[The names of the city and schools have been changed.]
Yesterday, I had what was the worst substitute teaching experience of my relatively short career. There was no single event, but rather it was one thing after all day long. One of the interesting things about being a substitute is that you are dispersed among schools. I substitute teaching in a town named Redstone. A predominantly white, blue collar place that’s been on a downhill slide for some time now. It’s actually a place of relative equality, because rich people don’t want to live there (there is a huge doctor shortage, for instance) and the unemployment rate is astonishingly low (I did a double-take when I saw it). You wouldn’t think that one school would be all that different from the next, but you’d be wrong. The differences are immediately apparent and, without even seeing the test scores, I was able to judge the schools pretty accurately as to where they stood. The best has a a nearly 80% proficiency rate and the worst less than half that. Church Elementary, where I was yesterday, was second from the bottom.
As it happens, I had a direct comparison between this school and the best school, Rushmore Elementary. One of the students I had last year transferred. At Rushmore, she was somewhat middle-of-the-road. I only remembered her because she kept hugging me. At Church, though, she was the far and away the best student I had. There was only one other that came close. At Rushmore, I had to struggle to decide which kids to give Gold Stars to. At Church, it was a matter of which ones to single out amongst the chaos.
I mention disciplinary problems, but it goes well beyond that. Every minute spent trying to keep order is a minute spent not-teaching. And time spent not teaching results in misbehavior from the otherwise good kids. The end result is, precious little gets taught.
I was discussing the various problems I was having with the other first grade teacher. She commented “The main thing is to keep them from killing each other. If they learn something along the way, even better.”
I believe the remark to be a reaction to, rather than the cause of, the problems. I’ve gotten tremendous support at every school I’ve subbed at. The main difference I see is one of atmosphere and the response to the atmosphere. The degree to which the mission objective to keep order and whether it is to impart learning establishes itself quickly enough (and is made apparent before I even see the students). If the other teacher introduces herself and lets me know about the lesson plan, that’s a great sign. If she introduces herself and says, in effect, “let me at’em if they give you any trouble” it’s a sure sign that there will be trouble. (I should note here that not all classes within the same school are created equal. But patterns emerge.)
The entirety of the experience gives me a somewhat nihilistic view of what, if anything, you can do to “fix our education system.” The same Direct Instruction that works in one place works much of the time fell apart at Church. We can question my competence as a substitute teacher, but I am equally good or bad wherever I go. My success of failure depends, in large part, entirely on the class, the school, and so on. How do we even begin to turn the Churches into Rushmores? And this is in a place without the grand economic inequality that pervades much of the country (though there is some inequality to speak of). Would shuffling the kids around make Church better, or Rushmore worse? Would changing the teachers help? Something akin to “pay for performance” would almost certainly lead to teachers avoiding Church to the greatest extent possible, where their job is far more difficult and the test scores make them look bad. The principal at Rushmore is hailed as a hero, though I haven’t a clue whether he really is that good or was just given a good hand. The principal at Church sends his daughter to Rushmore. I’m not really sure what else he can do.
“A predominantly white, blue collar place that’s been on a downhill slide for some time now.”
Meaning that it’s a former manufacturing center–a de facto company town–and now that the factory is gone, there’s nowhere for the dullards to go. It used to be that the ones who were not suited for higher education could quit after sixth grade and go work for the factory (or the mines, or the farm, or the Army.) None of those options exist anymore. The factories are in China, the mines are in Africa, the farms either use giant single-operator machines or a horde of Mexicans, and the Army’s no longer just “shoot straight and die” (and a lot smaller than it used to be.)
So they stay in school. And wreck it.
What can you do to “fix” education? You might as well ask how you can turn lead into gold. The only workable first step is to get rid of everything that’s not gold.
Meaning almost exactly that, actually. The main employer/industry has been on the decline.
The “stay in school” is only partly happening. My state has some of the highest drop-out rates in the country, due in part to rather lax attendance requirements. It’s actually been in the state lege late as they consider tightening them up. Partially because it looks bad, and partially because of federal incentives that disfavor school systems that a lot of kids drop out of.
The other side of the coin is, as I have mentioned here and there, the best and brightest young people leave. They seem to go off to college and don’t move back. That’s a statewide issue, though. There was an article about it in the paper recently. Half of the top students leave state for college.
Easy. You find addictive ways to teach kids. A lot of people are experiential learners — giving them a problem which they can work on, with their hands — it’ll keep ’em mostly busy the whole day.
Easy. You find addictive ways to teach kids.
I’m always amused when someone says “easy,” followed by a prescription that in the real world is not easy at all.
“How can we achieve world peace?”
“Easy, stop having wars.”
nu. we have a problem in this country. It’s called fat kids.
Know why? because they spend all their time playing video games.
If you make the learning entertaining enough, you can’t keep the kids away.
Don’t we all have the expectation that the answers to these questions are “No,” “No,” and “No”? There is something to the theory of “institutional memory” and in this cae I suspect it relates to expectations. By now, the performances of Church and Rushmore schools are just that, expectations, embedded in the social psyche.
