Changing what we can change

In conversations with many, many city teachers regarding why our schools aren't better, invariably the talk swings around to two things: the parents and the neighborhood.

Talk about setting yourself up for failure!

As long as we, in our hearts, honestly believe that the reason why our schools aren't better is because of parents and the neighborhood, then schools will probably never get much better. Oh, we can show some incremental improvement here and there, but as long as we've set up a logical structure where the prerequisites for success are completely out of our control, we don't have to really get upset at ourselves when we fail, because, it's completely out of our control.

We've looked at this quite a while, and our conclusion is this is the only reason why basically good, decent teachers and principals can come to work every day without drowning in despair. It is also why our schools are only getting incrementally better, 1% here and there.

What we need to do is change what we can change.

This sounds so simple as to be unrealistic, but it is the truth. Fortunately our path is lit by the many high-performing, yet high-poverty schools that have come before us. Not a single urban school has ever significantly improved focusing on things like parents and neighborhoods.

They focused on rigorous academics and a school climate of high expectations first, and made no apologies of the fact, and tolerated no excuses.

We are not saying that they ignored parents and neighborhoods. On the contrary, many high-performing schools have had significant outreach efforts to welcome parents into the school, and to help make the school a living, breathing member of the community. But they did all of this without losing sight of their primary mission: the hard work of teaching children academic knowledge and skills.

A few of these schools have been documented in the book No Excuses: 21 High Performing, High Poverty Schools by Samuel Casey Carter.