Bringing this story to the wider attention of BMG readers. City on a Hill, the charter school where I conducted my practicum is suddenly shutting down its New Bedford campus and consolidating its two Roxbury campuses. This will lead to layoffs for the entire New Bedford operation and 25% of the staff at the Roxbury location including teachers. Not at the end of the school year, at the end of this year. A good friend and former colleague of mine just found out yesterday that he will be getting laid off and will need to scramble to find openings in the middle of the school year. It is hard enough for history teachers to find openings in general (I applied to over 50 school districts until I finally got hired where I am), let alone in the middle of the year.
They did successfully unionize and it will be interesting to see how many jobs the BTU can save. The situation is dire, but at least my friends and colleagues will have an easy Boston Globe article to reference when the interviewer inevitably asks why they were let go in the middle of the year. It has nothing to do with their performance and everything to do with the fiscal mismanagement of the administration. Unlike traditional public school districts, salaries are much higher for charter school “executives”, many of whom, lack the basic administrative licenses that public schools require.
I feel bad for my friends, but I feel far worse for my former students who will now be uprooted in the middle of the year to new buildings, new classrooms, and have to make relationships with entirely new teachers. One of the few benefits of teaching in a smaller school was that I got to know every face in the building, even the kids I did not teach. Many of them are still there now. Good relationships with teachers are some of the most important in these kids lives, many of whom lack the traditional family supports and structures at home. For many of them, school is the only place they can feel safe. They have endured so much in this dysfunctional school in the last three years. Constant teacher and principal turnover, and now, forced teacher turnover due to layoffs. It is simply heartbreaking.
The irony is, this is the ‘school choice’ free market at work. Enrollment at COAH has plummeted in the past five years as a result of improvements in BPS and the gradual unmasking of the structural racism, statistics manipulation, and poor teaching conditions in charter schools. Many students lamented the lack of gym, sports, extracurricular activities, and the poor quality of the food. As a Commonwealth we voted to stop their expansion. As a Commonwealth, we rightly passed a law shielding college students from sudden closures and administrative malpractice. We should do the same for charter school students, who are predominately students of color from some of our most vulnerable communities.
As a History licensee, I can definitely sympathize with the last sentence of your first paragraph:(
We’re the runt of the litter when it comes to content subjects since we’re the only one without an MCAS (for now) which makes funding and hiring a challenge. Fortunately, once you’re in a good district, the lack of MCAS gives us a lot more room to be creative even in our core classes. So it’s a u Kaye tradeoff. I do think the new Civics requirement has led to a greater demand. I’ve encouraged my friend to look into middle schools too.
When did we stop giving a history MCAS? Also, when I’ve been to teaching job fairs it seems like everyone wants to teach history and I wonder where all these people were when I was growing up and felt like the only nerd who enjoyed the subject.
Is “u Kaye” an autocorrect error? I can’t decipher it.
Re: History MCAS, it’s dormant for now but supposedly on the horizon. There never has been one implemented for a graduation requirement but there was a pilot period between 2002-2004. I think I remember taking that and the teachers telling us it did not count for anything.
Re: it was an autocorrect error
I can’t remember the adjective I was going for, but it’s a double edged sword. On the one hand, admin is not up our case and we can enjoy a lot more autonomy without having to teach to a test. On the other hand, this means we approach the standards from widely different angles and assess it quite differently even within the department. It is also unclear what we are prioritizing. Non fiction writing skills or active citizenship or learning the subject because it’s really interesting. I try and tackle all three and use a variety of assessments to see how my students are doing. I want to increase our rigor as much as possible without giving up our freedom.
I think if 8th grade Civics is mandatory we should probably have a statewide assessment to track how our students are doing without it being a high stakes requirement. Maybe a capstone project and/or a variation on the actual citizenship test and then compare results.
You seem to be conflating civics and history in your comments more than I would. They definitely intersect when discussing the 1787 Constitutional convention, but I mostly consider them separate topics. (Most colleges have completely separate departments for History and Political Science, though there is some cross-counting of courses.)
Christopher,
The history MCAS was “piloted” for one year. The problem is that history is politically radioactive. Nobody gives a cr*p how many long division problems you ask on MCAS, but how many is the “correct” number of questions on European history? With all but one, are you sending the message that history is what white people did? When deciding what gets asked and what gets ignored, you’re sending a political message. The stooges writing these exams set up a company to rake in public money and sell consulting services on how to beat their tests, not to get into political arguments. So there’s always excuses to delay it.
Given how counter-productive these tests are, I’m glad as a history teacher I don’t have an MCAS that would get administration to start thinking they know what I should be doing.
That’s too bad because I always hold up History along with Math as subjects that lend themselves to tests and show why we need them. I would argue that ESPECIALLY in today’s climate we need to have some basic historical facts that every person on the street knows. The College Board has figured out how to do AP tests, so while MCAS would not be as challenging it certainly can be done.
