Not a fan of heterogeneous grouping. Never have been. It's a purely personal choice; I experienced it as a high school student and it was miserable.
But while I believe that tracking is the way to go, I believe there are a couple of ways we do it wrong.
Most commonly we track by the destination. We let students know that Bus A runs to college and Bus B runs to a trade. Each bus runs its own route, and only that route. If students want to ride Bus A, they have to get themselves to the bus stop. Once they meet they bus, the bus can drive them pretty reliably to their destination, but they've got to get themselves from their home to the bus stop, and some students get lost on the way.
Sometimes we track by the students' transportation. This student drives a Porsche, so we put that student on a wide, open highway. This student drives a Yugo with bald tires, so we put that student on a road that is flat and straight. This student drives a rugged SUV, so we send the student up a grinding rough rocky road. And this student is walking, so we put the student on a footpath beside the river. This can seem like a great way to customize the student's travels, but it often fails to consider either where the student starts or where the path leads. We still require the students to find their own way to the starting point, and we don't even think about where the path leads-- just how well the student can travel it.
We often talk about personalizing or individualizing a student's track, but what we really mean is that we make allowances for students to get on the path at different points. Instead of catching the bus at the very beginning of the trail, the student can catch the bus at many different points--along that one route. The students still have to get themselves to the bus stop, and every student is still riding along exactly the same route-- the only difference is how much of the route they travel.
What should we do? Pick up each student at home, meeting each student where he/she lives, drive the student around until the student is ready. Then give each one a gps, a map, and the keys to the car.
Tracking has to consider not just where the trail ends, but where it begins, and how the student is going to travel it. These days, at our best, we tend to just go two out of three. We need three out of three to get really individualized education in place.
Sunday, July 13, 2014
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Teacher Time
Every profession measures time differently. Doctors and lawyers measure time in hours or vague lumps. Teachers measure time in minutes, even seconds.
If a doctor (or his office) tell you that something is going to happen "at nine o'clock," that means sometime between 9:30 and Noon. Lawyers, at least in my neck of the woods, can rarely be nailed down to an actual time. Anything that's not a scheduled appointment is "sometime this afternoon." Even a summons to jury duty will list a particular time which just represents the approximate time at which things will start to prepare to begin happening. Further up the Relaxed Time Scale, we find the delivery and installation guys for whom "Between 8 AM and 3 PM Tuesday," means "Not at all on Tuesday."
Meanwhile, in teacher land, 9:00 means exactly 9:00. Other professionals may round off, saying 9:00 when they really mean 8:57 or 9:08, but we mean what we say. If a class starts at 9:00 and ends at 9:51, we are getting our fifty-one minutes of class.
This is one of those things that non-teachers don't entirely get. If you work in an office, time is pretty flexy. If a meeting can benefit by running an extra ten or fifteen minutes, you just do it. But in most schools, when the bell rings, you're done. There is no little extra bit of time you can just throw into the work.
Consequently we tend to measure out our time in coffee spoons. One minute and forty-three seconds left in class? Okay, I can totally get three more practice sentences about participial phrases in before I remind them of tomorrow's assignment. Which is better than realizing that you've got two minutes and twenty seconds left for a three-and-a-half minute piece of business.
Nobody in the business world feels any real difference between a forty-two minute meeting and a fifty-one minute meeting, but most teachers feel a whole world of difference in that nine-minute gap. That's why the phrase "It'll just a take a couple of minutes," doesn't mean a thing to civilians, but makes a teacher's heart sink. I think it's also part of why civilians don't really understand what they're asking when they request or require that teachers add "just one more little" thing to the teaching day.
Other than the fact that it gives some teachers the uncanny ability to act as human egg timers, I'm not sure we benefit much from this heightened time awareness. Yes, teachers learn to be punctual, which is a virtue, I hear. But doctors and lawyers and other folks are fast and loose (well, loose) with time because for them, a task takes as long as it takes, whereas in teaching, a task takes as long as we get to do it.
It's a fantasy of mine to imagine a classroom in which I say, "Okay, class. We're going to work with dependent clauses today, and we're going to keep at it till everyone gets it." I understand that problems that go with that (Mrs. Numberwhacker is up the hall wishing I would be done with clauses so she can get started with quadratic equations), but one of the screwy things about how we're set up in this country is that the most fundamental organizing principle is The Clock. Not the students, teachers, or lessons, but The Clock. I know it's hard to think of another way to manage several hundred humans working on a hundred tasks under one roof, but a guy can dream. And if your school figured out a way to be student or task centered, I'd be fascinated to hear about it.
