Maybe a year ago I thought about writing up my experiences in the four schools I've worked in: a public school, a charter school, a school abroad, and a private school.
This is a very rough draft of the first section, on public schools. Who knows. Maybe some day I can whip it all together into a book.
Note - the next posts on the blog are not likely to be part of this series. I'll add them as I get to them. Also, feedback is kindly appreciated.
The Public School:
Dad Works at the Factory
Part One
I was
five years out of high school when I began teaching it. Over the summers I’d
had some practice, taken on an internship the year before, and was now getting
my Masters.
The
best part of my Graduate program was that it required a full year of student
teaching. From August to June I’d be co-teaching and running my own classes at
a typical public school, with some 1,000 students. For reference, it was one of
the largest high schools in Vermont.
Previously
I’d been nestled amongst the green hills of that state, nourished by the rich yolk
of seminars, parties, lectures, and girlfriends within a protective college shell.
I’d never interacted with the townsfolk and knew nothing about their lives.
Besides working at the College, I wasn’t sure what else people in the town even
did to make ends meet.
My
college bubble didn’t pop, like soap, but deflated, like gum. A class was
taught senior year by the headmaster and dean of the high school I’d be working
at, fittingly titled ‘Classroom Teaching: Theory into Practice’. Gone were the
theorists, Piaget, Dewey and Freire. We instead spoke of realities. What do you
do, as an elementary teacher, when you read ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ and they
can’t stop laughing at ‘pussy’? What happens if, as a high school teacher, one
of them tries to knife you? The idea was to ease the transition from college
debutante to rookie teacher.
No
one is a great teacher their first year. Your beginner year of teaching is when
you make mistakes, are shocked by students’ abilities, disillusioned by their
vulgarity, and moved by their sincerity. From this point on in your life you
will be remembered. Perhaps you’ll be the one they hated, or the one who came
through when no other teacher would. It’s a heavy weight, an emotional triage,
and, while all this touchy-feely stuff is going on, you’re also supposed to
make sure they know who Ferdinand Magellan is.
History
was my subject, world history my specialty. I’ve noticed, wherever I go, that
this usually peters out around World War One. Content is a serious difficulty
for history teachers. Why, you could ask, learn content at all? The Internet
has now made content knowledge so accessible, on a student’s phone, that if a
student wants to know what became of
Louis XIV they can find it out, in less than 20 seconds. This is one of the
many questions that aren’t seriously asked, why still learn content? These are
the sorts of questions I was thinking on, as well as the more pedestrian, such
as why the copier seemingly hated me.
Most
of us weren’t raised in Vermont (I wasn’t), but most Americans did go to public
school. That’s where my teaching experience started. It was the 2008/09 school
year, and none of us knew the recession was here to stay. In light of the
economic downfall tens of thousands of teachers were laid off, and public
schools were hurting. But this precariousness in public education was nothing
new.
Part Two
The
sturdy Oak, it was the tree
That
saved his royal majesty.
Peter denies
His
Lord and cries.
Queen Esther comes in royal state,
To
save the Jews from dismal fate.
The
above are from The New England Primer, published as the first school textbook
in the Colonies, in the 1680s. But the Puritans and their ilk aren’t the
originators. After all, the Spanish were in Florida, the Southwest and
California nearly a century before the Primer was printed, and Native Americans
could get a basic Christian education in the missions.
Perhaps
it’s not surprising that, as a history teacher, I started looking at the story
of public schooling. Beyond these early progenitors, though, education didn’t
take off until the 1840s. The federal government played little role in
education, so states differed widely in their support for public education, as
opposed to the well-established private schools. The force behind this change
was Horace Mann, Secretary of Education, who worked to ensure all Americans had
the ‘three Rs’ of Reading, Writing and Reckoning.
America,
industrially, was beginning to flourish by this time. The rise of this
industrialism would determine Mann’s innovations in the States. Here the
factory model begins to infiltrate education. When we regard, sentimentally,
the one-room school house, with children of all ages learning from the kindly
teacher in the front of the room, we are thinking to what Mann began to erase.
The new idea, fundamentally industrial, was that we begin educating kids by age,
with first graders being separated from sixth graders and so on. Sir Ken
Robinson, a contemporary educationalist, has identified how Mann’s changes
still apply today:
“We
still educate children by batches. We put them through the system by age group.
Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing
kids have in common is how old they are? It’s like the most important thing
about them is their date of manufacture.”
But,
as Robinson continues, we all know of cases where different students excel and
different subjects at different ages. Boys, typically, don’t take to math until
later than girls, for example. Reading, multiplication tables, analytical
writing – these are skills that we all develop at different ages. Sure, there
are broad trends, you’re not likely to be doing complex multiplication in
kindergarten. But some do. And some do in eighth grade. And maybe that’s okay.
What
Mann set in motion was a process of standardizing education. It’s a concept
that would cycle back periodically throughout our history. It arose with the
industrial revolution because that was the concept that the industrial world
prized. When Karl Marx complained about the factory system he griped that it
took away autonomy. (His communist cures, of course, were inadequate to deal
with the very real problem he identified.) This lack of individualism that
factories in the industrial revolution created was passed on to the schools
that were designed like factories.
The
process of implementing this was a long time coming. The Civil War disrupted
things, as a start. Frontier states had to develop solid boundaries before
tackling systematic education. But once unified, the nation’s schooling would start
to have problems.
Part Three
There’s
around 99,000 public schools in the U.S. The problem is numerical. Those
schools serve over 50 million students. It ends up averaging to some 507
students per school. The student-teacher ratio stands around 15:1. But these
are national averages – most schools do not have 507 students and classrooms
capped at 15 students.
Why
is this? The reason is population, which is not evenly distributed. Wyoming has
366 public schools serving 88,000 students. As such they average 240 students
per school, not surprising for a sparsely populated state, with large distances
between towns. New York City, by contrast, with a dense population, has 1,700
schools, serving 1.1 million students – averaging 647 students per school.
That’s
a lot of people to keep track of. Public schooling was designed to promote
basic literacy and competence. Idealistically it’s designed to make good
citizens. Being a good citizen not only means knowing how to vote, but also how
to work, how to raise a healthy family, and how to improve the quality of life
in America. That’s why the federal government is involved.
The
big shift came in 1965. That year a law was passed called ‘The Elementary and
Secondary Education Act’ (ESEA) during Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”. The
reason for this development was due to shifting historical factors. Between the
turn of the century and 1965 something totally distinct from education had
taken place, which would radically alter education: World War One.
Modern
war required modern soldiers, but who were they? Bayonets take less training
than an airplane to use. Intelligence was the problem – cannon fodder farmers
weren’t good enough anymore. Alfred Binet
applied the principle of quantifying things, assigning a number to measure
accurately, to psychology and intelligence, while a professor at Stanford,
Lewis Terman, popularized it. The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale is more
commonly known as an IQ test. The SAT really is the child of Binet. One of its
first applications was being given to soldiers in WWI, to determine readiness
for modern warfare. The descendants of that test are obsessed over by parents
and students worldwide. Binet never intended any of this. Terman, however certainly
did. But Terman’s goal of standardized testing was more in line with eugenic
purposes, a grave reminder of the danger of assigning a person a number.
The
SAT had been around since the 1920s before Johnson’s ESEA law made such tests a
cornerstone of our education system. In the 1920s Progressive education was
hitting its peak, not coincidentally perhaps. Progressive education focused on
the individual student, and the role of exploration and democracy in the
classroom. American philosopher John Dewey had been the biggest name in the
movement. But there were others, Italian Maria Montessori, and Austrian Rudolf
Steiner, most notably. What they have in common is active engagement, instead
of passive learning. Not surprisingly this was antithetical to the rising
dominance of standardization in the post-war years. With the Cold War on, and a
concern for competition, individualism was on the decline. Just as war had
provided an impetus to creating standardization, so too it would continue to
fight it after another World War, three decades later.
Conservatism
of the McCarthy stripe was skeptical of individualism, and aberration. At the
same time an anti-Progressive work, ‘Why Johnny Can’t Read’ was published in
1955. This work had a solid intention, to teach kids to read with use of
phonics. However, at the time, Progressive elementary schools were using
context reading, and so it stood as a criticism of their system. It’s no
surprise then than Johnson passed a law with standardization as a cornerstone
of education.
