Keeping minds open…A conversation about learning & schools in Wyoming, Ohio

It appears there has been some progress on the academic front regarding the complaint about the book “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”.  Recall, the content of this book and its inclusion on the 10th grade reading list was challenged under the guise of teachers “not following THE process”.

What we know now:

The teachers did follow a process – it just didn’t create an outcome acceptable to the community member who challenged the book.

The district publicly jumped to a premature conclusion that teachers did not follow the process.

The district’s attempt to force fit an administrative guideline requiring teachers to prejudge the degree to which content of any supplemental material might create controversy has backfired – exposing a broad range of issues well beyond reading lists that have significant and adverse ramifications for our schools.

The English Department has reformatted their process into the currently acceptable rubric check box format, absent the requirement to consider controversy among community groups.  Rumor has it [although not yet confirmed] that the district has agreed with this process.

What we still need:

A final decision on Perks.  Although at this point, it’s hard to imagine an outcome that remove the book from the reading lists – if I’ve learned anything in this past month of interaction with the school district, anything is possible.

A clear statement from the district (as is done in other districts) that our Board and our Administration will continue to respect individual rights to opt out of any assignment due to personal beliefs while proactively defending the full breadth of the professionally created curriculum from the narrowing agendas of special interests and/or community groups.

The Board and Administration need to account for their actions vis-a-vis the speed with which they abandoned the English Department.

This last point isn’t about blame…it’s about responsibility.   To quote an email I received: “It’s time for the administration to buck up and own something around here”.

Early in my interaction with the Board on this issue, someone said to me “this isn’t about censorship”.  At the time I disagreed.  Since then, I’ve learned he was right.

Censorship is only the tip of the iceberg.  What lies below is a deep long-brewing and widening divide between our administration and our classroom educators.  A divide that shows up today in book lists, negotiations, and prioritizing buildings over teachers.  A divide that may in the future show up as a stain on our most treasured community asset – the reputation of our schools.  It is our community responsibility to protect that asset when those charged with that role have failed.

A letter from Wyoming Teachers to the community.

To share your comments and perspective on this issue with the entire Board, use this easy link:  Wyoming City Schools Board of Education.

To contact individual Board members, their email addresses are listed below for your convenience.  Please have your voice be heard.

Wyoming City Schools Board of Education
Todd Levy, President                        levyt@wyomingcityschools.org
Terry Marty, Vice President            martyt@wyomingcityschools.org
Deborah Mariner Allsop                  allsopd@wyomingcityschools.org
Sheryl Felner                                      felners@wyomingcityschools.org
Lynn Larson                                       larsonl@wyomingcityschools.org

Given all this talk that teachers haven’t followed some long standing guideline, I thought it would be an educational experience to see just how much time was associated with the “long” in long standing.

When I called the district office, I was connected with the district’s public information officer who has, without fail been an exceptionally patient source of, well, public information.  I thought I had a simple question – when were teachers informed of this guideline and its content ?

I learned there are no simple questions and two additional factoids.

First – there is no policy that articulates how the district deploys policy.

Second – and more concerning because it effects the day-to-day operation in our schools, there is no guideline that articulates how guidelines are deployed to the teachers throughout the district.  As a result, there is no record kept on when or even if teachers were informed of any guideline from the 1200 page administrative guidelines book.

I’m not really too concerned about the policy about policy.  There’s a fairly well documented in various statutes and, unless specified, they go into effect upon approval from the Board and are posted on the district’s web page in a format that is very easy to navigate.

Guidelines, and the lack of standards associated with their deployment, are a different story for several reasons.  They are supposed to be rules of the road for the schools’ operation but they’re hidden off in a password protected area of the manual – accessible only to administrators and the Board (unless you know exactly what you’re looking for).  More importantly, if we’re going to paint a group of teachers with the broad stoke brush of “not following the guidelines”, it feels like someone should be able to say with confidence “here’s what we told you on xx/xx/2008(9)” to support the administration’s contention that teachers knew about the process and did not follow it.

The folks in the public information office assured me that it was shared with the teachers but couldn’t confirm a likely date and couldn’t point to anything obligating the Principal group to actually share the guidelines.   In response to a direct question asking if there was a specific guideline dealing with how guidelines are shared with teachers, the district response was “no”.

The best I could confirm is that the guideline was shared with teachers on 9/29/09 in an after school meeting.

Four hours later at the 9/29/09 board meeting, the Board was referencing the “long standing guidelines”.

When I think about “long-standing”, especially in the context of a policy that has been in place for almost 16 months – I just don’t think 4 hours lives up to that definition long-standing.

“Did you ever hear anyone say, ‘That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me’?”

