Rigor: Pairing Demographics With Surveys & Other Ideas

Let's be clear: I am not a fan of pure number data. In fact, I hate it with a passion I reserve for pedophiles, murderers, rapists, and record producers. A raw number attached to a kid is as good to me as a detached toe without the patient. Without the knowledge on how the toe became detached- When? Where? In what conditions? Whose toe is it?- it doesn't do me much good. Only in a limited number of circumstances will it help me understand a situation where I need to act. What is more maddening, is that this number data could potentially help all educators and learners understand schooling in a much clearer way...

...if only it was compared to the real data that connects to peoples' lives.

 Our kids are clearly more than test scores. Yet, the testing fetishists (people who love testing so much they don't think of anything else) seem to believe that scores are all that matters. Test scores have more to do with student demographics than they do teacher quality. So what are educators and learners to do?

Rather than let these massive sets of information go to waist (it is often junk food, is it not?) perhaps we actually need more data. Yes. I said it. MORE DATA. I just think we need to go away from the kind that's been shoved down our throats and start to look for the information that really matters.

We know that the most successful people are not necessarily more talented than others. They are not better. They have more hope. We need to know how hopeful our students are and work to build hope if we are to truly make a difference. For example, use the Hope Scale as a meaningful pre-mid-post assessment to see if your school and teachers are building kids up or keeping them down.

Questions About Our Students must be answered if we wish to hit students where they emotionally live. That is to say, we have to reach their emotional centers if we want to reach their cognitive ones. This means we have to take them from where they are and let them branch out as co-operating individuals working together to make ours a better world. Thus, identity development needs to be nurtured. This means educators, who more often come from the dominating class than from the neighborhoods they teach, must not shy away from issues such as race, gender, or class. By teaching the controversy, we deal with the politics of education head-on. We are told to remain neutral. That's like being neutral on a moving train. You're either on for the duration of the ride or you're jumping off. When we choose to be so-called "neutral," all we are doing is standing in support of whatever the dominating powers want to be supported.

Questions About School and Learning also must be queried and paired with demographic and performance markers and trends. These can help educators assess students' prior emotional engagement (or disengagement) with schooling. If students have been traumatized by their schooling- in other words, their social, emotional, mental, and physical selves have been threatened by life in some way that has not yet been healed- then very little can be done to convince the students of the value of 19th Century American History or Biology. The only way forward is to assess...and then address the emotional (and sometimes physical) traumas experienced by our youth. We educators claim too often that we're not therapists. While this is true, we don't stand a chance of getting to curriculum until we address these unmet needs.

We also need to make our curriculum based in action research. Yes, of course we need to hit the prescribed curriculum (really, what would happen if we didn't and instead based student learning opportunities on student need?). Instead of looking at topographic data in a textbook, have kids learn how to build 3D models online and post them to Google Earth. Instead of learning about microbiology from a Bill Nye video, have the kids go out to the dirt behind the school and get samples there. Instead of diagramming sentences, have kids translate them into academic English and then do a compare-and-contrast of their favorite cumbias or hip hop tracks. Again, then teach them to pair their information with GeoCoding (Google it) and post their information online so they can learn about the diversities in their neighborhoods. Survey to help with GeoCoding where HMS students live.

Ultimately, what this all comes down to is basic creativity. Get rid of your textbook altogether or use it ONLY as a guide. When I was teaching in Japan, my first day I asked what textbooks we used. I was laughed out of the room. When I returned, I asked why they laughed. I was told, "My dear boy! We in the international schools know our subject matter so well as to not even necessitate a textbook."

Perhaps we should strive for such excellence. If not, consider how that's working for us.

Socio-Economic Staus and Culture

Why is it important to understand the Socio-Economic Status (SES) and cultural perspective? Isn't our job to teach to the standards, not culture? Well... it depends on what we are educating for and against. 

If educators and learners look at one another as objects, no different from the chairs in the room, then we shouldn't worry at all about the cultural and economic experiences and perspective of one another. This is particularly unfair for students. Seeing as we educators have the power of immense institutions behind us, the power dynamics of our relationships with our students means they must bend to our will. In a nearly-identical manner, teachers feel they must bend to the will of the institutions that house them. Educators don't like this babying of their professionalism and intelligence just as students don't like our babying of their learning and intelligence either. 

So...

We all need to step back, take a look at all those things that factor into our own identities, and keep that in mind as we try to move forward with others- whether they be other students, educators, parents, or the checker at Wal-Mart. How is it SO clear to us we can't teach a subject we don't know, but so strange to us that we think we can teach another person who we don't know?

Understanding the identity of ourselves and our students MUST provide the foundation for everything we do in the classroom. Our identities must be openly shared if we want students to open up to us as well. Here is some preliminary socio-economic data about HMS.

SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS

This data is screened from the 2010 Census information. Each pink-edged area has roughly the same population. 

• Blue indicates 7.0-13.5% of the area's population lives in poverty.
• Yellow indicates 19.3-28.1% of the area's population lives in poverty.
• Red indicates 28.1-63% of the area's population lives in poverty. 

