Victor Harbison is an award-winning high school civics teacher whose Chicago Public Schools students over the last two decades have undertaken ambitious class projects. They’ve built a memorial — with an interactive kiosk — to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. They’ve tried to stop older men from catcalling and even dating underage girls.
They’ve worked on voter registration drives and election campaigns. And, this school year, Harbison’s students won first place in a national video contest out of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights in Washington, D.C.
The Gage Park High School teacher wants his students to succeed academically, but he also wants them to learn how to solve problems affecting their lives and community. In short, he wants to teach them to be good citizens.
It’s an area of teaching that’s not easily measured for its impact on standardized test scores. It’s also not easy to quantify when assessing a teacher’s abilities. That’s true now under CPS’ new teacher evaluation system rolled out in 2012, and it was true under the old one.
The difference is that under the old rubric, Harbison said, he’d always gotten positive reviews. But he said that changed earlier this year when he received low marks during an informal session evaluating his classroom instruction skills.
You can imagine that didn’t sit well with him.
“Administrators are constantly asking: ‘How does what you do boost reading scores?'” he said. “My students come from communities with lots of challenges. If there was one model to fix (low test scores), then all you would need to do is look at a successful school like Whitney Young (Magnet High School) and copy what they’re doing.
“The question should be: ‘How do we meet the needs of the community we serve?'”
CPS said as a matter of policy the district doesn’t comment on teacher evaluations. And, to be clear, my goal here isn’t to try to determine whether Harbison, according to CPS standards, is a good or bad teacher.
But as I talked to him last week, I began to wonder: How much value should we place on teaching students how to be good citizens? And, if we agree that there’s some value in it, should that be connected to teacher competency?
Across the country, education reformers and child development experts have been giving more and more weight to noncognitive skills and arguing that the better predictor of high achievement and life satisfaction may not be a child’s IQ, but his or her ability to overcome challenging circumstances.
They argue that although book-learning matters greatly in a child’s development, so does his resilience because working through adversity helps build character traits such as self-confidence and conscientiousness. It helps the kid feel empowered, as though she has a degree of agency and control over changing her environment.
“But I don’t get graded on that,” Harbison told me. “There’s no (standardized) social studies test. There’s no civics test. I get graded on reading scores. So if my students study hard in English class and they’re reading better, I’d get judged (more favorably) for something someone else did.”
When the new teacher evaluation system was rolled out in 2012, the goal was to devise a better plan to weed out bad teachers and boost academic achievement, particularly among kids who have so many strikes against them.
Teachers were warned that some who once got rave reviews might get lower scores under the new standards in which this year 25 percent of a teacher’s evaluation is based on student progress and 75 percent on the teacher’s instructional skills.
I first wrote about Harbison and his freshman honors class in 2005 when he was teaching at Chicago Vocational High School. That year, female students had complained about fending off the advances of much older men, or sugar daddies. So the class project included surveying the community to determine the scope of the problem and then getting leaders to help fix it.
More Top Picks Best Eye Wash Stations
By 2010, Harbison was teaching at Gage Park in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood and I wrote about his students’ efforts to get the King memorial built. That award-winning project started after his students learned that in 1966 King had marched in nearby Marquette Park for equal housing rights and there was no marker commemorating the event.
Last week, Harbison told me that after his current students won first place in the RFK center’s Speak Truth to Power national video contest, they then set out to nominate the Rev. Michael Pfleger, the activist pastor of St. Sabina Church as a defender of human rights.
“They did the research and we invited him to come (to the school) for an interview, and he spent an hour with the kids explaining why he hosts basketball games (with gang members) and feeds the homeless and helps get jobs for ex-offenders,” Harbison said.
“The kids had to put together the nomination form and they had to (answer): What articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can you apply to his work? What concrete examples can you show? It’s a serious intellectual exercise.”
Because Harbison often tells his students that they should attempt to change things they don’t like, he decided to take his own advice. Last month he contacted the office of state Sen. Jacqueline Collins, D-Chicago, who featured the students’ video on her Web page, and requested a meeting about the teacher evaluation system.
Collins has scheduled time this week to meet with Harbison and state Sens. Kimberly Lightford, D-Maywood, and William Delgado, D-Chicago.
Harbison said he plans to tell them that there needs to be a better balance between teachers improving test scores and giving students a fuller high school experience.
“They should go on field trips and they should be able to learn about democracy from more than just a book,” he said. “And they should actually practice it in front of decision-makers and aldermen as they lobby for change in their community and school.”
Twitter @dawnturnertrice