If a doctor (or his office) tell you that something is going to happen "at nine o'clock," that means sometime between 9:30 and Noon. Lawyers, at least in my neck of the woods, can rarely be nailed down to an actual time. Anything that's not a scheduled appointment is "sometime this afternoon." Even a summons to jury duty will list a particular time which just represents the approximate time at which things will start to prepare to begin happening. Further up the Relaxed Time Scale, we find the delivery and installation guys for whom "Between 8 AM and 3 PM Tuesday," means "Not at all on Tuesday."
Meanwhile, in teacher land, 9:00 means exactly 9:00. Other professionals may round off, saying 9:00 when they really mean 8:57 or 9:08, but we mean what we say. If a class starts at 9:00 and ends at 9:51, we are getting our fifty-one minutes of class.
This is one of those things that non-teachers don't entirely get. If you work in an office, time is pretty flexy. If a meeting can benefit by running an extra ten or fifteen minutes, you just do it. But in most schools, when the bell rings, you're done. There is no little extra bit of time you can just throw into the work.
Consequently we tend to measure out our time in coffee spoons. One minute and forty-three seconds left in class? Okay, I can totally get three more practice sentences about participial phrases in before I remind them of tomorrow's assignment. Which is better than realizing that you've got two minutes and twenty seconds left for a three-and-a-half minute piece of business.
Nobody in the business world feels any real difference between a forty-two minute meeting and a fifty-one minute meeting, but most teachers feel a whole world of difference in that nine-minute gap. That's why the phrase "It'll just a take a couple of minutes," doesn't mean a thing to civilians, but makes a teacher's heart sink. I think it's also part of why civilians don't really understand what they're asking when they request or require that teachers add "just one more little" thing to the teaching day.
Other than the fact that it gives some teachers the uncanny ability to act as human egg timers, I'm not sure we benefit much from this heightened time awareness. Yes, teachers learn to be punctual, which is a virtue, I hear. But doctors and lawyers and other folks are fast and loose (well, loose) with time because for them, a task takes as long as it takes, whereas in teaching, a task takes as long as we get to do it.
It's a fantasy of mine to imagine a classroom in which I say, "Okay, class. We're going to work with dependent clauses today, and we're going to keep at it till everyone gets it." I understand that problems that go with that (Mrs. Numberwhacker is up the hall wishing I would be done with clauses so she can get started with quadratic equations), but one of the screwy things about how we're set up in this country is that the most fundamental organizing principle is The Clock. Not the students, teachers, or lessons, but The Clock. I know it's hard to think of another way to manage several hundred humans working on a hundred tasks under one roof, but a guy can dream. And if your school figured out a way to be student or task centered, I'd be fascinated to hear about it.
Poverty and the Moral Imperative of Education
We are being bombarded regularly with arguments about poverty and education that are fallaciously constructed, used to support the wrong conclusion, and, ironically, are unnecessary.
The Big Scary Facts
It usually begins with a list of assorted research factoids like these:
* Students who fail school are three times more likely to be unemployed.
* Students who fail school will make far less than what a high school grad makes, which is in turn far less than what a college grad makes.
* Students who drop out are hugely more likely to end up in jail.
* Students who fail school are more likely to end up uninsured, have poor health, a die as much as decade sooner than graduates.
* In 1970, most of the middle class had high school diplomas. In 2007, it was about a quarter.
And So, Education
The conclusion we're asked to reach from these data is always the same-- education. We must make sure that every student completes high school with a full education, because that's how we will fix all of the above problems.
This is the "education fixes poverty" mantra. If we get everybody through high school prepared for a good job (defined in many PD sessions as "a job with an above-the-poverty-line" wage) then nobody will be poor and everybody will be healthy and happy and successful.
There are two huge problems with this argument.
How Much Does a Workforce Shape An Economy, Anyway?
Let's imagine that over the next five years, every young American in the pipeline made it all the way to a bachelor's degree. Would we suddenly find ourselves in a country in which every job paid well above minimum wage (a necessity if we're all going to live above the poverty line). Would the vast service sector, the whole workforce of, say. Micky D's, get a raise, or would those jobs just disappear, the be replaced by well-paying tech jobs?
There's a huge number of twenty-something's living at home right now that suggest that having a great education does not make a job appear. "Well, that's because they got some useless liberal arts degree," say our hardnosed economics experts. "If everybody got, say, a computer degree, then we wouldn't have this problem." Because, yes, if the country were filled with trained computer guys, tech companies would just say, "Heck, hire them all!"
But more importantly...