In with sabutai that it’s better we have no test than a bad test, and it does make life a little bit easier that we are sort of the forgotten department in any given building. Easier once you’re in. I do think it’s harder for new history teachers to get hired and I don’t think we get the resources and attention we need. So it’s a mixed bag. In my present environment, I’m happier without a test and feel our department has balanced rigor with autonomy. At City on a Hill I think a History MCAS would have forced our own department to be valued and have more rigorous curriculum. It’s where the bulk of the teacher layoffs are.
I’d be open to a strictly data gathering statewide assessment with a mix of some essential civics knowledge questions (aka what is the first amendment?) with a project based approach to test analytical writing skills (like a DBQ). I felt that AP history classes were data dumps, very boring for students to take, and with very proscribed inauthentic writing assignments.
While I use DBQs even with my Honors and College Prep classes since it’s easier than hunting down documents on my end or their end, actual college level historical research is entirely different. It requires looking at secondary authors, original documents, and picking and choosing which documents to select to advance an analytical argument. Even AP classes were insufficient to prepare me to write a BA thesis. So I wish we had more time and supports to do authentic historical research. I think it’s a skill students of any future major or career could benefit from.
If we and our republic survive this hostile takeover by puppets of the Russian government, this will be a fascinating case study for the historians among us. This is a genuine crisis that will be studied and analyzed by historians decades or centuries from now.
I was 20 when the Watergate burglary took place, and 22 when Richard Nixon resigned. I followed the case closely and was reasonably disciplined in the sources I relied on. This was before the web, and so my task as an interested follower was much easier then than it is now. Publications like the Washington Post, New York Times, Chicago Sun Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and others were much more careful about sourcing then than they are today. I knew which reporters were doing good work and which were sensationalist hacks.
I write all that because the events that brought about Mr. Nixon’s downfall were only the tip of the iceberg of the abuses of the Nixon administration. I will go to my grave knowing that that Gerald Ford issued the blanket pardons in order to keep the full extent of the Nixon administration crimes and conspiracies hidden. Sadly, the raw data needed by historians to fully appreciate what Mr. Nixon and his co-conspirators were doing was successfully obscured and destroyed. Generations of Americans come of age and die believing that all that talk was just more tin-foil-hat stuff. It was not.
This comes to mind for me in this thread because several of us are historians, and there is every indication that similar abuses are happening today. The evidence is all around us in full view, just as it was between 1972 and 1974. For whatever reasons, it is becoming more and more clear that most of the corruption and treason that has been rampant since at least 2015 will go unprosecuted and unpunished. The impeachment will come and go. The 2020 election will come and go. I predict that no indictments or prosecutions will come from the DoJ after the 2020 election no matter who wins.
It the GOP wins, William Barr or whomever will continue to trumpet the Russian story that this is all a Democratic Party hoax. If the Democrats wins, the new AG will announce — with the new President’s warm blessing — that it is time to “move on” and “heal”. We saw this when the war crimes of the George W. Bush administration were similarly swept under the rug by the incoming Barack Obama administration in its futile and misguided attempt to form a “bipartisan” government.
I invite those of you who are at least a generation younger than me — those of you born after Watergate — to pay close attention to what is and is not remembered as the grindstones of politics, commercialism, and the ever-shortening attention span of the public wear down the bright rough edges of clear and explicit corruption and betrayal. The stark contrast between the Lindsay Graham of the Clinton impeachment and the Lindsay Graham of the Trump impeachment will be ground into dust. The New York Times reported over the weekend that PA voting machines “mistakenly” reported a Republican sweep — attributed to a “possible bug:. This reporting neglects to mention the widely-reported reality, during earlier elections, that the company that produces ALL of these machines — Election Systems & Software — counted a right-wing publication (“Omaha World-Herald Company”) as its owner in 2004 and is a subsidiary of “The McCarthy Group LLC”, owned by founder Michael McCarthy. Mr. McCarthy and his wife are (or were) major GOP contributors. This was all reported in the aftermath of the 2000 election, in sources like The Nation.
It is a duty and obligation of this new generation of historians to pay close attention to what is and is not being reported, investigated, and prosecuted. The mainstream media is not nearly as eager to publish hard facts about government corruption and abuse of power today as it was forty years ago — in spite of the hysteria and breathless hype that accompanies the nightly broadcasts of MSNBC and CNN. I promise each of you that when you are in your sixties and seventies, a new generation of historians will tell you that you are being “paranoid” and accuse you of being a “conspiracy theorist” when you tell them that the full extent of the abuses of the Trump administration was never investigated, prosecuted, or pursued.
This is a time when each of has access to rich troves of data and essentially unlimited technology for storing it. As historians, I want to remind you that each of you is a custodian of that data and the insights that come from it. To the extent possible, I encourage you to save pieces — especially first-hand reporting — onto personal media like thumbdrives or similar local mass storage. You should not assume that because it is easy to find today that it will be similarly easy to find even a decade or two from now.
These truly ARE historic times. I have a fantasy that one of the things each of you who teaches History can do — even though it is surely not on any standardized test — is inspire young people to BE historians. Find ways to instill and inflame a passion in them for preserving their experience of the current events of today. Help them learn the tools and techniques for doing that. Even more importantly, help them understand why it matters so much for each of them to do so.
Help them understand that the current events of today is the history of tomorrow.