I submitted the five-week report cards for all of my students this past week. It's not something I relish. The meticulousness and scrutiny of the task I can accept. But the tinge of inadequacy I feel when confronted with the inevitable reality that nearly a quarter of my students are failing English Lit. and Comp. is tough to handle.
Except this time it was even worse. Not much worse, but bad enough for me to question as to whether or not I've plateaued in my tenth year of teaching at a Title 1 L.A. public school.
Ever the neurotic, I did a mental teacher-man checklist: Am I differentiating instruction? Am I implementing SDAIE teaching methodology, especially for English language learners? Do I give students ample time to complete tasks? Have I established concise and consistent guidelines for classroom behavior? Do I convey clear instructions and expected outcomes for all assignments? Do I treat all kids with equal fairness and respect? Do I maintain a clean, orderly classroom?
And now for the answers: Yes, yes, yes yes, yes, yes, and...somewhat. An inveterate pack rat, I can't seem to bring myself to purge my classroom of the endless reams of student work that engorge my storage closets. Most of it was composed during the earlier part of the decade, so any time you need an exemplary student essay circa 2001 entitled, "Cell Phones: Why They Won't Last," just let me know.
But I don't save many of these essays anymore. The reality is that many of the kinds of students who once were able and willing to transfer their intellectual energy into cogent, coherent compositions have been "outsourced" - to parochial schools, private academies or charter campuses, all of which have the purview to lure the most talented kids away from the public system - while an increasing number of students in the public sector arrive, at various points during the semester, from group or foster homes, from other schools who have disposed of them (the district cheerfully refers to these individuals as "Opportunity Transfers") or from the criminal justice system.
This is not an excuse to quit on the remaining students. But it is yet another reality that is constantly overlooked when evaluating public schools and teacher performance.
Recently, my students' grades have more closely correlated with the LAUSD's dropout rates, which have perennially hovered around 50 percent for the past half-decade. Not that this is any comfort: To observe my students descending into the mean of mediocrity is abysmally disappointing for me as a professional, a mentor, and a champion of public education. But it's not surprising.
Students fail for a multitude of reasons. Not all do so chronically or willingly. But for a significant and growing portion, failure has become habitual, ingrained, and practically irreversible. There are reasons for this. Many of these kids are products of a bruised and demoralized working class, wherein their needs have become increasingly marginalized. As a result, they check out - academically, spiritually, and morally.
In Hollywood films, this is the youth who's portrayed as disaffected and angst-fueled, flailing and railing against all adult authority - the kid who explodes from his seat in a fit of failure-induced frustration, flipping over rows of desks and screaming to the world, "You can't reach me! Don't even try!" while storming from the classroom.
(F.Y.I: He's usually played by Lew Diamond Phillips.)
The reality is that I'd pay a day's wage for any one of these kids to get that fired-up about anything. These are individuals who dread undivided attention, clinging to anonymity whenever humanly possible. I can usually coax some of them from their oversized black hoodie cocoons by the third week or so of the semester with my full-scale assault of friendly ribbing ("The next time you take that iPod out during class, I'm going to replace all your songs with Michael Bolton's Greatest Hits.") and an endless supply of corny jokes.
I do this knowing that it will have an extremely limited impact on their academic future; I do it with the knowledge that, for the most part, their attitudes and actions toward formal education are pretty much indelible at this point and their skills (as Linguistics professor Stephen Krashen would say) "fossilized."
They fail emphatically but quietly and without revolt, indignation, or fanfare. These aren't English language learners unable to surmount the complexities of Fitzgerald or Keroac, nor are they the cognitively challenged, who, despite their best efforts, remain overmatched by the modest rigors of high school academia. They're students who refuse to learn.
Often arriving to school tardy, bleary-eyed, and bereft of basic supplies, they hunker down at their desks, burying their heads deep into folded arms for period-long naps. They stare vacuously at the floor while endlessly fidgeting with key chains or other random tchochkes. During passing periods, they vanish amidst waves of rambunctious peers.
One former colleague of mine used to refer to kids in this mold as "wallpaper." I view them as collateral damage from an egregious failure to address socioeconomic inequities and a the one-size-fits-all federal and state education agendas - generated not by lifelong educators, but by bureaucrats and theorists, whose knowledge and understanding of urban public school students begins and ends with Dangerous Minds. It's a system that exalts mediocrity and all but ignores students on the fringes.
Either way, these are the quintessential "slip through the cracks" kids, a major segment of the overall urban student population that no charter school or private takeover is going to resuscitate.
