Those d***ed middle class values

Well, at our district we are entering year four of talking about raising achievement of minority students.

Do not think for one minute that I am kidding when I say:

First we listened to outside people read us really bad poetry. We listened to painfully cliched free verse with no internal meter, imagery, or intellectual or emotional heft beyond bathos (which can be fun to those who are looking for it) about sad-eyed puppies left out in thunderstorms and birdies with broken wings and acrostics spelling out "I CAN" down the left-hand margin. And then there's that R. Kelly song-- don't make me relive that. Those of us with a brain were then treated to these presenters then providing literary analysis of this treacle, too, since it was obviously so very deep that we just didn't get it on our own.

Then we spent six months (that's nearly an entire school year to you) trying to figure out what kind of communities made up our school. We spent four and a half of those months basically defining our characteristics.

Then we were told by more outside consultants that if we just loved our students really really hard that they would all achieve. And therefore, since they weren't achieving, we must not love them. So we needed to own up to the fact that we were all cold-hearted bastards who were not "child-centered" and either come to Jesus or leave the profession before we scarred someone for life.

Now, we are told that we should stop trying to impose "white" middle class values upon our students-- that's the problem, yeah.

Now, I have several responses to all of this:
One, when are we going to realize that it takes two to tango, and at least effort on both the parts of students and teachers not to mention parents to provide the opportunity for an education. Note I did not say "provide an education." Because no one is "provided an education." Would that it were so simple as to just pry open some heads and pour some knowledge in. How wonderfully easy that would be! But it's not. A student can sit in the most sparkly, well-apportioned classroom in the world, with a teacher with a Ph.D in her subject and empathy oozing from every pore, and if that student is not willing or able to tune in and spend some energy manipulating the content being presented, he or she might as well try to strap on a helmet and pads and claim to be Tony Romo just because he or she watched ESPN's Sports Center.

But more to the current, transitory point, before we veer off into yet another direction, is this one question that I would like to ask the people who claim that the imposition of middle class values (I will leave aside the "white" part for a moment) is the cause of all our problems:

Just where do you think you are?

You are in a school. The entire purpose of public education in this country is to instill so-called "middle class" values. Let us first figure out just what "middle class" values are, or at least are supposed to be. In an ideal world, this is what schools should teach:

1. Show up on time.

2. Follow directions.

3. Work for what you get. The world doesn't "owe" you anything.

4. Take responsibility for your actions.

5. Practice, study, sweat: this is required for improvement.

6. If you want more money, you need more skills and more knowledge.

7. Take those skills and knowledge and then go out and find a way to use them.

8. Persevere.

Now, notice I said "in an ideal world." Unfortunately, schools mirror society, which is another thing no one seems to get. But, as someone who has been in the working class and is now in the middle class, I can tell you that, rather than being a force for oppression, the above are the way out. Of course, they aren't easy. They require effort. They require personal responsibility. They require patience. They do not provide instant gratification.

I refuse to submit to the thesis that these are somehow evil concepts that are somehow prima facie racist. I don't believe that middle class values are "white," either, since that idea is related to the claim that minority kids who seek academic achievement are "acting white."

The crisis in our schools comes from the fact that education is denigrated as useless. Education is misunderstood as something that should be easy. Education is thought to be something that is provided to you.

No one seems to understand that education requires self-transformation, which is the most useful thing in the world, the hardest thing in the world, and can only be done by you.

Mission: Impossible?

One of the things I've been talking about this weekend in my own classes is the question of what makes a community, which is ironic since we've been dealing with trying to knit together our school community after a rough patch for the last month.

One of the things that all humans need is a sense of belonging. We long for some identification, membership in some organism beyond the individual. Many different groups can fulfill this need in people, often beginning with family and/or friends. Faith groups are another important source of community: the church, the synagogue, the mosque, the sangha, the temple-- all provide a sense of mission, discipline, and support.

While there are certainly exclusive communities, such as gated neighborhoods, private clubs, and the like, it is unquestioned that in the public sphere, a significant idea right now is the idea of an inclusive community. Most public groups profess to want to welcome all, no matter their race or age or social background, and this is doubtless a worthy idea... provided that this inclusiveness does not dilute the sense of identity or purpose of the group. It would make no sense for a group of oenophiles to pursue teetotallers as members. Public schools also undeniably must function as communities. The question is: communities for what purpose?

