Unlike tests, kids aren’t standardized

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

April 24, 2014

Misguided movement puts testing above all

As new parents, we approach the work as we would any new job. We’re eager, excited, a little awed we got the job in the first place, yet ready for any challenge. Over time, though, we get bogged down, don’t we? There is the morning routine and the constant list of needs and demands from the administrators, our children.

It’s like that with any job, but maybe none more so than teaching. Have you ever talked with someone new to the profession? It’s infectious. They’re going to change the world one student at a time with a package of Crayola crayons and a piece of chalk.

But then something happens come spring. Beginning next week, our kids will be taking the TCAP standardized test to find out where they stand among their fellow students across the state. For many teachers and administrators in the school system, this is the speed bump on the road to education. Treating our kids like data on a spreadsheet is where the process begins to break down.

Kids are nothing if not nonstandard. They are wonderfully, blessedly unique in their gifts, their approaches, their thinking and their play. But there are children in our city who are new to the country, who have yet to master the language and customs. There are those who woke up without a meal, who may have gone to bed without a parent in the house. And there are those afforded every opportunity to succeed.

To measure them all against one another is to do them an injustice. To attach such importance to those tests is to hamstring our educators.

Such is the weight of the outcome of these exams — the high percentage of the child’s overall grade and the performance evaluation of the teacher — that there is little choice but to “teach to the test.”

I’m subjected to a performance review of sorts every school day. My 7-year-old daughter will let me know in the mornings if I chose the wrong uniform top for her, and she critiques the lunch I packed at the end of every day. I laugh it off, a hazard of the job.

But what happens when it isn’t a mere glitch in the bossy personality of an adolescent and is taken more seriously? I shudder to think of someone’s job evaluation coming down to how well my daughter might grasp the difference between answer C and answer D. I shudder to think that someone might judge my performance as a parent, and whether or not I’m allowed to continue, based on the fact that her socks don’t match today.

In the next year or two, the Common Core curriculum will be adopted and, with it, a standard that is unattainable for many in a misguided effort to raise the bar across the board. It’s an initiative with the propensity to do damage to the least prepared among the schools in our system.

Education historian Diane Ravitch, in a speech last January to the Modern Language Association, said, “I fear that the Common Core plan of standards and testing will establish a test-based meritocracy that will harm our democracy by parceling out opportunity, by ranking and rating every student in relation to their test scores.”

As spring blossoms, we should hope our kids do as well, that their senses are awakened and curiosity piqued.

Not all of our children are destined be artists or industry leaders, start a technological revolution or discover the cure for a disease. But we have to want that for them; it’s our job.

And we have to hope, more than anything, that they’ll be something more than standard or common.

Permanent link to The Commercial Appeal

Tennessee Brewery: Untapped potential

High Ground News

April 23, 2014

(feature & photos)

Tennessee Brewery

From Crosstown to Binghampton, Memphis has proven that temporary neighborhood activation projects can yield long-term results. With Tennessee Brewery: Untapped events ready for rollout this week, the city is once again ready to reimagine a forgotten space.

Beginning April 24 and lasting through May, live music, pop-up retail, craft beer and other programming will reactivate and animate one of Memphis’ hidden jewels, weekend by weekend. It’s a jewel that might still be considered a lump of coal just awaiting the right amount of polishing by a visionary developer.

The Tennessee Brewery at 495 Tennessee St. was built in 1890 and at one time produced 250,000 barrels of beer a year and employed 1,500. It last operated in 1951 and has sat idle since.

Tennesee Brewery: Untapped, as the event is known, isn’t the first such reimagining of a blighted neglected building, or the first time the idea that a few city blocks might benefit from the grassroots efforts of an enthusiastic few. Such successes can be seen in neighborhoods such as Bingampton and its Broad Avenue Arts District, and Crosstown with the redevelopment of the Sears Crosstown building.

“Our goal was to have 5,000 people, and 15,000 showed up,” says Pat Brown, vice president of the Broad Avenue Arts District, on the event that started it all–“A New Face for an Old Broad”–held during a single weekend in 2010.

A series of charettes hosted by the City of Memphis in 2006 was the jumping-off point for the district and garnered the interest of over 200 business owners, stakeholders and residents. There was promise, and with that promise came a lot of hard work and planning.

“It was very complex just with logistics and thinking through how you activate a space,” Brown says. “We were trying to activate all the different properties along Broad that had been closed up for years. Most of them did not have power, and so just getting electrical service, that was one thing we had really overlooked in our planning.”

At the Brewery, the team behind Untapped–restaurateur Taylor Berger, commercial real estate broker Andy Cates, attorney Michael Tauer and Kerry Hayes and Doug Carpenter of Doug Carpenter & Assoc.–has enlisted a revolving legion of volunteers over the past few weeks to clean and refurbish the 5,300-square-foot courtyard that will see much of the action. A stage has been built, furniture fashioned out of repurposed wood and electricians brought in to add lighting. It’s a physical effort to help people imagine the possibilities, the same challenge faced by the Crosstown redevelopment team when it held its MEMFixevent in November of 2012.

