The recent formation of Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst.org is a reminder to many educators of how many times we've heard that claim in its various forms:
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- We're going to put students first.
- It's all about the kids.
- Nothing is more important to us than educating the next generation.
Such statements have become clichés--but have they ever, on any consistent basis, been true?
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One need only spend a few hours in most inner-city schools to answer that question. To be sure, some teachers and administrators sometimes actually can manage to put students needs ahead of all else--though there isn't much of an institutional mechanism to require it. In fact, putting students first often requires us to break the rules.
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Current calls for "reform" and "accountability," including those of StudentsFirst.org, claim that compelling teachers and administrators to put students first requires firing teachers deemed ineffective and assumes that standardized test data can make such determinations and therefore protect students from miseducation.
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There may be a place for standardized testing to monitor the progress of students but these multiple choice measurements--and the often abstruse data they generate--do not ensure quality instruction or positive learning experiences for students. They tend to encourage the opposite.
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My own students seem to know that the tests aren't for them. They also understand that the manner in which their teachers are treated by the education hierarchy is in direct proportion to the manner in which they--the students--are regarded. If teachers are respected then students understand that such respect is for them as well. When they see their teachers being marginalized, undervalued, and insulted then students--those with enough awareness to notice--take that personally. And why shouldn't they?
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SOME OTHER LIES WE OUGHT TO BE HONEST ABOUT
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1. More money won't solve anything
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That money is ill-spent in schools and school districts--and departments of education--is no revelation. From meaningless professional development to useless equipment and inflated text books and supplies--to name just a few examples--the wasting of these funds not only leaves less to be spent in ways that actually impact students but also erodes tax-payer confidence and creates the misimpression that increased funding for schools won't improve things.
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Effective teachers and administrators know two essential truths about education spending:
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- We can (and many of us have) gotten results with very little in the way of resources or other support.
- Increasing our resources, providing us with more favorable conditions in which to teach and learn, better equipment and materials and so forth--in short, spending money wisely on what we need--will result in even better instruction
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2. School choice will improve education for everyone
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The creation, beginning in the 1970s, of public school alternatives to traditional neighborhood schools--including the recent proliferation of charters--has helped some students to a better education. But the exodus out of neighborhood schools has made the educational prospects worse for those left behind. Creating more parental choices might help more children--and no one should deny the importance of helping improve education for even one more child--but such measures aren't going to repair the struggling schools. Nor will giving vouchers to parents to subsidize private schools for their children. School choice as a solution is, at best, grossly insufficient--unless every school on the choice menu becomes a viable one.
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3. Purging the disruptive students will fix things
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There is certainly a logical nd perhaps even a moral argument for removing the most disruptive students from our schools. What right do they have to sabotage the education of others? Can we really afford to invest so much of our time and other resources on a few recalcitrant children when so many willing ones have such dire needs?
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But removing behavioral problems does not necessarily eliminate disruption. As a rookie teacher, I found that out when I lost my three most disruptive students--to various offenses outside my classroom--and almost immediately other students, previously quiet and relatively well-behaved, stepped into the void and took over the class. The problem was me.
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Since then I've figured out how to keep students from taking over but have witnessed this same dynamic play itself out in the classrooms of other mostly inexperienced teachers. I have also seen many of the most challenging students stay in school and gain a little maturity and self-control.
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4. Some children just don't want to learn
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There are children and teenagers who do seem entirely uninterested in an education. Some of them will proudly declare it. In the triage environment in which some schools must operate, it is understandable to want to focus one's efforts on those with an expressed interest in trying to succeed. But we ought never surrender completely to the seeming self-determination of failure.
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Which leads to the most important truth in all of this--the reason we really should keep trying to find a way for all of us to put students first all the time. That truth is the great untapped potential of our students.
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Our collective fervor--our passion in this discourse and beyond--ought to be directed at realizing that potential.
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But I don't believe the public schools have a monopoly on NOT putting students first. A lot of other individuals and institutions concerned with education don't do it either--and, as I said, some public educators do put students first, though they sometimes have to break rules to do so.
