Jason Kamras greets President George W. Bush in the Oval Office prior the the ceremony in the Rose Garden. photo courtesy of Council of Chief State School Officers

When I learned that Jason Kamras, a math teacher at Sousa Middle School in Washington, DC, had been named 2005 Teacher of the Year by the Council of Chief State School Officers, I decided this was someone Connect for Kids needed to talk to.

We have lots of information on our site about the racial and socio-economic achievement gap in our nation's schools—measuring the gap, trying to identify its roots, and worrying about its persistence. But Kamras, during his eight years in the classroom, has shown that the gap can be successfully addressed in an urban school serving low-income minority students in a notoriously troubled district. Student math achievement at Sousa has soared since Kamras joined the faculty, with the percentage of students scoring "below basic" on the Stanford 9 test dropping from 80 percent to 40 percent in just one year. He reminds us how central teachers will be to any successful effort to improve academic achievement.

In addition, Kamras has become something of a "poster teacher" for the Teach for America program, which over the past 15 years has funneled thousands of high-achieving college grads into high-needs schools after a brief but intensive training period. Teach for America is regarded with suspicion by some in the education community, who argue that too many of the program participants are short-timers who will not stay with teaching long enough to make a difference. Critics also question how a five-week summer course can substitute for a fully developed teacher-education program. But it has enough support that four major foundations recently announced a $30 million commitment to expand the program, and a plan to raise another $60 million.

CFK: Since you were named Teacher of the Year in April 2005, what have you been doing and how does it compare to teaching as a way to create better educational opportunities for disadvantaged kids?

Kamras: I've got the same goal, but I'm coming at it from a different direction. The classroom is where I love being, where my heart is. In the classroom, I know at the end of the day and the week, my students know more than they did. It's clear to me how I'm chipping away at the achievement gap.

photo courtesy of Council of Chief State School Officers

What I'm doing now is a more ethereal exercise, of trying to get people to look at my children differently, to be outraged by the disparities. It's harder to gauge your impact every day, but still it is important and has value. If you can get the public to really understand what is going on in public education in America today, and see the beauty in all the children in America...

CFK: There's a term used by people who work with low-income children in challenging situations—"at risk"—that has become a negative label. But I get the sense that you see your students, not as "at risk," but as delightful. What would it take to get more people to share that view, to really start off assuming the best rather than the worst about low-income, minority adolescents?

Kamras: I think one of the challenges is that a lot of individuals who are talking about children don't spend a lot of time with children. I say, if you spent time with my students, you would know they are so much more than the labels that we use. Yes, many of them come from economically disadvantaged families, but that is one small part of their identities. They are funny, creative, bright, deeply caring individuals with incredible humanity. I like to tell stories about my kids that have nothing to do with them being "at risk" but have to do with their diverse personalities.

The photography program I started at Sousa gives my students a chance to talk about themselves, instead of having other people talk about them on their behalf. I think the work you'll see on the website says a lot about the inherent dignity and creativity of adolescents.

CFK: I'm very interested in your photography project—what is it about photography that makes it such a good medium for kids and learning?

Kamras: Adolescents love taking pictures. They start off wanting to take pictures of their friends almost exclusively, which is fine, I let them do that and get it out of their systems. Then I encourage them to think more broadly. I've gone digital, I think children coming up now are very in tune with the digital world, and this is another outlet for them to explore that. There is an immediacy to digital work that kids love. I used to do black and white film, in the lab, and I was amazed I could get as much participation as I did. But it took a long time, and children like that instant result.

I use photography to teach math as well: when you talk about different lenses, different lenses have different angles of view and different magnifications. When we use Photoshop, we're using pixels per inch or per centimeter—that's ratios.

CFK: One of the things we often hear about good math teaching is that it connects math to the real world. When you started out in the classroom, did you have any breakthrough moments in terms of understanding how to do that for your students?

Kamras: Some of the more advanced concepts of middle school math—things like coordinate geometry and graphing linear functions—these are the underpinnings of algebra when you go on to high school, and it is something a lot of kids struggle with in middle school.

The way I teach it is to use the grid system of the streets of Washington, DC. North and South Capitol Streets make up the y axis, and then the x axis is East Capitol Street and the Mall. Because of the way city is laid out in quadrants, it works very well. You can easily find the slope of a lot of the diagonal streets like Massachusetts Avenue or New York Avenue.
CFK: The recent news on math and science achievement in the U.S. is not good. What can we do?

Komras: I think we need to make a national commitment to education as a whole, but also specifically to math and science, much as we did in the 1960s with the space race... I don't think American children today have a clear sense of the competition that is awaiting them 10 or 15 years down the line, and I don't think adults do either. We need to invest, not just in schools, but in research.

Bonuses for math and science teachers in underserved areas, that's something to look at. Using the bully pulpit of our national government structures to keep hammering away at the importance of math and science education generally, using every opportunity to let kids know how important this is, not just for whatever job they might get, but for our democracy, and our national security.

CFK: Parental involvement is something of a mantra in education reform... What do you look for from parents, as a teacher?

Kamras: The first thing is to establish some very clear lines of communication between parent and teacher, and to establish that as a two-way street, so that when great things are happening, and when challenges are happening, there is an existing structure in place at the very start of the school year. The second thing is for parents to ask lots and lots and lots of questions of their kids, so you know who their friends are, who their teachers are, what their interests are, and what is troubling them. Oftentimes in middle school, children become strangers to their own parents, and that makes everything more difficult when a problem arises.

On a more nuts and bolts level, parents need to know it's OK to admit it if they are not comfortable being the resource for their child, if they feel they are not well prepared to meet their child's academic needs in a specific class. Parents can just be honest and help their child find other sources of help—a tutor, older children. You shouldn't feel like you have to have all the answers.

CFK: In Washington DC and in some other communities, the charter school movement has grown enormously. Is that competition pushing other public schools to do better? Or is it harming them by sucking up students, teachers and money?

Kamras: I think the high-performing charter schools are great and are doing good things for children. Any time children are achieving, I'm happy. I think there are some charters that are not performing well. The difference is the quality of teachers and of school leadership. Really, I think that this debate is almost beside the point. The important question is how you get more quality people to teach and run schools. That's a difficult question to answer.

CFK: Teach for America, which was your route into teaching, aims to be one of the answers to that question. What did TFA mean to you?

Kamras: My experience was very positive. My success as a first- and second-year teacher was due in large part to the training and support I got from TFA. It can be a very isolating thing to be a first-year teacher in a challenging situation. The program gave me on-going training and support... That is incredibly important.

Susan Phillips is the editor of Connect for Kids.

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• Indian Education Under the Microscope
• Costs, Benefits and Kids
• Brown v. Board: Lessons for Tomorrow