The First Step
A huge thank you to all the teachers and principals for the love you pour into your classrooms and schools! You never fail to create amazing, welcoming places for children no matter what is happening at the district-level. I know the district politics affect your day-to-day in ways big and small. I know it’s not always easy to block out the noise from Central Office. So, thank you for always finding a way to absorb it so it doesn’t affect our children. Please make sure you’re taking care of yourself as you’re taking care of our children.
Well, we made it through another first day of school. For some, it was uneventful. Kids picked up and dropped off as expected. Breakfast and lunch consumed. Course schedules distributed and hallways navigated successfully. For others though, things were chaotic and exhausting. School transportation showed up late or maybe not at all necessitating an impromptu day off work or an unplanned expense. The morning’s stress of being late carried through the day making it hard to regroup and attempt the new routine. No matter what type of experience you had yesterday I know you’re already wondering what today will bring.
Yesterday morning as I helped my kindergartner onto the bus I commented “This is your bus driver. Can you say hello to her?” only for the driver to respond with “For today. I’m the driver for today.”
And doesn’t that single remark just capture the whole SLPS experience? What we have or experience today may be different than what we get tomorrow. A bus suddenly showing up at the right stop, at the right time mid-way through the school year. A field trip cancelled at the last minute due to lack of funding, or transportation, or both. A chicken sandwich for lunch every day for a month despite what the menu says until one day it’s something new and delicious. A beloved teacher’s aide or administrator reassigned with no notice. A different bus driver. A different teacher. A different routine.
And that’s just the student side of things. Teachers and principals also face the challenge of constant change. Student rosters vary from month-to-month as a result of high student mobility, inconsistent transportation, and our city’s obsession with school choice. A few extra students added to a classroom on any given day as a way to cover a teacher’s absence because substitutes are in high demand and short supply. Facility maintenance issues prompt classroom changes that bring the loss of desperately needed closet space or the benefit of beautiful natural light or both. Course assignments distributed at the last minute are changed a few months later when attendance levels out. Supplies ordered but not delivered.
SLPS makes us highly adaptable to change, changes as likely to be positive or neutral as they are negative but disruptive just the same. SLPS also makes us hyper vigilant and highly reactive. Our inability to plan and predict leaves us searching for who to blame and trying to identify which policy decisions caused this chaos.
All of that is valid. We’re right to be angry at our broken system because families and staff in affluent, well-resourced districts would never suffer this way. We’re exhausted from spending countless hours trying to make this convoluted network of schools work for our children. We know that we deserve far better than what we get, yet we persevere because of a relentless hope, a lack of options, a moral imperative, or some combination of all three.
The city’s history of injustice and racism compound and exacerbate the problems of our public schools, an incoherent system of excessive choice built as if by accident instead of by strategic planning and intentional decision making. It’s impossible to pinpoint what went wrong and when, making it crucial we admit the blame extends far and wide. It’s not just the charter schools, or just the magnet system, or just the school board, or just the state legislature that is at fault. The solutions we rattle off so easily — more equitable school funding, reinvestment into neighborhood schools, additional wraparound services, fewer schools — are far too simplistic for the convoluted mess we’ve made. It’s not that these solutions are wrong or that they wouldn’t lead to improvements, it’s that no single solution will bring the change we seek because no single problem is solely to blame.
Honestly, I’m at the point where I don’t care much about why or how or when we got into this mess. We’ve spent decades fighting about it, yet very few people are persuaded to change sides. Now the only thing I care about is that we start cleaning the mess up. Yes, our history is shameful. Yes, charter schools siphon resources, students, and staff from district schools. Yes, there are those who want to de-fund public education and put tax dollars into private hands or burn the whole thing down. Yes, school boards past and present struggle to strike the right balance between oversight and micromanagement. But the longer we spend declaring it to be someone else’s problem or someone else’s fault the longer it will be before we create the high quality public education system we deserve.
After I stopped teaching full-time I worked as a standardized test prep tutor. For many of my students, the math section of tests provoked extreme anxiety. Students would freeze up or panic when they realized the problem required many steps to solve. My advice was to focus on finding the first step, then the next step, then the one after that. When students felt like they had to come up with the whole plan at once they’d get overwhelmed, skipping the question or guessing instead of putting pencil to paper to work out the answer. But by making the task more manageable and asking themselves, “What do I need to do first?” they’d make better progress toward a solution and, as an added bonus, feel better about their own problem solving abilities.
I’d like to suggest we use that approach to address the extremely complex education policy problems we’re facing here in St. Louis. I don’t know the solution, or all the steps it will take to get there, but I do know we have to start somewhere because the work has been delayed long enough.
So, what’s our first step?
We need to commit to honesty, transparency, and accountability. And we need the leaders of the institutions with which we are associated to adhere to those principles too.
Over the past 25 years, district and charter schools have taken turns in the spotlight as one scandal followed another. Attendance or test fraud. A revolving door of superintendents. Fraudulent spending by administrators or boards. Poor record keeping. Real estate shenanigans.
These incidents should shock us into action, prompting us to make significant changes to the way things are done here, but they don’t. Instead, we deflect accountability for our misdeeds because the schools on the other side of the district-charter divide have done something equivalently awful. The mindset of “well, what about them?!” prevents us from acknowledging and then correcting the flaws that plague our system.
How dare you audit us if you don’t audit them?
How can you criticize our lack of transportation/advanced course offerings/athletics/special ed services? Have you seen what they offer?
What do you mean our schools are inequitable/segregated? Those other schools are so much worse.
These questions form the backbone of our current conversations and governance discussions. They move the spotlight off of us and on to someone else. It feels good, but only temporarily because the issues are never really resolved. Our chaotic and unpredictable day-to-day experiences are a result of our inability to reckon with our shortcomings.
So, our first step is to abandon this mindset and adopt a new one, a new mindset that allows us to admit that the way things are now isn’t the way we want them to be. One that demands our elected officials, policy makers, and decision makers stop blaming others or making excuses for this broken mess and start taking action towards change.
It feels almost too trite to type out, but I will anyway. The first step is the hardest. But once we’ve taken it we will be able the identify the next step, and the ones after that.
We keep trying things to make education better in St. Louis. None of them were as successful as we’d hoped for because we’ve always started in the wrong spot. Let’s try something new.