The comments on my last post, and some email I brazenly (desperately?) solicited, have been really helpful. Here’s a few quotes that I’ve been repeating to myself. (If you’re not mentioned, worry not: everyone’s words have made a deep impact, and I’m very grateful.)

Deborah Meier sent me a kind note.

We need to belong to some “community” – to be part of a shared effort – to find the classroom and the struggle to change our circumstances both–at least part of the time–a source of comfort, excitement, even pleasure!

Deborah understands the need for community on the lonely and draining walk of school reform. I’m lucky to have some of that. But she makes clear that I can’t subsist on crumbs forever. I need more. We need more.

Chris Lehman, teacher and principal of the stellar alternative Science Learning Academy in Philadephia, reminds me of this:

Trying to be Rafe Esquith or Debbie Meier is a good goal, but only if we don’t beat ourselves up when we fall short… teaching is a marathon, not a sprint. We desperately need wise, kind, thoughtful people who make this a career and a life.

And we need to forgive ourselves when we aren’t perfect or awesome or “A-game” every day. When the people who care leave because we cannot measure up to our ideal version of ourselves, in the end, that’s bad for our schools and our kids.

Chris walks his talk, and highlights my lifelong tendency towards a kind of moral impatience with myself: if I can’t make everything right right now, I must be failing. This is an illusory approach to education at best. Should I wonder that most of my heroes have spent decades doing what they do? If I mean to accomplish something useful as a teacher, I’ve got to be in it for the long haul.

Bill Cala, former superintendent of two local districts and well-known for his protest against military recruitment practices built into NCLB, his current efforts to begin a reformed school on the campus of Nazareth College (my alma mater), and his educational foundation in Kenya, says this to me.

The system is the rock of Sisyphus… If we do not fight, if we do not push to change the system, public education is dead. The more people who leave teaching and do not stay to fight the system, the sooner the demise of public education. Stay and fight!!

Yeah, he included those two exclamation points. Can’t beat a rallying cry from someone you trust implicitly.

And finally, my colleague Joseph, who is leaving school to pursue a Ph.D. in education reform, comments:

There may be a day when I regret this decision, but I don’t think so. I’d rather put my energy into developing other models of public education that work to really engage kids in their passions and don’t promote alienation from their environment and communities.

It has been a privilege to work with this gifted teacher. His words bring home to me that I also cannot be content unless I am involved– full time– in a solution to education’s ills: one that will someday allow people such as Joe to stay in the classroom and thrive there.

To sum it all up, I’ve finally realized that trying to reform schools, simultaneously with surviving those same broken schools, isn’t sustainable for me– morally, mentally, or physically.

So how do I put all this into practice?

I’ve come to a number of conclusions.

1) As many people have wisely suggested, I need to keep my eyes peeled for employment as a teacher in alternative education settings, ones that more closely align with what we know is effective pedagogy. Charter and public schools come first; superlative and accessible private schools a distant second. (And Dave, I deeply appreciate your kind words, but I will be a principal when hell freezes over. :) )

2) That being said, while I am looking, I also need to recognize the benefits of- and maximize– my current setting. The kids are diverse, the colleagues are smart and caring, the schedule supports teaming, my principal gets excited about thinking out of the box, and I have very high hopes for my new subject director. So I use this healthy stuff to the nth degree for the benefit of kids, and…

3)… make an utter pain in the ass of myself in matters that smack of anything else. This scares me. I am a natural introvert from way, way back. But I have no other choice.

4) Sooner rather than later, I need to get back to school for my own Ph.D. I’ve wanted to do this since third grade (no joke) but my focus has clarified in the past few days. My doctorate in education can’t be about investigating some esoteric realm of learning that only adds to the pile of knowledge that teachers don’t have the time or resources to implement. It has to be about change: what works in schools, and how to make it happen.

I don’t think I have to give up my first love, though. I have a kernel of an idea that true literacy can not actually exist without effective school systems. The more we demonstrate that a healthy school system is not tangential to, but indivisible from good learning, the better.

Charles Payne, author of So Much Reform, So Little Change, also shared these two burning questions of his with me.

How do we create trust in distrusting environments? How do we change negative teacher beliefs?

And that, I think, also may be at the heart of the matter. Not just an inevitable movement towards developing reformed schools from scratch– although this is certainly what ought to be done in some quarters. Instead consider this: what can we do to re-create trust and health in the wounded school systems that already exist?

Read this attempt at an answer. Try to ignore that it didn’t work for the moment, weird as that sounds. Its foundations are a solid indication, I think, of where we need to go in response to Dr. Payne.

So in the end? With some trepidation, I guess I’m still in the game.