Paul Karrer teaches fifth grade in a low-income community in California.
He writes:
Frank Bruni’s New York Times piece “Are Kids Too Coddled?” basically states tougher education standards like the Common Core may require a tough love that some parents and educators don’t like. So some parents are opting their kids out of testing.
Mr. Bruni is a journalist not an educator and it shows. He’s done a very harmful fluff piece on parents who “coddle” their young kids. He misses the many valid points that testing is a total waste unless it is diagnostic for kids. It should not be used for teacher evaluations. It is a destructive input into our educational system because it is subtractive to the content of what we teach. High stakes testing only causes test preparation. Plus, it sucks money out of the classroom.
Mr. Bruni is most fortunate that his life experience is around the sheltered, pampered, and the entitled. But even so, the conclusions he draws are incorrect. Even the entitled know testing is basely wrong, but testing and more testing for those who reside in the clutches of poverty is criminal.
Putting aside my first impulse to deeply insert some number two pencils (erasers first will be my humane gesture) in Mr. Bruni’s ears, I’d like to comment on coddling and reality for the vast majority of us in schools with children swaddled in the luxurious lap of desperate poverty.
Two weeks ago we had parent conferences – my cherubs are ten or eleven years old. A nice age. One parent confided that her child wore a diaper. (I hadn’t noticed – AH HA… THAT’S WHY THE CHILD WEARS BAGGY PANTS ALL THE TIME. )
Later, another parent had her kids spinning around me during our conference. One is on meds (not something I like or recommend) turns out the parent is a recovering meth addict, only the recovering part is in much doubt.
At last year’s conference an Anglo mom brought in her three children. All incredibly low performers, with low attendance rates, and low ability. In the middle of the conference her cell phone rang. For a milli-second this annoyed me. The youngest of the girls beamed at me, “Dad’s ready to cross.”
“Cross?” I asked.
“Yup, he’s at the frontier.”
“Frontier?”
The mom interrupted her daughter, “We are at the girls’ teacher conference. Her teacher is here.” The mom addressed me, “Their dad says hello.”
The mom refocused on the call, “When you going? Ok..we love you and will pray for you.”
She turned her phone off and couldn’t eyeball me. “Their dad was deported. He’s in the Mexican desert ready to make an illegal crossing on the frontier…the border.”
The girls are all 100% US citizens as is the mom. They linked up with their dad days later, but live on luck’s flip and poverty’s edge. They also moved….again.
Coddle….no, Mr. Bruni we don’t coddle our kids very much. I wish we could. But I hug them a lot…it keeps me from crying.
Beautiful. I wonder though if the Frank Bruni’s of the world truly understand or care.
This is why I love reading this blog. People who visit here care deeply about one another. Thank you, Paul, and each and every one of you, who still know hugs make a difference in a child’s life. Happy Thanksgiving to all the wonderful people who comment here and renew my belief every day, there is much goodness in the world. Thank you Diane for making this possible. May your Thanksgiving be a day of family, friends, and relaxation!!!
Thanks for your kind words. We are up against the wall, but we are the good guys.I will not give up the fight. Paul Karrer
I recall my daughter’s kindergarten teacher sharing that she scored the lowest of any student she ever had on a standardized test. Even though the test could be used for diagnostic purposes I put more weight on the teacher’s evaluation of my daughter over a years time. We both agreed it did not represent my daughter’s abilities at all. My daughter went on to graduate from an honors college summa cum laude. She holds advanced degrees and has a very successful career. How sad it would have been if my daughter’s kindergarten teacher would have been evaluated on her test results. She obviously taught her more than the results could ever measure.
“She obviously taught her more than the results could ever measure.”
And the VAST majority of public school teachers (and all the teachers in the private sector also) do that every minute of every hour of every day, month and year. Year in and year out.
And the best reward? When the teacher sees that light in the students eyes that says he/she now understands what was being taught and gains the confidence to continue to, at times, struggle through the learning process (which in reality is a never ending process until we breathe no more)!!!
Measure that against a “standard” or through a test!!
Many of my low-income kids are indeed spoiled and lazy. They are belligerent, uncooperative and only want to sleep.
I don’t consider these kids lucky or in need of more rigorous work, though, because their lives are textbook examples of what poverty breeds.
They are so “coddled” that no one is parenting them, they stay up until all hours, they desperately need glasses instead of cell phones, they roam the streets unsupervised at will, they use drugs/alcohol as young as elementary school, they are obese from poor nutrition…shall I go on?
My students are the polar opposite of coddled. They are, however, in desperate need of engaged, proactive parents. Once they get those, I will be happy to chat with Frank about making the work even more demanding.
Amen. Painful honesty. Funny, the underlying message that is being told to many teachers in their RISE evaluations at PPS is that if they were more effective at teaching, their students would not want to sleep or text in their classes. They would all be perfectly engaged.
