We have lived through more than two decades of shaming schools with low test scores, blaming and shaming their teachers and principals for scores that are primarily the result of poverty, poor housing, poor health, poor nutrition.
One reader asserted that excellent schools attract wealthy families.
He was corrected by Steve Nelson, who wrote First Do No Harm: Progressive Education in a Time of Existential Risk.
When I read anything he writes, I find myself nodding vigorously in agreement.
He wrote here that excellent communities create excellent schools, not the other way around.
“You still misstate the cause and effect by writing, “When a neighborhood has excellent schools.” The schools are not excellent. The neighborhood is “excellent.”
“It is, to be sure, a subtle point, but in my book I refer to my own public high school. It was “rated” among America’s best. Graduates went to college at high rates and won prizes of all kinds. The orchestra was considered among the 2 or 3 best in the country. But the teachers and classes were dull and uninspired. The orchestra was good because the kids were privileged and studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music. The parents were either affluent or in higher education or medicine or both.
“The community did not have excellent schools. The schools had an excellent community.
“The schools in the adjacent, poverty-riddled neighborhood were just as good in terms of dedicated teachers and curriculum. The community? Not so lucky.”
Many schools closed because of low test scores were excellent schools filled with dedicated teachers. They were serving the neediest kids and were punished for it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I agree that affluent communities do not have the edge when it comes to excellence in education. Many schools with a diverse student body also produce students that achieve at high levels. Integrated schools can also produce many successful students. Some urban schools may also produce students that achieve at high levels. Last year a young black student from Lamar High School in Houston was accepted into every Ivy League school to which he applied. Lamar High school is an integrated school in one of the more affluent parts of the city.
Some students from poor urban schools may also go to college and become successful, but it is much harder. Urban schools in most cities today are severely underfunded. Students will not do as well if they are in large classes with fewer resources. Minority majority schools also offer fewer advanced courses that put students at a disadvantage when applying to colleges. Students should not have to overcome their high school. All public schools require an investment that will allow their students to be prepared for the future.
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After spending decades teaching at several Philadelphia high schools I’ve seen the some of the best, most skillful, dedicated and creative teachers and support staff in the most difficult of situations. At the school where I spent the last two decades of my career, we had a wide range of situations, ranging from the most academically talented to challenging. Each teacher dealt with this diversity which was also ethnic, racial and economic. All these different children in school together, in class, at lunch, a community. It was such a privilege and pleasure to be a teacher in such a situation. Then things changed as the people in our central administration made decisions that adversely affected us.
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He refers to his own public school experience – “the teachers and classes were dull and uninspired.”
We should not publicly refer to our own school experience with basic generalizations and ask people to accept it as truth.
The teenage mindset and experience comes with a huge “Rashomon” of variables and judgements.
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Good point. I think of one of my HS history teachers who I regarded as extremely bland and mediocre until recently when I started to realize so much of what I know about the Soviet Union comes from her class. I learned a ton in that class. She wasn’t flashy, but she laid a solid foundation of knowledge that benefits me today. I find a lot of smart people are blind to the benefits they got from their teachers because they have this Hollywood vision of what a good teacher looks like –if they’re not Dead Poets Society caliber, they weren’t much good. I bet Steve Nelson could find a lot to praise about his HS teachers if he thought more about it.
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Ponderosa:
I have thought this for many years. Some of the teachers I ‘really liked’ in HS taught me very little, whereas some I liked ‘not so much’ turned out to be very influential, but it took me a few years to recognize the impact. [Don’t get me wrong, some of the teachers I liked ‘not so much’ taught me very little, and two I liked a lot taught me a great deal, but at the time I was ‘clueless’]
This is why the idea of students doing ‘end of course’ teacher evaluations is bogus. Now, if those students gave those evaluations four years after the course, that might actually measure something of value.
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Steve Nelson remembers “dull, uninspired classes” at his award-winning wealthy high school; bpollock speaks of the many dedicated, creative teachers meeting stiff challenges s/he encountered during decades at big-city high schools. I’ve seen that contrast too.
This is very anecdotal, but among my friends I count several (now retired) who spent their careers teaching in poor Newark schools. They are strong, assertive, loving and humorous people– life-long learners bubbling over with ideas and anecdotes from their classrooms.
