In 2011, a former graduate student of mine ran an Internet search for the term “failing school.” It was almost never used until the mid-1990s. Then each year, it appeared with greater frequency. After the passage of No Child Left Behind, it become a cliche: Any school with low test scores was “a failing school.” The term “failing school” is especially useful to those who want to close them and turn their building over to charter operators, which may not accept the same students.
A reader writes:
The term “failing schools” is a weapon. I have worked in a public school in the south Bronx for almost 20 years. Our students come from poor, often stressed, families. Many are English Language Learners. Most are socially and academically “behind”. And I love seeing them every day. We LOOK like a failing school when you judge us through the prism of standardized testing, but when my kids win the Thurgood Marshall Junior Mock Trial Competition, or come back to tell me about their college experiences, or stare in wonder at the city in which they live but don’t really know while we take them on field trips, or beg me to continue reading To Kill a Mockingbird or Of Mice and Men instead of turning to test prep material, I KNOW we are not a failing school. Eva Moskowitz has chosen our building for her next conquest, and we’ve been told that no matter what we do, “it’s a done deal”. Need a laugh? The vote is scheduled to take place deep in Chinatown! How many of our parents do you think will be able to show up for that? My kids are not failures, no matter how many times they are told so by the VERY PEOPLE WHO RUN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM IN THIS CITY.
It’s humiliating and soul crushing to be a teacher in an inner city school. The people who should be getting accolades for working in such places are beaten down instead. I’ll go to work tomorrow and discuss the symbolism of the objects that Boo Radley leaves in the tree in To Kill a Mockingbird. My kids will ask great questions and make wonderful observations. Many of them will score poorly on the ELA exam in 2 weeks. They, and I, will be labeled failures. It’s so very, very sad.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Two of my children went to a high school that was labeled “failing” shortly after they graduated. Many of the kids at the school went on to college or good careers. Others struggled academically and some dropped out. In other words, it was a balanced school with a variety of kids from different backgrounds. That was a good education in itself.
Once being labeled as “failing”, the school began to lose kids whose families were afraid they wouldn’t get a quality education there. It was sad to see that. At the same time, I was glad my children had dodged the reform bullet that torpedoed their school.
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The full meme and image is ” trapped in failing schools.”
What happens if you say “trapped BY charter school marketing?”
Or seduced by profiteers?
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Very good question, Laura. Using propaganda Techniques is the FEDs and the Charter School way.
Our country is being feed PROPAGANDA from the DEFORMERS who has their own hidden agenda … not good for this country. Egads, I detest liars.
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Howzabout when the “hard bigotry of mandated failure” aka high-stakes standardized testing feeds and reinforces the “soft bigotry of low expectations” aka the rheeflex rheephorm view of public schools?
Read the following on the blog of the redoubtable Ms. Katie O entitled “Say ‘Sayonara’ to the Japanese Language Program at Langston Hughes Elementary”—
Link: http://mskatiesramblings.blogspot.com/2015/04/say-sayonara-to-japanese-language.html
Ah, but the leaders and enablers and enforcers of the “new civil rights movement of our time” are tripped up by one of their own foundational principles:
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
Groucho would be so so proud of their devotion to Marxist belief and practice…
😎
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I’d much rather be trapped in a “failing” school than trapped in a failing White House.
I could face myself in the mirror if I worked in the former, but not in the latter.
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This makes me feel like crying. What will happen to the children?
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Ka-CHING … our kids are FOR PROFIT in this country. SAD.
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NJ governor Chris Christie loves to use the term “failure factories” at the highest volume and from countless media venues from which he can pontificate on education. You would think that Christie would crow about the fact that NJ public schools always score in the top tier of the nation’s schools. Instead, he prefers to highlight and talk about supposed failures in the troubled inner cities such as Camden, Newark and Trenton. A couple other overused bumper stickers and oft-repeated clichés of the reform crowd are status quo and entrenched bureaucracies. Why are charter schools being imposed on successful school districts which are success factories?
