Education in the United States is failing. No doubt about it. The public will say so, the government says so, and even the teachers will tell you that they spend more and more time on mandated paperwork than teaching the children. And time they get to spend with them is laid out by state “frameworks” that are based on federal standards. These are intended to allow the children to pass the standardized tests that are supposed to chart a child’s progress through the educational system. They have no choice but to teach to these tests if they intend to keep their jobs, but the kids aren’t learning the way us older folks did. In this edition, we’ll explore some of the differences, and how federal intervention is affecting how your kids learn on a local level.
First of all, let’s look at teaching in general. People see teachers as people who get paid all year for only being on the job 9 or 10 months, getting a paid summer long vacation. I don’t know how it works in other states, but in Arkansas, that’s horse hockey. Teachers get a set yearly amount to teach for the school year. They work under contract. You get this much to do this job. As a teacher, you can choose to have that amount divided up in 10 or 12 installments. It’s just that simple as that folks, no big secret. Out of that, the teacher pays all the normal taxes like everyone else. If the teacher takes the insurance available, he or she pays more than most people because teaching is looked on as a high risk profession. They are exposed to a room full of snotty nosed kids who drag every ailment known to man to school and spread it around. These poor teachers then take these things home to their spouses and kids, so the insurance companies use this as an excuse to ramp up the cost of coverage. All you folks out there working in factories and crying because your insurance is 50 bucks a week, listen up. As most of you know, my wife is a teacher and it costs us $900 a month for mediocre coverage, so don’t cry to me about it. I don’t want to hear it.
A teacher’s work day starts about 7:30, and runs till at least 3:30, but usually it’s closer to 5 with the faculty meetings and parent conferences and all that. There are no scheduled breaks; you can’t even go to the can without getting someone to watch your class. Teachers these days have no tools with which to maintain order either. When I was a kid, if you acted up in class, standing in the corner or at the blackboard with your nose in a circle was a common punishment. Further disruption earned you a stint of sitting out in the hall writing multiplication tables or doing a series of long division problems. And if you still persisted, then the long march to the principal’s office was your doom. Now, any of these save the principal’s office can get a teacher in his or her own disciplinary trouble, and a paddling will get a teacher or principal suspended or fired, along possible civil or criminal proceedings. Standing in the corner is, according to the bleeding hearts, humiliating and damages a child’s self esteem. Same with a trip out in the hall. This is a big “no-no” these days, so that’s out. You can’t penalize the child, so how do you deal with bad behavior? Doesn’t take long for the unruly kids to figure out that the dog has no teeth. Do something that involves or inconveniences the parents, like making the kid stay after school, and you face everything from being verbally abused by these parents to litigation. Even the ones who act out violently can’t be “embarrassed” or “humiliated”. You’ve probably heard some of the stories on the news where police have been summoned to schools because of children as young as kindergarten have assaulted teachers and other students. Not too long ago there was a big flap over a policeman who handcuffed an elementary student. Everybody thought that was just terrible and there were months of court battles over it, but what else was he to do? Cops have few tools to use, but they are effective. The kid was flailing about, breaking things, throwing stuff at teachers, other students, and everyone in range. He was a danger to himself and everyone in the office, so the cop restrained the kid and in a few minutes was in control of the situation. This stuff happens every day in our schools. It doesn’t make the news very often, but it happens every day. Why? Because the kids and their parents know that they’ll get away with it.
I was expected to show up in class on time prepared to do the tasks presented. Not having a pencil or paper or whatever was not an excuse, it was a punishable offense. Now, teachers are expected to provide these things, not the parents, and if they are not made available by the school, then how can you expect these kids to do their work?
Now you have a view of just a few of the things teachers face every day, so now let’s look at what all the so-called experts have to say about it. Just a couple days ago, one of the “talking heads” on network news was blaming the teachers’ unions for all the problems. It was all because it was nearly impossible to get rid of bad teachers and that the pension programs were driving all the schools to bankruptcy. Money that should be spent on the students was being spent on everything but students. The federal “No Child Left Behind” law was passed in 2002, setting federal standards for local schools. That was almost 10 years ago, but schools have continued to decline, in fact, this law has accelerated the decline because of its interpretation at the local level. Mandating that every child be on grade level within a certain amount of time sounds noble and gives those who have never dealt with children warm fuzzies about how serious they are about getting these kids an education, but it does not take into account the fact that there are a lot of kids out there who simply are not capable of doing this, and a great many more who simply do not care if they do it. In spite of these facts, this law holds teachers accountable if these kids fail and in fact has provisions to move them along whether they can do the work or not. Another big factor holding education back is the fact that a great many children are immigrants who do not speak English. If the teachers I know were to be required to speak the native languages of the students they teach, they’d have to be fluent not only in English, but in Spanish, Marshallese, Vietnamese, and an assortment of Middle Eastern languages. And it’s not that there is one or two of these non-English speaking kids in the class, the bulk of the kids are ESL immigrants. English speakers are far in the minority, right here in the middle of the Ozarks. Yet somehow, according to NCLB, that is the teacher’s fault.
Still others would lay the blame it on the economy, or television, or video games or the internet. Parents have to work two jobs or odd shifts so the kids raise themselves. They learn how to behave by watching Sponge Bob or Pokemon. They interact with other people through the anonymity of the internet, which allows them to be anyone they can conceive. Video games cheapen life and dull the children’s minds to reality.
