I suppose it is inevitable. At this time of year the standardized test results for the previous year are released. As schools come off or go on the “needs to improve list”, advocates cheer on schools that succeed and critics bash the ones that don’t. The impact of these test scores is profound, affecting everything from real estate prices, to economic development, to where parents decide to send their kid to school. This year several vaunted suburban district schools joined some of the urban ones on “the list”.

I’ve never been one to make excuses for shortcomings in our public schools. Like the guy who works in the sausage factory I know that there are many things that are not always done the right way. I know that there are some teachers and administrators that do a poor job. Immersed in the research as I have been for the past year, I have a laundry list of my own of things I think need to be done. I try to make it a practice to never defend the indefensible, so I acknowledge there are certainly valid criticisms to be made of public schools.

I also see many of the good things that never see the light of day in the public eye. I work with many talented administrators and teachers who are dedicated to serving the needs of students. The news media does not cover teachers who stay long hours tutoring kids or who develop innovative teaching methods that produce results. Today’s teachers undergo the most rigorous standards in the nation’s history just to get in the classroom. There are a great many talented teachers out there and they are not all in the private schools. We also put them under the gun as never before. When I first started teaching you were primarily judged by how you kept order in the classroom. If your students were well behaved and quiet you didn’t have much to worry about when the time came for evaluations. Today’s teachers have their test scores scrutinized every which way. I will be meeting with teachers soon to go over last year’s test scores in minute detail. We will examine every student population and how they did in various areas of the tests.

This post points out that today’s public schools are being asked to solve every social problem under the sun. We have therapists and social service coordinators to address issues that students bring with them to school. We attempt to educate every child that walks through the door to a standard that has steadily increased. We are asked to address medical issues, child nutrition issues, psychological issues, gang culture, housing issues, child abuse, and a host of other non-academic problems. We do this because kids cannot learn when these other issues hang like a cloud over them as they walk through the door each day. Today’s schools, especially in urban areas, are becoming one-stop shops to address issues that would have been off the table when I first started my career. This is no excuse. It is a statement of today’s reality.

The post also points out how many assume that there was some kind of educational golden age a couple of generations ago where students did not misbehave, everyone learned to a high standard, and schools were clean and orderly. I admit that I’ve probably been guilty of this myself….”back in the day when I was in school…(fill in the blank). At least part of the answer to this is that we are educating kids today that never saw the inside of a school in their teenaged years back then. It was quite common a couple of generations ago for young people who did not plan to attend college to drop out of school and take a good paying job in the nation’s factories. My first wife’s father did just this, dropping out, joining the army, then taking a job with a well known national manufacturer. He earned a comfortable living, enough to support a family of five. Those kids stay in school today because those jobs are not there anymore. We also educate millions of special needs kids, including my own, that did not attend school or who dropped out early. Most homes in those days had two parents to provide support. Society has changed and brought into our schools challenges that did not exist before. We must meet those challenges, but to pretend that things are exactly the same as they were forty years ago except for those lousy teachers is a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. We did however walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to school each day.

Yes, public schools provide my paycheck and perhaps I am not totally unbiased. But I do feel like the bash-fest that goes on regularly does a gross injustice to the people who toil away each day to educate kids and receive little compensation and no thanks in return. I am proud of the work I do, can’t imagine doing anything else, and I’m not alone.

Labels: Education and Schools

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The current subject of my research is student mobility. We live in a very mobile society and a lot of students change schools on a regular basis. Sometimes a parent gets a new job in a new city and a change in schools is required. However, research shows that about half of the residence changes of families with school age children occur within the same county. Move a mile away and change schools. Rinse and repeat. The cause? Take your pick ….. family instability, lack of affordable low income housing, custody issues, “rent skipping”, transportation ….the list is quite long. Sometimes it just can’t be helped, but in many cases it seems senseless.