These are kids who fail most or all of their courses, bubble out the logo for AC/DC on high stakes standardized tests, and ultimately vanish after several years of doing so. They wear different style clothes and sport different hairdos, but share similar behavioral patterns and grade point averages, which often hover perilously close to zero-point-zero.
They play Xbox Live all night, sleep through the first portion of the school day, and shrug when you ask them what their parents think about it all.
"My mom said she's tired of waiting for me in the morning," said one of my students when I asked her why she rarely makes it to my English Comp class. "So I said, 'Good: I don't care.' So now she just leaves without me. Whatever."
They frequently come from homes and entire upbringings devoid of boundaries, limits, attention, and love - homes where the importance of education is rarely emphasized or reinforced in any meaningful way.
"It's not just outright abuse with these kids," says Ronald Arreola, a veteran Biology teacher of nearly two decades, who has been my mentor and colleague since I began teaching in 2001. "Many of them are used to not having an adult who's all that invested in their education. There's no one there to say, 'Hey, what did you do in English class today?' or 'When's your next Math quiz?'" He then added that, even for many struggling students who do have an adult present, "they're almost completely hands-off when it comes to their kids' education."
So are parents really to blame?
If the volume of media coverage currently being deployed to critique teachers who work at struggling schools is any indicator, one would quickly conclude that these coffee-slurping, union-loving, summers off-having slackers are the primary culprits for student failure.
Then again, many of the journalists writing these scathing exposes and editorials on teacher inadequacy fail to acknowledge the origins of this failure, which often continues unabated once they reach high school.
One need only look to the pages of the LA Times, a publication that has ironically taken sadistic pleasure in teacher bashing by accentuating a handful of egregiously poor performers, to discern the correlation between socioeconomic status and student achievement. The following is posted on the LA Times' California Schools Guide, by way of the California Department of Education's web site.
Numerous academic studies have shown a high correlation between economic status and educational attainment.
Also virtually unmentioned in these reports are the added challenges that teachers in disadvantaged communities must confront: In addition to contending with enormous class sizes, they must also address the needs of a growing population of students who are either English language learners, learning disabled, or the "reluctant" learners of whom I speak.
Parents, however, are typically only mentioned glancingly, if at all, and within the context of being victimized by a perpetually faltering public school system. And while the entire community shares the blame for this growing collection of listless adolescents, their parents are clearly getting an enormous pass.
"My dad doesn't care," said yet another one of my students when I asked him what his parents think about him ditching three full school days a week. "Xbox is my classroom."
(As chilling as it is to hear, some of the pithy retorts can be pretty epic. Xbox is my classroom? Pure gold.)
"How do you know he doesn't care?" I asked the same kid - the pithy one.
Without hesitating, he replied: "He told me."
And then there was the student who had just entered my classroom, mid-semester - fresh from jail - who spent full periods glowering at the top of his vacant desk. Noticing he was wearing a crisp Detroit Tigers cap one day, I brought in a stack of my old Sports Illustrated magazines from home to hopefully cajole him into reading something. As I reached to place one on his desk, I asked if he liked sports.
"Nah," he said.
"No, huh?
"Nope."
"Not a Tigers fan?"
"Who?"
"What do you do for fun then? Are you in a band? You like music?"
He nodded and smirked. "I like drugs."
I know these kids. I like these kids. And, as a guy who's never smoked a joint or ditched a class, or even, as a student, pondered the possibility of putting his head down on a desk while the teacher was in the room, I have absolutely nothing in common with so many of them - no doubt to my disadvantage. But their tragic refusal to contribute to their own education, on any level, frustrates me, terrifies me, and forces me to wonder whether the root causes of this unfortunate calamity will ever be addressed - or whether it will continue to worsen.
Follow Brock Cohen on Twitter: www.twitter.com/brockdc
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"Sitting in class, doing and learning nothing" was what the Montessori method sought to correct. Learning Centers are set up around the classroom, and the while the student was still on a schedule [self-designed], they are free to choose what they want to study for that particular slot. Teachers stick around for support, feedback, and some assessment.
My personal take is waaay out of the box for our institutions:
Gov't and private business should in CD and online learning where lessons are arranged in sequence but can be accessed according to the student's needs and interest. Someone said primary and secondary education must be modeled after college/university where we choose our own classes, I agree. Let the students have their gadgets: e-book readers, online discussions, blogs, laptops per class, interactive whiteboards. The key is human-computer interaction, animation, and games. I've seen how even the simplest flash animation will hold their attention. If they are able to manipulate it in some way, they will be more than glad to stay in school.
