a kid, when you really get them talking and they trust you, they apologize for how they treated you sometimes,” says Chacon. “One of my students dropped my class because he said ‘I know I’m just going to keep being disrespectful to you and I don’t want to do that.’”
This year, Chacon made the hard choice to leave East mid-year because her job had become too stressful and was affecting her health.
Look at the language. "Code switch into the predominant white supremacy culture" is a fancy way of saying "acting white," which is something the Authentic might see as selling out, and which might be a way to be bullied or beaten up. That might be what was on the mind of the student who dropped the class, he just didn't have the basis for understanding that
being able to interact well with others might serve him better than keeping up his street cred. But the road to promotion in the school district (or to a gig at a college of deaducation) appears to depend on not grasping that point.
When asked if this year has been tougher than other school years, Lauren says teaching now requires some level of discomfort.
“For those of us like me, who have been uncomfortable in the system, it’s always been like this. What a privilege it must be to be comfortable. It’s never been comfortable for people of color, for immigrants, for people who speak other languages,” says Lauren. “We have to move through this. Teachers have to lean into the discomfort and be curious about what’s on the other side. That’s what I want from my staff. I want a culture of collaboration in my school.”
That might be so, and yet the immigrants and people who speak languages other than English are here for a reason, possibly they perceive opportunities for a better life in an English-speaking country with bourgeois conventions.
Lean into that. "[Y]oung people who get away with transgressivity or authenticity or all the other enablings of yobbishness in the education system often reveal themselves as unemployable. What sort of evolutionary advantage does that confer?"
In Madison, though, the soft bigotry of low expectations is likely to continue to be the policy, never mind that it's not going to do much to help the kids most at risk. It's the trendy thing to do.