"Trauma-Informed" Schools are more than Teacher Training

Trauma. As educators and activists fighting for the schools our students deserve, trauma has got to be talked about. Most teachers I know get that. It's obvious in our day to day interactions with children that some of our little ones need far more help than we can provide.

Which is why I am heartened by the rumblings of "trauma-informed" schooling. The idea that we would build schools around the needs of our kids who have experienced all kinds of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs): poverty, hunger, homelessness, violence, police brutality, the impact of mass incarceration, racism. The list goes on and on, but the basic idea is that schools could be safe spaces for kids who have experienced trauma.

In my vision, a trauma-informed school would be a school that commits to being a low-stress, stable, low-competition, highly joyful place, with ample arts, music, dance, and sports as positive outlets. Testing would be outlawed replaced by low-stress, creative projects. Young children would have ample time to play and socialize. Class sizes would be low to foster positive relationships. Curriculum would be culturally-relevant, and students would tackle subjects like racism and injustice, but there would also be plenty of silliness and laughter. There would be full-time mental health workers who spend time in classrooms weekly teaching coping skills and appropriate ways to handle strong emotions, and would be available for emergency interventions as needed. An on-site clinic with a full-time nurse practitioner would also be a staple for these schools. The staff would be trained in de-esclation techniques, educated about signs to look for and ways to intervene successfully with kids in crisis. And most importantly, staff would be given lessened workloads and time schedules as working with kids with mental illness takes a greater personal toll. Staff would need to treated with extra care in order to give the extra care that our kiddos experiencing a hard life need.

I hope we can move to this approach and center the idea of "trauma-informed" schools. But, (there's always a "but")....I want to make this abundantly clear....trauma informed-schools are much much more than just some extra teacher trainings.

http://traumasensitiveschools.org/tlpi-publications/

As everything else in education, I already feel this positive idea being blown into a negative, anti-teacher, schools-are-the-problem use. Instead of a call for the redesigning of schools to meet the unique needs of the ever growing number of kids with a high number of ACEs and the political will to fund such schools, what I hear from outside experts is that teachers need more "training". As if THAT is what a trauma-informed school would be.

No. Stop. We have put too much on teachers already. We cannot treat this as one more item that teachers have to "deal with" in their classrooms. Alone. Unsupported. Even as every other support crumbles around them. No.

I always tell teachers who are exasperated with the difficult behaviors in their classrooms of kids clearly affected by trauma about my time teaching at a psych hospital. There, I worked with an entire multi-disciplinary team including doctors, nurses, social workers, mental health professionals, teachers, etc. And even with every intervention on hand, doing everything "right", we could not prevent the crises children with mental health issues experienced. We simply dealt with the crises.

Yet somehow we expect teachers to learn a few tricks that will magically fix truly debilitating classroom behavior? Cut it out....

So much of what teachers are experiencing is outside their control. Here in Chicago, we are reeling from the horrors of terrible "school choice" policy that has led to further segregating schools by income, race, and ability. Some neighborhood schools get dubbed the "dumping" schools where high numbers of kids with ACEs and associated mental health issues are concentrated in the same space. These are also the exact same schools more likely to experience disruptive school closings or turnarounds, massive budget cuts and staff layoffs, and to have the democratic processes of Local School Councils stripped away. Meanwhile, teachers in the schools are given far less autonomy, fewer resources, and less time to plan for their growing number of kids with significant mental health challenges. They are forced into the bad practices of using wildly unreasonable curriculum based on developmentally inappropriate standards that are tied to high-stress, high-stakes tests. These "non-negotiables" place teachers in the awful position of forcing kids experiencing trauma into toxic classroom cultures where teachers have to crack down on behaviors instead of taking the time to support kids through troubled moments. Without resources or other options, teachers are left with few ways to control the chaos.

All of this frightening school-level harm is coupled with state and federal level defunding of vital supports such as mental health services. At the psych hospital, kids used to stay for months until they were stable and then move on to step-down services before carefully reentering school. Today, kids are lucky to get five days of hospitalization time, and we often discharge kids suffering massive trauma with extreme behaviors right back into some unsuspecting teacher's classroom the very next day. These are kids who, less than 24 hours before, required locked, inpatient care with no access to sharp objects such as pencils or paper clips, and around-the-clock care being thrown, unceremoniously, into a general education classroom. And we tell teachers to just deal with it? To use the magic words that calm a kid that couldn't be soothed in the most restrictive environment? I could add defunding of DCFS, the CHA sitting on hundreds of millions instead of providing housing, police brutality, growing poverty, lead poisoning, spikes in violence, the brokenness of our foster care system, and a mass incarceration system touching millions of families and children. Teachers can't be expected to be able to do their jobs in the middle of these multiple crises.