This is the flip side of the concept of community. To be a true community, no matter how welcoming, a community has to have some strictures, some expectations, some sense of mission to which its members adhere, otherwise the edges of the community stretch forever outward until the community itself is thinned like a pie crust rolled too hard. A community has to have some sort of organizing principle or belief, or there is no gravitational pull to attract members to it and hold together the members that are already there. A community must also demand something of its members, whether that something be a belief or a behavior, or it ceases to function as a community. A community only exists as long as there is allegiance to some principle which drives the community. This organizing principle can best be expressed by the word "mission," which has both military and religious connotations. Note that both military and religious organizations can inspire great loyalty, achievement and action. In each context, mission informs and drives the activities of the group.

We certainly see the disastrous effects of a loss of a sense of mission in some churches, which is how this subject same up in the first place for me. However, the institution of public education has also been damaged by this problem. This is one of the current flaws in the thinking of many people who set public educational policy in America, and, I suspect, in many countries around the world. In trying to be all things to all people, schools have lost their way as communities as well as educational organizations. In too many places, schools have become the places to receive social services, or to become "socialized," or to see your social worker or juvenile officer, or to play sports, or to be fed, or to see a nurse, or to join a dance group, or to provide childcare for parents (or even some of our students) or to go on ski trips or learn how to drive a car. This expectation for schools to provide a smorgasbord of experience and services beyond that of academic content is predicated upon the unfortunate belief that modern schools are solely responsible for the transmission of services which previously were assigned to other parts of society. In too many schools, the successful transmission of academic knowledge and skills comes in dead last as a priority.

What is the most basic mission of a school? I am hoping we seriously contemplate this question, and be honest with ourselves about what the answer should be if schools are to endure as a vital component of society.

I would like to suggest that the fundamental or foundational mission of a school is to provide academic content and skills to its members. I base this assumption on the fact that most of the time spent in schools is titularly devoted to academic subjects. Can we at least agree on that? I wonder.

It is one thing to provide lip service to the idea of gaining an education as the primary expectation of members of our community known as a school, just as most of us would expect members of our religious communities to be willing to live their lives by the religious requirements of our faith, or expect citizens of our country to be loyal to the same. Let's face it: we expect members of our softball teams to come to games ready and willing to play. Why do we accept members of our school community who do not exhibit the same dedication to the ideal of gaining and utilizing academic knowledge? The end result of such a strategy, further, is to dilute schools' attractiveness to those members who do exhibit a rudimentary dedication to this goal.

For example, in an effort to prevent drop-outs, we abandon our expectation of educational behavior and lower academic standards until they are functionally meaningless. We divorce the expectation of allegiance to academic achievement and academic behaviors from the expectation for membership in the school community, and therefore undercut the very mission of the school. Although the providing of all of those other services and experiences is no doubt noble, and certainly enjoyable, they also serve as static that destroys the message and mission of the school. Shouldn't the education of our members at least be priority number one in public schools? If not, why not just call schools "community centers" and be done with the hypocrisy?

Current debate (as enshrined in laws such as No Child Left Behind, among others) regarding American public education derives from the nonsensical premise that, as my friend and colleague the Education Wonk consistently reminds us, every young person in a school is indeed primarily in attendance there in the role of a student and that if there are any who fail to learn, the responsibility lies solely with the educators and the schools within which they labor. I am sure that sometimes the failure to produce competent students IS one of an individual educator or of the school structure itself. However, there are too many other factors that influence the successful transmission of the cultural and cognitive knowledge that most would classify as an education.

At the very least, shouldn't we expect some fundamental and functional adherence toward academic achievement on the part of our students? The desire and dedication to learning is a not a passive nor inconsequential part of the process, to put it mildly. There is often a general weakness of familial and societal support for education as a valuable acquisition, which is often undercut by an unspoken yet undeniable sense of suspicion toward and de-emphasis upon intellectual pursuits which is endemic in American culture, among other things. We compulsively fill our hours with meaningless distractions to relieve ourselves of the opportunity (and some would say the obligation) to do the one thing that makes us human, which is to think. Too many of us, adults and children, need the constant static of empty entertainment, and fail to see that the constant blur of activity in our lives makes it impossible to live our lives in any other, more meaningful way. Indeed we are too exhausted to consider that there might even be a more meaningful way to live our all-too-short, all-too-precious lives. But I wonder if part of the lack of the dedication to learning is not also profoundly hampered by the lack of focus schools themselves display toward accomplishing the complex task of education.