Public
schools today are now under No Child Left Behind, passed in 2001. This is the
most significant update of the ESEA, and education generally, since 1965.
Part Four
Vermont,
small as it is, is divided in two parts. The leaf-peeping, syrup-tapping, Ben
and Jerry’s creating north, known as the Northern Kingdom, and the South. I was
in the South, and it basically felt like an extension of Western Massachusetts,
or upstate New York. Albany was closer than Burlington. Southern Vermont,
unlike the Northern Kingdom, once attempted to industrialize. The ubiquitous
cows are not so ubiquitous down there. There are Wal-Marts and chain stores,
and poverty.
Still,
according to the numbers, agriculture and related industries make up a third of
the town’s economy. It’s a rural setting; a Winter’s
Bone atmosphere soaks the back roads (although meth hasn’t blighted the
town as far as I know). Fittingly, amongst the foliage, Robert Frost is buried
on a hill. It is a mix of modern strip and New England charm, rural town and
developed settlement. Excepting the cities, it represents what most kids in
America will experience in high school. Approximately 65 million teens will
live in this, with nothing better to do on a Friday night than bum cigarettes,
think of James Dean and Eminem, and get drunk.
Mount
Anthony Union High School has about 1,000 students, their mascot is the
Patriots, and their colors are red, white, and blue. Mount Anthony has been
ahead of the curve with education reform, in large part due to their
population: a solid portion of the students and their families, are simply
getting by.
For
example, they built a dentist’s office on-site. “If a kid has a toothache, how
can you expect them to focus on a test in class?” asks MAUHS Principal Sue
Maguire. Once a week a dentist comes in, looks at the teeth of kids whose
family can’t afford such attention, and continues to help alleviate the effects
of poverty on schooling.
Educational
statistics are often debated counter-argued, and misinterpreted. A classic
example was the supposed connection between classical music and intelligence in
young children. This was an inflation of a study that suggested listening to
classical music right before a test on spatial relations improved performance.
From this, “Baby Mozart” TM.
However,
studies have consistently confirmed, over decades, that poverty is the greatest
factor on educational performance. Most basically, poverty leads to increased
absenteeism and dropouts. If a child of 13 is also the primary care-provider
for their siblings, school becomes far less important. Development is also
delayed disproportionately in poor children, just as learning disabilities
increase.
Bennington,
Vermont, has a poverty level around 25% of the population. For under-fives that
increases to around 40% for male children, and stays around 25% for females.
67% of this poverty is represented by single-female households. Bennington is
not unique. The national figures show that under-18 around 22% of students in
the U.S. live in poverty.
Increasingly
the demarcation between poverty and ‘just getting by’ is blurring. Middle class
is defined as around $50,000 for annual income, maybe less in semi-rural Vermont.
(Although for the Northeast the median hovers a little above that at $53,000.)
The average male income, almost $10,000 more than female, stands at $39,400 in
the town I first taught.
But
there was more to it than numbers. It was an obvious condition of the student’s
lives, with kids wearing the same shirt to class every day. Not that every kid
fell into this category. Many, indeed likely most, were doing fine, no
different from the city and suburban kids in other towns and states.
Part Five
No
Child Left Behind was bipartisan. Ted Kennedy and John Boehner both supported
the bill.
It’s
been more than a decade since the law was passed, and we can start to study the
data of what exactly has come of this major shift. Many students have gripes
(nothing new) as do teachers and parents. But anecdote is less reliable than
what we can measure, and since measurement is the main point of the law, there
should be clear data answering whether students are doing better by NCLB or
not.
First
off, many teachers and administrators scoffed at the goals. 100% proficiency
sounds admirable, but if you gave every kid in the US a test to write their
name, some would still screw it up. 100% is not achievable. So a decade later,
it’s not surprising that nearly half of American schools haven’t reached the
law’s proficiency goals, 48%. The number should strike us as high, though.
Reading
stayed the same in 8th and 12th graders. The disparity
between blacks and whites, well-off and poor, these remained too. NCLB hasn’t
addressed the problem. It made teachers focus on the test and, as testing hours
increased per year, diminished active learning hours.