I am trained to work with the most difficult population of students. For a long time, I loved what I was doing. My problem is not the kids who have more needs than I can meet, but the administrators who are carrying out the reform orders of people whom I feel are either clueless to the real problems facing teachers everyday or are in cahoots with some agenda to undermine teachers for some reason I can’t quite wrap my head around. It’s like the world has gone mad. I am cussed out at least once a day, yet it is somehow my fault. I am failing to do something. I try not to write discipline referrals on students who are acting out in even extreme ways because I know that instead of the child’s behavior being addressed, I will be targeted by administration. The kids know this, so it has created this vicious cycle of bad behaviors that do not allow for classroom instruction and learning to take place.
Thank you to all the politicians and billionaires who are pushing the reforms that have done nothing to raise achievement and are ruining the lives of wonderful teachers and fragmenting public schools which are a vital part of the fabric of our neediest communities.
Special thanks to Charlotte Danielson for her wonderful contribution to the implementation of a highly SUBJECTIVE tool used to evaluate teachers – RISE. Teachers who are truly poor teachers are being evaluated as proficient or distinguished, and teachers who have put their heart and soul into teaching are being evaluated as basic or unsatisfactory. It has done absolutely nothing to improve teacher practice.
It’s all so very sad.
“. . . for some reason I can’t quite wrap my head around. . . ”
Five letter$$$$$.
Given his willingness to pontificate on topics about which he knows nothing, I wouldn’t trust food critic Frank Bruni to coddle an egg.
Well said.
Wonder if he even knows what coddling an egg is.
This story is an example of why teachers need to always take the time to get to know the parents. I always made an effort. I will never forget, after doing home visits my first year teaching the shock I went through realizing that only one child, the white one, had running water. That the one whose rather large mother, who also only had one arm, (reportedly the other had been shot off by his father), had been pregnant. “Mama had a baby last night. The lady with the black bag came and we went to grandma’s. When we came back, the baby was there. We named him Alonzo. He has curly hair. Elijah and I had to sleep in the little bed so mama could be in the big bed with the baby.” Eugene and Elijah were 11 and 12. Eugene couldn’t read, but he knew exactly how he was related to every child in the school.
You never know what your kids are going through, what parents are on drugs or mentally ill, or in jail who has an active father (Ask for Daddy to come to the IEP) or what kind of life they have. I had an undocumented Mexican highschooler in my homeroom who was absent a lot because when his father got drunk he hit his mother. So sometimes he had to miss the bus to be there until his father went to work.
And never assume that the parents don’t care. Every day, living in the hood I watch parents walk their kids to the bus stop and wait for them at the bus stop in the afternoon. We have a lot of registered sex offenders because it is an area with fairly low priced rental housing where the owners ask nothing more than you pay your rent. Just because a family is poor (although none as disadvantaged as the rural kids I talked about above) does not mean they don’t care. They aren’t coddled. They are tough as shoe leather but as gentle as lambs. They are real people with real aspirations and whole bunch of love for anyone who dares to care about them..
I would agree.
I remember when a group of inner city 8th graders (KCMO) sat and chatted about funerals. About how if the person was shot in the face (like a couple of their brothers), it was closed caskett. And about which overpass their cousin got gunned down on.
And when I asked an 8th grade Hispanic boy what he wanted to work towards as a career he told me, in all seriousness, that he wanted to be a drug dealer. And a gal in the class (who was later expelled for bringing a 5 inch blade to school) chimed in, “well seriously, Miguel would be a good drug dealer.”
When you mix adolescence with “hood” culture, it can be hard to reach the kids. But I do know I reached some. They are jaded and, I think, feel rejected by an unreachable world (the downtown offices they see, the banks and those who own sports teams) and they develop a defensive reflex that can be just plain mean; but they do find community in the “hood;”. It’s just that this community sends them messages that often hurt them (gangs, drugs etc). They are quick to mock anything they perceive to be patronizing or irrelevant to them.
I am all about high standards. I just think there has to be, also, an understanding in group dynamics, establishing trust and staying motivated among groups of older kids who will work to suck the motivation right out of you.
To lead into music lessons (this was a K-8 school, where the 8th graders came to music every day, but I did not have band instruments), I often used group building games and activities I learned from church youth group and camp (the Presbyterian church has done a good job of cultivating recreational ministry for positive group dynamics, that are not religious in nature and can be applied in any group setting). If I had not had that background to anchor me and to reach the kids, I am not sure I would have made it. That said, when the opportunity came to move and work elsewhere, I took it.
“I am all about high standards.”
I’m not! (Didn’t that one surprise you Joanna-ha ha).
I am all for respectful behaviors from and for all that help uplift the classroom teaching and learning environment so that all students can learn the most that they choose/can learn all the while learning that they can be a positive force not only for the class but for themselves.
Standards are externally imposed criterion that may or may not serve the interests of the individual learner/child. Standards are also edudeformer speak for those impositions.
Numerous stories from the Buffalo Public Schools:
2 elementary siblings who came to school every day for a week until it was discovered their single-parent missing mom had gotten drunk and died in a ditch.
Pre-school teacher who got in trouble for sending a note home asking parents to bathe their kids and wash their clothes – they stank.
2 pre-teen girls who were making money prostituting. They were happy for a little extra pocket change. Their parents were . . .?
10 year old boy in prison for stabbing and killing a woman who was arguing with his mom.
These kids aren’t coddled.