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The Science Leadership Academy lost one of its founding members as our librarian, Paul Scaer, lost his battle with cancer and passed away at 3:30 am on Tuesday morning. Paul was a truly outstanding and caring educator, and his vision for the role of a library in an inquiry-driven and project-based school will guide us in the Scaer Library for years to come.

Paul took great joy in being a part of the SLA community, and he felt deep regret that he had to leave SLA before the work he set out to do was finished. As SLA continues to grow and evolve, we will honor Paul and his ideals by continuing to create a library that is both a place of great learning and of great joy.

That was what I wrote on the front of SLA’s web site today. And that was the sentiment of what I said to the students who knew Paul — our sophomores and juniors — this afternoon. But there’s much more to say…

Paul was an extraordinary educator. He embodied the ethic of care in the way that he treated students and teachers alike. As another one of our founding teachers said today — it was when Paul signed on to join us that we all really knew that something very special could happen at Science Leadership Academy. He left Masterman — one of the most prestigious magnet schools in the country — to build the library at SLA. He was well-respected state-wide for his leadership in school libraries. And, in fact, when I first called him, it was to see if he knew anyone to recommend as librarian, because it never even crossed my mind that he’d be willing to leave Masterman and join us.

Bringing Paul to SLA was one of the great stories of the birth of the school. I called Joyce Valenza, who I knew a bit from blogging and such, to see where I should look to recruit a tech-saavy “blended” librarian, and she told me that while she didn’t know the Philly scene that well, I should talk to Paul Scaer because he was a great resource in the city. Paul and I traded a few emails, and arranged to talk on the phone. We talked for a while, and I laid out my vision of the school and of the role of the library and of tech and of open source and asked Paul who he could recommend. Paul’s response was, “Well, I’d be really interested in doing that.” I don’t think I can accurately describe the stuttering response from me that followed, because I was so caught off-guard. With all of the due-diligence we did around the first cohort of teachers, I can say — we only interviewed one person for the librarian position.

There are few librarians who see their job as encompassing information specialist, music teacher, head of the second lunch-room, open-source advocate, union chapter chair and sounding board for the adults. Paul was all of those things and more. The library under Paul was a safe haven for so many kids. It was packed at lunch every day with students reading and playing music and talking. It was open every day after school, and there were always students at Paul’s desk with him. And he was a magnificient collaborator as well, bringing the ethos of research — such an important part of our school — into classes as he worked with other teachers to do information and research literacy classes so that kids saw the value and need for those skills as a part of every class, not just when students made a special trip to the library.

And on a personal note, Paul was an amazing colleague. Being a thirty-five year old founding principal wasn’t easy, and there were (are) many moments of a crisis of confidence for me along the way. One of the most humbling and comforting and emboldening things about that first year (and onward) was that educators like Paul — career teachers with many more years of experience (teaching and life) than me — believed both in our vision and in my ability to lead us there. As a young principal who occasionally wondered what I was doing even attempting what we were doing, Paul’s support and belief in me and willingness to dive into the work in front of us was so important to me.

Paul’s goal was to spend five years at SLA before retiring. He wanted to get the library to a point where a younger person could take the work he had done and build on it. We only had Paul for a year and a half, and he really did view his work at SLA as unfinished. We are very lucky in that we have hired the person this spring who has the energy and vision and passion to continue what he started. Last week, while sitting in on a meeting with our new librarian and various faculty members and library science experts in the area, I sent Paul an email to let him know that his vision was safe in her hands, and that his work would be continued. His family was, as we found out this week, reading him all the notes and letters and emails that people were sending him, and I hope that he heard what I wrote and could feel peace that his work would be continued, and that he could see his work at SLA as a job well-done for the leadership he gave the space that will forever bear his name.

While Paul was there, the library was my first stop every morning. Cup of coffee in hand, I would come into the library every day at the start of school to catch up with Paul… get his read on what was going on at school… bounce ideas around… or listen to his latest ideas for the space and the school. I looked forward to that every day. Our school lost a founding member today, but for me, I also lost a friend.