So with all this finger pointing, who is really to blame for it? Well, all of them are to blame, in their own measure. The lion’s share in my opinion falls on parents. Yes, I actually expect these people to be responsible for the child they brought into the world. You, mother and father, are primarily responsible for guiding your children to what they should know and how they should live. Yes, I understand the needs of working for a living, but you know what, you are not the first to have to do that. You have to feed, clothe and house them, absolutely you do. And if that means working 2 jobs, so be it. I did it for a lot of years. That doesn’t transfer your responsibility for making sure your kid knows how to eat, how to tie his shoes, which shoe goes on which foot, how to dress himself, blow his nose or wipe his butt to the school system. You are the one that is supposed to do that. And yes, you are supposed to be the one making sure your kid can read and write. That he does his homework, that he knows that kicking others in the shins and taking their lunches away is not acceptable. You are the one that should teach your kid to respect the teachers and try to learn from them. This is your job, not the school’s and not the teacher’s.
Teachers and schools bear a large portion of the blame, second to that of the parents. As with all human endeavors, the pendulum has swung both ways in schools. They’ve gone from being strict, almost prison-like institutions run by tyrannical martinets where failure meant punishment and ridicule to “politically correct” asylums for mediocrity where everyone is a winner and no one gets an answer wrong and the kid that comes in 49th still gets a trophy because he tried so hard. I’ve seen kids get named to the honor roll who couldn’t even read their own names in print. I’ve seen kids earn full college scholarships whose conversation was limited to “me throw football good”. All this concern for a child’s self-esteem and giving him a good grade on a test where he got 75% of the answers wrong because it would embarrass him to get a bad grade artificially inflates his ego, and has a detrimental effect on the kid that actually got the answers right. Why should he try to do it right if the other kid gets the same grade or close to it for doing it wrong? Believe it or not people, there are right and wrong answers to test questions. Would you hire an accountant that feels really good about himself but thinks that 2 plus 2 equals 5?
The federal government shares in the blame. They have no business whatsoever meddling with local schools. Setting down federal standards for schools is like using a cannon to kill mosquitoes. It does a tremendous amount of collateral damage, and may not even kill the mosquito. The population density, ethnic mix, income level, and even geographic variety of this country makes it ridiculous to even think a federal standard would work. It’s not that I think any one group or locale is inherently smarter than another, but it is proven and obvious that different surroundings influence how you think and learn. People learn by association. A kid in the inner city surrounded by concrete and steel has a completely different frame of reference than a kid that grows up on a 1000 acre wheat farm or a coastal fishing village. They can all learn math and science and reading and all that, but if it’s presented in terms they can relate to, in ways that make sense to them, they will grasp it much more quickly and firmly than if presented in a completely foreign manner. By enforcing federal standards for what you teach and how you teach it, you tie the hands of the teachers and put blindfolds on the students. And of course, if you have standardized things to learn, you have standardized tests to take to see if you’ve learned it. This bit so stupid it defies description and belief. The standardized tests that came along as a result of NCLB are supposed to be the meter for whether the schools and teachers are doing their jobs. You give the kids test booklets, along with answer sheets where the student fills in a bubble with his pencil to indicate his answer. Sounds great, right? Well, what do you do when little Johnny decides he doesn’t want to do the test today, so he goes down the sheet coloring in pretty patterns, or making domino dots? After all, there are no wrong answers, and he’ll get told what a good job he’s done just for getting it done on time, right? Not a big deal if a couple of kids out of each school do that, there are lots of kids there to take the average back up, right? Well, that ain’t the way it works. Remember when I mentioned that the kids that don’t speak English, or may have some sort of learning disability? The wonderful folks in Washington DC that came up with this standardized nonsense made an attempt at taking these children into account. There are ways to exempt certain children’s scores on these tests from being counted, as well as the fact that they don’t count immigrant’s scores until they’ve been in country for at least three years. Sounds reasonable, right? Wrong. Once again, they’ve fired a cannon at a mosquito. What they did not take into account is the distribution of these children throughout a school system. Let me break this down for you. A teacher is judged on performance by how well his or her class does on these standardized tests. That is then carried a step further, and an entire school is judged by the performance of its teachers. Sounds reasonable, right? You exempt the kids with disabilities and language barriers and test the rest. Average kids should perform to an established range, right? Here’s where it gets sticky…What happens if you have 25 kids in a class, but scores from only 4 of these kids are counted in the results? In this area with the great influx of immigrants, it’s not only possible, it’s the norm, especially in the elementary schools. Let’s say that the target is to have 85 percent of the class pass this test (I don’t know the actual percentages, just using this as an example), otherwise the teacher gets a failing grade. That means that in a class of 25 kids, 21.25 of them have to pass. If little Johnny draws domino dots today instead of taking his test, that’s not a big deal, but if only his and 3 others count, the best the teacher can hope for is 75%, resulting in bad marks in the teacher’s record. Why is that the teacher’s fault? If your school has 100 classrooms and this happens in 16 of them, the entire school fails! In this example, there are 2500 kids in the school, and if 16 of them screw off, the entire school is endangered because the pass rate for teachers dropped to 84%, caused by 16 out of 2500 kids. Granted, I’ve taken this to an extreme to make a point, but it is a real possibility especially in elementary schools. You see why federal standards won’t work at a local level? This is an artificial problem contrived by politicians who don’t know what they are doing.
Teachers unions, bus drivers, lunch room workers and all that have an influence on these things, but not nearly as much as the ones I’ve talked about here. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to these other problems.