Correlation Is Not Causation
It must be something about the age we live in. I'm an English teacher and even I am tired of pointing out the correlation-not-causation thing to people.
If A and B tend to appear together, it's always wise to look for a C that connects to both of them. It's that simple. And for the data above, C is not particularly hard to find.
Here's a group of people who tend to have bad outcomes-- low income, poor health (because no insurance and poor nutrition and lousy home situation), high rate of actual "criminal" (as defined by the dominant culture) behavior as well as high rate of navigating the justice system badly once they get hoovered up into it (almost as if they can't afford good lawyers), difficulty getting and holding jobs. What emerges as a likely cause of most of this? That's right-- poverty.
Here's another group of people. They may see no real use in education, they get the most poorly-managed and under-resourced schools, they have an unstable home life that makes school difficult, they come from a different culture than the dominant culture around which schools are organized. For these reasons and others, they often do not finish school. What do many of them have in common? Yessirreebob-- poverty.
These two groups are mostly the same group. They are A and B-- poverty is our C. Failing school does not lead to all these other outcomes. Failing school is one more outcome on the list of Effects of Poverty.
Two Incorrect Conclusions
I want to absolutely clear. It is absolutely, categorically, unequivocally, dead-wrong wrong to conclude that poverty is such an obstacle to educating some children that we should just give up or pack it in or settle for doing a crappy job because, after all, poverty. Just as it is wrong to say that education is helpless before the power of poverty and therefor we should just shrug and expect that we won't do any good. No, no, no, no, no, no, NO, no, and also, no.
It is also incorrect to conclude that delivering a middle class education to poor students will turn them into middle class adults.
A Better Conclusion
Look, research may conclude that the happiest animals in the zoo are the ones that roll in the mud and eat hay with their trunks. But I would be a fool to then declare that I will make the penguins happier by feeding them straw and teaching them to roll in the mud.
Whenever a PD leaders or a politician or a reformster of some sort throws these details at me, I do not think, "Oh, man. We are failing to educate well enough to end poverty." I think, "We are delivering the wrong product to some of our students."
I think we are making a huge mistake in trying to deliver the same product to students living in poverty that we deliver to students living in comfy middle class life. What we keep proposing is that we approach a population of students with distinct needs and a distinct culture and declaring that if we just educate them real hard, we will make those differences go away. We are figuratively suggesting that students in the ELL population will become fluent speakers of English if we just teach them as if they already were. And of course the Secretary of Education has already literally suggested that students with special needs will no longer have those special needs if we just demand that they stop behaving as if they have special needs.
This is dumb.
It's Teacher 101. You meet students where they are. And what all this data says to me is that students living in systemic generational poverty are somewhere different than where we are setting up schools.
Important Clarification
I know that nobody wants to have a conversation about schools designed for areas of poverty and the students trapped there, because for decades "schools serving high-poverty populations" has been synonymous with "crappy schools that are underfunded, understaffed, chaotic and crappy." On the list if Things Anti-Reform Resistance Fighters Don't Get is just how powerful it is for people living in those areas to hear, "We are going to get you schools just as good as the ones in the 'burbs." Nobody has made that promise in a long, long time.
But we can't confuse "just the same as" with "just as good as." Feeding my penguins straw in the mud is just the same as what I do for elephants, but its worse care, because it doesn't recognize the needs and nature of the penguins.
We are missing the boat for students living in poverty because we are not committing to finding out what resources they need. Instead of meeting their needs, we are trying to create a system that erases those needs-- not by meeting them, but by denying them. We are doing the educational equivalent of saying, "You would not be so hungry if you were wearing a polo shirt. People who wear polo shirts are never hungry."
Why The Whole Argument Is Irrelevant
The whole "we must educate students because failing school leads to all these awful things" argument is used to create a sense of urgency, to convince everyone that we must use all our educational might to bring about social justice. It's a moral imperative to teach all these students who are failing school so that our society won't have all these bad effects any more.
Maybe this is useful when addressing civilians and politicians and trying to create a sense of moral urgency, but I wish folks would stop using it with teachers. Here's why--
Teachers already have a moral imperative to teach every single student to the best of our ability and to the fullest of his or her potential.
This whole argument hits me about like someone saying, "Hey, let me explain to you some good reasons for helping people get out of a burning building." It's okay. Really- I don't really think I need a set of extra reasons, particularly ill-formed ones, to convince me of what I already know.
Every young human in America deserves a high-quality education, which will be best created in a relationship with an institution that recognizes the student's potential, abilities, needs and situation. Every young human deserves an education of the highest quality, an education that will open up a whole world of awesome possibilities. Every young human in America deserves an education that is a journey, one that begins right where the student is, and opens up a vast network of pathways that give the student infinite choices to reach the destination of his or her choosing. That's the moral imperative.
