Miguel arrives late, usually, if at all. He brings just himself, not a notebook or pencil. He listens, sometimes closing his eyes or laying his head on his arms. At the end of class, he smiles and says goodbye. He looks like Harry Belafonte.
One day, I ask him what I can do to help him get some work done. Seventh grade can be hard, especially when you should be in ninth. He can raise up the desk with his knees.
"Nothing," he says.
"Let me know," I tell him. "See you tomorrow."
"Maybe."
I decided to teach English this past fall. I am a writer and thought that I could share a little knowledge where it was needed most. I am a loon about words, don't like to see them compromised. I read the dictionary. I could do some good.
So, I took a job at a middle school where about 90 percent of the kids qualify for free breakfast and lunch. That is how "poverty" is calibrated, in pancakes. All but a few students are Hispanic, and most arrive each morning by bus, eight-hour refugees from gangs and drugs and upset. Their mothers, if they are at home, don't let them outside after school. They know whom to avoid, by the color of the bandanas.
Before many of these kids sit in front of my blackboard, they have had a day. They have had 13 years. They are in no shape to learn about pronouns. Write about a time when your family did something funny, I instruct them.
"I can't," one girl whispers in my ear. "My dad does drugs."
"Can you write about that?"
"No."
"A sibling?"
"He sold my phone to buy pills."
I think that Michael Bloomberg could put an air conditioning repair man in the chancellor's seat. Or a neuroscientist. Or, frankly, a university president. It doesn't much matter, and here is why: They do not know Miguel. Or Maria. They are just too far away. They do not know that these kids' survival, right now, is not derived from brilliant test scores or good grades, even. Or, the allocation of money from one place to another.
Today, if my students find their way to Room 146 with some peace, they are a success. If they make it into the building without a security guard hollering at them because their shirts are untucked, they are a success. If an assistant principal doesn't suspend them because their ID cards aren't hanging on their necks, well, it has been a marvelous school experience. If they can forget for 50 minutes that their brothers are in jail for selling cocaine at an elementary school, they are doing okay.
This public school district is not terribly different from other large urban machines, where kids are passed along without proper skills, ex-cops parade detention-goers through the campus like a prison work gang, and poorly paid teachers learn on Tuesday what a flawed curriculum says they need to teach on Wednesday, maybe.
Of course, administrators will have you think the place is Choate Rosemary Hall, what with "Pre-AP" classes (entrance criteria: compatible scheduling, not academic ability) and college posters plastered on corridor walls. Work hard, go to Princeton. Dally amongst the Ivy. Aspiration is good, except when the goal is so utterly unreachable. Then, it is a tease, a reminder that the cycle is not nearly broken, that only 43 percent of students will graduate from high school, that repeat teenage pregnancy in this city is the highest in the country, that kids are not allowed to take home textbooks because the principal believes they won't come back.
In order to fix the schools, as is the common parlance, the Bloombergs and Blacks need to fix the kids. First. But this would require a tectonic shift in philosophy, from penal to uplifting, from frenetic to calm, from dictate to reality. For there to be any hope for true achievement, these kids need to feel safe, respected and secure before prepositional phrases and periodic tables can penetrate their bodies and brains. They need social workers and psychologists in every classroom, and teachers who resist screaming at children even when administrators tell them to. They need longer classes and fewer subjects each day. They need physical exercise, even if they can't afford the $10 for the mandatory check-up. The need hugs and cookies, yes, at 13. They need people to listen when they are told, finally, that their father was killed in a drug deal, not a car crash.
Then, perhaps, they can learn to write a paragraph. Or dream about a place like Princeton.
After three weeks on the job, I am demoted. I wouldn't change failing grades to passing ones, and I asked a few too many questions, I suspect. My 64 students are stripped from me, sent to crowded classrooms, instead. Now I teach 23 kids all day, a few at a time. They feel lucky. The other ones come back to visit in between classes, in a hurry, because Officer Riley's on their heels.
One day, Miguel stops by. "Have you ever seen a dead man?" he asks me, just like that. "I have, with his throat..." he says, slicing his hand cross his neck.
Miguel collapses into a beach chair by the window. He tells me that his father is on the run, that he hasn't seen him for almost a year. He says people drive by his house and yell out the window that they are going to kill him.
"I can't sleep. I have nightmares."