Many publishers [Hougton-Mifflin for example] should go full force into this business and merely produce worksheets for their online content. OTOH, what I've observed that works best for secondary students is video watching or video production. This works well with English and Social Studies classes.
Some of the reformers' mentality must have emerged from the imaginations of people who have been isolated for all their lives in the affluent, leafy green suburbs and/or in elite private schools. With stars in their eyes about rescuing the world, they honestly don't have a clue. They are a perfect match for inner-city parents with fantasies of escape, who aren't able yet to see that this nation has a permanent under-caste, despite the one or two success stories that occasionally emerge and make it onto the Oprah show.
Another Huffington poster, Joel Shatzky, has got things figured out.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-shatzky/educating-for-democracy-s_b_517743.html
Here's another piece to add to the puzzle for what kind of country we really are:
At 715 per 100,000 people, the U.S. has far more prisoners /capita than any other country in the world. Russia’s #2 at 584. Singapore is 388, Taiwan is 250, Israel is174, Mexico is 169, China is 119, Germany is 96, and Finland is 71.
Of all the European countries, plus Mexico and Japan, the U.S. has the second highest child poverty rate. Mexico is 26.2% and the U.S. is 22.4%. In terms of trade union membership, we’re at #17 after the European countries, New Zealand and Japan (which range from 82% to 22%, averaging 38%). Stats from NationMaster.
For another serious factor, google "the 30 million word gap."
We could start with making good early childhood education a major priority.
Think NOT??? Then where does the "I'll decide whether my Child goes to Church and / or I'll decide which School they go to, (rather than the Child deciding) come from?"
IMHO, the essence of what WE are dealing with is twofold...
(A) Consider the statement: QUESTION AUTHORITY... Re-Frame that as DO NOT AUTHORIZE ANYONE TO THINK FOR YOU, OR FOR CHILDREN... Instead, WE send Children off to School and Church...... AUTHORIZING others to put thoughts in their minds... Schooling has become way to much about memorizing information to pass tests...
(B) Why would either Dominant Political Party, or Religion, in America, actually want children into Adults who refuse to allow others to think for them? Would NOT the spin and Lies become unacceptable?
Supposedly the last good year of Schooling was 1960 and now, 60 Years later WE are NOT up to that Standard in many Schools? And, Billions$$$ spent?
To me, the great difference between the Schooling I was force fed and the Education I HAVE GIVEN ME SINCE, is I learned to NOT Authorize others to think for me! WE need Education for Children, NOT Schooling... I also do NOT Believe Organized Religion can stand up to children into Adults who refuse to allow others to think for them...
NOT raised on a Farm, I'd guess...
As my Dad uesed to say, in Re: you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink.
"Well, I can put some salt in their Hay..."
You seem like a good teacher and an passionate writer. However, I think you miss the point. You ponder allowing the dialogue on public education to be defined by the very people you know have no concept or commitment to pragmatic reform. "So are parents really to blame? “ No, the parents were my students at Audubon Middle School when I started teaching 24 years ago. Where were they supposed to learn how to be parents? By the time a single subject credentialed teacher like yourself sees these students, the damage is irreparable in a direct function to how long they have been in a system that socially promotes and is concerned more with Average Daily Attendance money from the State of California and jobs than it is about addressing these kids subjective needs. The students you presently teach had just as much potential as those who got out to any place else that would deal with them in a timely manner. If you are interested in working on fixing it, come to www.perdaily.com, where we are trying to create a neutral public commons on education that redefines and addresses the problems, instead of the false issues like blaming teachers that one sees elsewhere in the media.
Thanks Brock for spelling out our challenges in clear and concise language. I hope many people read this and stop looking for the easy answer to the complicated problem. Do you think that the small minded teacher bashers were,at one time, the students with their heads down who came into class red eyed,pissed off and already defeated? We teachers need to know that we are doing the most important work in our society. It doesn't pay well or offer real security(too many lay offs) but it does contribute more to our future than any other profession. But you already know that, it is why you became we went into educatio in the first place.
I had a veteran teacher tell me, when I was new, that you never know when a student will hear your message. He spoke to a student who only thought about his lectures in jail. He then got out and finished high school and got a college degree and a successful job. This from a kid who put his head down.
Don't give up hope. We are making a difference. Many of these kids may have only our stability and constant support in their lives.
Your circumstances growing up are so different then the children portrayed in this article. You had parents who pushed you, and not a lot to distract you from school, other than your own desire to not be there. That's the point of the article.