But...and here's the kicker...no matter what kind of quality schools we would be able to design even if the political will existed to create and fund these place-our first act should be to protect kids from trauma in the first place. My experience working in the hospital taught me that you don't fix trauma, the best you can hope for is to learn to cope with it. Which is why every dollar of public money should be flowing to protect kids from poverty, making sure their families have the support they need, shoring up public services like DCFS, giving all who need it access to quality affordable housing, living-wage jobs, and health-care, and supporting policies dismantling the carceral state.

Stop putting EVERYTHING on the backs of teachers. No one is going to be willing to work in the schools that need stability the most. When your evaluation focuses on test scores and a standardized rubric designed for mentally stable children, no teacher will be willing to risk their jobs to work with our neediest kids. Plus, it's too damn hard working with tough behaviors AND navigating the impossible workloads with no autonomy or joy. You can't control the outbursts of our kids. You can't control peer effects that happen when a tipping point is reached of negative behaviors in a classroom, and kids are re-triggering each others' trauma daily. Our teachers are exhausted by all of society's ills playing out in their classrooms.

These fragile children are the ones harmed the most by bad policy. Anyone serious about creating true "trauma-informed" schools needs to join teachers, parents, and students on the streets to end neoliberal edreform and to force politicians to fund the services and supports every person deserves. Fight the system and in the meantime, do everything in your power to uplift and support teachers trying to do the best they can in this broken system. Please....

The Dangers of Teach For America Indoctrination

Now, I have a lot of gripes with Teach For America. (You don't say, Ms. Katie!) I think their 5 week training stinks, and is bad for kids. I think their ties to the neoliberal education reform movement are dangerous and impossible to decouple from all that TFA is. I think their funding, their lobbying efforts, their twisted PR "research" are all crap. I want to strangle every expansion effort they push through even as veteran educators are laid off. They are anti-union. Ridiculously so.

Yet, one effect of TFA that does not get enough coverage, although it's often referenced tangentially, is the power of TFA indoctrination. (But oh! was it in effect at the #TFA25 celebration held over the weekend! Another post, perhaps...)

No one wants to admit that they have been indoctrinated. And we all have to some extent. For the most part, we do not even know that we don't know much of what has been spoon fed to us through the media, cultural norms, or existing power structures. None of us is immune, including myself.

However, what TFA does is something unique. And it's measurable. Think of any encounter you've had with an edreform "true believer". How many times have you thought to yourself, "must have been TFA", then after doing a quick Google search been right! This has happened to me too many times. Way too many times.

Let's take an example. A few weeks back, there was a truly shocking commentary in our Chicago education magazine Catalyst Chicago that was titled How Bailey Reimer's kindergartners came to love testing. Most educators who saw this piece were appalled. Look at the comments.

I know when I saw this piece, the very first thought I had was...she's TFA. And lo and behold, she just completed her TFA stint. TFA's influence on this young woman's ideas were stark, obvious, undeniable. Now that indoctrination process is reinforced by other neoliberal organizations such as being placed in a charter school and then also being recruited into Teach Plus-a Gates funded faux teacher voice group. But that's the thing with TFA, it's often a one-two punch. TFA-in many areas-operates inside a nexus of neoliberal edreform ideology. TFAers are completely isolated from alternative view points even as they are beaten up by a ridiculously arduous summer training filled with unnecessary sleep deprivation and mental health harming stress. Then they are thrown-unprepared-into some of the most challenging workplaces in our country. There is quite literally no time to stop and think about the bigger picture and that is intentional.

When all you have ever heard is "testing data is necessary to teach", then this statement makes sense:

"To get to a point where my students appreciate and understand testing, I had to first appreciate it myself. I love tests that give me relevant, timely information about how my students are doing, from how many letter names they know to how many words per minute they read."

Suddenly, what "good teaching" is gets warped into the image of neoliberal ideology based on a bunch of "data-driven" drivel. Most teachers, especially veteran educators could never, ever say this line: "Of course, 5-year-olds don’t come to school automatically loving testing. As educators, it’s our job to build that appreciation and understanding." No! No, it's not. But we can see how it was TFA, combined with the charter school environment, that made this statement real for this teacher. This mindset is dangerous.