Some of the teachers my kids had in our wealthy district were like that too, but they were the standouts, & mostly found in the then-overcrowded middle school. Many more were unseasoned/ uninspired, & seemingly not changing much w/ added experience– a possible consequence of too many easy-to-teach hisch students dashing thro their class to pick up the necessary grade. Uniformly outstanding were those running the child study and guidance teams, and the lead SpEd teachers.
My tiny unverified poll suggests that the most gifted among us seek out and thrive under difficult conditions. These folks need only kids to teach, and the freedom to do their best to make a difference in those kids’ lives. The only way you can chase them away is by tying their hands & feet to the point where they can no longer do that.
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It’s not that one teaches or studies in the neighborhood; it’s that one is part of the neighborhood. I like that.
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Your last paragraph says it all.
It isn’t easy to find teachers willing to stay and work with the neediest kids. Most bailout in the first few years and leave education or move to an upper-middle-class community to teach. The teachers that stay don’t do it because they are incompetent. In those schools, the kids eat incompetent teachers and spit them out in no time.
The fastest burn out at the high school where I taught was one new teacher who left after teaching three classes on his first day. At the end of his third period with two classes left to teach, he stormed in the office, threw his keys on the principal’s desk and quit. Said he couldn’t take it.
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I taught poor minority ELLs for my most of my career. Some teachers were surprised that I could “endure” it. I didn’t; I loved it. It was what I was meant to do! When I taught French to Americans, I was bored to tears with the ridiculous prescribed program, and, frankly, the students didn’t need me as much, although I had some lovely students.
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I don’t think it is fair calling those teachers incompetent because they lack at classroom management. They may be amazing at other aspects of teaching.
There is an art to classroom management, but I know plenty of teachers who are great at classroom management that need to improve in other areas.
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Having attended and taught in “excellent schools” clearly the community mattered. I expect that high expectations had a lot to do with the “excellent” descriptor.
If the communities were “excellent” it was because they had the highest of expectations for their schools – and that is not just parents – and it was not because good schools = high property values. It was because the majority of those in the community valued PUBLIC education (and many sent their kids to private and parochial schools) and they supported the public schools.
When a school becomes a parent and community member’s “MY school” or “OUR school” – then they become the “excellent” community that nurtures excellent schools.
The answer: community full-service schools.
There is a double-edged sword with which we contend today. Choice in all of its iterations is a solution and a problem. (And, I do not include charters in that category of choice. Charters (except the few bona fide Shanker version charters) are a blemish, ok, an scorching sore on public education. Private and parochial schools know their place. Except for the voucher and tax credit crowd, they are not out to kill public education for every student)
Magnet schools make sense. Of course, why not have options?
Integrating schools make sense because everyone’s achievement can go up.
Desegregation makes judicial and equity sense.
However – they kill neighborhoods.
It is no surprise that those who (finally) recognized that reconstituting schools, closing schools, punishing schools, fixation on test scores for schools and other political fixes do not work have shifted energy to creating community schools: “Full service” schools with the overused but sensible concept of “wrap around services.”
For many adults school was not a pleasant experience. And, going to their child’s school now is intimidating. Between our jargon and authoritarian presence, it’s just another trip to the principal’s office.
If the neighborhood is not “excellent” or does not carry high expectations, the convenient, open 12 hours a day, full service community school can be that hub of high expectations. Clubs, medical vans, family advocates, legal services, agency outreach, public utilities support sessions, and parent education are the norm.
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Diane Finally–a moment of thought by the one-percent.
(I’m trying to move beyond thinking: “poor babies.”) CBK
ALL SNIPs Below:
“Capitalism in crisis: U.S. billionaires worry about the survival of the system that made them rich.”
“The billionaire on the other side of the table let out a nervous laugh. Chris Larsen was on his third start-up and well on his way to being one of the wealthiest people in the valley, if not the world. ‘Realizing people hate your guts has some value,’ he joked.
