One might suppose upon superficial analysis of my various rants that I’m of the mind that a school cannot be improved without a change in the community it serves. This is inaccurate and I’ve personally experienced the opposite several times. A school can most definitely improve greatly irrespective of its student population and surrounding circumstances; I just fervently argue that the improvement in impoverished communities will still fall short of what can be accomplished in mostly middle and upper class environments, and have considerable hard and irrefutable evidence to support such thinking beyond my own experiences. This disadvantage is not due to some sort of natural inferiority of the people in poorer communities, but directly the product of the many more challenges poor people face in life just trying to survive. There’s no money for tutors when it’s hard to pay the rent each month. Basic survival will always come first. However, I do commonly call “school reform” an illusion and most definitely believe this to be true more times than it is not.
To be clearer, school reform isn’t some sort of mythical creature we all know to be fantasy. My reservations stem completely from seeing the term applied inaccurately to the extent it’s often close to if not outright fraud. Bozo the Clown, or even Michelle Rhee, can truly transform any school if given the right ingredients, and these aren’t secret, but they are awfully scarce, and here’s where our true problems lie, as they almost always do with anything, a very limited supply of remedies, tools and people to serve extremely abundant needs.
All anyone needs to establish and maintain a first rate school is a staff of first-rate people. While there can be a few weaker secondary links in the chain, overall the vast majority of staff in direct contact with children must be high quality individuals. Unfortunately, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and many other “reform” initiatives most frequently aggravated instead of improved conditions in our most challenging schools. I often saw the reform clubs drive good people out of education entirely, or more commonly, to schools where pupil needs weren’t nearly so demanding and success much easier to attain. Good teachers can get a job almost anywhere, a fact commonly forgotten on those with the mindset “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”
Before I retired I worked for 14 years with exclusively at-risk teenagers bounced around by a wide variety of extraneous circumstances we could not control. Originally, this special school was evaluated with the understanding that we would not have the same success rate as schools with heterogeneous populations that always include a lot of high-achieving students. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, the reformers forgot the mission and decided our school should achieve to the same level of any school and held us to the same standards. I’ve grown fond of comparing this thinking to being told to form a basketball team of midgets with the expectation it would be competitive in the NBA. Maybe that’s stretching the point a bit, but at the end of my run our school had as much of a chance of performing like a mainstream school as President Obama had being cheered at a Tea Party rally.
If we were lucky and worked very hard, we managed to just barely meet the statistical challenges, more often we were in violation of some standard and got slapped around as a result. For another sport’s analogy, we were Randal “Tex” Cobb fighting Larry Holmes and took a similar beating. Like Cobb, most of us kept swinging, but a lot were KO’d.
One critical flaw of NCLB and all similar philosophy was a complete failure to understand how good teachers would react to being hit upside the head with “low performing” bricks. Unlike unionized factory workers who often have few alternatives to union busting tactics and vastly increased performance pressure, tactics thinly veiled but most definitely present in most contemporary school reform models, top-flight teachers have a lot more options, in the teaching field and beyond.
In my particular case I decided to hop off the merry-go-round entirely in spite of my principal’s pleas for me to reconsider. I had a long track record of classroom success by any standard of measurement, from student test results to formal evaluations, and my boss tried his best to change a mind that was already made up. By this time in my career I was eligible for a full pension and retirement benefits plus had the new opportunity to reenter my former field of journalism by editing a magazine. Like I just said, good people always have options and I took them. As for my replacement, the poor guy only lasted six months, so it would be most difficult to argue school improvement was the result in my particular case.
Another major error many so-called school reformers make is mistakenly believing a lack of training is the primary cause of poor results. While in the case of the inexperienced this is often true, but far too often the “training” I grudgingly endured as a veteran teacher served no useful purpose and actually did damage. Here’s a good case in point.
