August 1996

For a great many teachers, the most formidable barrier to professional development is the classroom wall. Unlike professionals in other fields, teachers have hectic schedules and working conditions that seldom allow for thoughtful discussion with peers in the next room, let alone those elsewhere in their communities, their states, or the nation.

Standing Proud
Cissy Lacks, the Missouri teacher who was fired for failing to censor foul language from her students' creative writing (See "Expletives Deleted,'' September 1995), has received the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award, given by the PEN American Center. The center, which is based in New York City, is a writers' association that defends freedom of expression. In April, actor Paul Newman presented Lacks with the award and a $25,000 check at a ceremony in New York. His nonprofit company, best known for its salad dressing, sponsors the award. Lacks, who taught at Berkeley High School in the St. Louis area, had always received high marks. She was fired in October 1994 for allowing her students to use profanity in plays they had written as part of a class project. She is fighting her dismissal in court.

The insults and the abuse are etched in the memories of the three young men. For Jamie Nabozny, they include the time in 7th grade when two boys wrestled him to the floor and acted out a rape and then in 9th grade when schoolmates assaulted and urinated on him in the boys' restroom.

Dumb Jock?: A new study of high school students in North Carolina suggests that the "dumb jock'' stereotype may be off the mark. Roger Whitley, a doctoral candidate in education at East Carolina University in Greenville, looked at data on attendance, graduation, grades, and discipline referrals for 126,700 students at 133 high schools across the state. "For each of the variables we examined, the performances of the athletes were significantly better than those of the nonathletes,'' he says. For example, the mean grade-point average for all athletes was 2.86 on a 4.0 scale, compared with 2.0 for nonathletes. The gap was even wider between female athletes and nonathletes. In terms of attendance, athletes, on average, missed almost six fewer days during the 1994-95 school year than classmates who were not involved in sports. Whitley, a former jock turned school administrator, conducted his study in conjunction with the North Carolina High School Athletic Association. Neither he nor the association, however, offers any explanations for why student athletes seem to fare better than others in school.

Following a hard-fought campaign for the leadership of the nation's largest teachers' union, delegates to this year's convention of the National Education Association elevated their vice president, Robert Chase, to the presidency.

Like most teachers, Maggie Brown Cassidy doesn't have to be prodded to tell a horror story about professional development. It was a presentation about the detrimental effects of drugs and alcohol that included a film strip showing an autopsy. All Cassidy could think about was the wheezing teacher next to her, a heavy smoker, and how uncomfortable the session must have made him feel.

It's 7 a.m., and senior David Cone's day at Evergreen High School is already under way. While some of his schoolmates are eating their Wheaties, brushing their teeth, and otherwise preparing for the day, David is in class--working on a geography assignment. He is putting in time before many of his classmates show up for the day as part of an increasingly popular way to organize the school day known as block scheduling.

DISMANTLING DESEGREGATION: The Quiet Reversal of Brown vs. Board of Education, by Gary Orfield, Susan Eaton, and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation. (The New Press, $30.) Of all the education books published recently, few should provoke as much consternation as Dismantling Desegregation. I say "should'' as opposed to "will'' because skimming readers are likely to find perfectly reasonable the book's central contention, put forth in almost 400 pages of densely footnoted text, that our nation is making a serious mistake in retreating from its commitment to integrated schools. What nettles, then, is not so much this thesis as its unavoidable corollary: that it is virtually impossible to improve poor and segregated black schools. Dismantling Desegregation more than suggests that the best hope for those who attend them is a bus ride out to the suburbs. This is a disturbing message--and for many black leaders surely an offensive one--for it calls into question the very possibility of urban school reform. But Orfield and Eaton aren't trying to attack school reformers or African-American self-determination. They want to say, rather, as did the famous 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, that separate is by its very nature unequal and that we are kidding ourselves if we think that reforms can make much of a difference in the absence of genuine desegregation. The authors' point is not to claim "that black gains are supposed to come from sitting next to whites in school'' but to argue that blacks benefit from "access to the resources and connections of institutions that have always received preferential treatment.'' To bolster this claim, Orfield and Eaton bring forth evidence demonstrating that desegregation has indeed worked: Blacks attending integrated schools are much more likely, for instance, to attend college. What, then, accounts for the widespread perception of desegregation as a failed experiment? Some of it has to do with the conservative ideology of the 1980s, which portrayed busing as ineffective and coercive. Another factor is the understandable insistence of some activists that attention first be paid to decaying neighborhood schools. But perhaps the biggest factor of all in the trend toward resegregation was the 1974 Supreme Court ruling in Milliken vs. Bradley. In an apparent nod to local school control, the court determined that suburban schools could not be forced to take in minority students from outside the district. This made desegregation almost impossible within cities that were becoming virtually all-black. While Orfield and Eaton are right in lamenting the increasing acceptance of school segregation, solutions are hard to come by. The authors, citing polls indicating that whites are willing to live in multi-racial communities, hope for greater integration of neighborhoods, which would lead to the natural integration of schools. It's hard, though, not to be skeptical about such surveys: What people tell pollsters is by no means commensurate with how they really feel and act. And with suburbs extending ever farther from the central cities, desegregation plans face ever more complicated logistics. Dismantling Desegregation is an impressive work of scholarship, which, for all of its idealistic striving, cannot surmount the dilemmas it so ably presents.