RESOURCES ON IDENTITY AND CULTURE

500 Años del PuebloChicano: 500 Years of Chicano History
Role Models and Academic Identity Among White Students and Students of Color
Unpacking the Knapsack of White Identity

English Language Learners

• For resources and additional information on how educators can best maximize working with students labeled ELL, check this out.
• For communication with parents who do not speak English proficiently, APS offers this.
• For a detailed account of standards used in English as a Second Language classes, see this.

This first chart shows us which Zones have the largest percentage of students labeled "English Language Learners" or ELLs. 

The second chart shows us the percentage of students at each level designated both SPED and ELL

What does this all tell us? Again, we cannot say for sure what each of us can or will do with this information. Our job is to think about it, speak with one another about our ideas, and then figure out what all this data means for us as educators and as learners.

SPED Breakdown by Zone

Overall, 31% of the students attending HMS receive Special Education Services.

APS' Department of Special Education for educator can be accessed here. 

APS' Parent-friendly Department of Special Education website can be accessed here. 

APS' Special Education Department Liason can be reached at 505-855-9912 Monay-Friaday 8 AM- 4:30 PM

The chart below shows us the breakdown of students receiving special education services by zone. It is important to note that A, B, C, & D -level Special Education designations (labels) have nothing to do with the behavioral or intellectual quality of our students. Rather, A-level students receive the least number of hours in a Special Education class while the D-Level students receive the most number of hours. 

One of the most striking statistics on this page for me is seen in Zone 04- Northern Edge. No zone in our borders has a larger percentage of its population listed as receiving SPED services! Why is this? Is there something about the era in which these homes were built? Is there a lot of lead in the paint? In the pipes? Is there something funky with the water in those wells or in the city water that is pumped into those homes? We don't yet know the answers to these questions, but this kind of data can help us create action-research, highly-rigorous lessons that are immediately relevant to our students while staying true to the high expectations within the Common Core. 

Population Percentage Breakdown by Zone

Let's first take a look at where HMS students live. We can see from the data below that our largest Zone by population is 05 Mobile Home Parks. While Zone 5 is not made up entirely of Mobile Home Parks (MHPs), the majority of its geography is dominated by this type of housing.  

When we take ALL of our Zones into consideration, between 35% and 40% of students live in multi-family housing areas- mostly MHPs and tiny townhouses. One in ten HMS students live in the MHP "Vista Del Sol" at the Northeast corner of Blake and Unser.

Maps of Neighborhood Groups

Here, we see an overview map of the 50+ neighborhoods served by HMS. In reality, there are over 60, but some are so sparsely populated by our learners that we combined them so that the student data inside of the neighborhood would be statistically significant (worth our energy and time). Again, for statistical purposes, they have been put into ten groups to make the data more understandable. This post will include screenshots of these neighborhoods to give us context.

This is a map of the 50+ neighborhoods served by Harrison Middle School in Albuquerque's South Valley.

01 North of Campus --> North Border: Rio Bravo, East Border: Rio Grande River,
South Border: HMS campus, West Border: Isleta Blvd.

 02 Alberto's Alley --> North Border: Blake, East Border: Rio Grande River,
South Border: Rio Bravo, West Border: Isleta Blvd.

03 Midlands --> North Border: Blake, East Border: Isleta Blvd., 
South Border: Rio Bravo Blvd., West Border: Coors Blvd.

04 Northern Border --> North Border: Various acequias, East Border: Isleta Blvd., 
South Border: Blake, West Border: Coors Blvd.

05 Mobile Home Parks --> North Border: Gibson,  East Border: Coors Blvd., 
South Border: Dennis Chavez, West Border: Both Coors and Unser Blvd.

06 Gibson Circle --> North Border: Gibson,  East Border: Unser Blvd., 
South Border: Amole Mesa & Colobel, West Border: 118th.

07 Southwest Mesa --> North Border: Colobel & Anderson Hill,  East Border: Between Unser and Coors, 
South Border: Dennis Chavez, West Border: 118th.

08 Shooting Range --> North Border: Dennis Chavez,  East Border: Coors Blvd., 
South Border: Metzgar, West Border: Laguna Reservation.

09 Valley Gardens--> North Border: Anderson Farms,  East Border: Isleta Blvd., 
South Border: Metzgar, West Border: Coors.

10 West of Campus --> North Border: Rio Bravo,  East Border: Isleta Blvd., 
South Border: Gun Club, West Border: Coors.

Taking Control of our Destiny

One of the most important things we can do to empower ourselves (to help us take control of our own lives) is to learn as much about ourselves and our community as possible. This means we need to think about how our physical environments (ecology, biology, consilience theory), our social environments (sociology, social holography), and our mental environments (neurology, psychology, intersectionality theory) interconnect to produce what we call reality.

Once we better understand our present situation, once we are anchored in the present, we can then start to look towards our past to understand how we got to this point in space and time. After we learn about our past and our present, we can use these two "points" to estimate where it is we are likely to go next if we change nothing in our lives or in the society we create together.

We can then make a choice:

• Do we accept things the way they are because they work for us? -OR-
• Do we seek to change where we are headed because the past and present do not lead us to a healthy future?