According to a 2012 study by the National Center for Fair
and Open Testing this led to a serious problem:
“Then there is the cheating epidemic that has erupted across
the nation. In Atlanta, where cheating was confirmed in 44 public schools,
involving 178 teachers and principals, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI)
report described a culture of “fear, intimidation and retaliation spread
throughout the district” (GBI, 2011). As 2011 came to a close, Georgia
investigators released another report documenting widespread cheating on tests
in Dougherty Country, 200 miles south of Atlanta. They found evidence of
cheating in each of the county’s 11 schools and similar evidence of teachers
coerced into correcting students’ wrong answers. The report cited three main
causes of the cheating. Reason number one: “Pressure to meet adequate yearly progress
under the No Child Left Behind Act.””
Furthermore
“According to published reports, incidents of cheating in the past three years
have been confirmed in 30 states and the District of Columbia” raising alarming
questions about the nature of this new testing environment’s effects on
communities.
A
broad social observation could argue that the reason we didn’t reach 100% was
due to the recession – and since the U.S. doesn’t fund/prioritize education in
amounts comparable to other developed countries – the cuts that resulted in the
lackluster results. But to suggest this merely confirm that NCLB is nowhere
near as important as economic factors in determining success, not some matrix
of standardized tests and incentives.
The
students entering college now are the recipients of this poor education. Our
youth vote.
Is it
surprising then, with such a failed policy doing a decade’s worth of damage,
that colleges and universities have seen a rise of 28-40% of undergrads take a
remedial course? Or that the gaps black and white are still apparent, with 42%
of black students needing remediation compared to 31% of white? If the tests
are so standard, these socio-economic factors wouldn’t have an effect, would
they?
Part Six
Student
teaching is not easy. You are basically apprenticing – seeing if the career
choice you picked is what you wanted it to be. It’s the first time you have
adult powers in the classroom setting.
Back
at the college, there were only a few in my graduate program – six or seven. It
was the fall of 2008. Being as it was Vermont there was a lot of celebrating
when Obama was elected. For prospective teachers, though, there seemed to be
more menacing clouds rolling in over the green mountains. As grad students we
were all wondering if we’d have jobs next fall. Looking over my old reflections
and work from the time, I find a consistent theme in writing. From my official
portfolio, ‘First Student Profile’:
“‘I
can't stand you and I can't stand this class.’
“Lyndsey
has proved to be one of my most difficult students.
“When
the Dean and I pressed her for details none were forthcoming. She seemed
convinced that she was going to fail, but why she thought so was unclear.
“From
my perspective the reasons were obvious: she didn't do work, would walk out of
class (when she showed up) and was, in general I thought, a disrespectful and
rude kid.
“However,
I was prepared to work with her and get her back on track, which is why I had
arranged this meeting with Dave the Dean in the first place. That, and because
the last interaction we'd shared was her screaming at me and storming out of
the computer lab…
“…
This case has been vital to
my understanding of teaching in that with some students their performance is a
combination of external and internal pressures. Sometimes as a teacher, you have
to recognize your limitations and allow other forces to work with you in tandem
to help the student succeed. In this case Lyndsey's success, while mild,
required a combination of patience on my part with greater parental and
administrative pressures, and finally her own self-discipline to get done what
needed to be done. ”
Looking
back, Lyndsey was a typical kid, and I wouldn’t blink my eyes at her conduct
now. I now work almost exclusively with
difficult cases. Hers was an early and
important lesson. But beyond the frequent bouts of confusion, frustration, and
enjoyment, I ended the portfolio with the following:
“As
regards where I may be teaching next year my net has been cast wide. The areas
and schools that need teachers are many and distributed across the country. I
may find myself working in Washington, or Washington D.C. This seeming
complacency is not due to a lack of interest in where I teach – there are
certain places I have ruled out – but instead stems from an acknowledgment that
strong teachers are needed almost everywhere.
“Similarly
I have not ruled out working in a public, private, or charter school. Depending
on the vacancies and areas any of these positions could be beneficial to the
community. I am attempting, in as much as I have learned from my practicum
experience, to be flexible, patient, and dedicated to wherever I end up, and
whomever I end up working with.”
Sure
enough my path through education across the next five years would encompass all
that and more. I left Mt. Anthony with recommendations in my pocket, a year of
classroom experience under my belt, and a Masters in Teaching in hand, ready to
take on the impersonal system of America’s public schools.