“For decades, Democrats and Republicans have hailed America’s business elite, especially in Silicon Valley, as the country’s salvation. The government might be gridlocked, the electorate angry and divided, but America’s innovators seemed to promise a relatively pain-free way out of the mess. Their companies produced an endless series of products that kept the U.S. economy churning and its gross domestic product climbing. Their philanthropic efforts were aimed at fixing some of the country’s most vexing problems. Government’s role was to stay out of the way.
“Now that consensus is shattering. For the first time in decades, capitalism’s future is a subject of debate among presidential hopefuls and a source of growing angst for America’s business elite. In places such as Silicon Valley, the slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and the halls of Harvard Business School, there is a sense that the kind of capitalism that once made America an economic envy is responsible for the growing inequality and anger that is tearing the country apart. . . .
“In Sanders, Khanna found a candidate who shared his diagnosis of the country’s most vexing problems: inequality and the failures of unrestrained capitalism.” END QUOTES
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/capitalism-in-crisis-us-billionaires-worry-about-the-survival-of-the-system-that-made-them-rich/2019/04/20/3e06ef90-5ed8-11e9-bfad-36a7eb36cb60_story.html?utm_term=.76ef56c883fc&wpisrc=al_trending_now__alert-economy–alert-politics–alert-national&wpmk=1
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The students make the school. If you can cherrypick a low-income community for its best behaved and most motivated students, you get a KIPP.
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Steve Nelson’s book, FIRST DO NO HARM, is excellent.
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The tail (school culture) rarely wags the dog (community/family culture). The inherent constraints imposed by under-educated, unstructured, and dysfunctional family cultures are nearly impossible to overcome, at scale and at a sustainable level, by the culture of a school system. There are many examples of high energy, intense, well intentioned efforts to surmount the challenges temporarily, but they inevitably fail to last.
Without economic hope in the form of meaningful work at a living wage, nothing else much matters. People mired in generational poverty and dependence may be under-educated but they are not stupid. Without a light at the end of their tunnel, it makes no sense to strive.
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Rage, veteran teacher, you come closer to the truth here than 99% of the pundits who opine on this topic. Few are willing to look this truth in the face: many poor kids –especially after 5th grade — are extremely difficult to educate. Bordering on impossible. It is taboo to say so (that’s the reason we don’t hear more voices like Rage’s here –it’s not because others are thinking the same), but someone’s got to say it because it’s the truth. It’s not because the kids are dumb. It is, as you say, because their families lack the invisible learning-support architecture that exists in most middle class families, and because they don’t believe that school is a ladder that will take them to a better place, so they make little, if any, effort. It is a doomsday scenario that we pretend doesn’t exist. Our “cures” are glib, fake cures –often generated by jejune, facile, ridiculous, non-teachers in Gates-funded think tanks or hack professors of education (they know the party dogma well, but they don’t know the truth at all). KIPP cherrypicks the best behaved and most motivated, and leaves behind the rest. When KIPP incorporates everyone, it falters. As you say so well, it’s an impossible task to create a school culture that deviates significantly from the home culture. Home culture is stronger. So critics of dysfunctional schools need to stop giving glib advice to “fix the school’s culture”, as if a handful of teachers and administrators can push back the tide with their bare hands. And they definitely need to stop insisting, idiotically, that standards be raised, as if this magical cure –making school harder –will do anything but engender despair and revolt among students. I do not think the situation is hopeless –small gains can be made, especially where teachers are given short teaching days, empowered to discipline egregious behavior and have a solid, knowledge-building curriculum (Common Core is making the situation worse) –but I do think our society needs to reset its expectations and be patient. It will be a long, difficult journey (and reducing economic inequality is a big part of the solution).
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As long as we continue to avoid the truth about so-called “failing schools”, nothing will ever change. It is a fairy-tale notion that these “failing schools” are filled with mostly hard working, serious, self-motivated, and well behaved students who are only being held back by burned-out, lazy, incompetent, union abetted teachers. In fact, these schools have more than their fair share of dedicated and highly qualified teachers striving desperately, against all odds, to make a difference; and occasionally they do. However, the group dynamics in these schools produce behaviors that make sustained school success virtually impossible, even for those trying to learn. The immediate solution must involve moving the unmotivated, chronically disruptive, and dangerous students out of the mainstream.For those who think that this is just more victim blaming, think again; it is a socio-economic system that is deeply at fault.