- Joseph Henry Jackson

Joseph Henry Jackson moved to California after WWI and became editor of Sunset Magazine from 1926-28. From 1924-1943 he hosted the radio program “Bookman’s Guide,” and in 1930 he became literary editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, continuing in that role for the rest of his life and gaining national prominence. He was also the author or editor of some dozen books, often concerning California history. He served on many literary boards, including the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Harper Prize Novel, and the Pulitzer Prize. In his book columns and by personal contact, Jackson was always interested in discovering and encouraging new writers. Appropriately, his friends established the Jackson Award after his death in 1955.

Wyoming buys our district policy, administrative guidelines, and rubrics from NEOLA, Inc, a firm specializing in school policy management located in Stow, OH – just north of Akron.  Their marketing message:  Policy by superintendents for superintendents.

Their approach to censorship is to reframe it as “prior review and, if necessary, restraint” according to Dick Clapp, Neola CEO.  Interestingly, in a recent webinar he did mention that those two concepts (censorship and prior review/restraint) are probably not different.

Earlier this year, in response to pressure from the Student Press Law Center, Neola modified their 20 year old policy (and therefore ours) on student publications and performances to be more in-line with the First Amendment while creating language that would still enable districts to exercise prior review and, if necessary restraint.

Their May 13 (year unknown, implied to be 2009 but could be 2008)  webinar sharing these changes with client districts is an interesting listen as it gives a great insight into the way our policy authors think about censorship.  My conclusion, this is a training block in how to meet the letter of the law while circumventing the intent of the law.

Maybe it’s time to update their 14+ year old policy on supplemental materials to get it more in line.  Hopefully it can be done without some district taking the public relations hit of a lawsuit to get their attention.

In all this conversation about policy and guidelines and rubrics and processes I decided to take a closer look at what they mean, how they fit together, and how they’re applied in the Wyoming School District.

The Wyoming School Board manages the Administration through policies that are available for all to see and the Administration manages the schools through administrative guidelines (which include the process and applicable rubrics) that are unavailable for anyone outside the board and administration to see – unless you know exactly what to ask for or it is in the best interest of the board and administration to publicize it.

Said another way – publicly debated policy sets the vision and intention for our schools while privately developed administrative guidelines, processes, and rubrics, are what create the day to day environment our students’ experience.

The Wyoming School Board has joined the increasing number of school districts that has “out-sourced” policy management – simplifying what had been a costly compliance challenge and making the district policies more accessible to the community via an on-line presence.   There’s a menu driven template structure that enables local boards to tailor policy choices to the needs of their communities.  This template structure enables boards to rightly claim that policy “decisions” are made locally…probably factually true but there are a number of contract elements with the policy supplier that incent local boards not to stray far from the supplier recommendation.

These programs also provide a series of administrative guideline choices for each policy that enables each administrator to tailor the guideline choices to the needs of their communities.   Each policy seems to come with a menu of guidelines that can be chosen.  Again, this enables the local administration to claim decisions are made locally but there is strong incentive to go with the recommended guideline.

In Wyoming, as in other local districts such as Princeton and Winton Woods, the Board and Administration have chosen to keep these guidelines private, only available to the administration and unavailable to the teachers and community.  Several other school districts, such as Sycamore, Madeira and Finneytown, have chosen to keep these administrative guidelines open, available to students, teachers, and public.  Indian Hill is in the process of rebuilding their policy system and, according to my conversation with their administration, they expect that (as in the past) their administrative guidelines will be easily accessible on-line for everyone to access.

The difference is that policy is created in an open forum and guidelines, that is the practices and processes by which our schools actually operate, are created behind closed doors.  This whole discussion of the “long standing process” that was not followed by the English Department in choosing the summer reading lists is more appropriately described as teachers not following “the administrative guideline in place since summer 2008 that was kept private from the teachers and the community until unveiled on 9/29/09″.

I’m not surprise that our teachers lacked the foresight when the 08-09 reading lists were created prior to summer 2008 to know what guidelines might be purchased from the Akron based policy supplier.

I’m not surprised that our teachers lacked the foresight when the 09-10 reading lists were created prior to 9/29/09 to know what guideline (aka process) existed behind an administrative firewall that is not open to teachers or the community.

I am surprised that our board lacked the foresight to understand how he Wyoming community would react to all this conversation about teachers not following policy, especially when wrapped up in the all the noise of policy versus guidelines versus process.

I am also surprised that our board lacked the foresight to predict community reaction to what is, in effect, the privatization of our schools by hiding the actual operating guidelines of our schools from the light of day.

Someone suggested to me that it might be valuable to share the reading lists from all the high school grades since the response proposed by the administration is to inject the questions of community controversy into ALL of the book choices, not just the 9th grade list.  Duh…is that a good idea or what ?

10th grade list – designed to be coherent with the global nature of the 10th grade curriculum including stories of international experiences, many by foreign authors.

11th grade list – designed to be coherent with the American focus of the 11th grade curriculum so it includes all the big household names…Twain, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Ellison as well as some names that may not yet be too familiar.

12th grade list – designed to be coherent with the British Commonwealth focus of the 12th grade curriculum.  This is where you’ll find Kilping, James, and Atwood to name just a few.