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I teach in a “failing school” in Newark. The One Newark plan and charter school proliferation are instrumental in the downward spiral of my school. Next year, the plan is to eliminate LD classes and place those students in maintsream classes with in class support. Many ELLs have received little to no ESL/Bilingual instruction the entire year. Word is that next year more ELLs will be placed in the school. Savvy parents are exploring other options.
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“Failure is in the eye of the beholder.” The school described here is simply a school that serves the neediest and most vulnerable. Poverty causes low performance on standardized tests, not poor teaching. If our leaders cared about improving outcomes for children, they would address the funding inequities in our system while supporting poor families through community outreach. Instead, our leaders have chosen to ignore all the research about schools and poverty. They have jumped on the bandwagon of “failure factories” in order to placate the oligarchs that contribute to the campaigns of our professional sycophants.
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AMEN!
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I do not think funding alone will solve the problem. It will help of course, but it won’t solve the problem. I taught in the Watts section of Los Angeles when I started teaching (I didn’t leave because I had a problem teaching there, I left to move to the east coast where I am originally from) and I found the students there more motivated than the students I currently teach. But they lived in an environment that had all the problems that come with poverty, high crime, parents who work too many hours to be able to be as involved as they should in their children’s education, and the hopelessness and despair that often comes with poverty. In the four years I taught there four of my students were killed in gang related shootings, only one of them was involved in gangs. Students in poor neighborhoods often do not begin their “formal” education until they start school in kindergarten or first grade, while children from more affluent areas start their learning at a much earlier age, often only because they grow up around educated parents. But there are also resources available to them, like pre-school, that are not available to the children of the poor. I think the funding is important but there also needs to be greater appreciation for the obstacles these children have to overcome to complete their education successfully.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
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There are more to the problems in urban America than a bare bones school budgets. Poverty with all the problems you mentioned are at the heart of the problem. I don’t have a magic bullet for solutions, but I think ignoring the effects of poverty has been a failure. First, we need to pay people a living wage. That move alone should help those that are aspirational. It would also allow parents to spend more time with their children and make gang life less appealing. Beyond that, we need to support families, particularly single parent households or families in crisis.
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Yes, the really sad thing is that this wonderful teacher and students who learn without a pre programmed curriculum but through an interchange with their teacher will be lost with the push to business operated charter schools. We all have neighborhood schools that we love that are not in the high achieving, good part of town but we love them and stay throughout our work lives. This will not happen with charters.Good teachers will get discouraged and leave, parents will pick charters under the mistaken perception that they are better and neighborhood schools will become a collection of profit-making chains that survive 1-5 years, but who cares, as long as the national charters can suck the money out of them. Pretty grim picture, hope it doesn’t come true.
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http://trueschoolreform.org/2015/03/destructive-reform-mike-miles-style/
An example of how a Broad-trained superintendent can cause a school to “fail.”
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/headlines/20150522-little-progress-seen-on-dallas-isds-staar-results.ece
In fact, entire district is on downward trend after 3rd year of Mike Miles destructive reforms
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Sadly the United States government has labeled schools with mainly poor children as “failing.” Whoever thought…
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At least in my area, parents usually don’t pick charters because they’re better educationally (and they REALLY aren’t). It’s more of a status symbol and a form of segregation. We have a large number of immigrants in our area, generally from Latin America. These charters are almost completely Caucasian. This is a chance, parents say, to get away from “those kids,” who are seen to be disruptive and maybe even criminal. The sad thing is that the percentages of disruptive kids in my school are pretty even between groups. And these parents won’t even give our school a chance–even though we are far and away better educationally. Sure, the charter scores higher on the stupid school grade, but the student populations are nowhere near similar. But then, the parents can brag that they have their kids in a charter school. I sincerely don’t understand their thinking.