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Very well said.
I like your emphasis on sustainability. The all-hands-on-deck, 14-hour day approach cannot be sustained. It inevitably peters out. Witness the astronomical teacher turnover rate at high-intensity charter schools like Success Academy and KIPP.
Another stale fake cure for the ills of low-income public schools, confidently proclaimed since the Sixties, is a culturally-relevant curriculum. I have no beef with a heavy focus on the root cultures of different demographic groups, but anyone who’s actually taught this stuff quickly learns that it rarely makes much of a difference. Just as habitually failing white kids do not thrill to a study of “their” culture (e.g. Goethe or Steinbeck), so habitually failing black kids normally do not suddenly start paying attention, doing HW and studying when the subject shifts from European to African history, or from Abe Lincoln to Frederick Douglass. There are exceptions, and I do think there is a mild positive effect, but to think the overall effect is anything dramatic is folly. (I’ll bet there is research on this and I’m curious to see it).
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I taught in an inner city high school with a population of 3,300+ low income minority students, grades 9 to 12. The daily absentee list had anywhere between 500 and 800+ names on it. Home lives were borderline third world conditions. The curricula was irrelevant to the vast majority of students who faced insurmountable odds at having their HS diploma make a bit of difference in their lives. Family culture was the result of mostly single mother homes filled with insecurity, neglect, stress, and abject poverty. Like in so many other impoverished, inner city schools the gap was filled by “ghetto culture”; one of machismo, unprotected sex, violence, crime, substance abuse, and an explicit rejection of the education offered. Doing homework and taking school seriously was openly mocked as being, “too white”. Back to your thoughts on a culturally appropriate or relevant curriculum for such needy kids. The reality was that the missing piece was not a “black studies” component, but the self discipline needed to attend school daily, stay serious, pay attention, and a strong work ethic; and to overcome the stigma of “acting white”.Homes that lacked the structure and discipline provided no preparation whatsoever for school success. A black teacher friend and I were talking about these issues one day and he made a comment that drove home your point. He said, look at these kids, many of them love basketball more than anything, yet even the really talented kids didn’t have the self-discipline to succeed in an organized school program. How can we make academics even more appealing than that?, he wondered.
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Wow. Your teacher friend’s observation says it all.
If you haven’t seen it already, I suggest you see the French film The Class (Entre les Murs). To me it’s a very accurate portrait of the kind of classroom we’re talking about. The kids are, for the most part, charming, bright and likable. But they’re difficult students and not making a lot of progress despite a very talented and dedicated teacher. Diane’s reaction to the film was, if it’s that bad, why even bother? It seemed to her hopeless. Her reaction was an eye-opener to me. The school is a bit rough, but I think many are far rougher. If Diane thinks that one’s hopeless, what would she think of the others? I’d be interested to hear your perspective on the movie. Do you agree with me that there are many worse-off classrooms out there?
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I just watched the trailer on YouTube. It seemed like a pretty accurate portrayal of disengaged and apathetic students. One youtube commenter stated that they had taught in London and it was much the same. Non-teachers who watch the film should take careful note of what teachers in these schools are up against: a group dynamic that produces a combination of counter productive behaviors that makes teaching and learning a daily and nearly futile battle. Apathetic, Uncooperative. Rude. Profane. Insulting. Combative. Argumentative. Belligerent. Threatening. Some good days and mostly bad ones. That magical and persistent teacher that can manage the negative energy and move it in a positive direction is hard to find and even harder to keep. I recently met a young teacher who worked in a very challenging high school in NYC. When I asked him about the experience, he said that he never worked so hard in his life for so little in return. Are their classrooms where behaviors are worse? Unfortunately, the answer is too many.
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I taught for thirty years in public schools like you described in your comment, but that never stopped me from doing my job, to teach the children that were there to learn and in every class I taught for those thirty years, I always had students that were there to learn.
Teachers teach.
Students learn.
Parents are supposed to support the education of their child but not all of them do. Many would like to, but when they live in poverty and earn poverty wages, they are usually working more than one job and are not home as much as they want to be.
Teachers can force students to learn, but a teacher with strong management skills can control the students that are not there to learn so the students that want to learn may learn.