Moving teachers would result in teachers unconsciously diminishing their expectations if they wound up at Church, and increasign their expectations if they wound up at Rushmore. And whatever kids were in their classes, regardless of where they started, would perform to the level of expectations they encountered. None of it would be spoken out loud, everyone would be trying their best in good faith — but wouldn’t that be the expected result?
This is all the more frustrating, though, because when that element is injected, it makes the already-chellenging task of turning Church around that much more challenging. And, of course, what Will relates here is so obviously a microcosm of social inequality playing out in schools everywhere, embedding itself generationally.
Though the phrase hadn’t quite entered my mind, the concept of “institutional memory” has been swimming around in there. The thought being that it’s almost as though it would be better to blow the school up and start all over. Or demolish-and-rebuild, to have the newer facilities that Creon speaks of.
They did this when I lived in the Southwest, though without actually destroying the building outright. They closed an old and troubled school down, much to the anger of local residents (the alt-weekly had a story about it), sending the kids to overstuffed classrooms in neighboring schools for two years. Then they reopened the school with some renovations and a new staff. Supposedly, things did improve. Though it was from a neighborhood that had been gentrifying, so it’s hard to say exactly why.
I’m honestly not sure what the answer to my question is. I think putting the toublemakers from Church into Rushmore could ultimately hurt Rushmore, if it happens too frequently. It could help Church, though, if it made the classes more manageable. Or it could be that institutional memory emerges victorious.
Back home, the school district tried this sort-of by putting the magnet programs in the worst schools (including my middle school alma mater, Go Eagles!). The end result, though, was that the magnet kids were simply segregated anyway.
What do you think would happen if you closed Church and scattered its kids among less dysfunctional schools where their behavior wouldn’t be either tolerated or reinforced by their peers?
I’m thinking of places I’ve worked where the product was good, the people were capable, and the culture so fished (politicized and focused on the wrong goals), that success was completely out of reach. The same employees, in a different environment, did fine.
Wait, now it’s the students’ responsibility to maintain discipline in their own classes? Sounds like you’re encouraging bullying.
“I’m thinking of places I’ve worked where the product was good, the people were capable and the culture so fished…”
Listen, nancy-boy, if you don’t want to swear then don’t swear. I know it makes your panties all moist to think about “ooh I just said a bad wooooorrd” but honestly, get your thrills some other way.
Culture is people. Bad people can wreck a culture. If you aren’t going to have the established authority figure step in, then the only way to stop bad people wrecking a culture is to get them out of the culture. There’s a reason that reform school existed and it wasn’t that white people didn’t want to deal with poor browns.
Culture is people. Bad people can wreck a culture. If you aren’t going to have the established authority figure step in, then the only way to stop bad people wrecking a culture is to get them out of the culture.
You really have no understanding of the power of peer pressure?
Bullying is an accepted form of sedating those people wrecking a culture. See Japan.
You know, I hadn’t thought about it until you mentioned it, but one difference between this class and others I have taught is that there were absolutely no “enforcers.” Enforcers being the kids that attempt to enforce classroom behavior.
Such students are often actually somewhat annoying, despite their (presumably) good intentions. They make more noise telling people to be quiet than the original people are making in the first place. But I guess they aren’t all bad, because the absence of them certainly may have made a difference.
I’ve never taught in school, but one approach may simply be to “tire the kids out” — do some sort of physical activity (interpretive storytelling, a hike… something)
I think it’s less “enforcer” than “alpha”. Whatever the person who’s giving off the proper Dominance Signals does is what the rest of the class will do. Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, that person is the teacher.
As for scattering the kids, that might help. Though the next two closest schools to Church are Lewis (the worst) and Pitts (the third worst). The layout of the schools and the towns works out almost exactly so that the further east you go, the better the school. I don’t know the extent to which this is tied to SES. It obviously is to some degree, but there are a fair number of mobile home tracts on the east and the neighborhoods in the west tend to be more house-oriented. But west is also where downtown is, and downtown seems kind of sketchy*. So maybe a lot of apartment dwellers, though it seems to me that most of the apartment buildings I see are boarded up and abandoned. I might not be going out nearly enough from downtown, though.
* – Seems, perhaps, being the operative word. I accidentally left my laptop on a bench on main street, and it was there two hours later when I realized it was missing. It was in a public area, but nobody took it. That impressed me. But the overall feel of the place may push those with money eastward.
How do we even begin to turn the Churches into Rushmores?
I am curious as to the physical environment of the schools. The UK’s Building Schools for the Future program comes to mind. I recall interviews with students in new schools feeling they matter, feeling that society values them, feeling that they are not so much detritus to be overlooked with substandard facilities. Beyond my remembrances of BBC interviews, one lit review I ran through suggests building quality can positively impact pupil performance and teacher satisfaction, with some poor quality environmental elements having detrimental effects: air quality, noise, and poor build quality (A sound foundation? What we know about the impact of environments on learning and the implications for Building Schools for the Future). I’m also curious as to the backgrounds of the parents and family backgrounds of the students, how much education the parents have, percent single parent homes, first language in the home, etc.? What percentage of students on free or reduced price school meals?
