Education debates in D.C. and the media tend to be
dominated by what economists and think tanks say. What is needed
most and seldom heard is the voice of teachers. Here is a brilliant
new voice that should get as much air time as Bill Gates, Joel
Klein, and Arne Duncan. What are the chances? In
this article at Salon, John Savage describes his
experience teaching at J.E. Pearce Middle School in Austin, Texas,
which the state education commissioner called “the worst school” in
the state. Why was it the worst school in Texas? Savage considers
the reformer thesis: Teachers with high expectations can work
miracles. This is the line from Michelle Rhee and Teach for
America. Savage quickly dashes that fantasy–or his experience
dashed it. He writes: “In the last decade a new species of
educational reformer has captured the public’s attention. Talk
show-friendly celebrities like former Washington, D.C., Schools
Chancellor Michelle Rhee, and award-winning movies like “Waiting
for Superman,” have gained fame by blaming teachers for the
achievement gap between poor students and middle-class students.
“The appeal of this educational axiom — ascribing student
achievement to teacher quality — is understandable. It suggests a
silver bullet solution: improve teaching and you improve test
scores, especially for poor students. And because test results
predict life outcomes — the likelihood of securing a job, getting
divorced, going to prison—better teaching can lift students from
poverty. Or so the thinking goes. “Some have called this narrative
the myth of magical teaching. We yearn to believe it. We yearn to
think that caring, hardworking teachers can change the world, or at
least their students’ lives. Like American Exceptionalism and
Horatio Alger stories, this supposition has become part of our
national mythology. As an idealistic young educator I, too, gladly
accepted the myth of the magical teacher as reality — that is,
before Pearce shattered my naïveté.” He discovered: “Here is the
hard truth about my experience: I didn’t have much of an impact.
Sure, I made a small part of the day more pleasant for some
students, but I didn’t change the course of any of my kids’ lives,
much less the nature of the school. A middle-class teacher coming
into a low-income school and helping poor students realize their
true potential makes for an excellent White Savior Film, but
“Dangerous Minds” isn’t real life. Real life at Pearce is
survival.” Reform after reform came and went: “We have poured money
into high-poverty schools, and we have replaced entire teaching
staffs, but to little avail. Teachers aren’t the problem, poverty
is. Moreover, segregating our poorest students in high-poverty
schools, as we often do, exacerbates the problem. “After parsing
fourth-grade math scores, education theorist Richard Khalenberg
concluded, “low-income students attending more affluent schools
scored almost two years ahead of low-income students in
high-poverty schools. Indeed, low-income students given a chance to
attend more affluent schools performed more than half a year
better, on average, than middle-income students who attend
high-poverty schools.” “If socioeconomic status is a primary driver
of academic performance, and if student achievement suffers in
high-poverty schools, why do we continue to organize schools in a
way that predetermines some for failure and then blame teachers?
“There are ways we can make education better for all students —
socioeconomic school integration, investing in early childhood
education, providing the wraparound services students need — but a
myopic focus on teacher quality won’t fundamentally improve
schools.”
I have to agree. In Kansas City, MO I asked for the “worst” school and I got it. I saw teachers working hard. I saw the same efforts going into things that I saw at middle class and upper middle class schools where I had taught previously. The only visibly weak teacher I ever encountered had already been moved to the ISS classroom (in other words, the administration found a way to best utilize what she did have to offer in honor of her tenure). The first day I toured the school I went home and cried (and wrote this song https://myspace.com/jibblinthefroeline/music/song/promise-kept-35097075-36678433), but I stuck it out, wondering what the real answer to changing the future for these children really was. I decided I just have to hope that I did some good; I sure tried. I spent my own money and that of donations to bring in music groups. Every day I tried something new (it was a K-8 school and I saw 8th graders every day and I was the only white person, usually, in the room). I only called security twice in my two years there (whereas, many other teachers called them any time there was a disruption).
But the teachers were not the problem in that school. At all.
I think the school has since been closed (I moved away and that was eight years ago).
For those interested in a wonderful recent moment honoring a teacher, here is a voice teacher with Kristin Chenoweth. Not saying teachers can solve all problems. But the song reminds me of what great teachers do…they can help change people’s lives:
http://www.broadwayworld.com/article/In-Her-Own-Words-Sarah-Horn-Shares-Inspirational-Story-of-Singing-with-Kristin-Chenoweth-at-the-Hollywood-Bowl-and-Going-Viral-20130825
Savage is right and it begins to be obvious that the “myopic focus on teacher quality” is being used so that fundamental improvements to the survival-high-poverty don’t get made.
Instead, we use corporate media to attach citizen attention onto the manufactured issue of teacher quality and away from the human reality of “high-poverty”.
