This piece appears on the Chalkbeat news source on April 28, 2014. It is the first time I've posted something for a New York news media outlet so I'm pretty excited.

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As a high school teacher in Brooklyn, I have to remember to fill in a daily and weekly attendance sheet with a #2 pencil and remember to hand it in to our data collector in time for the school to call absent students.

This strikes me as a wildly inefficient system that has negative effects on teachers’ workloads and on student learning.

Teachers are already responsible for managing stacks of paperwork—student work, evaluation forms, meeting notes, and more—so the risk of us losing or forgetting attendance sheets is high. Even if all the sheets are submitted, there’s a lag time between when we submit the sheets and when we can access that data in the system.

I’ve seen a better way. In Philadelphia, where I taught until I moved to New York this year, I had access to up-to-date attendance information that let me find out right away if a student was absent from school or just from my class. Each of my students scanned his or her ID card each morning using a system called ScholarChip. Then, once in class, I logged onto a central server to quickly enter period attendance.

I was shocked when I found out that in New York, teachers still use bubble sheets to take attendance. Without good attendance data, a student in New York student could be skipping class without raising alarm, because her teacher could assume she was absent from school.

At my school, I’ve noticed that students have tried to game the system to avoid getting a detention for arriving late to class. Instead of entering a class late, they skip the class and hope we’ll assume they were absent all day.

The quality of attendance data is also a safety issue, particularly in the case of fire, a bomb threat, or a fight between students. Teachers don’t know to account for students they don’t know are in school. If poor attendance data leads us to assume students are absent when they are in fact in the building skipping class, we run the risk of not looking out for them when it’s our job to keep them safe.

In New York, I usually email other teachers to find out if a student is actually absent, since it takes time for the attendance data teachers submit to make it into the centralized database. In Philadelphia, where teachers entered attendance data electronically, I could check a student’s attendance status in five seconds.

With all the technological strides New York has made in recent years, why shouldn’t city teachers be able to do the same?

Last week my principal announced that we had money in the budget to replace the desks in some of our classrooms for next year. The desks we currently have are those with small shelves to place materials and they have become repositories for trash, textbooks, lost cell phones, and some worse things I choose not to mention. The replacement desks will have no shelves and no graffiti. When I heard this news I was (and am) elated.

Then on Friday when my grade team had our weekly meeting I looked outside our meeting room and - lo and behold - the desks were there! Not only was the funding in our budget for new desks but they were coming earlier than I had expected! 

It is unfortunate that I have to say this but I do not think this kind of thing - simple though it is - would happen in Philadelphia. In my four years of teaching there I never once expected to receive any special budgetary consideration, let alone earlier than expected. 

Currently in Philadelphia Superintendent William Hite has announced that he needs $216 million in order to open schools in September and here I am not more than 100 miles away reeling because we have an adequate budget. Or, perhaps, it is still inadequate and I am simply unaware as to what an "adequate" budget really is. 

I look forward to learning what real schools can do with actual money.

I am in the middle of reading a wonderful book by author Simond Head entitled, Mindless: Why smarter machines are making dumber humans, and have found myself making numerous parallels to what Head discusses and how the system of education in the United States has been running over the past 5-10 years. He mentions the idea of "misindustrialization" as one where corporate models that demand ruthless efficiency and computerized micromanagement are leading us to understand less of what we create or produce and leading to overwhelmed workers. 

While reading this passage it made me think about how evaluation systems nowadays are trying to reach "targets" for students, teachers, schools, and district so that we can get more funding from a variety of sources. The systems created to support this effort mandate more and more of a teacher's time so they have less of it to focus on individual needs of students and spend inordinate amounts of effort on paperwork, "artifacts" of their work, and attempts to reach all parts of tools like the Danielson Framework.

Head compares a part of the automotive industry between the United States and our counterparts in Germany to make the point that there are multiple models of management that can be used to create cars. In the US, we micromanage and use computerized tools to determine how fast a worker should be able to install a rivet or screw, therefore taking the skill of thought away from the job. In Germany, the skilled laborers decide how best to use their machines and tools to create their product and management looks over plans, provides feedback, asks questions, and allows the process to take place. Both systems work to make cars, but one has better relationships, higher-skilled employees, and more trust - which one do you think that is?

