More Than a Mascot and Two Colors: Making the "We" Mean Something in Public Schools

I started my day in an inner-city middle school that is in danger of receiving its third consecutive Academically Unacceptable rating. The principal, new this year, and the fifth in the last three, has been out on leave for reasons that appear to be a mystery to her Associate Principal. Neither of them was on board when I began working with the school on their Redesign grant a year ago.

The Associate Principal looks put upon when she sees me, asking, “Did we have a meeting today?” I apologize for not having sent her an email reminder, and this disarms her. She shakes off her annoyance and asks me to follow her into a conference room where we sit alone.

She is a very professional, very “put together” person. I can tell she has a strong inner-self that is keeping her going in this job, especially when she begins to elaborate, explaining that despite the fact that the district has appointed a substitute administrator in the principal’s absence, she has been pretty much running the show herself for the last couple of months.

The more comfortable she gets with me, the more truth comes out. She describes a number of her faculty members as “a cancer” that needs to be removed before it can spread any further. Relating a conversation she had with the district leadership, she tells me that when asked how many of the 65 teachers she would keep for her ideal school, she says maybe twelve. Maybe.

We discuss ways we can re-direct the work being done via the grant so that it more directly addresses some of her wishes, i.e. that the faculty feels some ownership over their stake in the school, so that there is more of a sense of shared vision and purpose in the building. I tell her about some of the work being done on other campuses, which seems to interest her, but mostly I can tell she’s just being polite with me.

Finally, and inevitably, about 45 minutes into our conversation, she gets the call on the radio that she is needed in the main office. As I walk her over there, I look at the faces of the children in the hallway, and they look lost. They look abandoned. They have that 50-yard stare you hear about people with Post Traumatic Stress having. I want to throw open the doors and free them; though I’m not sure where they’d go. The surrounding neighborhood drips with the same malaise as the school building, punctuated by “Payday Loan” storefronts and heavily fortified drive-through liquor distributors.

There’s an attempt at positivity on the walls near the office, with a poster proclaiming “Our Future’s So Bright, We Have to Wear Sunglasses!” But the faces of the children make it feel perfunctory.

The ultimate irony is the saying that hangs above the principal’s door. Made of wood, it looks like a child’s shop class project, and says, cheerily, “No Discouraging Words.”

So those of you who know me professionally are probably asking yourself, “What’s with Fuchs? Why is he trashing public schools?” Well here’s the thing about real life, as opposed to how it’s written up by Davis Guggenheim or Michelle Rhee. News flash: There are depressing, ineffective public schools like the one described here, and then there are the schools that I refer to as my “palette cleansers” – schools without which I might have to find another line of work.

I ended my day at one of these schools today. To be fair, we’re not talking “apples and apples” here. My afternoon meeting was at a 5-A suburban high school. But I’m tired of people using demographics as an excuse. “Well of course, Dan. But OUR kids can’t do that…”

To me, it’s about the “we.” The palette-cleansers have one thing in common: They are devoted to creating a sense of meaning behind the name of their school, besides just a mascot and two colors. In the school where I ended my day today, there is a strong team, quietly led by a stalwart principal who stays out of their way, while fully endorsing their work, because he knows it makes his school a great place for students and their families.

I get accused at times of over-simplifying things, and I’ll admit that if the “we” is all you have, you don’t have enough. You still need great, enthusiastic, exciting teachers who care about their students. And you need to be willing to push kids out of their comfort zone.

But if you DON’T have the “we,” you’re really hamstrung. And contrary to what the Guggenheims of the world might tell you, there are public schools out there that we can point to as models of what it means to have a strong sense of shared vision. It's time for us to start looking at what they're doing right, so we can preserve the basic human right that is public education.