Failing school does not cause poverty. And it's not even right to say poverty causes failing school. The high level of failure among students living in poverty is a sign that our schools are not meeting the needs of those students.
The Big Scary Facts
It usually begins with a list of assorted research factoids like these:
* Students who fail school are three times more likely to be unemployed.
* Students who fail school will make far less than what a high school grad makes, which is in turn far less than what a college grad makes.
* Students who drop out are hugely more likely to end up in jail.
* Students who fail school are more likely to end up uninsured, have poor health, a die as much as decade sooner than graduates.
* In 1970, most of the middle class had high school diplomas. In 2007, it was about a quarter.
And So, Education
The conclusion we're asked to reach from these data is always the same-- education. We must make sure that every student completes high school with a full education, because that's how we will fix all of the above problems.
This is the "education fixes poverty" mantra. If we get everybody through high school prepared for a good job (defined in many PD sessions as "a job with an above-the-poverty-line" wage) then nobody will be poor and everybody will be healthy and happy and successful.
There are two huge problems with this argument.
How Much Does a Workforce Shape An Economy, Anyway?
Let's imagine that over the next five years, every young American in the pipeline made it all the way to a bachelor's degree. Would we suddenly find ourselves in a country in which every job paid well above minimum wage (a necessity if we're all going to live above the poverty line). Would the vast service sector, the whole workforce of, say. Micky D's, get a raise, or would those jobs just disappear, the be replaced by well-paying tech jobs?
There's a huge number of twenty-something's living at home right now that suggest that having a great education does not make a job appear. "Well, that's because they got some useless liberal arts degree," say our hardnosed economics experts. "If everybody got, say, a computer degree, then we wouldn't have this problem." Because, yes, if the country were filled with trained computer guys, tech companies would just say, "Heck, hire them all!"
But more importantly...
Correlation Is Not Causation
It must be something about the age we live in. I'm an English teacher and even I am tired of pointing out the correlation-not-causation thing to people.
If A and B tend to appear together, it's always wise to look for a C that connects to both of them. It's that simple. And for the data above, C is not particularly hard to find.
Here's a group of people who tend to have bad outcomes-- low income, poor health (because no insurance and poor nutrition and lousy home situation), high rate of actual "criminal" (as defined by the dominant culture) behavior as well as high rate of navigating the justice system badly once they get hoovered up into it (almost as if they can't afford good lawyers), difficulty getting and holding jobs. What emerges as a likely cause of most of this? That's right-- poverty.
Here's another group of people. They may see no real use in education, they get the most poorly-managed and under-resourced schools, they have an unstable home life that makes school difficult, they come from a different culture than the dominant culture around which schools are organized. For these reasons and others, they often do not finish school. What do many of them have in common? Yessirreebob-- poverty.
These two groups are mostly the same group. They are A and B-- poverty is our C. Failing school does not lead to all these other outcomes. Failing school is one more outcome on the list of Effects of Poverty.
Two Incorrect Conclusions
I want to absolutely clear. It is absolutely, categorically, unequivocally, dead-wrong wrong to conclude that poverty is such an obstacle to educating some children that we should just give up or pack it in or settle for doing a crappy job because, after all, poverty. Just as it is wrong to say that education is helpless before the power of poverty and therefor we should just shrug and expect that we won't do any good. No, no, no, no, no, no, NO, no, and also, no.
It is also incorrect to conclude that delivering a middle class education to poor students will turn them into middle class adults.
A Better Conclusion
Look, research may conclude that the happiest animals in the zoo are the ones that roll in the mud and eat hay with their trunks. But I would be a fool to then declare that I will make the penguins happier by feeding them straw and teaching them to roll in the mud.
Whenever a PD leaders or a politician or a reformster of some sort throws these details at me, I do not think, "Oh, man. We are failing to educate well enough to end poverty." I think, "We are delivering the wrong product to some of our students."
I think we are making a huge mistake in trying to deliver the same product to students living in poverty that we deliver to students living in comfy middle class life. What we keep proposing is that we approach a population of students with distinct needs and a distinct culture and declaring that if we just educate them real hard, we will make those differences go away. We are figuratively suggesting that students in the ELL population will become fluent speakers of English if we just teach them as if they already were. And of course the Secretary of Education has already literally suggested that students with special needs will no longer have those special needs if we just demand that they stop behaving as if they have special needs.
This is dumb.