I have enrolled students in March who were attending their 5^th school in the same school year. It only makes sense that kids who change schools that frequently are likely to fall behind in learning. There is a ton of research out there that ties frequent school changes to a higher risk of everything from dropping out of school, to achieving lower scores on standardized tests, to being more likely to be referred to special education programs. In many cases it is the kids that are most at risk who keep changing schools. Getting complete records, even from schools within your own urban district, can be a time consuming and tedious process. By the time records are finally received, teachers get to know the student a little, things begin to settle down and the kid makes friends…bam, they are out the door and down the road. It is so frustrating sometimes!

I had a student last year who started out the year in our school. He left in October to live with grandparents in Houston. That lasted a month or two and he was with an uncle somewhere in rural Oklahoma. From there he came back to another school in our district. He got in trouble there and ended up back with us in February. How much learning did he do in that time? He didn’t have any grades from anywhere, all the schools saying he wasn’t there long enough to earn grades. This makes him likely to be retained in the same grade. This in turn makes it twice as likely he will drop out of school. And so it goes.

My latest project is researching initiatives that individual schools, districts, and states could use to reduce mobility and give some of these kids a chance at success.

Labels: Education and Schools

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Dear Teacher:
"I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: Gas chambers built by learned engineers.
Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So I am suspicious of education.
My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane."

Haim Ginott, a concentration camp survivor, wrote this letter at the beginning of his book, “Between Parent and Child”. It relates his thoughts about the purpose of education, about how education and knowledge bereft of context, morality, and humanity is not what we want for our children. Nazi Germany at the time of Hitler’s rise was perhaps the most advanced civilization the world had ever seen. Its universities graduated some of the world’s greatest scientists, its theaters showcased some of the world’s great composers and musicians, its military officer corps was classically trained and regarded as among the best in the world. This “educated” society gave rise to one of history’s most vicious and murderous figures and supported him in large numbers. In the midst of all the knowledge, where was the humanity? Educated citizens stood by and allowed a psychopath to take control of their nation.

This cuts to the heart of what we mean when we say we want our children to be “educated”. We want them to know how to read, add, and subtract, but these abilities are without meaning standing by themselves. Do we risk this in our current obsession with standardized test scores? Where and how are we teaching our children about humanity, about our larger purpose, about service to others, about decency? Many parents do, many churches do, and some educational institutions do, but in our schools this can get washed over in the rush to raise those scores a few percentage points.

Schools should be institutions that prepare children to be productive citizens and responsible adults. This includes literacy and numeracy, but it also includes citizenship, the arts, history, and an understanding of humanity. What does it mean to share a free society with others of different backgrounds? What are our responsibilities to our brothers and sisters and what are theirs to us? What does it mean to participate in the civic life of your nation in a meaningful way? What are the lessons that history has taught us? How does a person stay true to their own beliefs and values, their own culture, their own religion, while at the same time working to build a better world with those who do not share some of these values?

Of course, schools cannot answer all these questions or solve all these problems. A child’s attendance in school is but one facet of the experience of growing up. In a sense, all of us are teachers. When kids see a politician lie, cheat, and steal, they learn. When one of my students sees his father slap his mother, she learns. When a teenager sees a popular music star simulate sex onstage with a teenage girl, he learns. When a kid hears a family member use racial slurs and chortle with laughter, she learns. When a child hears the term “Nazi” tossed at anyone with whom someone disagrees, he learns that the term has no real meaning.

When child sees a parent drop a check into the collection plate or send it to the Red Cross, she learns. When a high school student has a teacher that has high expectations of him, he learns. When a kid sees a neighbor rushing to New Orleans to help out, she learns. When a child sees his dad come home after a hard day at work and go out in the rain to vote, he learns. When a student has a teacher that promotes respectful debate, dialogue, and critical thinking in the classroom, she learns.

They will always learn. But what will they learn?

Teach them to read, to write, and to use mathematics. They can’t be successful without these skills.

But teach them more than that.

Teach them to be human. Teach them to be a citizen. Teach them about how to love and respect one another. Teach them to stand up for what is right. Teach them about rights AND responsibilities. Teach them what it means to live, work, and play with people who are different than they are. Teach them what the purposes of knowledge are.

Teach them well.

Labels: Education and Schools

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Labels: Education and Schools

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Test scores are looked at as the primary focus of education today and much time, effort, and money is expended trying to find ways to improve those scores. Curriculums have been revised, benchmarks have been established, and rigorous attention is given to teaching the material on the test.