At the base of all these considerations is the problem that schools have lost their organizing principles as communities. We have to harmonize the primacy of the mission we claim-- to provide the access to an education-- with the actions of the schools. To do this, we have to require certain behaviors of our educators and our students. Educators must make education the primary purpose of the school. Students and their families must make the acquisition of an education the primary pursuit of their affiliation with the schools. All other services provided at school must be retained only if they do not detract from the accomplishment of our primary mission.

A community attracts members through its mission. Public education in this country suffers from a crippling lack of this kind of primary organizing principle. This organizational drift in individual schools leads to their failures as attractive communities which provide a unique and valued commodity to society. We then seem surprised that so many consider it irrelevant.

Which is more important: process versus product

The discussion over the post on innumeracy and memorization got me started thinking, and so I will throw it out to you all, hoping a few people might de-lurk:

k mentioned that students can get partial points on the math section of the NCLB-mandated tests in her state if they demonstrate using the correct processes:

My classmates and I were surprised to learn that, on our state's high stakes do or die test, a student can have the wrong answer but get more points, because they labeled, graphed and explained, than the student with the right answer who didn't jump through all the hoops.
The very next week one of our school districts announced a huge immediate cut in programs and technology, followed by a staffing cut next year. Why? Because the budget contained an error to the tune of millions of dollars.
Now, I'm sure, that the budget report was neat, tidy, with graphs, labels and explanations...
but, darn it, that wrong answer doesn't seem to be getting the school district many points with parents and staff.

graycie said this:

The reflection of your post in the world of reading is looking at the first letter of a word and then just sorta guessing at it. In literature it's the Disney-fication of everything. Aaargh.

I have heard many involved in education trumpet this emphasis of process over product. Think Frank Lloyd Wright here: beautiful designs, exquisite buildings-- which often leaked like a sieve and needed major repair work almost constantly because he seemed to skimp on the boring engineering side of the job.

Perhaps this gets back to our emphasis on style over substance; yeah, yeah, human nature, right? But isn't part of education about overcoming human nature for the better?

So should we reward process over product? Is it good to know how to do something even if you can't do it?

An open thread for you.

Innumeracy and the Persistence of Memory

All of my grades are based on percentages. I'm not one of these teachers who wants to convert someone's scores in my head, so I just weight grades differently. But all grades are based on 100 possible points. I can tell at a glance how a student is doing this way.

But this habit often makes it interesting when students are trying to figure out their grades on quizzes. I usually have a rather simple number of questions in terms of being able to calculate grades easily: 5, 10, 12, 20, 25, or 33 items. As I watched several of my AP students struggle with figuring out their grades, I had to suppress a groan of frustration. It was a 20 item quiz-- therefore each question would be worth 5 points, right? Young Frederick wanted to pull out his calculator to figure out what his score would be if he missed 7.

"No calculator. You can do this," I urged.

He couldn't begin to figure out how to determine his grade without a calculator. He is 16 years old and taking pre-calculus and other college-track classes (I never took a course beyond algebra 2, much to my chagrin). He doesn't immediately know that 7x5=35, and then subtract 35 from 100, nor can he figure out that 13x5=65. As a matter of fact, he stumbled over the 100-35 part and insisted the answer was 75.

It is obvious that his only problem is NOT that he didn't do his reading for my AP US history class carefully enough last night. His problem begins with a basic innumeracy. Of course, many would say that he is a victim of a larger educational trend which I pray to God is finally being placed on the pyre of idiotic educational theories: that rote memorization is bad, bad, baddety bad bad.

Frederick has to THINK about what 6x9 is, and he doesn't get that 6x9 is the same as 9x6 is the same as 3x2x9 is the same as (3 cubed) x2, and so on-- that's a related but different problem we could talk about all day. I think it's a crime that Frederick has to waste valuable thinking time on matters such as 6x5, much less 100-35. Frederick has much more complex things to think about, but by the time he gets there, his poor little thinker is all worn out on information he should have committed to recall 7 or 8 years ago.

The greatest civilizations of the ages depended upon rote memorization. The Torah was preserved through the power of memory for hundreds of years. The Iliad and the Odyssey were memorized and sung for generations. But somewhere along the line in the last forty or so years, memorizing was a skill that became shameful and vilified by someone among the educational cognoscenti. In the words of some of my students, I would like to find this dude and kick him in the shins.

I still remember huge chunks of poetry and music that I had to memorize over twenty years ago.