It's Teacher 101. You meet students where they are. And what all this data says to me is that students living in systemic generational poverty are somewhere different than where we are setting up schools.
Important Clarification
I know that nobody wants to have a conversation about schools designed for areas of poverty and the students trapped there, because for decades "schools serving high-poverty populations" has been synonymous with "crappy schools that are underfunded, understaffed, chaotic and crappy." On the list if Things Anti-Reform Resistance Fighters Don't Get is just how powerful it is for people living in those areas to hear, "We are going to get you schools just as good as the ones in the 'burbs." Nobody has made that promise in a long, long time.
But we can't confuse "just the same as" with "just as good as." Feeding my penguins straw in the mud is just the same as what I do for elephants, but its worse care, because it doesn't recognize the needs and nature of the penguins.
We are missing the boat for students living in poverty because we are not committing to finding out what resources they need. Instead of meeting their needs, we are trying to create a system that erases those needs-- not by meeting them, but by denying them. We are doing the educational equivalent of saying, "You would not be so hungry if you were wearing a polo shirt. People who wear polo shirts are never hungry."
Why The Whole Argument Is Irrelevant
The whole "we must educate students because failing school leads to all these awful things" argument is used to create a sense of urgency, to convince everyone that we must use all our educational might to bring about social justice. It's a moral imperative to teach all these students who are failing school so that our society won't have all these bad effects any more.
Maybe this is useful when addressing civilians and politicians and trying to create a sense of moral urgency, but I wish folks would stop using it with teachers. Here's why--
Teachers already have a moral imperative to teach every single student to the best of our ability and to the fullest of his or her potential.
This whole argument hits me about like someone saying, "Hey, let me explain to you some good reasons for helping people get out of a burning building." It's okay. Really- I don't really think I need a set of extra reasons, particularly ill-formed ones, to convince me of what I already know.
Every young human in America deserves a high-quality education, which will be best created in a relationship with an institution that recognizes the student's potential, abilities, needs and situation. Every young human deserves an education of the highest quality, an education that will open up a whole world of awesome possibilities. Every young human in America deserves an education that is a journey, one that begins right where the student is, and opens up a vast network of pathways that give the student infinite choices to reach the destination of his or her choosing. That's the moral imperative.
Failing school does not cause poverty. And it's not even right to say poverty causes failing school. The high level of failure among students living in poverty is a sign that our schools are not meeting the needs of those students.
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Details on New Teacher Equity Equality Plan
This aspect of school reform has been lurking around the edges for some time-- the notion that once we find the super-duper teachers, we could somehow shuffle everybody around and put the supery-duperest in front of the neediest students. But though reformsters have occasionally floated the idea, the feds have been reluctant to really push it.
Now that the current administration has decided to bring that federal hammer down on this issue, you're probably wondering what they have in mind for insuring that the best teachers will be put in front of the students who have the greatest need. I'm here to tell you what some of the techniques will be.
Before Anything Else, Mild Brain Damage Required
Any program like this requires the involved parties to believe that teachers are basically interchangeable cogs in a huge machine. We will have to assume that a teacher who is a great teacher of wealthy middle school students will be equally successful with students in a poor urban setting. Or vice-versa, as you will recall that Duncan's pretty sure it's the comfy suburban kids who are actually failing. We have to assume that somebody who has a real gift for connecting with rural working class Hispanic families will be equally gifted when it comes to teaching in a high-poverty inner city setting.
And, of course, as always, we'll have to assume that teachers who are evaluated as "ineffective" didn't get that rating for any reason other than their own skills-- the students, families, resources and support of the school, administration, validity of the high stakes tests, the crippling effects of poverty-- none of those things contributed to the teacher's "success" or lack thereof.
Once everybody is on board with this version of reality, we can start shuffling teachers around.
Financial Incentives
Schools with great need and challenge often have trouble attracting top teachers, so let's throw money at them. And since an underlying problem for high needs schools is that they don't have money to throw at their problems, we'll have to use tax money from the state. Which means that wealthy school districts will fork over extra tax money to help convince the teachers at those wealthy schools to leave and go elsewhere. I don't anticipate any complaints about this at all.
Bait and Switch
Simply tell new teacher grads that they have been hired by Big Rich High School and drive them over to Poor Underfunded High School instead. With any luck, you can get some work out of them before they figure it out.
Indentured Teachitude
The federal government will pay for your teacher education, but you then owe them seven years of teaching at the school of their choice. As I type this, I'm thinking it has actual promise. Sure, they won't know if you're great at first, but once you've taught a year or two, they'll have an idea and if you are a really great teacher they'll ship you to one of the underfunded, collapsing schools with high populations of students who are at risk, but if you turn out to be lousy, they'll stick you in some cushy already-successful school where...oh, wait. Never mind.