When you talk with parents at the Washington Core Knowledge School in Fort Collins, Colo., about the typical public school curriculum, the discussion is often filled with images of erosion. Many describe how the curriculum they knew as children, the one rooted in the granite truths of Western civilization, has disappeared from most schools, or as they like to put it, "washed away.''

The American Federation of Teachers has weighed in on the matter in a pamphlet titled "Principles for Professional Development.'' Here are some highlights.

Sue Funk can remember a time when she was perfectly happy to teach her 8th grade mathematics course the old drill-and-practice way.

As Ellin Keene lugs a battered canvas tote bag into Cottonwood Creek Elementary School in Englewood, Colo., she meets up with Don Biery, who is wound tighter than a spring despite the early morning hour. "My kids have mutinied,'' the 5th grade teacher tells Keene bluntly. "They hate questioning. They say it's stupid, that it ruins the book, that it makes them forget what they're reading.''

Teacher networks come in all shapes and sizes. Some are national in scope, while others cover only one state or region. Some focus on a specific subject, while others target such topics as diversity, assessment, and bilingual education. The list that follows is not intended to be exhaustive. It suggests the range of options for teachers in search of professional development through a network of peers with similar interests.

Imagine waking up one day, and all of a sudden everyone around you is speaking a foreign language. All of your friends are on another continent--a world away. Your parents, too, are on another continent. They thought that being in this new country would give you more opportunities--but they must take care of business back home in order to support you here.

As a graduate psychology student in the late 1960s and early 1970s, A. Wade Boykin remembers feeling dissatisfied with much of the research he came across on educating black children. The studies, he remembers, often blamed achievement gaps between black and white students on the "cultural deficiencies'' of black children's homes. To Boykin, however, black culture was not "deficient.'' It was simply distinct.

Ron Randolph is about the last person you'd expect to be fighting for women's rights. A longtime resident of Owasso, Okla., Randolph works as a firefighter in nearby Tulsa. He's got a double chin, a pot belly, a thick Okie drawl, and a nasty cigarette habit. At first glance, he seems like a typical Oklahoma good old boy. So it comes as something of a surprise to learn that Ron Randolph is accusing the Owasso Independent School District of discriminating against its female athletes, one of whom just happens to be his daughter, Mimi. "I'm not a libber by any means,'' he said. "But if it's right, it's right, and if it's wrong, it's wrong.''

Proponents of school-uniform policies got another boost in February, when President Clinton ordered the Department of Education to distribute a manual on the subject to the nation's 15,000 school districts.

Mississippi Gov. Kirk Fordice has signed legislation that gives teachers in the state who have been certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards an annual pay increase of $3,000 for the 10-year life of the certificate. The state also will reimburse those teachers for the $2,000 cost of undergoing the assessments required for the voluntary certification.

In a ruling that goes against the grain of several recent decisions, a federal appeals court has said that a school district cannot be held liable for failing to stem student-to-student sexual harassment.

DEADLINES
Following is a list of application deadlines for grants, fellowships, and honors available to individuals. Asterisks (

A federal judge has ruled that the Pontotoc County, Miss., public schools violated the U.S. Constitution by allowing students to recite prayers over a school intercom.

Reform-minded leaders of 21 local teachers' unions will spend the next two years looking at how their organizations can play a leading role in promoting change in education while protecting teachers' rights and benefits.

We launched Teacher Magazine seven years ago because we believed no significant improvement in public education was possible without the understanding and commitment of America's teachers. Our objective was to help involve them in a conversation about teaching and learning.

Mary Beth Blegen, a history, humanities, literature, and writing teacher at Worthington (Minn.) Senior High School, has been named the 1996 National Teacher of the Year. "She is the embodiment of the all-American teacher--a hard-working, dedicated, caring person, always working to do better,'' President Clinton said of Blegen at a White House ceremony in April. "Her greatest achievement has been her ability to help her students understand the complex relationships that exist in our changing world.'' Over her 30-year career, Blegen has adapted her teaching to demographic shifts in the Worthington area. Once white and middle-class, the community has become much more ethnically and economically diverse. Blegen was selected from among this year's state teachers of the year by a panel representing 14 education groups. For a complete list of the teachers honored in each state, see "In The Spotlight'' on page 60.

Math education experts nationwide have hailed California's efforts to reshape the way its schools teach mathematics as a breakthrough in the push for higher standards. But the changes aren't going over too well with some of the people who might be expected to welcome them the most: parents.

In its ideal, professional development is beyond reproach: Set aside several days a year for seminars and workshops where teachers can pick up teaching ideas grounded in research and commiserate, collaborate, and rejuvenate. Unfortunately, most sessions don't live up to that ideal. In fact, they often flop. We asked a number of educators to jot down their most memorable experiences. The short essays that follow describe professional development at its best--and its worst.

Although the term "professional development'' typically conjures up images of half-day seminars and after-school workshops, these represents only a small slice of the kinds of learning opportunities available.

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has awarded a five-year contract to the Educational Testing Service to design and administer its assessments. The decision earlier this summer by the board's 63-member governing body marks a turning point for the organization, which was founded in 1987 to set high standards for accomplished teaching and to certify teachers who meet them.

Rollerblading, one of the most popular sports to come along in recent years, is gaining a foothold in physical education programs in the nation's schools. And now the National Association for Sport and Physical Education has joined with Minneapolis-based Rollerblade Inc. to promote the activity--formally referred to as in-line skating--in the school setting.