What the general public is probably not aware of and doesn’t appreciate is the amount of time teachers and other school employees spend on discipline and behavior issues. The single most frustrating thing teachers tell me is not their low pay. It is not conditions of the building itself. It isn’t lack of supplies. It isn’t the textbooks. It isn’t the lack of technology. Although all these things are important, the most frustrating and challenging issue for today’s teachers is the amount of time they spend on discipline and managing student behavior.

We feel the same way in the office too. I start the day with a grant proposal on my desk, trying to do some research and write a grant that would benefit our students. That work is constantly interrupted by student discipline issues. From the mundane to the serious, student behavior issues dominate our day. It extends to our bus drivers and even the custodians and cafeteria workers.

“But Brian”, you might say, “you work in a high challenge school. It isn’t that way everywhere.” I submit that it is and that in schools across the state and the country teachers spend an incredible amount of time dealing with discipline issues that suck up very valuable class time. Teachers are under the gun as never before to raise their students to an expected standard, and every time they spend ten minutes trying to get Joe to sit down in his seat and stop doing impromptu rap performances, they feel that time slipping away. At the end of the day no one in the public will care that they did a good job in this area. They will look at those test scores in the newspaper and make a judgment about how well the school and its staff performed.

I look back to my own school experience and think why (except for those err..few unfortunate incidents) I behaved in school.

I both feared my teachers and also wanted their approval.

I feared my principal as a god-like figure in the office.

I knew that if I misbehaved at school there were going to be consequences at home that I seriously wanted to avoid.

I was intrinsically motivated to do well in school because I wanted to succeed. I was also quietly competitive and wanted to do better than my classmates.

I didn’t want to disappoint my teachers or my parents.

I generally liked school and found it interesting.

A great many of today’s kids lack many, if not all, of these motivators. I can tell you right now that by middle school the fear is mostly gone. They know that there really isn’t much that the school can do to them if they fail to obey the rules. Some of them fear the administration slightly more because they know the administrators can suspend them, but a lot of them view that as a vacation. Many of our parents work very hard to try and control their kids, but so many have lost control long ago. I can tell within two minutes of the start of a parent conference if the parent has any sway over the child. Sometimes they are worse with the parent than they are with the teacher.

So we are left trying to be consistent and creative with kids, trying to have order in the classroom and in the school. We try and keep all the kids in the classroom without damaging the ability of the teacher to work with the kids who aren’t misbehaving. It is easy to see why it would be frustrating to the teacher. Some teachers are more effective in classroom management than others, but virtually all of them have to deal with problem behavior on an almost daily basis. I am sincere when I wish some of the critics of public education would come spend a week substituting in class. You have no idea if you’re not there.

School is a reflection of problems in the larger society. Ignore this problem and they won’t suddenly turn into well-behaved tax paying citizens when they turn 18. Kick the worst ones out? Then they are roaming the streets and getting in even more trouble. Get parents more involved? Absolutely, but as previously stated many parents have lost their influence over their children. I know of several middle school aged boys who have been physically abusive to their mothers. More counseling services to deal with anger management and behavioral issues? My school has two full time therapists and a social worker. They are working hard with kids and I hope it will make a difference over time. Mentors? Sure thing. There are some excellent mentoring programs that need to be expanded and need more volunteers. Alternative schools? Yes, these schools can be helpful with some students but some have behaviors that even alternative schools cannot deal with.

One of my teachers is a retired sheriff’s deputy. He teaches and coaches during the day and often goes and knocks on doors in the evening, talking to parents about their kid’s behavior, attendance, and grades. He doesn’t get paid for this. He does it because he cares about the kids and wants to help them. When he points his finger at a kid and says, “do that again and I’ll be sitting on your momma’s couch tonight”, he means it. He is doing the Lord’s work, unnoticed and generally unappreciated except by those who know him. He does all of this for a salary that a 20 year old assistant manager at McDonald’s would sniff at. No, they aren’t all like him, but there are more of them than you think.

So……anyone want a teaching job? We’re hiring!

Labels: Education and Schools

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