Also, having students pick and choose the hours they want to be in school is not a good idea. And I will tell you the same reason I give my students; we are teaching you that you have to do things, even when you don't want to. I don't always want to be at work; I don't always want to drive home and help my parents; I don't always want to study for the classes I take. But I do. And the reason I can stick it out is because I was given discipline in high school.
This is the very thing that undergraduate and graduate professors do NOT understand, but that high school teachers do- that there is a big different between a 18 year old high school senior, and a 19 year old college freshman. Just because a high school student is close in age to a college student does not mean that they can be treated as such. Similarly, you can't just do "lecture" in high school- you lose most of the students. A class period is a chance to change it up every 20 minutes, to differentiate the lesson and reach all types of learners.
As to your argument about a big difference between an 18 year old and a 19 year old: I don't buy it. My grandfather once told me that he was just as smart at 16 as he was in his 60s, and I completely agree. I think the difference is that teenagers now are kept in a perpetual holding pattern and denied the experiential learning (and experience is the best teacher) that we are when we go to college.
What is being described in the article above is the classic response of oppressed people: play dumb and eventually your oppressor will give up. I am so struck by the similarity of the students described above to studies I did on how indigenous peoples in South America dealt with being forced to work for Europeans.
When was the last time you spent more than a day in a high school classroom? And not a top magnet high school, but a typical high school composed of students with mostly average to slightly above average intelligence levels.
I have formally tutored and taught all age groups, from Kindergarten through college. I have worked intimately with students of all intelligence levels and socioeconomic backgrounds. Therefore, I'd like to think that my perspective is based on experience and reflection.
The problem with decisions being made by those outside of the high school field is that they do not know what it is like to be a current high school student in an urban, low socioeconomic setting. You are right when you say that some students who are 16, 17, or 18 years old are comparable to college students/adults. But that is some, and not the majority. Your anecdotal evidence does not withstand the rigors of examining a large sample size. Your grandfather may have been an excellent man of above-average intelligence. And so may you. But that does not speak to the majority. This is not a put down on my students, or any students, but the fact of the matter is that not everyone can have above-average intelligence. It is not statistically possible. There is a bell-curve.
And it is stunning to see how many theoretically "rational" people
live in total denial of this reality, as if their own lives depended on the ludicrous fantasy that
an education can be "pumped into" a passive, disinterested person like gas into a car.
Unfortunately, the millions of idiots who feel that way are currently involved
in "reforming" the Public Education system.
I repeat your common sense:
"Education has a lot more to do with LEARNING than with TEACHING.
Good athletes make good teams, good citizens make good countries, good musicians make good orchestras, and good students make good schools. It is not the other way around. We have all heard of junk bonds? These are junk students. Can they be rescued? ONLY if they want to be rescued."
This is head-exploding reality, and way too much for many
obstinately-blind and deaf critics of Public Education to withstand.
It could almost be written by me, or one of my fellow-teachers
at my high school.
The basic concept that must be faced is, that
LEARNING & EDUCATION IS NOT A HAIRCUT (i.e. something
that can be achieved by just sitting passively with no effort).
These days, the problems I experience with too many students has little
to do with "Can" or "Can't", and has EVERYTHING to do with "Will" or "Won't".
It is shocking to realize how many children in schools today
seem absolutely dedicated to the principle
of "Won't".
Private Charter schools reject these kids within a few DAYS, and
send them right back to Public School.
So many children who seem just barely "wanted" by
their own families---This is a tragedy-in-the-making.
All the wayward children, where do they all come from?
All the wayward children, where DO they all belong?
Your essay is heartfelt, and so is, apparently, your dedication to teaching and your students. Teachers, in general, are not the blame for the failure in our schools: it is the "system" and the politics that have been thrust into public ed. in the last ten to twenty years. You are correct when you write, "the one-size-fits-all style"of "standards" education is not meeting the needs of many learners. Both middle schools and high schools have to provide a diversity of curriculum, which includes high-level traditional academic courses math, humanities, arts, social studies, but also must include high-level techincal classes, which include electronics, metalurgy, woodworking, architectural desigh, automotive, culinary, and maybe some craftsman classes in furniture. Professionals, in those fields from the communty, could be hired to teach the tech classes. If a layman, in the community, has been making furniture for ten or twenty years. and can show proof of a successful client base, surely that person would be the best to teach furniture-making at the highschool. The same goes for the other tech classes. Unfortunately, these kinds of high schools are very expensive, requiring lots more hardware and up-front investment than the typical highschool we have nowadays. Also, the type of high school I am proposing would drastically cut the drop-out rate.