“The biggest challenge that we had, and they (the Brewery team) have as well, is getting people to see something beyond what they see,” says Crosstown co-developer Todd Richardson. “I can’t say it any more simplistically than that. What people see with the Crosstown building is the huge, blighted building that has been empty for 20 years and that defines an expectation. For us, the biggest challenge is getting people to see or to imagine something beyond what’s before them and that’s just harder than it sounds.”

Cates, Executive Vice President for Brokerage Services with Colliers International, is part of the Untapped team, not as a commercial real estate broker, but as a citizen who has known the other members for years and finds the project “exciting as hell.” Still, with his knowledge of the city’s real estate, his pragmatic point of view is invaluable . . . (read more)

Learn the strategies for a rising city: Memphis Boot Camp

High Ground News

April 23, 2014

Sprawl, burdensome regulations, rising property taxes, and decreasing levels of municipal services – these challenges are the focus of the inaugural Strong Towns Boot Camp happening in Memphis this week. At these events our local leaders are being immersed in out-of-the-box civic planning that can save a fragile city with shrinking resources and growing demands – and you can learn along with them.

On Tuesday, the Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team and its partners gathered together some of Memphis’s biggest developers, business and civic leaders, philanthropy groups and investors to suggest they do one thing: think small.

The mantra is “tactical urbanism,” and it’s a focus of the three-day workshop Boot Camp Memphis, led by the Minnesota-based nonprofit Strong Towns. In town to speak to a nearly full auditorium at the Memphis Bioworks Foundation were Chuck Marohn, President of Strong Towns, and Mike Lydon, Principal of the Brooklyn-based The Street Plans Collaborative.

Participating partners include the Urban Land Institute, the Chairman’s Circle of the Greater Memphis Chamber, Community LIFT, Livable Memphis, theCommunity Foundation of Greater Memphis and the Hyde Family Foundations.

After remarks by Mayor A C Wharton, Marohn opened the executive session by asking the audience whether or not government should try to make a profit and likened a city’s investment versus return exchange to that of any business. He walked through the first life cycles of post-World War II growth and the development of sprawl that began in many cities as developers moved further and further out. Such growth created an “illusion of wealth” yet left cities destitute during the second life cycle, when the infrastructure built to facilitate such growth came due for maintenance.

“We’ve been doing everything right, we’ve been doing everything by the book, we’ve been doing everything that the experts told us to do and we’ve been creating growth,” Marohn said. “The problem is it’s not long-term–it’s an illusion, and that’s what we’re struggling with today. This is what governments around the country are struggling with today.”

The idea of Boot Camp Memphis is to find answers to the problem of sprawl and solve how to create opportunity in neighborhoods to facilitate action that might lead to improved communities.

According to Lydon, the process is three-fold: Build. Measure. Learn.

It’s this method that has worked for Binghampton and the Broad Avenue Arts District, a model now studied nationally: Think small and invest minimal capital in an idea, see whether or not that idea works and why and then implement it on a larger scale . . . (read more)

A sense of place

Rhodes Alumni Magazine

Spring 2014

Grant examines ways to enhance gateway programs

(with Lynn Conlee)

For Rebekah Barr ’16, the discussion-based classes of the Search for Values in Light of Western History and Religion program (Search) gave her the skills to more diplomatically address issues of poverty in Memphis public schools. The roots of western civilization studied in Search helped political science major Cecil Brown ’14 better understand politics. Sumita Montgomery ’15 made connections with Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, studied in Search, when she experienced a reality of Memphis that she had never before seen while conducting a Crossroads to Freedom project. And it was the skill of synthesizing conflicting perspectives learned in Life: Then and Now (Life) that helped Mary Catherine Cadden ’15 prioritize and process information during her Summer Service Fellowship.

A grant-funded study currently under way on the Rhodes campus aims to shore up these critical links between classroom and experiential learning by taking advantage of Rhodes’ Memphis location to enhance the college’s foundational Search and Life programs. As part of a four-college consortium awarded $250,000 by the Teagle Foundation, Rhodes will draw on its strength of place to ensure that the big questions of human existence studied in Search and Life classes remain part of a student’s fabric of learning throughout his or her education—and beyond.

The Rhodes Twist

Learning that takes place in the classroom informs an equally important aspect of a Rhodes education—that of experience gained outside the gates. Whether through internships, fellowships, or research projects, the Memphis community at large becomes a veritable petri dish of learning opportunities for Rhodes students.

“Something that is unique to Rhodes College is the experiential learning component and how Memphis plays a role in that,” says Dr. Russ Wigginton ’88, vice president for the Office of External Programs and member of Rhodes’ Teagle team. “That’s not a factor at most liberal arts colleges around the country. If you’re asking ‘What’s my purpose in life?’ and you’re reading Plato and Socrates and Martin Luther King as part of thinking about that question, and then you’re volunteering at Cypress Middle School or an impoverished community or at the Church Health Center, that’s a unique kind of education. That’s our individualized twist.”

It was this twist that led to Rhodes’ collaboration with Lawrence University in Wisconsin, College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, and Ursinus College in Pennsylvania to share the Teagle grant titled Gateways to Liberal Education. The initial consortium meeting of the grantees was held in August 2013 at Ursinus to work on a plan and establish a mutual understanding of their respective gateway programs; each campus will host subsequent conferences as the process unfolds. For Rhodes, those gateway programs are Search and Life . . . (read more)