We assign Bill Clinton to establish the New Market Tax Credits Initiative so that hedge fund and private equity dollars get a huge payback for financing the teacher quality/charter/NCLB/CC industry. We allow Gates, Broad, Arnold and so many other entrepreneur foundations to create “philanthropy” headlines and follow-the-leader grants to teacher quality spin-off research and reforms.
But teachers like Savage meet the kids every morning and it is like greeting an Orphan Train, children and communities abandoned by the very social, economic and educational forces that could have made a difference if We The People had just stayed the course and gave it a TRY.
I started my teaching career in a school in a rough-and-tumble blue collar, one-factory town. Because I was the new guy, I got all the remedial preps–six of them. My students were largely from homes with single moms who worked the second shift and were never home or parents who were unemployed alcoholics or drug addicts. They were foul-mouthed and dirty and ill-clothed and often hungry. I was idealistic and hard-working, and I desperately wanted to help each and every one of my students to have a shot at a better life.
Guess what? I didn’t make a lot of difference in the life of the quiet, mousey, childlike thirteen year old with the fanatical fundamentalist parents who got pregnant; in the life of the fourteen year old who came to school with bruises from regular beatings and who stole his father’s car and ran away to another state; in the life of the sixteen year old daughter of a reputed prostitute who was expelled for getting into a fight in a hallway in which she kicked her classmate repeatedly in the head; in the life of the boy who stole his father’s gun and had it taken away from him when he held it up to the head of another kid in a locker bay and threatened to blow his brains out; in the life of the fifteen year old so desperate for any sort of affection that she slept with half the boys in the school and had been doing so for years. A lot of people saw my charges as criminals and delinquents. But I could still see that they were just children.
That was decades ago, but I still remember each of those children as though it were yesterday. And what I most remember is that each one was worth something, had value, but was SO desperate and SO lost and SO in need of much, much more than I, or any teacher, could provide that it all seemed, quite often, completely hopeless. I would have dreams at night of the scene from Jesus Christ Superstar in which Christ is overwhelmed by the lepers crowding around him. Not that I thought of myself as Christlike–far from it. But I was a teacher, and the Buddha and the Christ were in the same profession as I.
And here’s what I thought about, all the time: take any one of those kids and put him or her in a different home environment from day one–an environment where people have money and hope and concern and attainments–and everything would be different. One would only have had to switch these paupers out for princes and princesses, in the cradle, to have changed the outcomes utterly.
It’s easy for politicians to buy into magical nostrums because doing so keeps them from having to face and deal with the real problems: a THIRD of the kids in the United States, with all its wealth, are living in families below the poverty line, a third of them are living in environments in which the American dream is something one looks at from the outside, in which hope is a word that politicians throw around when it’s time to garner votes, in a world in which the fix is in from the cradle on, and it’s an angry one.
I agree that traditional geographically based school admission policies reinforce the SES segregation in residential housing. Even in my college town the free and reduced price lunch rates range from nearly 70% to under 20% in the elementary schools (I do have to admit that this can be misleading in a college town as the families of students may not be poor in the same sense as the families headed by high school leavers earning minimum wage).
Isn’t going to open admissions and less SES segregation in housing part of the solution?
Mr. Shepard, lots to comment on in your thoughtful post. But here are two quick points as I need to go to school in a few minutes.
1. You wrote, “Because I was the new guy, I got all the remedial preps–six of them.” Can’t say how often it happens. But that does happen, and it should not.
2. You wrote, ” I didn’t make a lot of difference in the life of…(and then you eloquently describe some young people in very challenging circumstances.” You may be modest – they may remember your kindness and encouragement. You may have inspired them far more than you know.
What I do know is that there are schools that have a huge positive impact on youngsters of the kind you describe. I’ve worked in some, I’ve visited others.
Those schools did not solve all the youngsters or family’s problems. Yes, we do need to work on problems outside schools.
But schools can and are, in some cases, having a huge positive impact on the youngsters you describe. Lots to learn from them. Here’s something I wrote about the 7 year effort of Cincinnati Public Schools that resulted in closing the HS graduation gap among white and African American students:
http://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2011/06/what-did-cincinnati-public-schools-do-close-high-school-graduation-gap
Joe:
I found and read the Strive 2012-13 report.
Click to access 2012-13%20Partnership%20Report.pdf
It makes for encouraging reading.
Thanks for your kind words about what I might have accomplished without knowing it, Joe, but I was very young and way in over my head. Out of sheer embarrassment, I won’t recount my many failures. I will tell one success story.