As many are wary of what has become of the teaching profession, so have I. In the midst of Gates- and Walton-funded "research" that is retracted later, we are losing control of what will actually help out students. Charter schools - which have the blessing of many urban districts - are not fulfilling their promise since many are being run in a misindustrialized manner. In Pennsylvania, Diane Ravitch reports that one in six charter schools is considered "high-performing," much lower than the state's public school average.

I hope that governments and local leaders are reading these reports to make decisions and not simply listening to who has the most money to donate.

When I walked into school last Tuesday morning in preparation for a three day camping trip (referenced earlier) I was intrigued to see news van outside beginning to film around the building. I later found out why: the school below BCS, called the Brooklyn New School (PS 146) has many parents who are taking a lead in the fight against standardized testing. According to NY1 coverage, at least 211 of the 306 students sat out testing over the three days. These parents believe that the testing has become detrimental to their child's education and are attempting to push back. 

This effort has become so strong that the NYC Department of Education has issued guidelines to parents in how to deal with these situations. One of the most momentous aspects of this document is provision of an "alternate educational activity (e.g. reading) during testing times." 

Truly, this has made many people in New York want to learn more about the opt-out movement. An organization known as Change the Stakes has begun to share resources in order to take action in this regard. They are offering a variety of literature to plead their case and take action against the environment of standardized testing in the city and state.

What's interesting to me coming from Pennsylvania is how my home state is leaning towards using tests so frequently and for such important decisions. The Keystone Exams, similar to the NY Regents Exams, are graduation requirements and are likely to be in place for the near future. As a proctor of the exams myself I can tell you they are more difficult and rigorous than ever before and take way too much time out of the school calendar for testing. 

Michelle Rhee, former Chancellor of Washington, DC Public Schools and head of StudentsFirst wrote an editorial piece in the Washington Post advocating for the use of standardized test. Amongst the arguments she used was that without these tests we would not get an accurate picture of how a child is doing in school. She wrote, "It’s not inconceivable for a student to be receiving all A’s and B’s on her report card but still be stuck far behind her peers." This aggressive attitude towards testing is held up by the lack of trust in teachers across the country, If we don't trust our classroom leaders to do their job, why would we put them in that position in the first place?

If we are doing our jobs correctly, we should be able to really understand and explain how a child is doing in his or her studies, without the need of "standardized tests." I would hope people would ask us first before believing a score on a bubble sheet.

This week my experience with many students whom I teach changed remarkably. From Tuesday to Thursday three other teachers and I supervised a group of 27 kids as we camped out at Floyd Bennett Field. We played games, cooked food, ran introspective activities, hiked around, and shivered a lot in the cold. It was an amazing experience (both in terms of survival and in terms of interaction). 

It was one of the first times I have been really encouraged to take more of a hands-off approach with my students. Instead of planning every detail of their experience we tried to let them come up with things they wanted to do together. While sometimes that involved burning things in the campfire that were probably inadvisable, it also meant many showed their leadership abilities.

One of the best expressions of that was a game the kids call "Manhunt." The basic premise is to find and "capture" the individuals on the team that is hiding from you at night. A few of the kids were very excited about the idea so they led the charge. I am happy to say I played in one of the rounds and caught one of the kids! It's possible I earned some more credibility in a few of their eyes for that 10 minute period.

They were mostly working together - cleaning, cooking, finding activities and including everyone. A few times there was some turbulence, especially towards the end when those who had been consistently helpful felt overburdened because of the various people who were freeloading. It was difficult to encourage everyone to help. But at the very end we ran a circle activity in which each student shared one thing they appreciate, one thing they apologize for, and one memory they are going to keep from the trip. It was very enlightening to see who can and cannot become self-aware in those situations. 

I can't wait for more experiences like this and I hope you get some too!