I believe there are number of reasons why this indoctrination process is so effective. 1) They use the time-tested method of breaking you down to build you up in the Bootcamp summer training. 2) The recruitment process onward is a series of indoctrination sessions. And perhaps most importantly 3) TFA's claim of being the "best and brightest" means any other opposing viewpoint is immediately dismissed on the basis of not being TFA magic.

Right now stop and do a google search for "how to indoctrinate". No seriously, do it. What pops up? Article after article describing how to lure folks into a group with promises and lies about the actual purpose of the organization, slowly strip down any autonomy or sense of self through boot camp like conditions, then carefully isolate and fill with desired ideas. This is exactly what TFA does. Exactly, like they copied the "indoctrination" playbook. Colleges of education don't do this, unions don't do this, but TFA uses the most blatantly cult-like process they can to get the desired effect.

Something perhaps unique to TFA is their claim of being the "best and the brightest". They recruit so heavily on college campuses in order to have an extremely large number of applicants so they can sell the idea that their program is extra selective. This elitism is actually very damaging as it sets up TFA as the holders of all knowledge and all others in education as "less than". TFA recruits are therefore encouraged to only listen to TFA insiders. TFA even has processes within the recruitment and training process to rein in any lost sheep or depose of troublemakers. (This resulting exclusivity is part of a larger problem among elites which Chris Hayes writes about in his book, The Twilight of the Elites. I wrote about this phenomena in education: Twilight of the EdReformers. When non-TFA teachers complain about TFA arrogance, this reinforced elitism is what they experiencing.)

When you look around and see TFA alums in all the edreform-inspired non-profits, running charter networks, serving as aides to high-ranking government officials, getting appointed to important state and national-level edpolicy positions, or getting elected themselves through the political wing of TFA, suddenly the impact of this indoctrination process becomes exponentially damaging. I would make the case that the success of edreform over the past decade or so, especially under the Obama administration, would not have been nearly as pervasive if TFA did not exist. 

I often think to myself, if I had done TFA, would I now be a corporate reform cheerleader? It's possible. Even likely. That's how powerful this indoctrination process is. I am thankful every day that I came into teaching through a full Masters-level teaching program and that I'm in Chicago where my union is strong and clear on the issues of edreform.

Thankfully, not everyone from TFA remains a true believer. But just wait til those who are see this post....

My Kids are Learning DESPITE Edreform

The thing that gets me about all the ridiculous policies coming down hard on teachers, especially teachers teaching in neighborhood schools serving low-income African American communities, is that despite everything, my kids are learning! I am SO proud of them.

I teach special education for third and fourth graders in a resource room. My kids-almost all of whom were non-readers when I met them in September-are ALL reading after just a few short months. With simple exposure to almost excessive amounts of high-interest books (and never restricting them to reading books only "at their level"), beautiful culturally-relevant and diverse literature, and lots of small group/1:1 reading practice, they are getting this thing called reading. We celebrate books and our reading in the classroom, and the kids are eager to share what they are learning. Yesterday, during our Friday Peace Circle, kids were so excited to share their favorite stories, that we went well over the usual time allotment. One girl, a struggling third grader, chose to read an entire short book to the group. And we applauded and cheered her success.

This is only a fraction of the thousands of books I have collected over the years. Like so many other teachers out there, I have scoured used book stores, craigslist, ebay, library sales, amazon, befriended retiring teachers to amass a huge selection of high-interest books for my students.

 Many of my students went from difficulty sounding out CVC words, to reading whole sentences and stories. The teacher before me did a great job of reinforcing those basic letter-sound relationships, and skills like writing of the alphabet and numbers, and so when they got to my class, they were ready for the next step. Now they are reading whole pages, and some are so hungry for reading practice they ask to try the grade-level work I had intended to read orally. And they are doing it-choppy, with plenty of errors-but they are doing it!

Most of my kids could barely add single digit numbers, but now nearly all have mastered multiplication, division, fact families, factoring and multiples, etc. They are even writing, and are excited about Science and History. They are asking important questions about their world, their communities, all the protests on the news, about injustice and racism.

My student wrote this, completely unprompted, to help another student.

And my kids are kind. They have developed true empathy for others in our class. Yesterday, one student came in after gym class very upset about some encounter with another peer in her homeroom. And our little boy with autism went up to her and said, "You need to relax, let me help you relax." He went around the room and offered her toys, feeling balls, drawing items, and even wrote a list called "How to relax" on the board for her. And it worked! That little girl was soon laughing and smiling thanks to a little boy's kindness.