Not that you have answers to these questions at the tip of your fingers, but just in terms of building a better picture of the current situation and the kinds of interventions that I imagine flow from the answers. That’d be my thinking on your question of turning Churches to Rushmores.
Lastly, I’m extremely skeptical of the outlook DensityDuck gestures towards when writing, “What can you do to ‘fix’ education? You might as well ask how you can turn lead into gold. The only workable first step is to get rid of everything that’s not gold.” As I understand OECD education stats, other developed countries manage to confront similar problems and meet more success. The solutions may not always involve education provision itself, widely available prenatal care, nurse home visits in infancy, high quality childcare in early childhood – those are the kinds of ideas that spring to mind. If the hypothesis that some children are lead and some are gold is accurate (and as I said, I’m extremely skeptical), then why don’t we see America’s problems reproduced, one to one, in other educational systems around the world?
“As I understand OECD education stats, other developed countries manage to confront similar problems and meet more success. ”
As I understand OECD education stats, most other developed countries successively reduce the number of students in school for reasons of academic performance; they are allowed to select only the best students for promotion to successively-higher levels of education. The USA has nothing like the eleven-plus, no entrance exams. In other words, they’re cherry-picking.
“If the hypothesis that some children are lead and some are gold is accurate…”
Note that I’m not advocating that we pre-judge children. What I’m saying is that you aren’t doing anyone any favors by pretending that every kid gets exactly the same benefit from a unit of teaching time as every other kid. A pupil who requires intensive one-on-one mentoring to learn anything is inherently going to consume a disproportionate share of limited teaching resources.
I think that everyone who wants to go to school should get that chance. I also think that everyone who doesn’t want to go to school should not be forced to go. And I think that someone who is unable to show academic performance–for whatever reason–shouldn’t stay. Maybe Joey can’t run as fast as the other kids because he was malnourished, but that doesn’t mean you let him on the track team anyway.
DensityDuck, with the proviso that comparing education systems across the OECD is really difficult stuff, I’ll point to the OECD’s 2011 Education at a Glance.
Here is what I’m looking at How many students finish secondary education? (pdf), and I am open to correction. Their definition of graduation rates (p. 49),
The chart on page 55 has the US as performing below the OECD average, the United States’ 76% compared to the OECD average 82%. If I understand the OECD’s definition of graduation rates correctly, it would include the tracking you speak of (as an aside, the UK has phased out the eleven plus exam) – but in any case the US performance does not speak well of the US K-12 education system.
As for compulsory education, I don’t give much credit to a 16 year old’s preference to drop out of school. Also, given the requirements of the knowledge economy I think compulsory education makes sense through age 18.
“How many students finish secondary education?”
…is not actually a rebuttal to my statement that secondary education is often not compulsory–and that once education is non-compulsory, graduation rates will inherently improve because the ones who stay are the ones motivated to perform. American college students have, in general, better academic performance than grade-school students, because the ones who don’t want to go to college don’t have to go.
“[G]iven the requirements of the knowledge economy I think compulsory education makes sense through age 18.”
Which is fine, but you do need to recognize that some students will require vastly more effort to teach than others, and that some simply won’t learn past a certain level no matter what.
When I signed up for substitute teaching, I assumed that I would probably mostly be teaching secondary – I was hoping it would be high school rather than middle school. But I got almost no high school call-ins (which was fine, as I found it dreadfully boring, albeit easy – the students have mentally checked out by that point). So I have little to report as far as that goes.
Statistically, the standardized testing scores tend to be pretty low, though I think a lot of that has to do with the Catholic school plucking off a lot of the best students. The building was built in 1900 or so with additions. It’s a very odd place, reminding me a bit of Quake II. They do have enough in the way of programs that we would send our kids there rather than the Catholic school.
I was pleasantly surprised by the middle school. It was, as one might expect, better than Church/Lewis/etc but not as good as Rushmore/Creston/etc. The Catholic school does have middle school support, though I sort of get the impression they don’t really start plucking kids until high school. Testing scores are mediocre. The building’s conditions are… not great.
(I’m not making grand points with this post, merely providing background.)
That’s a good question, actually.
As luck would have it, Church is the oldest remaining elementary school and Rushmore is the newest, though we’re talking about 1959 vs 1971. Church is reasonably well-kept, given its age, but you would never guess how old Rushmore is by looking at it. Particularly the interior.
The relationship between facilities and performance is inexact. The second nicest (and newest) school is also the worst performing. Once you get below that, though, almost all the schools are varying degrees of unimpressive. I guess this is not unexpected when you’re dealing with a bunch of buildings that are forty-years old.
Building a new school would be difficult. Right now they are simply trying to keep schools from closing down.
I can sort of speak to the home situations of the students. I am a male substitute willing to teach at the elementary school level, which makes me unusual. At a couple of the lower-performing schools, I was specifically told how great it was to have a male substitute because a lot of the kids don’t have fathers at home. They might have just been being nice, but nobody said anything like that at Rushmore.
Are there differences in the way accountability and expectations are presented in each location?