Rendering
Teams visit the homes of excellent teachers in the middle of the night, tie a bag over their heads and throw them into a van. Days later, the excellent teachers wake up in their new classroom.
The Draft
All the teachers in the state go in a giant pool. The schools of the state will go in reverse order of success last year and draft teachers. We could also do this as a Chinese auction. Chinese auctions are fun.
The Lottery
All the effective teachers' names go in a giant drum, from which they are drawn for assignment. May the odds be ever in their favor.
Note
For both the draft and the lottery, no teachers ever buy homes or settle into communities. Under these systems, states may want to offer teachers good deals on nice campers, fancy Winnebagos, or modified school buses. At last, every teacher can live like a rock star (I'm a Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem guy myself).
One Other Alternative
States could take the actions necessary to make sure that every single school had all the resources it needed, that it was fully staffed, fully funded as well as clean and safe and fully functional. States could take the actions necessary to make teaching an attractive profession with job security, great pay, and the kind of autonomy and power that makes a profession attractive to intelligent grown-ups. States could offer incentives and support for college students who pursue teaching. States could provide support and assistance for teachers, so that great teachers were free to be great and teachers struggling to find their way could become great. State and federal government could reduce the burden of dumb regulations, destructive mandates, and wasteful, punishing tests (reducing to "none" would be the best goal here). In short, states could invest the money and resources to make all schools so attractive that so many teachers want to work there that every administrator in every building in the state gets to choose from among the best and the brightest to find the very best fit for the students.
Fun Puzzle
Among these alternatives I have included one that nobody in power is even remotely considering right now. Can you guess which one it is?
Now that the current administration has decided to bring that federal hammer down on this issue, you're probably wondering what they have in mind for insuring that the best teachers will be put in front of the students who have the greatest need. I'm here to tell you what some of the techniques will be.
Before Anything Else, Mild Brain Damage Required
Any program like this requires the involved parties to believe that teachers are basically interchangeable cogs in a huge machine. We will have to assume that a teacher who is a great teacher of wealthy middle school students will be equally successful with students in a poor urban setting. Or vice-versa, as you will recall that Duncan's pretty sure it's the comfy suburban kids who are actually failing. We have to assume that somebody who has a real gift for connecting with rural working class Hispanic families will be equally gifted when it comes to teaching in a high-poverty inner city setting.
And, of course, as always, we'll have to assume that teachers who are evaluated as "ineffective" didn't get that rating for any reason other than their own skills-- the students, families, resources and support of the school, administration, validity of the high stakes tests, the crippling effects of poverty-- none of those things contributed to the teacher's "success" or lack thereof.
Once everybody is on board with this version of reality, we can start shuffling teachers around.
Financial Incentives
Schools with great need and challenge often have trouble attracting top teachers, so let's throw money at them. And since an underlying problem for high needs schools is that they don't have money to throw at their problems, we'll have to use tax money from the state. Which means that wealthy school districts will fork over extra tax money to help convince the teachers at those wealthy schools to leave and go elsewhere. I don't anticipate any complaints about this at all.
Bait and Switch
Simply tell new teacher grads that they have been hired by Big Rich High School and drive them over to Poor Underfunded High School instead. With any luck, you can get some work out of them before they figure it out.
Indentured Teachitude
The federal government will pay for your teacher education, but you then owe them seven years of teaching at the school of their choice. As I type this, I'm thinking it has actual promise. Sure, they won't know if you're great at first, but once you've taught a year or two, they'll have an idea and if you are a really great teacher they'll ship you to one of the underfunded, collapsing schools with high populations of students who are at risk, but if you turn out to be lousy, they'll stick you in some cushy already-successful school where...oh, wait. Never mind.
Rendering
Teams visit the homes of excellent teachers in the middle of the night, tie a bag over their heads and throw them into a van. Days later, the excellent teachers wake up in their new classroom.
The Draft
All the teachers in the state go in a giant pool. The schools of the state will go in reverse order of success last year and draft teachers. We could also do this as a Chinese auction. Chinese auctions are fun.
The Lottery
All the effective teachers' names go in a giant drum, from which they are drawn for assignment. May the odds be ever in their favor.
Note
For both the draft and the lottery, no teachers ever buy homes or settle into communities. Under these systems, states may want to offer teachers good deals on nice campers, fancy Winnebagos, or modified school buses. At last, every teacher can live like a rock star (I'm a Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem guy myself).