I had one class of all remedial 11th-grade boys. I pretty much threw out the textbooks, and we wrote, together, a manual on basic auto repair. Kids who hadn’t paid any attention to anything else in their classes for years were arguing intensely with one another about organization and development and unity and coherence and format and design and grammar, usage, mechanics, and spelling! It was awesome. It helped, of course, that those boys knew a LOT more about repairing cars than I did.
These days, of course, I wouldn’t be able to get away with something like that, with something successful. I would have to be following the invariant, mandated Literacy Design Collaborative lesson plan design for approaching complex texts via text-dependent questions (Plutarch, anyone? He’s one the recommended CCSS list for New York) in order to prepare the kids for the one-size-fits-all Common Core high-stakes standardized assessment they would be forced to take.
As it was, the principal called me on the carpet when he saw my class out in the parking lot, several days in a row, with our heads under the hood of a car. He wasn’t amused, or interested, but then he was already furious with me because I didn’t approve of hitting my students with the paddle that sat in the chalk tray in every room.
Great story, inspired teaching, terrific active learning. We need to have opportunities for great teachers to use their insights, creativity and knowledge to do things like this with and for young people.
This is a well written article. Savage mentions research by Richard Kahlenberg from the Century Fund to support his argument about poverty being a key factor in educational achievement. In trying to track down this research I came across this interesting data driven report:
Click to access Diverse_Charter_Schools.pdf
It makes for interesting reading.
The best thing we could do for the nation’s kids, in the long run, might well be to implement Kahlenberg’s other proposal to help create a climate in the United States that will encourage union organizing and so the rebuilding of the middle class. I am not expert enough in this area to comment on his specific proposal to amend the Civil Rights Act, but I am very much interested in reading his book on the subject, Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right. Until we see the GINI index lowered, we’re not going to see significant improvement in kids’ educational attainment. That should be clear enough to everyone.
Good piece on NPR this morning about a 32-year old father in Detroit trying to raise his two kids on the $7.50 an hour he gets at McDonalds. Another heartwrenching piece on a single-mom waitress in DC unable to make ends meet earning $15/hour. Americans who don’t support higher minimum wages or more robust safety net programs are either ignorant or sadistic.
We clearly see the world differently. It would be better in my opinion for more students to think about starting their own businesses.
Bernie, I like the idea about starting businesses but how do people do that with no money?? Or, when they are saddled with college debt.
Sweat equity is the first place to start. If they go to college then they have four years of business planning and networking. Only the wealthy can afford to treat it as a rite of passage. If your only resource is the willingness of the bank to make a student loan, then best use the opportunity to its fullest.
Some of the most thoughtful responses that I’ve read on this blog! I too spent several years teaching in a high poverty school and everything mentioned hits home. Yes, effective teachers make a difference, but it’s only a piece of the whole solution. What a massive act of malfeasance the reformers are perpetrating against the children of this nation.
There is an ENORMOUS amount of money behind these initiatives for a single set of national standards, one-size-fits-all high-stakes standardized testing for every pupil, value-added measurement of teachers, school letter grading, a national database of student responses, scripted lesson plan designs, charter schools, vouchers, and other parts of the reform agenda. Everywhere one looks there is a “study” prepared by one or more advocates, and each “study” is as slickly illustrated and designed as an annual report from a Fortune 100 company. The stock photo companies must be making a mint licensing pictures of rainbows of smiling kids and teachers whose lives have been renewed and invigorated by turning their schools into test prep factories.
I taught at charter schools which, supposedly, have a great new way of reaching and teaching kids. What I discovered, sadly, was it was the same nonsense of “blame the teacher” for everything. I saw children so undisciplined from day one in my classroom who simply hated school and had parents (or parent) who had zero interest in what their child did or did not do in class.
Then I suffered through “cooperative learning” seminars which means the smart kids do the work and the kids who don’t care just goof off and pretend to learn something. I wore out on “learning styles” of each child. Really? The real world is not going to ask you, “Which learning style are you so we can best teach you how to do your job every day.”
The continued “research” in education is killing a generation of kids. Charter schools have become “let’s hire all my family and make a lot of money off taxpayers” but charter schools are not even close to the answer.
The answer is society itself. The demand for ALL children to be taught that school is important. Whether they become a truck driver, carpenter, dentist, etc…they need to learn the basics and learn how to think and process information. I had kids who could not read a watch or clock, could not write a paragraph and who could not solve the simplest of math problems and yet they passed the 8th grade math state exam.
The system is broken and the politicians don’t care and the parents don’t care. It is the reason private schools are bulging at the seams because anyone who has any $$$ will do anything to get out of public schools.
The culture we live in today is destroying education. It’s not the teachers. It’s the breakdown of families, the outsourcing of jobs destroying our middle class and the poor attitudes of many cultures who consider education a “bad” idea.