My kids love "playing school". They act out our peace circles, they practice their spelling words, they read books to one another, they quiz each other on math facts. They learn more in the small moments of "free time" we have built into the day as a reward than they do with all our computerized programs, Common Core standards, graphic organizers, and complex text. Their best learning is not coming from a scripted lesson plan from a scripted curriculum and is not happening because of draconian, harsh discipline strategies. They are learning because they like it, because they have had been able to experience some successes. Successes that I have had to intentionally carve out from our educational world of bogus "rigor", improper expectations, developmentally inappropriate standards, and constant ridiculously difficult and confusing standardized testing. I have had to do everything in my power to protect my kids and create a space where they are comfortable and excited to learn, instead of the dread they often feel in the cutthroat educational climate edreformers have built.

I am no superteacher. I don't have that charisma, that spark, that would draw outsiders to my classroom in awe. But I'm a decent teacher who lets my kids be kids. I am lucky enough to have support in my classroom in the form of quality paraprofessionals, so each child is getting that important one on one/small group attention-something we have had to constantly fight our district to maintain. My classroom is well-resourced, but not because the district shelled out. No, the district pays for things like test prep computer programs or all the latest fads in education like STEM. It is teachers who are paying out of pocket, through our dwindling bank accounts, and through our own sweat and tears to collect and create the kinds of materials that actually benefit our kids. We are given the Common Core workbooks, told to follow the horrid Common Core Curricula, and implement the latest computer programs with "fidelity", but then must supplement everything with our own resources-the games, the interactive art projects, the child-friendly materials off of teacherspayteachers.com, the advice from our colleagues and veteran educators, and the accumulation of years of experience. And most importantly we are guided by the power of those teachable moments that our curious little ones bring with them every day.

We teachers do this in the middle of mass "budget crises" where threats of layoffs, reductions in vital services like special education, cuts in pay, and the destruction of our retirement looms close on the horizon. We do it with time and money we don't have as edreform robs us of our autonomy and the resources we need to reach our students, especially our kids who live in deep poverty and have experienced untold trauma.

I know my other teacher colleagues are experiencing the same sorts of everyday successes. But I want all the edreform cheerleaders out there to understand-the learning is happening DESPITE your reforms, not because of them. We are teaching the way we know works best for kids "in the cracks", done in hiding or between mandates.

And the biggest kick in gut of all is how we are punished for doing what's right. Too many excellent teachers in my school are being given poor ratings due to a flawed and cruel evaluation system. Our school gets budget cut after budget cut when we serve the kids that can least afford these types of disruptions. Already this year we have lost four teaching positions resulting in split classrooms, large class sizes, loss of Social Studies in our middle grades, and the chaos of rearranging classrooms and schedules weeks into the school year. We lost a much needed clerk, we lost our Climate and Culture coordinator who was overseeing our restorative justice program. We lost our Japanese program. And now we are bracing for the worst cuts in living memory to hit us thanks to ideologues and the 1% elites in political office.

My kids are doing such great work. But none of that matters. We are living in a time where the kind of teaching that I believe deeply in is being intentionally destroyed with the ultimate goal of the demise of public education.

But damn all of you edreformers, I will keep celebrating my students and all their hard work. I love my kiddos. And I'm not afraid to step out of my classroom into the streets along with thousands of my union brothers and sisters to fight for what is right.

We Can't Talk About Discipline Without Discussing Mental Health

I try to follow closely the discussions around school discipline including zero tolerance or "no excuses" discipline policies, restorative justice, and the school-to-prison-pipeline. I applaud many of the groups of youth, youth workers, educators, and parents working to dismantle the StPP and implement more restorative practices in our schools, especially in schools serving low income Black and Latino students. There is no question that Black and Latino youth are being mistreated by racist and misguided discipline policies.

However, I feel there is a huge piece of the conversation that is missing: mental health. As we discuss student behaviors and appropriate contexts and reactions to those behaviors, I feel like we are glossing over the very real and very serious implications of trauma, depression, or other mental health effects that are exacerbated by poverty and racial oppression. Too many of our students and their families and communities are daily being bombarded by such incredible injustice and obstacles that the mental health toll comes out in their behaviors. Children and youth are responding in very normal and predictable ways to absolutely untenable circumstances. Poverty is often racialized in our city and poverty matters.