Expectations and belief go a very long way, though as I mentioned resources and reasonable class size can make a difference. So, by the way, can experience as a teacher. I think I was a pretty good new teacher but I know I was better after five years, better than that after ten. I'm in my twentieth year and I expect to keep getting better. Teaching may sometimes feel like a contact sport but it isn't -- and so there is no reason the wear and tear should diminish us. Of those "less experienced teachers" you say are doing great things, I would ask this: don't you think they will be even better with more experience, knowledge, and wisdom? Why wouldn't they be?
I did not mean to imply that "self-awareness of teachers" necessarily could manage "disruptive" students but only that, as I think I said, we are kidding ourselves if we believe that getting rid of any student is a meaningful solution for us.
Administrative support and parental involvement can certainly make a difference--and they ought to be there in every situation--though many of the most challenging students that have confronted me over the years have been boys and a few girls without much in the way of parents. Foster kids or children being raised by aunts, grandparents, or just kind and generous neighbors. Or no one.
I don't think banishment once adjudicated is any sort of answer though. Rather, a consistent structure for behavioral problems and consequences of which caregivers, teachers, and admin are all aware is a foundational step for addressing this. This has not While this assumes several things (particularly caregiver involvement), I think aiming for this one of the more realistic ways to begin addressing both "disruptive" students and the significant challenge posed by poor learning environments.
This has not been present in a number of the schools I've been exposed to (schools of juveniles during doctoral training and the low SES school my wife teaches at). But again, thank you for your post as I appreciated many of your points ad well as the spirit of it.
I have a comment about #1. I'm sure you know we spend more than other countries. I understand that the money doesn't make its way to the classroom, that it's spent on the wrong things (textbooks are a pet peeve of mine). I was challenged by another commenter on a different column to check out the 990s (tax returns) for Canada's Harlem Children's Zone tonight. So I did. Sort of took my breath away -- he certainly has a talent for raising money. But more importantly, the two Promise Academies spend 94% & 95% of their money on program expenses, only 6% and 5% on administration. By far the largest expense is salaries and benefits. (Canada is not paid by the charters, by the way; he's paid only by the Harlem Children's Zone, Inc. organization, $394,000 a year. Brings in tens of millions, is paid less than $400,000. Yes, that's a whole lot to most of us, but given what he brings in, I think he deserves it. And sadly, it's not much more than superintendents of schools make in many large cities.) Anyway, I wonder whether the money problem in public schools might be addressed by shifting the WAY money is spent, by doing some serious re-organizing and focusing on the governance issues -- school boards and superintendents and large administrative staffs.
And yes, the way that money is spent is a great impediment to progress.
So it is reasonable for critics of eduction spending to question increased funding -- but we shouldn't give up on money well-spent because it really can make a difference.
1. There is no dichotomy between more money and more wisely-spent money. For genuine improvement, both would be helpful.
2. The trouble is when one person's choice takes away someone else's.
3. Getting rid of any single child doesn't often make that big a difference, but the ability of educators do so makes a huge difference. Kids who know they will not get second and third chances rarely need them.
4. Every child can learn, but the classroom environment is not for everyone. Failure is instructive. Refusing to let any child experience failure and some of its consequences prevents them from learning.
Appalling corruption and unethical greed has undermined the purpose of PUBLIC education, and in doing so, comprised Democracy in America. Without academic freedom, there's no way teachers can keep students engaged. They will drop out more! And I don't blame them.
It's simple. RELEVANT coursework offers rigor, not memorizing data for a test. Socratic discourse is important, not data from test scores. My more paranoid colleagues suspect an insidous plot to turn teachers into low wage workers. I am more concerned about the fate of working poor children. Are they being doomed to a like of servitude?
I can be sure of only one thing: Education is necessary for social progress, for psychological evolution, for Democracy.
Now WHO would want to interfere with these noble concessions to our humanity?
Money does attract parasites -- and the system really could use a good colon cleanse.
There are expenditures that have made a difference for me. Like being able to keep the classroom temperature below 85 degrees or being able to project a student's sentence onto a screen and have other students take turns trying to repair it.