"Little Orphant Annie's come to our house to stay,
To wash the cups and saucers up and brush the crumbs away,
And shoo the chickens off the porch and dust the hearth and sweep,
And make the fire and bake the bread and earn her board and keep..."
...and I could keep going for the next 30 or so lines, trust me....

"But soft! What light through yonder window breaks!
It is the East, and Juliet the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon
Who is already sick and pale with grief...."

Not to mention the lyrics to almost every song on the pop charts since 1974, much to my enduring shame in some cases (Some people call me the Space Cowboy, yeah; some call me the Gangster of Love; some people call me Maurice, 'cause I speak of the pompitous of Love-- YIKES!)....

My two youngest kids learned the names of the presidents in order to the tune of "Yankee Doodle Dandy." When they were 4. In preschool. Before they could read.

What is all the more appalling is that we live in the "Information Age." Never has so much information been at the fingertips of so many but been manipulated or understood by so few.

In this year's State of the Union address, President Bush called for creation of the American Competitiveness Initiative, the goal of which is to encourage more study of math and science. This is all well and good, but when students lack a fundamental understanding of the way that numbers work, I fear their ability to go any deeper into the subject. Let's also not overlook the fact that mathematics is also the language of science. Combine innumeracy with the frightful lack of vocabulary (there's that darn memorization thing again) and you've got a seemingly insurmountable problem. Further consider the default response of 90% of our students to delayed gratification, frustration or struggle-- which is to quit--and you've got a major crisis on your hands.

Then you've got this bubble headed bozo who assures students that algebra is unnecessary. More kicks in the shins for this dude.

I am on the verge of promising young Frederick and his classmates a pizza party if they learn their times tables. If we don't get them now, we may never get them. And this is too important to ignore.

If I was the Queen of the School

So my daughters have made sure that I have heard Gwen Stefani's "If I Was A Rich Girl" on Tune Disney-- and I must say, I briefly tried to picture Tevye singing it wearing Gwen's wardrobe, or Gwen with Tevye's beard. It was almost like a hallucination.

Riches don't really appeal to me. But being a queen does. So I got to thinking, what if I was the Queen of the school? (Yeah, follow THAT train of thought, whydontcha?) Anyhow:

-Girls couldn't dress like Gwen Stefani, and boys would no longer need that grab-the-crotch duckwalk they have to adopt to keep me from seeing London and France.

-Ketchup would never be allowed to be counted as a vegetable in school lunches. And ground turkey? Yikes!

- No one could become a principal unless they had successfully taught for at least ten years. And once every five years, they would have to take a full year's rotation in the classroom, in another building to prevent getting favorable treatment from his or her fellow administrators, with all the attendant duties, privileges, proximity-to-a-bathroom and salary that implies. During this time, teachers getting their administrative credentials could do their intern experience in that slot, which should last at least a full year.

-Cooperating teachers in a mainstreaming situation (like in class-within-a-class) who stiff their partner teachers by not showing up or bringing a puppy to school or sitting in the back of the room doing paperwork or surfing the 'net would be forced to eat lunch in the boys' bathroom. Without the use of their hands. On the floor. Without a tray.

-The school would only have the rules that everyone in the school will enforce. Anything else makes you look like a chump in front of the kids. If only the teachers in the math wing enforce the tardy policy, what's the point? Especially when administrators make up draconian punishments in the behavior guide and then ignore them? And Principal Perpetual Plea-bargain would be fired.

-Teachers should be evaluated carefully by a principal who has been a teacher, who loved being a teacher, and is a true instructional leader who knows what she is talking about. Principals should have a CFO to handle budgetary matters so that they do not have to spend a majority of their time on tasks which have nothing to do with the instructional needs of the school. Incompetent teachers would be fired. Period. Incompetent administrators would be fired. Not shuffled off to another position.

-Parents who are guilty of educational neglect of their children would be subject to criminal penalties.

-Helicopter parents would be forced to work for a year as a teacher's aide in a different school from the one their children attend.

- No one could pass laws about education unless they had been a regular education teacher for five years within the last fifteen years. And if one might criticize that practically no one in the state lege or in the Beltway could pass laws about education.... um, what would be your point?

Obesity and schools

There is currently a big push to offer more healthy fare in school cafeterias, and it is certainly a good idea. The days that I fail to bring my own lunch to school are always days of tension, as there is no way that an adult who is concerned about their weight can eat the food in the school cafeteria. It seems like 80% of the calories come from starches and fat. I would love to be able to explain to the people who make up the menus in a typical school that if you substitute ground turkey for beef as an ingredient (which by the way, unfortunately, tastes completely different, and by that I mean unpleasant), that cooking it in lard is spectacularly missing the point. If I'm going to clog my arteries, it should at least taste good. Which is the first problem: healthier fare won't do any good, either, if the kids won't eat it.

