Atlanta school board member Matt Westmoreland jotted down two hashtags inspired by the four panels he served on at a recent workshop for top APS teachers: #fear and #nothing.
During panels on how to make their voices heard in policy decisions, teachers said they feared repercussions if they came forward. And it wasn’t only fear holding back; teachers described frustration over having spoken out in the past and seeing nothing change.
I served on the panels discussing how teachers can get their voices heard. (There were other panels, most of which dealt with improving instructional practices.) But it fell largely to Westmoreland to reassure teachers that new APS Superintendent Meria Carstarphen wanted their input. (She spoke earlier at the workshop.)
Westmoreland cited a recent example of an APS employee speaking out and being heard. A registrar at an APS high school emailed Carstarphen, saying the bathrooms weren’t being cleaned. Carstarphen hopped in her car, drove to the school, photographed the unseemly latrines, and sent the photos to the operations head with a request to spiff them up and keep them so.
His anecdote raises the question of whether a superintendent has the time to respond to every employee email — including ones about dirty bathrooms — in such an emphatic and dramatic way. I understand Carstarphen’s compulsion, because it’s aggravating when basic housekeeping is ignored. It fuels the perception APS is a mess and a morass. But there are more pressing problems the superintendent must address, many of which teachers raised during the panels.
Among them:
• Disconnects in math instruction. In concerns being echoed statewide, APS math teachers said schools were adopting different supplemental materials, so children were not learning the same math language or sequences. Teachers stressed the problem transcends Atlanta schools, and that math statewide needs review.
Fellow panelist Whitney Naman, a Springdale Park Elementary School math teacher who holds a doctorate from the University of Virginia, said Georgia needs to examine whether it has swung too far in demanding high-level math of every student.
Had she been required to take trigonometry in high school, Naman said it would have been a disaster. While she came to love math and excel in it, she wasn’t ready for trig as a high school student. And Naman — a member of the state Superintendent’s Teacher Advisory Council who has written math curriculum for the district and the state — said many children she works with now will not be able to handle it.
• Also reflective of their peers statewide, several Atlanta teachers of young children made passionate pleas to reconsider testing mandates, especially those requiring kindergartners and first graders to use computers for some testing. The steps and passwords to access computers and then the test sites sounded daunting to me, never mind a 6-year-old. Plus, teachers said, ongoing technology challenges in many schools hamper computer testing.
Westmoreland said the daylong workshop reconfirmed for him the importance of creating a teachers’ advisory council in Atlanta. Taking a break outside the hotel where the panels were held, Westmoreland spied Carstarphen driving by — apparently the woman is everywhere — and jumped in her truck to tell her APS needs to move on creating a council. She agreed.
The APS cheating trial — now entering its ninth week — reflects the worst of Atlanta. This workshop showcased the best. Participants were all remarkable teachers, and their commitment to their craft and their students was apparent in their comments and their questions. But it was clear they were weary of changing edicts, policies and visions and often succeeding in spite of the system, not because of it.
That is what Carstarphen has to fix.
