Fight for America's Future Tour 2010: Kansas City

Mayor's Citywide Town Hall
May 17, 6:30 p.m.

As she pinned a pink heart button on his lapel, AFT president Randi Weingarten told Kansas City, Mo., mayor Mark Funkhouser, "Let this serve as a reminder: Teachers give their hearts and souls to get kids what they need. We need to keep teachers working in the classroom, not standing on unemployment lines."

The AFT president was on stop six of the seven-city Fight for America's Future Tour 2010. She got no quarrel from the several hundred educators, parents, students and community supporters gathered at the mayor's "Schools First" citywide town hall meeting. They were there to honor "our incredible students, doing incredible things," said Andrea Flinders, president of the Kansas City Federation of Teachers & School-Related Personnel, who was one of the people presenting Shining Star proclamations to students, teachers and principals who represent some of the good news coming out of Kansas City.

The city is struggling to stay positive as it confronts decades of decline, now aggravated by the harsh recession. Funkhouser opened the meeting by flashing maps showing the city's population trends. "There's been an explosion of people moving away from the urban core of Kansas City," he said. "People are leaving in droves—100,000 since 1970."

In March, the Kansas City school board decided to close 29 of the district's 61 schools to eliminate a $50 million budget shortfall. Closing the schools and cutting the workforce by 700 is part of the sweeping reform plan of superintendent John Covington, who came on board last year to tackle a system that had become renowned for its dysfunction.

For his part, the mayor is trying to focus on schools and neighborhoods in order to bring renewal to the city. The town hall meeting was organized to raise support for his plan, called the Schools First initiative, to put a $100 million bond measure on the ballot. It will allow infrastructure improvements within 50 blocks of every school and provide extra money for public safety. Weingarten applauded Kansas City for "coming together in a really hard time."

Weingarten arrived in Kansas City on the heels of a visit earlier in the day with President Barack Obama in the White House. She said she talked with him about the AFT's "Pink Hearts, Not Pink Slips" campaign and the need to keep teachers working. And she talked about the need to support two measures in Congress that include $23 billion to help districts avert layoffs of teachers and other educators.

Weingarten praised the cooperative relationship that the KCFT and Flinders have forged with the new superintendent in working out the school closing plan. "This is a classic example of how collaboration can lead to smart solutions to very difficult problems."

Kansas City Federation of Teachers Reception
8:30 p.m.

After the town hall meeting, Weingarten met with KCFT members and expressed how, as a former local leader and now a national union president traveling the country to visit beleaguered school districts, "I feel your pain."

"Not many places have been as hard hit as Kansas City," she said. "You're facing half your schools closing," and you're doing it in such a way that "you have the administration listening to teachers." She spoke about the bad rap educators are getting in the press. "No one is here for the status quo," she said. "We have been trying to fight the status quo."

"If the mayor is willing to build community with us, and parents are a part of it, this is the only way to make change," Weingarten added. "We have to be flexible." She also spoke frankly about her meeting with President Obama. "Teachers must not be scapegoated," she told him. "They cannot do it alone."

Meeting with superintendent John Covington
May 18, 10 a.m.

Collaboration to achieve transformation was the topic of discussion when AFT president Randi Weingarten, Kansas City Federation of Teachers & School-Related Personnel president Andrea Flinders and Kansas City superintendent of schools James Covington met at Rogers K-8 Elementary School on Weingarten's second day visiting Missouri. With them were Covington's leadership team and four teachers who had been part of a field delegation that had visited two districts—in Colorado and Maryland—to observe how schools there have implemented standards-based learning, effective professional development and performance-based pay.

In his first year in Kansas City, Covington already has designed and introduced a transformation plan, an ambitious shift of the schools to a standards-based learning system. It is in place in a handful of model schools, where the teachers at the table this morning work. The overall implementation is overseen by an action committee on which Flinders is an active participant.

Making the change requires extra work on the part of teachers and their buy-in to do things differently. So, how do they feel about it?

"I've been teaching in the district for eight years," said Mary Daniels, a teacher at Garcia K-8 Elementary School. With the standards-based approach, which relies heavily on collecting data, understanding it and modifying instruction based on those results, "I feel that now I'm allowed to teach the way I want to teach, at the level kids are at."

Greg Stegall, a teacher at Ecole Longan French Magnet School, described the pay-for-performance plan he learned about in Prince Georges County, Md. "The union and district sat down, worked together and created a meticulous plan for paying for a list of activities. The thing is, you have to have total buy-in," he said.

"What impressed me," added Maria-Elena Singelmann, a library media specialist at Southwest Early College Campus, "was the collaboration and ownership, teacher input and trust."

Covington welcomes the conversation. "It's not a matter of 'if' the administration is going to support you," he said. "Transformation is going to take place in one place only—the classroom. If we don't have your buy-in, we won't be successful."

Weingarten added that she has seen that the Kansas City community is behind the changes. "Districts turn around when parents see that change is possible."

Rogers Elementary School
11:15 a.m.

At the beginning of this school year, says Rogers principal Wendy McNitt proudly, the students in Ms. Teeple's sheltered English language learners kindergarten classroom, "did not speak a word of English. Now they are chattering their little heads off." Today, they are unfazed as a group of suited professionals crowds the perimeters of the room during story time. Ms. Teeple reads aloud while the students finish sentences and laugh at the story.

Likewise, Ms. Katz's third-graders are eager to show their smarts, deconstructing compound words in a series of active learning exercises.

Rogers is a turnaround school, which means that after five consecutive years of not making adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind law, the school has thrown itself into a new data-driven instructional model. The teachers collaborate as grade-level teams, compile data and analyze it to drive instruction, and then keep detailed student portfolios to show student growth or achievement.

Seventy-five percent of the students at Rogers are Hispanic. The staff has reached out to the predominantly Latino community and has strong parent involvement. Teachers also have formed professional learning communities and, together with the school's administrators, have carved out time during the week for teachers to collaborate across grade levels.

Weingarten is delighted. "What we're seeing here," she tells a TV news reporter, "is, they're using proven programs, and teachers are getting the time to learn the new programs. Everyone is working together to transform the schools. They're doing what's necessary to set children up for a knowledge economy."

Weingarten and Flinders closed out the day by sitting down with the editorial board of the Kansas City Star. [Barbara McKenna/photos by Roy Inman/video by Brian Pascale]