But there is another problem that is more important, if we are going to take this issue seriously. My school district currently requires 1.5 credits in physical education during the four years of high school, and the half credit is taken care of by a health class. There is currently talk of reducing this to one credit. In middle school, many students attend PE only every other day if they play a musical instrument. This is not enough. Then there is the fact that I often easily lap students taking "Power Walking" when I'm walking from one hallway to another on my planning period without breaking a sweat-- even in my street clothes and as ancient as I am.

Now, before people think that I've gone all "Multiple Intelligences" on them, let me say that I am all about the primacy of academics in schools. Nor do I believe that it is the job of schools to solve all societal ills-- far from it! However, physical education has been part of the educational landscape for decades now. My experience has been that people can use their brains better when they are not prisoners of lethargy. Physical education is a key component in an excellent education.

Failure by any other name...

I love to read the news; in fact, I'm a news junkie. Friends of mine know this and send me little snippets they think I'll like. So I'm sure many of you have seen this one lately (July 28, 2005).

According to the Guardian newspaper, it seems a retired teacher in the Professional Association of Teachers in the U.K. recently put forward a motion that would "delete the word 'failure' from the education vocabulary and replace it with the concept of 'deferred success.'"

Said Liz Beattie, sponsor of the resolution: "I feel very strongly about this. For most of my teaching career I have been upset by seeing some children give up on themselves. If dropping the word 'fail' from our educational vocabulary could help, isn't it worth a try?"

Let's try this out, shall we, and see if it works:

The Boston Red Sox baseball team's delayed success in the World Series endured for eighty-eight years and was attributed to the "Curse of the Bambino."

What we have here is... delayed success to communicate!

If only we could fix everything by just making words go away... no, wait! Isn't decreasing one's vocabulary a BAD thing for educators to do?

But then again, what a fabulously Orwellian concept, one that Winston Smith's superiors in the Ministry of Truth would love! If we have no word for failure, then it won't occur! Right?

Right?

Here's the problem. No matter what we as teachers try, some students are going to fail. No matter how we try to paper over the lack of attainment of skills or knowledge, most of the students know they've failed, too. Grown up people-- teachers, coaches, principals, parents-- who try to duck the pronouncement at the moment of truth are doing the kids no favors. First of all, the kids know you're not being honest with them, and secondly, deep in their hearts, they don't appreciate it, either. Once you start down the dark path of euphemisms, kids know they can't trust you to give an honest assessment.

And that's what grades are or should be-- an assessment. Not a lifetime sentence. Not an identity. Unless, of course, you keep excusing away the failures as they pile up. What about the kid who buys your load of tripe, and thinks that nothing is wrong? Eventually, the lesson, the unit, the semester, the school year will end. Eventually, the students will expect to be able to go to the next lesson, the next unit, the next semester, the next grade, or eventually out in the world and do something with the knowledge they are supposed to have attained. Will they be able to do it?

Think of it, to twist the words of Pink Floyd, as a wall. Together, teachers and students are trying to build a wall of skills, knowledge, and facts that is going to have to support students' endeavors and aspirations after graduation. Honest assessments lead to the chance to correct flaws and mistakes before they become crippling weaknesses in that wall, before they pile atop each other. Students who face and recognize their failures get a chance to mend their failures. But what happens if students are allowed to stumble blithely on? Riddled with gaps and holes and in some cases yawning chasms where knowledge and skills should be, will their education collapse under the weight of ignorance at the first challenge?

In our frenzied quest to enhance "self-esteem," we are teaching our kids that it is okay not to do your best; it's okay not to get it right. We are taking away that inner sense of disappointment that encourages us to get it right the next time, and so there is no "next time." What kind of education are we giving our students if they are not held accountable for ever learning material that they have failed to attain previously?

By excusing or obviating failure, we are saying that we don't believe in our students. We are saying that we don't believe them CAPABLE of learning. We are saying we don't believe they can do better. And no matter how much people like Ms. Beatty think they are demonstrating their advocacy for children, by wanting to protect them from sometimes harsh truths, really all they are doing is ensuring that the failures will continue.

Oh, by the way, the motion to do away with the word "failure" itself-- failed to pass! Let's hope that this notion doesn't experience any "delayed success" any time soon.