And in every class I taught, I had students that went to college. In every class, a few students turned in the homework and did the classroom. Even if I only had four or five students that made an all-out effort to learn out of the thirty-four that was the average class size I taught, I thought that was a success. As long as I had one or more students in a class working to learn, that was a SUCCESS to me, and I never gave up on the ones that didn’t make an effort to learn, and somites one of those would get their parents to transfer them out of my class to another teacher known to not make that effort.
I refused to ever surrender to a child’s apathy.
The public schools where I taught had very high child poverty rates starting at 70 percent or higher.
Those schools were located in a barrio where the streets were ruled over by violent street gangs. I witnessed a drive-by shooting one day as school was letting out. The shooter was shooting at a house across the street from the high school. I heard the shot. I saw the pistol. The street was full of children walking home or being picked up by parents.
Every year, some gangbanger that was one of my students would ask me what I’d do if his gang jumped me. Stone-faced, I replied, “Kill as many as I could before I went down and died. The Marines did not train me to fight. They trained me to kill.”
“You can’t do that,” the gang banger always replied.
“You can always find out.”
That always ended that discussion but usually didn’t mean the gangbanger would cooperate and learn. Most of the gangbangers learned to keep their mouths shut and not disrupt the learning environment in my class so they’d spend all their time filling pages with written graffiti-style gang signs and get really upset when I stealthily slipped up behind them and confiscated the sheet before they could hide it.
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Your students were lucky to have a teacher as tough, persistent and smart as you, Lloyd. It sounds as if your Marines background was helpful.
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Rage,
The young teacher you describe reminds me of a bright and affable young man I know who taught math in a South LA high school for several years. He said the first half of each year there was zero learning; the only thing he was able to achieve was to get the kids to start liking him. Once that was achieved, he was able to tackle some content in the second half of the year, but the kids’ skills were so low that progress occurred at a snail’s pace.
It also reminds me of Alex Bloomberg, producer of This American Life, who said of his four years teaching science in Chicago Public Schools that he doubts whether he managed to teach the kids a single thing. In four years.
These are inconvenient truths that no one wants to talk about. Why are these facts so radioactive? I believe if we’re going to be serious thinkers about education, we need to work with the facts and live with the truth, however unpalatable it may be. Many of us are in denial.
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Outsiders and edu-meddlers would be shocked at the scope of this problem. Disaffected teenagers who use classrooms as their personal playgrounds, with little to no intention of learning, kids with zero aspirations, number in the millions. That’s MILLIONS of adolescents who have decided at too young an age to cash in their future for some laughs with their friends. Factor in “cell phone/social media culture” and the picture gets even gloomier. These negative school behaviors have also been exacerbated by the constrained curricula produced by test-and-punish pressures, and the opportunity costs that have become incalculable.
And to think that these same edu-meddlers and edu-fakers once touted standards-based testing as the “civil rights movement of the 21st century”. If cluelessness was a horse, Bill Gates and David Coleman woyuld be riding in the Kentucky Derby.
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Yes. But in a way you can’t blame non-teachers for not getting it because teachers and administrators aren’t speaking up. They’re ashamed. They know they’ll be blamed for not being able to control their classrooms, or failing to create a “culture of respect”. No principal wants to draw attention to the chaos in his school. Plus there’s a stigma to speaking ill of students. Plus they think they won’t be believed. Beleaguered and abused teachers need their own #MeToo movement. I hope more teachers will start speaking out on this and other blogs. I look around and see many of my colleagues worn down by the daily struggle with bad behaviors. When will they rise up and demand change?
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Ponderosa
I do blame them for being clueless. Under the RTTT/NCLB Duncan Waiver they forced a test-and-punish policy that included the Common Core standards and companion tests that were designed to produce hyper-inflated failure rates. The so-called “failing schools” we have been discussing have failure rates in math and ELA in the 80 to 90+% range.
Using their much bigger soapbox, reformers cried, “ineffective teachers!” and “low expectations!”. Reformers then had the audacity to call higher standards and harder tests, the “civil rights movement of the 21st century”.