A few weeks later, he visits again. He says his mother is quitting her job so they can move away, far away. He seems relieved. I hope that they actually go.
"Stay inside your house until then," I tell him. "And when you get where you're going, do your work. It will give you your life."
He said he would try.
Larry Strauss: Waiting for Santa Claus
It has historically been "Acceptable" and yes, it has made great progress to now be "Recognized."
Additionally, I know recent Marsh students who were accepted at Princeton, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell, Georgetown, all the military academies and many more top academic schools.
Not true. In order to fix the schools, as is the common parlance, the Bloombergs and Blacks need to fix THE WORLD the kids come from first. Focusing on "fixing the Kids" or fixing the teachers or fixing the schools is why all current the reform efforts are doomed. Trying to "fix the Kids" is why the "security guard is hollering at them because their shirts are untucked" or "an assistant principal suspends them because their ID cards aren't hanging on their necks."
Until and unless it is recognized that the "kids" are NOT the problem but the world they come from IS, reforms will continue to fail because they continue to try to fix the wrong problem.
Giving kids "a safe understanding shelter from the storm raging without" is not the same thing as giving them an education which is what the schools function is. The plan should be first to set about making a plan to fix the broken world the kids come from and while the fixing is being accomplished remove these broken kids from the education system while giving them "understanding shelter from the storm raging without." It must just be recognized that many of the broken kids will never be able to achieve the educational success of the mainstream kids. I favor a plan that systematically removes the broken kids and puts them in a safe environment that place less emphasis on educational accomplishment and more emphasis on emotional and physical remediation with the possibility of a second chance to reenter the system. This will improve the schools for the cooperative and unbroken kids and incentivize the broken kid to try to get back into the mainstream. The sad fact is that the schools can not both save broken kids and educate all kid to a high level.
I too left another career to become a teacher in an "urban" (read high poverty) public school and was overwhelmed by the burdens my students carried. But we can't give up on teaching our kids. In the beginning, I wanted schools to provide social workers, health clinics and food banks. While I still think those things could help, I realized that the only thing I had any power to change was the knowledge my kids left my room with. While public schools fail our kids in so many ways, there ARE teachers who are making it work. I will not excuse our government from its responsibility to our kids, but in the meantime, it is NOT hopeless. Schools and districts can transform themselves. I recommend Doug Lemov's book, Teach Like a Champion, to any teacher frustrated by the obstacles we face. Pamela, don't give up, we need loving, committed teachers like you if this is ever going to change. The fact is, we can't change parents, we can't remove poverty, but we can give our kids hope and the education they need to make that hope reality.
The problem is that the people who care are not organized in any coherent way and are too thinly spread out to be heard above the background noise of daily problems and difficulties that are by kids in schools today.
Terrible prompt you assigned them, but you were learning so you get a pass.
I teach in the "burbs". But I have the same % on free and reduced lunch, highly diverse culturally, highly unstable homes...
I see the same disconnect. 9th graders entering reading and writing at a 5th grade level. But is it me that fails if they don't pass that state assessment by the end of the 10th grade or graduate. I feel like we're doing triage with the human mind and spirit.
Our SYSTEM is broken. We don't have bad teachers. Maybe one or two per building if that. It is a systemic problem. We need a re-design.
There are solutions out there. Harvard did a massive 15 year study. "Understanding by Design" "Assessment for Learning" "Democratic Classrooms", etc.
But the system itself is broken and unless and until we address that in a fundemental way, we're going to see far too many beautiful young people fall by the wayside, regardless of how good our teachers are.
Fix the education system and in a generation or two, poverty might be eradicated in this country. But you have to really fix it. Not these tweaks you read about in fad articles on HP. A total re-design. Ours is a system designed to feed a Republic. It is by definition designed to lose 30-45% of our kids each year and see the top 10-15% really excel and maybe jump into the high earning brackets.
The re-design must be one intended to feed a democracy wherin we really leave no child behind. We must see education as a matter of national security and a matter of our economic survival in addition to a moral good.
Many of us that work in inner city schools have been saying the same thing for a long time- fix what's happening outside of the schools, rather than blaming teachers for the so called "achievement gaps".
Those that do not have direct contact with the types of students and their lives that we encounter each and every day are quick to offer "band-aid" solutions. What REALLY needs to be done- can't be solved in a political sound bite.
Are you listening, Mayor Bloomberg?