Back last fall, I finagled my way-by  practically begging my administration-to a CPS training on Restorative Justice. It was a good training. I appreciated practice in alternative ways to handle disputes, student conflicts, and especially the focus on "repairing the harm". Instead of "punishment", students are encouraged to come up with ways to fix whatever damage their behavior caused. I could see it working for many smaller problems that arise daily in schools, teaching children and young people responsibility while giving them a voice in the matter.

But in the back of my mind, I kept thinking back to my time teaching at a psychiatric hospital. And I thought about the kinds of absolute horrors some children have been exposed to. Hearing their stories of abuse that make you want to come home and weep. Kids being exposed to all kinds of violence. Children being thrown-unwanted-around foster care and group homes. Poverty and racism were so often at the heart of these stories. Parents who sought refuge in alcohol and drugs when there are no jobs, only housing insecurity and pain available. Families ripped apart by the prison-industrial complex. Babies who watched their siblings burn to death when they were left alone in a subpar housing complex during winter. Kindergartners being shot while sitting in their living rooms.

These stories sound extreme and certainly not every child or family living in poverty experiences these types of tragedies. But far too many people do. Far too many.

Being back in a neighborhood school located in a neighborhood experiencing deep poverty, I am reminded daily how ineffective even the best-intentioned discipline strategies are.

I appreciate the fact that restorative justice advocates are trying to reduce suspensions. But who is working on addressing the underlying reasons behind tough behaviors? People, especially children, will not be cured from major PTSD or depression by good intentions. No, we should not make things even worse through punitive discipline, but let's also not pretend that switching to restorative practices is nearly enough.

I want the conversation to go deeper and get more real. Teachers are in classrooms every day having to decide how to address truly dangerous and debilitating behaviors. A peace circle is great, but it's not enough. We are experiencing concentrated negative behaviors with no where near enough resources. And school policy is creating more concentrations of poverty and further segregating our school by race, class, and ability. It's one thing to be an advocate on the outside calling for restorative practices, it's quite another to be the teacher or school staff personnel confronted daily with the behavioral realities of working with kids in deep poverty. Kids who are in a constant state of fight or flight-ready to fight at the smallest provocation. Kids who cannot sit still, cannot focus, and even with modifications and accommodations, end up monopolizing a teacher's time.

There is racism in our school discipline systems. I don't want to take anything away from that fight. I have no doubt that there are white teachers who are making racist discipline decisions which accounts for some of the disparities. But isn't a greater racism that children of color are far more likely in our city to be exposed to trauma, to toxic stress, to have a greater number of adverse childhood experiences which lead to very normal but very disruptive behaviors in schools?

Can we talk about that please?

The Ugly Truths of Choice and That Which Divides Us

I spent the summer working on the Southwest side of Chicago-knocking on doors, organizing, and helping plan education justice events. I met amazing people who care deeply about equity, about justice, about improving the educational opportunity for their children.  I saw thousands come out in support of their neighborhood schools. I heard powerful testimonies of the great work happening inside the schools from students, teachers, staff, and parents.

I had not spent a lot of time on the Southwest side before. There is so much good, so much community involvement, so much kindness. It was beautiful.

But I also saw a less attractive side of the area. The SW side has a growing Latino population which is expanding into once formerly white working class or working class sometimes poor Black communities. I saw the tensions as demographics change and the racism or prejudice that arises when people from different backgrounds mix. I met older working white people talk about "those people" (referencing the Latino population) moving in which is why the schools struggle today, how there are only a few of "us" left on the block. I heard from Latino families that would NEVER send their children to "that school" even though it is just a block away with the unspoken understanding that "that school" is where Black students go to school. I met Asians who would never send their children to the closer neighborhood high school because it had too many "bad kids", but instead send their kids farther afield to a school with more middle class and stable families. And at the heart of the battle over charter schools in the area, giving parents "the choice" to run away from the parts of the their community they don't want to associate with. The kids with behavior problems, the kids with disabilities, the kids from deeper poverty or who live in public housing.

In other words, the Southwest side is like every other corner of my hyper-segregated city: race and class throw up seemingly insurmountable divides. Selective enrollment schools certainly fill this role. They are a "life raft" for families that want nothing to do with the "others" in the city, and ostensibly serve as an anchor for the middle class. And the charter movement, at least at face value (ignoring the obvious privatization, union-busting, and profit-motives involved with charters), offer that opportunity to "escape" to more families. Because that's what's equality looks like apparently: giving all people an equal opportunity to discriminate. To divide communities. To force families into cutthroat competition for the scraps of funding allowed to trickle down to the working class.