One Other Alternative
States could take the actions necessary to make sure that every single school had all the resources it needed, that it was fully staffed, fully funded as well as clean and safe and fully functional. States could take the actions necessary to make teaching an attractive profession with job security, great pay, and the kind of autonomy and power that makes a profession attractive to intelligent grown-ups. States could offer incentives and support for college students who pursue teaching. States could provide support and assistance for teachers, so that great teachers were free to be great and teachers struggling to find their way could become great. State and federal government could reduce the burden of dumb regulations, destructive mandates, and wasteful, punishing tests (reducing to "none" would be the best goal here). In short, states could invest the money and resources to make all schools so attractive that so many teachers want to work there that every administrator in every building in the state gets to choose from among the best and the brightest to find the very best fit for the students.
Fun Puzzle
Among these alternatives I have included one that nobody in power is even remotely considering right now. Can you guess which one it is?
Monday, July 7, 2014
Hitting the Road
In a few hours my wife and I will get on a plane and head off for Seattle, where I will learn about PLCs (yay) and stay with my daughter and son-in-law. From there, it's off to LA, where we will stay with my son and future daughter-in-law.
Consequently, things will be quieter than usual here. Were I a blogger of Diane Ravitch's stature and stamina, I would keep up my regular output while strapped to the bottom of a struggling biplane under attack by flying sharks with lasers attached to them. But as it turns out I'm just a guy who doesn't get to see his children on the left coast nearly often enough, traveling with a finicky laptop on which my online-class-taking wife has dibs. My in-laws are minding the store and the dog, but I'll not ask them to blog for me, too. I'll try to check in now and then, but no promises.
I'll be back to normal in about ten days. Just didn't want anybody to worry that I'd been kidnapped by orcs or something. In the meantime, help yourself to the archives and go visit the other many excellent writers scattered about on line.
Consequently, things will be quieter than usual here. Were I a blogger of Diane Ravitch's stature and stamina, I would keep up my regular output while strapped to the bottom of a struggling biplane under attack by flying sharks with lasers attached to them. But as it turns out I'm just a guy who doesn't get to see his children on the left coast nearly often enough, traveling with a finicky laptop on which my online-class-taking wife has dibs. My in-laws are minding the store and the dog, but I'll not ask them to blog for me, too. I'll try to check in now and then, but no promises.
I'll be back to normal in about ten days. Just didn't want anybody to worry that I'd been kidnapped by orcs or something. In the meantime, help yourself to the archives and go visit the other many excellent writers scattered about on line.
Sunday, July 6, 2014
There Really Is No Superman
Though personally I always wanted to be part of the Doom Patrol (original flavor, not modern artsy version). But there's no Doom Patrol, either.
There is something very seductive about the superhero ideal, the notion that as soon as X gets on the job, things will finally be okay. Here he (yes, almost always he) comes to save the day.
There are subtler versions of the superhero ideal as well. Maybe we don't expect Our Hero to Save The Day, but we expect to be able to follow him. There's this powerful yearning to be able to sort people into two groups-- People I Can Always Trust and Believe on the one hand and People Who Are Always Wrong on the other. It makes life simple; if Wally McHeroface says "Go left," I can just go ahead an turn left.
I don't believe in the hero, for the same reason I don't believe in the efficacy of centralized national education standards. Because nobody can be right all the time.
First of all, we're human.
I don't mean "Well, we're all human so we all make the occasional mistake." No, I mean "We're all human, so at one time or another we are each going to behave like selfish asshats, like scared monkeys on an fear-fueled adrenaline overdrive that fills our head with so much blind energy that it pushes our brains straight down into our butts."
For as cranky as I am, I'm actually pretty rosey-viewed about humans. I've met just a miniscule number of people that I would call flat out evil or bad. I think lots of people do bad things without actually being terrible human beings.
It's comforting to think that there are lots of terrible evil human beings who are responsible for all the bad things that happen. It's comforting because A) I can take comfort in believing that I'm not one of Those People and B) people can be easily permanently sorted into two groups and then we never have to think about it ever again. Neither A nor B are true, is what I think.
So neither is the corollary true-- that there are people who are just pure good 24/7 and you can always trust them to steer you right without you having to think about it. Also not true, I think.
Collectivism Doesn't Necessarily Help
Believing that you've found a group that you can trust blindly is likewise a fool's errand. Because groups are composed of people, and see above.
The hard part of running a group is figuring out how to manage the outliers. Sometimes the one lone voice in the crowd is the person who has a conscience today. Sometimes he's a raging asshat. One should be listened to; the other should be silenced.