Low income minority students have struggled with academic success for decades; we had boatloads of data in the form of graduation, college acceptance, employment, and incarceration rates to prove it. Harder tests were used to kick them while they were down while allowing reformers to blame the public schools and their teachers (and unions).
Now that they “exacerbated” (and advertised) a problem that had always existed, reformers conveniently offered to sell us the solution in the form of charter schools, vouchers, personal learning, (and privatization).
It didn’t take a genius to realize that no one can solve a problem
without knowing the cause. Failing to do this, defines cluelessness. Imagine if Bill and Melinda learned about the Malaria epidemic in Africa and ignored medical knowledge and experience and concluded that all these sick African children needed was a rigorous exercise program to prevent the disease, never asking about the cause. Well that’s what they did with the “failing schools” problem. They never asked “WHY?”, “Why do students struggle to learn?” This is an exemplar of utter cluelessness
The “why” has a very complex set of explanations that have their origins in the debilitating effects of generational poverty, economic hopelessness, dependence, single parent families/fatherless homes, and institutional racism. However, the “why” also has some very specific explanations when it comes to daily school life. None of them have a thing to do standards, testing, or even curricula and pedagogy.
What teachers in these “failing schools” see as impediments to learning include chronic absenteeism, social distractions, inattention, apathy, insufficient effort, and the laundry list of counter-productive, disruptive behaviors that negatively influence all students. The toll that this takes on teachers simply compounds the problem. And yes, teachers are afraid to speak the truth out of fear of being branded as weak classroom managers or even part of the so-called “school to prison pipeline” (i.e. racist).
The question is, where to realistically begin? If the chronically disruptive behaviors we have been focusing on are not brought under control, all other bets are off. Behaviors that Bill, and Arne could never even dream of must not be a taboo topic of discussion if school success is a serious goal. Calling these “failing schools” and branding teachers as “ineffective” under the conditions we have been describing is about as clueless as it gets.
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I agree that Gates and Co. were remiss in doing a sloppy job diagnosing the real problems with “failing schools”. It seems they just had a hunch that it was lazy teachers and low expectations and went with that. Not very scientific. Still I don’t think anything’s going to change unless teachers do a better job of communicating to the world what’s actually happening in classrooms. The fact that someone as focused on education as Diane could have such an overly-rosy view of classroom conditions (cf. our discussion of “The Class”) is a sure sign to me that misapprehensions abound. Despite ubiquitous surveillance technology, the classroom is still a black box. The truth is not getting out, and policy suffers as a result.
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Black Boxes indeed. I would be more than willing to have a drop cam in my classroom for public viewing. I have jokingly suggested to colleagues that we wear body cams for all the world to see and hear what we have to put up with. If only the politicians and pundits could see what a real “class from hell” looks and sounds like maybe we could steer the conversation into a more helpful direction.
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Yes, we fantasize about the body cam too. The whole world is surveilled except the one place that needs to be surveilled: the classroom. We’re fastidious about student privacy when it would help the teachers, but reckless when it helps Silicon Valley.
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ponderosa and rage There are here-and-there some teacher-development programs that film the teacher in their real-time classrooms; but it is/was only teacher self-evaluation, under the idea that as adult professionals, and besides critique from supervisors or others, we are best able to correct (or admire?) ourselves when we can “get out of ourselves” to get a glimpse of how others might see us. I cannot name such programs, but am remembering my experience while teaching in a master’s program for already-working teachers a few years back. CBK
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cx: “…it’s not because others AREN’T thinking the same…”
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As they say, ‘It takes a village to raise a child’.
In our culture, many have forgotten that truth. We have become selfish, possessive, and only want to raise OUR children, or pay for someone to do that for us. We allow our lives to be so controlled by our ‘career’ that we have little time to raise our own children, let alone those of our neighbors.
No. Only when a community understands that the next generation is the primary responsibility of any society can we have ‘excellent schools’ and create an ‘excellent culture’.
People here are somewhat familiar with the schools of Finland. When the PISA scores dropped Finland from #1 to #4 or so, I seem to remember some reporter asking the Finnish Education Minister if there was concern, and the answer was perfect…. (I paraphrase) “We really aren’t concerned about International test scores. We try to provide the best education possible for Finnish youth, and we will continue to do so”. In this case, the dog controls the tail.
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