Getting Mad About Schools

Yet anger, or at least firmness in the face of apathy, has its uses. I would like to see more of it in the D.C. schools I visit. I would like to see students given more homework, and disciplined when they don't complete it. I would like to see principals point out to teachers that they are not engaging every student in their classes and showing them how to do it. I would like to see parents complaining to school board members about inadequate teaching and low test scores, rather than just school closings and changes in vacation schedules.

After all, what was so wrong with Feinberg's disruptive lesson in advocacy? He timed it for a teacher training day when his students had a holiday, but administrators would be in their offices. He gave a lesson on how peaceful change comes in America and gave the students a script to help them out. They practiced the words: "I am an extremely hard-working student. I am part of the KIPP Academy and we were supposed to know where we were going to be next year, but we don't know yet. I wonder if you have any information about where our new building will be. My family and I are very worried about where we're going to be next year. We want to make sure we continue to get a great education."

Feinberg told them what crank calls were, and made sure they understood this was something different, a polite appeal to the authorities for redress of appropriate grievances. They had to act like adults. "Look," he said, "the minute you call up and start giggling on the phone, this is all ruined."

Patterson called Feinberg in and shouted at him herself, but they both knew that was not her style and her heart was not in it. To protect herself, she wrote him up -- a method of toothless discipline popular in many school districts. She gave him an official letter, to be placed in his personnel file, telling him what he had done wrong and directing him how to act differently in the future. She told all of the officials that had complained to her about Feinberg that she had written him up.

What actually happened was that after Feinberg signed the reprimand, adding the smiley face that both he and Levin often use in their communications, she tossed the letter in one of her drawers, not Feinberg's file, and forgot about it.

"This is something Ann and I still kind of argue about," Feinberg told me. "The fact that, to get through to the school district, they are like the ocean liner. It takes forever to get them to turn." His advocacy homework had been partly motivated by his view that schools in the wealthier parts of Houston got much of what they wanted because "those affluent, white parents scream and yell if they don't get it for their kids."

Patterson said Feinberg finally pushed her too far the night when he failed to come to her defense as parents accuse her of not caring for the students in his school. Five years later he finally persuaded her to forgive him.

Patterson acknowledged that the last several months before her retirement might have been happier if some administrators in her area, including her, had been more sharp-eyed and pushy. Two high schools that were in the center of Houston's dropout statistics scandal were her responsibility. She said she did not know that the schools had been falsely reporting they had no dropouts. She trusted the principals and the staff to do their jobs, and nobody risked angering the people who faked the numbers by suggesting they were part of a cover-up until Sharpstown High School assistant principal Robert Kimball spoke up.

Patterson recalled that at her first teaching job in Houston 34 years ago, she found herself continually short of supplies for her fifth-graders and had to wheedle money out of her husband to buy what her students needed. After several months, she happened to visit the office of the school's supplies coordinator and found behind the woman's office a large storage room with all the supplies that she had been denied.

Was the coordinator hoarding supplies to sell for a profit? Did she give them just to teachers she liked? Patterson never found out, and as a 27-year-old probationary hire, she never asked, or complained.

She first met Feinberg and Levin when they were that age. Asked how she thought they would have handled the case of the missing supplies, Patterson said she had no doubt: "They would have staged a robbery or something, but they would have got them."