Paul Scaer was as kind and decent and passionate an educator and colleague as I will ever meet. Our world is better for his having lived in it, and he was taken from us far too soon

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Tom Hoffman, in his post Social Work and School Reform, cites an article from January’s Washington Post – DC School a Test of Teachers’ Grit:

And this:

Two of my personal goals for my own life is this — I want to be a great father and I want to be a great husband. I want to be powerfully involved in my childrens’ lives. I want to be the husband my wife deserves. If the only way I can be a great principal is to sacrifice those goals, then it’s not interesting to me. If I’m not home for dinner with my family (and dinner is often at 7:00 pm) at least three nights a week, it’s a bad week. I don’t want to miss a Saturday T-ball game because I’m at school. I’m in school from 8 am until 6 – 6:30 almost every day. After my wife goes to be at 10:00 pm, I sit down at the computer and work until about 1 am almost every night. I put in between 60-70 hours every week, and if that is not enough, then I am not interested in the job anymore.

We have to come up with a better model of urban school reform than the messianic workaholic model. It is unsustainable and it requires Faustian bargains that no one should have to make. The danger of KIPP… the danger of Dangerous Minds and Stand And Deliver and all the newspaper articles that talk about the unmarried / childless teacher / principal who makes their school their entire life is that it excuses us — as a society — from envisioning a healthier model of school.

If we expect teachers to have an ethic of care about our students, we have to have an ethic of care about toward our educators. Asking them to sacrifice their lives to teach doesn’t get us there. And it certainly doesn’t get us toward systemic reform.

Let’s start having that discussion… and every time someone talks about / writes about / makes a movie about some teacher who sacrifices everything to be a great teacher, let’s demand that the authors answer one question — Why can’t we imagine successful schools in our cities that don’t require Herculean effort to succeed? And what does it say about us — and the underlying assumptions we make about teachers, schools and cities — that we cannot.

Tags: urbaned

Tom VanderArk has a very interesting / provocative post about the teacher effectiveness debate and there are plenty of controversial and challenging in a very short post, but there’s one in particular that I take issue with (tonight.)

Now… I complained about my grad school classes when I was in them, but I’m not sure “worthless university certification that has little to do with the job” is accurate or fair.

I’ve studied under some truly brilliant folks in grad school, from Tom Sobol to Ruth Vinz to David Schaafsma. They were career educators who made me think about teaching differently. Sometimes, they forced me to confront the assumptions that I came into teaching with because of my experiences as a students, sometimes, they gave me language for things I thought but could not express. (And in the case of Tom Sobol, I just sat there trying to soak up as much of his wisdom as I could.)

It’s interesting because, two years out of my English Ed masters, I went back and re-read a lot of my notes and books and papers from grad school and I found that I was in a much better place in my own teaching to try to do the stuff we were talking about then. Sometimes, I think we waste pre-service teacher programs on pre-service teachers who aren’t yet at a point to fully get what they are learning. So much of what the first two or three years of teaching is about is about figuring out who you are and how that “you” relates to the stuff you learned in grad school (or undergrad) and how any of that relates to the kids in front of you in the classroom.

And while, yes, I think Mr. Vander Ark is correct that we need do to a much better job of coaching / mentoring our new teachers, I disagree that it follows that just because we don’t do that, that means that our current pre-service program is invalid. In fact, I’d argue that, in the best of all worlds, better mentoring of new teachers would allow them to more quickly and more effectively access the skills they learned in graduate school.

I’d hate to think that we’d do away with the notion of teaching teachers how to teach because we don’t do a good enough job of supporting young teachers. Our profession needs more thoughtful practice, not less. A summer of quick and dirty “here’s how to teach” lessons will not create thoughtful pedagoges, but rather, mostly, it will create a generation of teachers who teach the way they’ve been taught — at best.

(By the way… One of my biggest frustrations about our profession is how little we know about the history of our profession. One thing I think our teacher education programs could do better is to teach the history of our profession. We need to be a less a-historical profession, and we can use our teacher education programs to do that. But I digress.)

So yes, let’s look at how we support our young teachers. Let’s build in apprenticeships into teaching. Let’s mentor and coach much better than we do. But let’s also help young teachers become scholars of their fields. Let’s give them the time to learn about teaching, not just in the middle of it all, but in study because we stand on the shoulders of giants… and our teachers should have the time to learn who they were, what we’ve learned, and how that can transform what we think our classrooms can be.

And one last thought — if our teacher-ed programs don’t always get there… that’s reason to push to make them better, not get rid of them.

Tags: teachereducation

SLA (and I) are featured as the Video of the Week on ScholasticAdministrator.com. They really did a nice job of capturing a sense of the school in a four minute video!

Tags: SLA, ScholasticAdministrator