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“I sincerely don’t understand their thinking.”
I think we bring out this sort of thinking systemically, simply by creating another tier of schools. Humans have enough wired-in competition and tribalism that it pops up as a no-fault when rationalizing our choices. We can educate our way above that to some degree, but experience counts heavily. One is not likely to get experience countering easy generalizations about groups, unless we’re all thrown in the same pot.
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BRAVO!!!! You are a gift to your students and to the city.
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If you haven’t discovered Google n-grams they give you a way of charting the frequency of phrases. Here’s “Government run schools”, a favorite phrase of the Fox news crowd, charted from 1940 (when the term was non-existent) through 2008:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=government+run+schools&year_start=1940&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cgovernment%20run%20schools%3B%2Cc0
And here’s the one for “failing public schools” which began entering the lexicon in (surprise!) in the late 1980s but REALLY took off after NCLB. Substitute your own words or phrases to see how particular ones increase in frequency…
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Oops! Here’s the n-gram for failing public schools:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=failing+public+schools&year_start=1940&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cfailing%20public%20schools%3B%2Cc0
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“Failing school” means a school that is made up of poor, immigrant and minority students. They are often “miracle schools” but there potential for easy profits tied with the ignorance of cultural elites makes them easy targets for modern “Carpetbaggers”.
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Failing schools?
How about the charters?
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Gordon Wilder: so glad to see another fan of Ionesco—
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
😎
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The conversation needs to stop about failing schools, failing teachers, and failing students. This kind of judgement hurts everyone–except, perhaps, for people who see dollar signs in education.
Rather, let’s start talking about the various successful practices in different kinds of educational situations. Why do students get low test grades at a certain school and higher grades at another? What can be done to support those students who have reading, math, and writing obstacles? How can we support schools troubled by violence, poor attendance, or where large cohorts of students are language learners or suffer from learning disabilities? How can we support students who come to school troubled by violence or poverty at home? How can we help new teachers in general, teachers who don’t or can’t use technology in the classroom, teachers in classrooms where kids are used to being treated unfairly?
We are a nation of incredible means. Let’s talk about how can we help schools with such tight budgets that their classrooms are overcrowded. I teach at public school in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where our graduation rate is over 95 percent and our students all go off to college, yet our budget seems to shrink every year, making it more difficult to support our students as they try to graduate and prepare for college. I have watched, in our 14 years of existence, the number of students rise while the number of faculty decline, setting up the conundrum where classroom size had grown by about 10 students per classroom.
Our national conversation needs to be about helping and supporting different kinds of schools–each school is like a student, with its own strengths and weaknesses. And thus each school needs different kinds of support, just like each child needs to learn as best she can in her unique way.
There is no silver bullet in education. Never has been.
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Garth,
“I teach at public school in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where our graduation rate is over 95 percent and our students all go off to college, yet our budget seems to shrink every year, making it more difficult to support our students as they try to graduate and prepare for college. I have watched, in our 14 years of existence. . . ”
What is the public school in which you teach?
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High School for Public Service in the Wingate campus.
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Is your school administered by, a part of the NYC public schools?
TIA
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Duane, the school is entirely a NYC public school. Proud not to be a charter school.
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Thanks for the reply. From what I could read on your school, it appears it has a lot of excellent programs. Keep up the good work for the students!!
If only the teachers were allowed to design programs for the students (obviously in conjunction with the parents and students) without outside interference of “educational standards and standardized testing” dominating the curriculum we might be able to truly provide an excellent teaching and learning environment for all students (at least those willing to take advantage of it.)
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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Face the problem, Apply the solution. We need to stop putting band-aids on and get “right down to the real nitty-gritty”. People race and resources? Uh, yeah–duh-uh. Let’s get with it and make it happen. Bull, horns, words, confrontations, tangled yarn, combing through knots–yeah, we need to get right with it and finally act like we know…seriously, as in, “BYE, FELICIA…”
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