But I suppose if education spending and corruption are hopelessly bonded then perhaps we're all better off just hitting up donorschoose.org for air-conditioners or LCD projectors or new books...
I have some kids who hate the school we offer, but work long hours without complaint. That tells me something.
We have great vocational programs (banking, construction, culinary arts, film and digital media, fashion, nursing, accounting, collision repair, firefighting, and like 20 more), but not enough kids see that as an option because they have to ride a bus for a half-day program. Those who do love it.
I don't know the answers, but there's a lot to talk about, and I'd love for us to have the discussion.
Send them to the bad boys schools or some other (non-existent) alternative school that will interest them? Voc ed? Some tough-love program in the wilderness? Conscript them? Make them their parents problems and admit that they are uneducable?
We need an answer to this question.
My point about disruptive kids is that they do not exist in a vacuum. They help create the chaos of their schools and classrooms but also the chaos of their schools and classrooms create them.
Just this year I've been working with some of the most disruptive boys at the school where I teach. Some I have in class. Others I know from athletics or from class last year. There's no great art or science to getting them to behave better. It's just basic parenting and big brothering to go along with their own maturation. It's refusing to accept them as behavior problems. It's appreciating their sense of humor--even the sadistic aspects of it--and giving them less disruptive outlets for their goofiness or anger.
The public school system (particularly in inner-cities) and corrupt politicians failed in their job. The parents are not without participation in the system's failure. Who are losing big time? Our public school system kids.
Educational system in the USA has become all about money. Funding is growing and the quality of education is decreasing. The inter-play of interest groups remain ignored.
If you have money you go to prestigious prep schools, then to the Ivy League After graduation you get a job paying you about 20% more than graduates from non-Ivy League.
If you don't have money the public school system runs the agenda of your education. After graduating from high school or college, no jobs for about 55% of your class this time.
There are true-to-their-calling public school's administrators and teachers. But they are in the minority.The unsung patriots and heroes who are motivating our kids to achieve their best potentials.
But much is to be blamed on parents' attitudes and valuations of education in the lives of their children. Now the parents expect the government to feed their children while in school. Why? They have to go to work.
How time changed. When my three sibling and I went to school our mother fixed our lunch boxes (with sandwich, snacks, drinks, no soda) to take to school. Mum went to work too.
Note: Not included are the well-lobbied public schools in inner-cities and outside.
What a ridiculous blanket statement.
If my colleagues and I were corrupt, we could find something a lot easier to do than teach in the inner city.
Are you really responding to this article? It looks like you saw something I didn't.
You may not agree to my statement but it's not ridiculous. I checked on the public school systems productivity statistics.
The public school system costs is onerous compared to the quality of the education given to our public school kids. Across the US on the average , the drop-out rate in the inner-city public high schools is staggering. The remedial classes costs for primary, secondary and collegiate (to add to the injury) students are rising as well.
The majority of the public school teachers I know all across the country wish they can do something else. But they choose not to. Aside from the fact that teaching is what they prepared themselves to do, the frustrations to stay in the public school system is much more lucrative in terms of pension, benefits and job stability.
I am sorry if your sensibility about yourself and your colleague were bruised with my comment. It's not meant to.
I am glad that you remain teaching because I know you choose a more difficult profession but it's not without payback much better that the private school system.
Studying the qualitative results of the public school system the problem is always money without clear direction on how we can better educate our children.
The public school teachers are not vocal enough to tap on the interests groups representing them to question the relevance of the drop-outs rates amongst their students, the incompetent teachers, the dispositions of the membership fees and dues they paid and the economic impact of their salaries and benefits against the financial capabilities of the governmental body that hired them.
The parents have not organized themselves to represent their children and leave the full run of the show of their kids education to the teachers and the public school system.
The big time losers. Our kids.
http://learnmeproject.com/2010/12/17/absolute-contingency/
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Hope you are looking into the grant with which to earn your administrative/supervisory certificate. You have already decoded many of the problems indemic in our schools. Thank-you.
Yes, somehow, I've managed to keep it real all these years. Never really thought much about administration but thanks for he suggestion.