“The same four or five people have been doing the after-school tutoring all quarter, and that has to stop.”
We sixth-grade teachers shrank in our chairs a little. Rusty Moomey was confirming his reputation for brevity and bluntness.
I’d been warned that my principal doesn’t go out of his way to address problems and disagreements diplomatically. That if you have a problem, crying in his office isn’t going to do you any good.
His approach to problem-solving was blunt but effective. When a colleague complained about me, he called us both into his office. “I want this out here and now,” he said. “No more pussyfootin’ around.” It was a challenge to look at my colleague and hear exactly what bugged her. But our problems disappeared.
Just as well that the principal so values clarity. We’ve got a lot to deal with.
Twenty years ago, my school was on “60 Minutes” as an example of how bad schools had gotten. Four years ago, the school was permitting out more than 400 kids a year who chose to go to other schools. Eighty-eight percent of the kids who remained were minorities, and half spoke little or no English. Test scores were in the basement; neighbors were afraid to be in their yards as the kids walked home.
Rusty Moomey might be just the kind of administrator to turn that kind of record around. A former foster kid, he knows the families in the neighborhood as those of us who grew up more comfortably never can. He dropped out of school in 10th grade, and says he learned how to be a student only in college. He carpooled for two years, to night school in Denver, to get his administrator credentials. Before teaching, he coached baseball and basketball and sold insurance. He’s never been near an ivory tower.
Three years ago, Moomey pulled together a team to remake our school, renamed Galileo School of Math and Science. “Above all, we wanted kids to be safe,” he says. “And we wanted them to achieve.” He conducted many interviews to find the energetic, committed teachers who would work in the building.
And mostly, it’s worked. Galileo is still an undeniably diverse school. Twenty percent of its students fit into either the English language learners or special education category, and 70 percent receive free lunch. But the kids have figured out how to be students. It’s very hard for a student at our school to fail. They don’t just have the opportunity to retake tests and re-do assignments; they have to continue working on them until they have reached 80 percent proficiency.
Galileo’s the only place I’ve ever taught where zeros really aren’t permitted. Some kids do get tired of the relentless push to achieve and leave for other schools; we smile when they come back a few months later.
The teachers are seriously committed to achieving student results. I’m betting that many of them would agree with the state Senate bill that limits teacher tenure to those who have recently proved their effectiveness with state test scores, even though many of our kids will still score below proficient on those very tests.
Colorado Springs resident Sue Spengler considered having her older son attend Galileo. She looked all over, even at the new charter school, whose curriculum proudly proclaims lots of Latin and no electives. Then she decided to start her own school.
I understood both her search and her decision. Middle schools are the great homogenizers of society, and often are no gentler in the process than a blender.
Sue had been a schoolteacher for 19 years. But, “I’d just about had it with public education,” she said, speaking of incessant assessment to ensure and prove student achievement. “We say to the kids, ‘OK, you think you know it? Now prove it.’ I can tell how my students are functioning. I check their skills every minute, as I walk past their desks. But I have to have an official demonstration of learning written in my lesson plan every day, and test them every week.”
Sue’s one of the most intentional people I know. She uses Christmas celebrations to teach kids about the holiday’s Solstice history, junk mail to help her sons discern the language of propaganda.
When Sue announced that she’d be starting her Little School on Vermijo, I figured they’d camp out in her living room, explore Fountain Creek to study science, the Business of Arts Center in Manitou for humanities, history at the museums, libraries and cemeteries. Still, I had this idea that it would all be, “Let’s just get together and learn stuff, y’know?”
Nothing doing. Her curriculum includes math, science, reading and writing, but also a heavy emphasis on multicultural learning, household skills such as sewing, and community service. Each arm of the mandala culminates in a performance or project authentically demonstrating the students’ learning.
She has four students, and is hoping for up to eight. Parents will be able to pay for nearly half of the tuition with the services to the school that she clearly defines in the entrance packet. Parents also sign a very concrete contract, in which they will promise, among other things, to talk with their children each evening about what they’ve learned and to read Rafe Esquith’s book on child rearing.
“In the 18th century, when our educational system was created, parents didn’t have the resources we have now to teach their kids at home,” Spengler said. “They were limited to the books in their house. But now we have the whole world available on the computer.
“Education used to have three branches: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Nowadays it seems like we’ve forgotten the middle branch, and go straight from grammar to rhetoric. I want to teach kids how to be thoughtful.”
The American education system suffers from antiquated systemic thinking, yes, but even more from people who don’t even recognize the boxes by which their thinking is limited. In the end, people like Rusty Moomey and Sue Spengler will make the difference that counts. Forty years ago, they might have faced each other across barricades. But they’re both after the same thing. To paraphrase the old Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young hymn, they want to “teach our children well.”
Eva Syrovy (evasyrov@msn.com) of Colorado Springs is a middle school special education teacher.