Now the "who" parents are fleeing is subjective. Sometimes it is the racism of white families fleeing Black kids or Latino kids. Usually it is more subtle. It's about class. It's about degrees of poverty. It's about real fears for safety. A common refrain was anger over the gangs in the area. It's an understanding that a school with shrinking resources, but high special education needs, will not adequately serve all students. It's also about real and demonstrable disparities in funding in certain schools and certain areas. Schools serving more white and middle class students get more funding in this city. So do the charter schools with our ideological Mayor and Unelected School Board in charge. Parents aren't making that up.

Which is why I think it's important to say that parents aren't actually crazy to choose discrimination. It is in fact, in many ways, the only "choice" given, as neighborhood schools are defunded and sabotaged. It's a pragmatic choice.

I don't have the answers on how to overcome these barriers. But I look to the fight for Dyett High School as a beacon of hope for our divided city. The fight for the last open enrollment high school in this city's historic Bronzeville neighborhood is being fought by a coalition of people from around the city. The Hunger Strikers were predominately African-American people from the community, but they were joined by a Mexican-American man from Pilsen, by a white man from Uptown, by grad students and teachers from around the city.

The struggle is what brought this unlikely group of people together, fighting united, for a common cause. I believe it is only being a part of the struggle that will change people's hearts and minds. I've seen parent groups from the north side take up the fight for great schools for ALL children after being exposed to the savage inequalities through the struggle. I've seen African-American, Latino, White, Asian, and people of all backgrounds march united through this city for the schools Chicago's students deserve. When people across the city unite, we become a force that might actually change the realities that try to reinforce our divides.

The advocates of "choice" want us separate. They want us to fight each other. It is that competition which drives profit and the expansion of choice.  We must choose a different way.

AUSL: A Pale Immitation of Good Teaching

The other day, I was at a professional development at an elementary school near mine on the south side of Chicago. I'm a Social-Emotional Lead at my school, so once a month, we go to a different school in the Network and learn from our peers about what works in their schools. We always start the meeting with a walk-through of the school, looking for inspirational new ideas.

As we walked around this school, we entered a classroom and one colleague noted, "Oh! I love the curtains!" Another answered, "Oh, that's an AUSL thing, I bet this teacher was AUSL."

[For those readers outside Chicago, AUSL stands for the Academy of Urban School Leadership. It's a private turnaround company which our unelected school board now gives every single turnaround contract to. I'm sure that monopoly has nothing to do with the direct links of our former school board president and Chief Administrative Officer who both worked for AUSL before coming to high positions inside CPS. But hey, we're used to serious and unabashedly open corruption in our city, right Chicago?]

This remark really got me thinking. How are curtains an AUSL thing? Apparently, this private turnaround company mandates curtains in every classroom. Mandates them. They also mandate things like having plants, couches, and rugs.

I have nothing against curtains and plants in a classroom. In fact, teachers have been adding touches like that probably since forever. But what started to bother me was that AUSL was copying something they thought was good and forcing it in every classroom, which completely negates the purpose of those darn curtains: to create a homey positive environment for kids. AUSL, like so many reformy groups, completely misses the point about what makes a positive atmosphere. It's not the curtains, it's the teacher who uses little touches like curtains to foster positive relationships with students.

And AUSL is not known for it's positive teaching environments. In fact, what they are most known for is oppressive environments where students are carefully policed and pushed out and teachers are given huge workloads with little autonomy or joy.

Does AUSL somehow believe that putting up curtains is going to negate the effect of draconian relationship-destroying discipline policies? Will teachers be more likely to create deep, positive relationships with kids under strict surveillance and long lists of "non-negotiable" mandates? And how does AUSL's policy of firing at least half of the staff when they take over a building affect kids' trust in the adults in the school? You cannot build strong relationships on a foundation of intentional chaos.

Of course AUSL is not about relationships. But neoliberal edreform is all about image. If you walk into an AUSL classroom, you might think it's a beautiful place. Just don't stick around long enough observe a child being berated and ultimately pushed out of the school. Don't watch the primarily new, young teachers be beaten down daily with mandates and heavy work loads. Ignore the hyper-focus on tests scores or the inhumane "data walls" put up next to those curtains.

AUSL fakes relationships. They go through the motions of creating positive environments while stifling the actual autonomy, creativity, and joy that is necessary to build those relationships.

Like so much else in edreform, AUSL is a phony.