Reality Lesson

Reality Lesson


There ought to be a law. A law that says no one can propose a way to reform schools and/or raise student test scores unless the author of the law has spent at least four semesters teaching in an inner city school - teaching anonymously (not known as a possible lawmaker), teaching a full program and receiving no more help or attention than any other faculty member.
We guarantee that s/he will not propose the kind of “Race to the Top” that President Obama is pushing with his carrot of $5 billion to schools that tie student test scores and teacher adequacy into a single rating. Judging how well a student is being educated by how well the student scores on the current test is just plain wrong. Apparently the President is unwilling to accept the judgment of the only true authorities on classroom education, the teachers; instead, he is pursuing his goals despite warnings from teachers that he is on the wrong path.
To understand why test scores are not the measure of education, why a teacher is not to be judged by his/her students’ scores, it is apparently going to be necessary to forget PC, forget the usual careful language of education gurus, and tell a few truths about classrooms today. Here goes:
Kids don’t show up. Check the absence rates of schools with low scores. Kids living in poverty and/or broken homes are absent because they are sick, but as often they just didn’t make it to school for many other reasons. What kind of test scores will kids have if attendance is irregular, if they simply aren’t there to learn the lessons they will be tested on?
Kids are not well enough to learn their lessons. Coming to school half sick, lacking energy, malnourished, without adequate clothing or sufficient sleep, kids aren’t going to absorb the day’s lessons. Many - far more than we want to know about - are neglected and abused.
The kids are culturally indifferent or hostile to the whole concept of school. In some communities - and yes, ethnicity does matter - parents don’t believe in education enough to encourage their kids; many parents simply don’t pay attention to whether their children are attending regularly, let alone learning. The kids are not convinced that sitting in a classroom for hours every day is a good idea.
The kids are distracted and led by alternatives to classroom learning. They change channels when they are bored. They have cell phones, they can text, they can listen to music, they can have fun at will. And having fun is what the world around them, especially today’s media, tells them life is all about.
The kids are scared. Gangs infest their neighborhoods, demanding loyalties, inflicting damage of all kinds, including the commonplace of gunfights and murder. They come to school worried, watching carefully for indications of how they must behave in order to escape or to join the social levels at their school and in their community. Aggression and violence are the norm in the world they know.
The kids are hostile to authority in school, rude and disobedient to their teachers, disruptive to good order in the classroom. There is little school authorities can do to ensure reasonable discipline or to remove bad actors.
Not all of the above applies to all of the kids, certainly. But enough of it does apply to make any classroom in a poverty/ethnic community a fragile learning environment, enough to try the patience of a saint and to test the skill of a teaching genius. The kids’ test scores are not descriptive of their abilities, only indicators of which of their problems were active on the day of the test. To judge the kids and their teachers by those scores is simply insane.
Obama ought to know all of this. He was a community organizer and he must have met these conditions over and over again. But he has forgotten or he is willing to forget.
It is not pleasant to look clearly at what is happening in what we call our inner cities; we don’t, any of us, want to know that so many of our children are doomed by their living conditions. Above all, we don’t want to do whatever is necessary - ask the teachers, ask the social workers - to help these kids get decent lives and the chance to grow into responsible, reasonably contented adults.
So instead we blame their teachers. Raise those test scores! If you don’t, we will mess with your salaries, with judgments of your professional skills and integrity. If we drive you out of teaching, fine; there will always be a new crop of young idealists to come in at minimum salaries to take your places. The facts show that they will last, most of them, less than five years, but that’s all right; keep on blaming them, keep the turnover going, and while you’re at it, cut the education budgets and for good measure, throw in inept, untrained people to supervise the whole thing.

Sorry if the truth hurts.