AP Honors list – this is all about getting prepared for the AP Exams – books of “lasting literary merit” that are broadly accepted among AP test graders as the support for point:counterpoint argument essays that often appear in the AP exam.

All things considered, when taken in together with the 9th grade list posted earlier, it’s all pretty heady and it’s all caught up now somewhere between content and process issues.  Somehow, we’ve managed to take the folks who are probably the only people in this community capable of guiding our students through this maze we call learning and painted them with the broad brush…implying that they’re somehow undisciplined, out of control, running through the library willy nilly just picking any old book without forethought…somehow we’ve cast our teachers as the bad guys because they stretch our students and have resisted excessive controls on either content or process – engendering the ire of both players in this perfect storm.

I was impressed with the bulk of the English Department before I started this work.  Now, seeing the list of literature with which they have to be facile in order to teach in this district, I’m way more impressed and it reinforces for me a comment someone made – just because you can read English, speak English and write English doesn’t mean you can teach English.  For me, I’ll stick to reading, speaking, and writing.

There has been much ado about this year’s 9th grade reading list so I thought it might be worth sharing the list in the format that it was shared with parents.  Click here to download it.

There are 33 books on the list ranging from Queen Bees and Wannabees to Night, Ender’s Game to Death on the Nile, The Perks of Being a Wallflower to A Separate Peace.  The current process used by the English Department generated this list and before we start condemning a process based on a single book, let’s take a look at the broader, more representative output of that process.  To Kill a Mockingbird, My Losing Season, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn…all the outcomes of the same process that also gave us The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

The list is designed meticulously to represent the full range of reading skills and interests that exist among our students.  The goal is training students to read, comprehend, see things from another’s point of view and see that there is a world out there very different from their own.

If you look at this list in its full context, I think you’ll conclude “the process” followed by the WHS English Department has created a great list of reading suggestions for the 9th grade students.  Some may be better literature than others, some may be more boring than others, some may be more my cup of tea than others, and yes…some may even be more controversial than others.  The intent of the list is to ensure student and parents have sufficient information about each book to make a read/not read decision and it is easy to see from the descriptions that Perks is probably the “out on the edge” book in this list.

As I said to someone recently, if there’s a book on the optional reading list you don’t want your student to read…then pick one of the other 32 books.  If Perks is too far out on the edge for you, great…there’s Exodus, It’s Not About the Bike, Seabiscuit, or Tell No One…just pick another book.

If you can’t find one among the 32 that meets your personal family values, find a 33rd, or a 34th, or even a 100th…I’m sure the English Department will work to find something that meets the standard.  Note, the bottom of the reading list does a great job at the end highlighting that the English Department wants to hear from any parent needing additional perspective on the books or having the desire to opt-out of any assignment.  They make it very clear they are there to help if you want to engage with them.

The process used by the WHS English Department has been churning out literate students for longer than most of our students have been alive and if you step back from the controversy created about the content of a single book, I think you’ll conclude the current list instills confidence they’ll keep turning that crank and churning ‘em out.

It is unfair to the teachers that we have allowed this content issue to be cast as a process issues with the English Department teachers playing the role of the bad people who “didn’t follow the rules”.   It’s unfortunate and equally unfair that the administration has responded to this issue in a way that obliquely supports this inaccurate assessment.  It’s not that the English Department “didn’t follow the rules” because the rules now being bandied about as “long standing” were deployed to the Department on 9/29/09…15 days ago

This is a case where the dissimilar interests of two groups combine to create “The Perfect Storm”.

One group doesn’t like the process used because it generated a content outcome they don’t like, but we’ve got a constitution that says in almost all situations one doesn’t get to squelch ideas simply because one disagrees with the content of those ideas.

The other group doesn’t like the process used because it leaves teachers more in control of their classrooms but that’s been a situation that, in general,  seems to have served the Wyoming community and our schools quite well for quite some time.  This isn’t about standing still or going backwards and there are more than enough things about our schools that need improvement that we shouldn’t be putting any energy into the areas that are working well.

Taken together, these two interests have inappropriately demonized a dedicated, committed, and just flat out amazing group of teachers in the pursuit of feeding these dissimilar interests that, when taken alone, do not have sufficient rationale to stand up to community scrutiny.

Shift Happens was originally created by Karl Fisch for an August 2006 high school teachers development meeting in the Littleton Colorado School District. The original powerpoint presentation went viral in February 2007 and by June 2007 had over 5 million hits. The updated version has over 20 million hits. Not bad for a concept that started in a high school staff development meeting.

While there is some duplication of information between the two versions, the original focuses more on the effects of globalization and the updated version focuses more on the impact of technology.  Both are worth the time.

Learn more about the video and the story behind it  here.

Original – August 2006,  Teacher Development Workshop, Arapahoe High School (Littleton Colorado School District)

Updated version:  Web posted June 2007