Cuenca Part 2 – We Go to School / Things Get Interesting
Monday Morning Meeting
During our six months in Quito, we accumulated enough cultural knowledge to realize that if we visited a school and started cross-examining the principal and faculty right away, the only answers we’d get would be along the lines of “oh yes, everything’s fine, thank you, everything’s going well.” People are much less direct here than in the States, while networks and norms of reciprocity between cousins, friends, godparents, or hairdressers are much more important. With that in mind, when we arrived in Cuenca for three weeks of school observations and analysis, we tried to resist our task-oriented, objective-driven, we-only-have-three-weeks-SO-LET’S-GET-GOING American instincts, and instead hung around the teachers lounge drinking more instant coffee than we’d care to remember, and slowly got to know the faculty. In the end, spending a week to build this trust and friendship proved more important than any “work” we could have accomplished.
As (a few) readers may remember, the initial point of our series of school visits was to analyze Fe y Alegría’s structure administration across four regions and 82 schools, and to explore the impact of Fe y Alegría’s religious-public-school identity on the experience and outcomes of its students.
Matt goes to class
But first, we had to figure out how the school worked, so we visited classrooms and started interviewing the school’s 34 faculty members. As we mentioned in our previous post, the school’s Director informed us last minute that he’d be gone for the first week of our three week visit. We later realized this was a blessing in disguise – the school’s Assistant Director, the teachers, and everyone in general was more open, more honest, and more relaxed without the Director around.
Through our initial conversations, we learned that most of the kids commuted from the outskirts of Cuenca from mostly lower-middle class neighborhoods. 
The school used to more directly serve the city’s poor, the teachers explained, but in the ’90s waves of Ecuadorian emigration brought remittances to the neighborhood from the U.S., Spain, and Italy. At its high point as many as half the kids had a parent living overseas; now the number is down to 10-20%. This influx of money bought houses, cars and televisions, but the lack of support at home brought behavioral and psychological problems for the kids, along with a new set of values where material possessions and exiting the country to work abroad became the modern definitions of success.
To meet these challenges as well as others more traditional to low income school settings, the school developed a comprehensive support staff – including a director, academic coordinator, learning specialist, clinical psychologist, social worker, and two coordinators for spiritual development and community engagement for a 600-student school. 
(note: this wealth of resources is atypical for a Fe y Alegría school; FyA Cuenca benefits from being the only Fe y Alegría center in Ecuador’s third largest and a relatively prosperous city, and has employed a variety of partnerships with government, city, and local religious groups to not only hire additional support, but to cover the salaries of half the staff members. While it was great to see this support network in action, we had to keep in mind that most Fe y Alegría centers share one psychologist with 12 other schools and can´t afford support staff).
Among the support team, it was particularly interesting to work with Fe y Alegría’s “Pastoral” staff. Pastoral broadly covers Fe y Alegría’s work in religious education, ethical development and community engagement, and we were fortunate to make friends with the Pastoral Coordinator at the school. She was in her mid-40s, at once compassionate and feisty, and talked to the kids about the kind of liberation theology and emphasis on ethics-in-action that we’d hoped to find in Fe y Alegría. During our three weeks at the school we spent many hours observing her classes, watching her charisma amongst the faculty, and talking over coffee or hot chocolate in her living room. 
As one of the school’s unofficial leaders, our friendship with her also went a long way towards gaining the confidence of the teachers.
Through these conversations with the Pastoral Coordinator and other faculty, it became apparent that despite the school’s resources and strengths, there was something deeply amiss in the school’s teacher climate and leadership. In our first week at the school we witnessed a curriculum meeting devolve into a shouting match between teachers, and a week later the director stormed out of a meeting while a teacher yelled after him, “You don’t treat us like people, you treat us like machines!” In short, it was odd to see that the respect and human values we saw the teachers successfully integrate into their daily lessons for the kids too often faded within interactions between adults.
After two weeks at the school, we developed an anonymous teacher survey to quantify some of our observations. We asked about community and family involvement, students’ engagement with their education, and the role of spirituality in teaching and relationships at the school. We ended the survey by asking what one thing faculty members would change about their school. After a few days of herding cats to get the surveys back (“I promise I’ll bring it mañana”), we rounded up 32 out of 34 and spent a few late nights on Excel. Coding and graphing the various responses, we soon realized we had a bombshell in the last question: half of the respondents had voted to change the school’s director. And we had already promised to present the results (in Spanish) to the faculty and administration two days later. @#$%!!
In some ways, this result was not surprising. Beyond the personality clashes, we’d observed a truly stunning lack of transparency and participation in the school’s leadership decisions. While he was personally a nice guy who had given his adult life to the school as a teacher and later administrator, the Director seemed incapable of delegation, played obvious favorites, and shut the faculty out of school decisions and even basic information. When we’d pressed him in interviews the Director said that everything was fine and the teachers just didn’t give any extra to the school…He had a minor point in that many teachers left right at 12:30 to work second jobs to supplement their $200 monthly salaries, but it was our view that the teachers were devoted to the kids and worked reasonably hard, but refused to give any extra to the Director.
So we found ourselves with 48 hours to assemble and deliver a diplomatic but honest presentation that we hoped could do some good for the school, faculty, and kids that we’d grown fond of (later on we will give similar but less sugar-coated results to Fe y Alegría’s national and regional offices).
Us with some of the faculty
We started our presentation with our less inflammatory results, and built off the school’s strengths – support staff, shared values and commitment to kids – to deliver our recommendations. As outsiders with a fresh perspective who had taken time to build trust with the faculty, we were able to gently remind them of the need to rebuild confidence and personal relationships as the first step for any change within their school. We presented the demand for a new director as a request for a more inclusive leadership, and tried to give a few structured examples of practical ways that teacher leadership teams could contribute to areas such as finances, curriculum, and faculty development. As the lynchpin to our recommendations, we proposed a change to the school’s current 7:30—12:30 schedule that lacked any time for faculty planning and collaborative work. We suggested that school begin at 7:00, and that kids be dismissed at 10:30 every Wednesday so that teachers had time to work together and exercise leadership within their school on a weekly basis.
To our surprise, both teachers and the Director were at least publicly receptive to our recommendations. We formed a committee to discuss them after we left, and the faculty agreed to consider starting the day at 7:15 to recoup at least an hour for collaboration, with a potential for larger changes in the years ahead. After our presentation we exchanged our goodbyes, and the faculty presented us with very well meaning but very geriatric looking scarves as a thank you gifts.
A few hours later we boarded the plane exhausted after our visit, but aware that our work for the year was finally in full swing.