Although school systems nationwide continue to put people into teaching jobs with woefully inadequate training, they simultaneously spend considerable effort to train people who already know full well how to teach, perhaps to catch the ones who missed the training, like I did initially when thrust into a classroom in 1980 with absolutely no experience or teacher training of any kind. Yes, at this time, I sure did need a lot of training. However, seldom are there means to differentiate from those who need additional training from those who do not. This is stupid and also a reality.
Under pressure to appear constructively engaged in improving teacher effectiveness as many school systems are today, my last employer greatly expanded the number of required training sessions it required, taking the time to do so from what was previously provided in the school year to independently plan or collaborate with colleagues. In support of the district, quite a few teachers didn’t appropriately utilize the independent time constructively, but I also know that many really did make good use of the opportunity to work independently and with selected peers in what’s nearly always today a situation where time is a most precious commodity.
Without question, the overwhelming majority of good veteran teachers I worked with despised the additional “training,” finding it unnecessary and of very little utility in the classroom, and rarely were there instances where those not in need of a given session exempted. In fact, most “training” I was forced to endure failed miserably in providing the kind of growth any accomplished teacher would find beneficial. I got to the point where I wanted to kill the next presenter who started a spiel with, “Lots of you probably already know this but…” because I heard it so many times before and was then still forced into another meaningless, time-sucking dungeon.
There are, of course, exceptions and positive experiences, but I’d conservatively estimate in over three decades of attending mandated teacher training that, at most, only 25 percent was ever actually of any value to me, and I’m being most gracious with my one in four rating.
One of my last mandated sessions in abject boredom occurred in the beginning of my final year when my new classroom looked as if it had been used as a computer salvage yard. I sat feeling chained to a desk while piles of disconnected machines of unknown operating capacity sat about the floor of my new classroom in total disorder. With two tables and no chairs, I was supposed to set up a computer lab on my own and then begin using complicated software I’d never seen.
Prior to the mandated training session, I had just endured two previous days of mostly worthless meetings, and now directed to another day of unnecessary tedium. These circumstances made me about as angry as a man facing home foreclosure because my wife took off with the family tax attorney who also cleaned out our joint savings account.
Under the conditions just described, about 95 percent of the captive audience felt the about same way I did, although, perhaps, with slightly less pained urgency. I was time bankrupt and desperate, about as receptive to new learning as a condemned man the night before his execution. Consequently, the climate in the host school my colleagues and I were sentenced to do time in was on par with the mood on cellblock six on lockdown after a bloody riot. The inmates were positively hostile.
I’m still not sure if it was the best or worst in-service session I ever attended. In the wake of the huge budget cuts Rick Perry and company dumped on all of us in Texas the year before I retired, no funds existed to pay anyone additionally for presentations my final year and the bulk of the central office curriculum folks not currently assigned a teaching position were occupied annoying other captured educators, leaving us with peer presenters for the day, two district teachers who had been coerced into hosting the festivities that also were to involve various forms of audience participation and practice, in vogue as of this writing, as opposed to the old style “sit and get” sessions once the norm.
We generally hated the new sessions even more than the sit and gets because not only were we again forced into abject boredom by information we already knew, we were often required to bore our colleagues as part of the show and become unwilling parties to the crime. (I know one teacher who was actually removed from one of these sessions for refusing to participate in demonstration parts as he viewed the entire process as a bad joke. He was, of course, a good friend and still is.)
At the beginning of one of my last district mandated redundancy sessions, my presenter explained the day’s agenda, and then added, “You already know all of this stuff anyway, so I’ll leave it up to you. If you want, we’ll do the whole deal as scripted, and if you decide not to, we’re not going to tell anyone.”
I’d never been given that option before, and nobody voted for the planned activities, so we all spent the day on independent projects. I wrote a new class letter, prepared a computer roll book and reviewed and updated my elective class syllabi, what I could do locked up all day with my laptop, being marginally grateful I at least got some usefulness out of the day and wondering how much more I could have accomplished over the years if the choice had been presented more often.
We’ll get deeper into this issue and much more soon as we continue to peal the public school onion in future editions. For now, why not say something nice to a teacher? Especially in challenging environments, most can really use positive affirmation today.