since they have been very much in the news recently, not necessarily for the best of reasons.
I write from the perspective of one who spent most of his career in public schools, but is for the second time in a charter school serving by and large high-needs children. We are a middle school with 70% of our students receiving Free and Reduced Meals (my first charter, at which I taught November 2012-January 2013 until my wife was diagnosed with her cancer, was 93% Free and Reduced Meals).
Our students wear uniform shirts (either red or blue), and one of two colors of trousers, shorts, skirts.
We line them up before they can come into our classroom.
We have sound educational reasons for both, which I will explain.
But we are not as rigid as some of the horror stories I have read.
We have a longer school day, and we require Saturday school for students doing poorly academically.
I might note I am not the only teacher with an undergraduate background from an elite college - my team leader (who teaches Math) comes out of Dartmouth after having done his junior and senior years of high school at a progressive school here in DC.
Please keep reading as I explain our rationale.
Many of our students have never developed that much self-control. Were we to allow too much freedom it inevitably escalates first from play and then into conflict.
The uniform shirts addresses two problems. The first is one of economic inequity, one I very much saw growing up in a wealthy suburb of NYC where we also had kids of far more modest means. It also serves to prevent the wearing of gang colors, which is still often a problem in schools within DC.
We require students to line up, face forward, and be quiet before we transition into the next class. If we did not enforce this we would have far too much horseplay or worse, and it would take far too long to get them settled down and on task for academic work.
That said, we are not totally rigid within the class. We often have students doing group work, or working on computers.
We are attempting to balance a number of things, including the fact that while in general our students outperform schools in DC (charters and most public schools) in math, far too many are behind in English/Language Arts, and they lack writing skills.
The latter is in part because roughly half of my 7th graders do not know how to write cursive. If they do not have access to a computer, any kind of written work becomes very time consuming. Thus they do not write sufficiently to develop fluency in written expressions, which also contributes to fluency in reading.
We will be issuing all students laptops for use at home. We have laptop carts in every classroom, and I guess we will have to teach students to take notes on them - and the tests we are required to give them as a DC Charter also must be taken on computers.
Most of those who do not know cursive want to learn it. I plan to give up my free time when they have "freecess" (40+ minutes either before lunch for the girls or after lunch for the boys) to offer them some instruction, because we cannot carve out time from our other academic needs.
Do i consider the need for uniforms and the lining up requirement ideal? It would be my preference to teach in an environment where that was not necessary.
But it is necessary for our students, and as my beloved wife points out, it enables me to make more a difference in helping my students overcome their academic deficiencies.
We keep our classes relatively small - my largest is 20, my smallest 13.
We provide lots of extra support for those who need it.
We are trying to make up for what they have not gotten so that they are prepared to move on to more challenging academic work in high school settings.
We are non-profit, on the campus of and under the sponsorship of Howard University, which leads to the situation of my being the only European background white in the building. We have finished a quarter, and at this point most of the time my skin color is irrelevant: I am a part of a learning community trying to make a difference for children.
We do not by and large raise our voices to the kids - if we need to settle them down we need to take energy out of the situation.
Wherever possible we look to find things to affirm. We have some who have little experience of positive feedback.
We should not have 7th graders who read at a 2nd or 3rd grade level, but we do.
We have students who need special education support but whose parents are reluctant to have them identified.
We have homeless students.
We see a lot of what presents as Attention Deficit Disorder, with or without hyperactivity.
We have had students arrested.
We may have a student being expelled.
But what is important is that we have a commitment to the well-being of our students.
Which is why, despite the emotional energy it takes to get through a day, I am still here, despite the opportunity to go elsewhere.
We are one fourth of the way through the school year.
I have pretty demanding standards.
At interim report time more than half of my students had Fs.
At the close of the quarter, in part because I allowed students to make up back work in my presence in lieu of going to freecess, I was down to 10, and I had just as many with As. More than half of my students earned either Bs or Cs. I can see I am making a difference.
We are a charter.
Parents choose to come to us.
We do not exclude based on test scores.
We do not have tons of extra money to help us education our young scholars.
Not all charters are evil.
I would rather give up my house than teach in an environment which I thought was harmful to the children in my care.
Just saying.