I have some trust for the wisdom of groups because I believe that on any given day, most people know right from wrong, good from bad, dumb from smart. It won't be the exact same people every day, but a firm majority should be on track. But you can mess with the wisdom of groups by trying to control the crowd and shut people up. "We won't talk about that" or "Nobody question Fearless Leader" or "We already know how this vote is supposed to turn out" are all signs that a group is fundamentally flawed.
Which doesn't mean the group is evil and easily dismissed. But you can't safely follow blindly.
Never Stop Thinking and Paying Attention
History is full of these humans. John Wesley founded Methodism, and I have no reason to doubt that he was a man of God with a great understanding of the divine. But if he had married your sister, you probably would have ended up punching him in the nose. But that doesn't mean we shut down the Methodist Church.
We've seen binary thinking before, because all of our heroes did some crappy things. JFK, MLK, Ronald Reagan, Donnie and Marie-- all had their less-than-admirable moments/days/years. It's pointless and impossible to try to categorize them as 100% heroes or unadulterated villains.
Oh, But Then--
Yeah, if you can't just blindly follow your heroes, then you're stuck thinking for yourself. And that's going to be long and hard.
The fundamental approach of the reformsters has been to say, "Look! There's a terrible crisis in education! Follow us, and we will carry you out of this dreadful valley of destruction."
We cannot counter that with, "No, you'll lead us to more destruction. We will follow Our Hero over here and He will quickly lead us out of the valley on the correct path." Because it's the exact same fallacy-- the notion that one heroic person can take the correct bold steps and end all this struggle right now.
Bad News
Let me tell you something neither of us wants to hear. The struggle for US public education, the fight to help children, the push to create more social justice-- it's going to continue for the rest of your life. There are going to be victories and defeats. There are going to be great moments and terrible moments. And then it's going to continue. This is not a sprint. It's a very long marathon. And a crazy marathon at that, one where every runner runs her own path, and nobody else can set the path for you.
Oh, Wait-- That's The Good News!
So, do I have heroes? Sure-- they are people who are pretty serious and wise about most things. But I don't imagine they're perfect. I know other people who are sort of serious and occasionally wise, and some who are hard to take serious and rarely (but not never) wise, and all the other possible permutations. All that means to me is that I have to listen and I have to pay attention. (That includes keeping an eye on myself and seeing if I'm a jerk today or not.)
Which is cool, because life then turns out to be fascinating and varied and way more interesting than a puppet show based on monocolored cut-outs. It's also cool because it allows us to stop focusing on the surprise of discovering that a hero did something stupid or the exertion of defending something Dead Wrong that came from someone On Our Side or the tortured denial of trying to prove that a villain didn't just get something right. It keeps us from organizing our whole lives around simply sorting people out into two groups, and let's us focus on what really matters, whatever that might be.
In the battle for education, we need our sense of outrage, our moral sense, our professional sense. Let's not wait for some sort of hero to emerge, and let's not imagine we can win this by beating a single Evil Mastermind. See, I called this a marathon, but really it's more like trying to move a great, giant sled. We are all stationed at different corners of this massive machine and its harness, and consequently we have lot so different ideas of what the challenge looks like. But if we gather our strength, throw it against the load, and keep pushing, we can move it a little bit every day, and it's in the struggle and the movement and the series of small, important victories that we move forward and that we find our best truest selves. It's in that long hard haul that we win victories for our students and get them one step closer to the lives they deserve.
There is something very seductive about the superhero ideal, the notion that as soon as X gets on the job, things will finally be okay. Here he (yes, almost always he) comes to save the day.
There are subtler versions of the superhero ideal as well. Maybe we don't expect Our Hero to Save The Day, but we expect to be able to follow him. There's this powerful yearning to be able to sort people into two groups-- People I Can Always Trust and Believe on the one hand and People Who Are Always Wrong on the other. It makes life simple; if Wally McHeroface says "Go left," I can just go ahead an turn left.
I don't believe in the hero, for the same reason I don't believe in the efficacy of centralized national education standards. Because nobody can be right all the time.
First of all, we're human.
I don't mean "Well, we're all human so we all make the occasional mistake." No, I mean "We're all human, so at one time or another we are each going to behave like selfish asshats, like scared monkeys on an fear-fueled adrenaline overdrive that fills our head with so much blind energy that it pushes our brains straight down into our butts."
For as cranky as I am, I'm actually pretty rosey-viewed about humans. I've met just a miniscule number of people that I would call flat out evil or bad. I think lots of people do bad things without actually being terrible human beings.
It's comforting to think that there are lots of terrible evil human beings who are responsible for all the bad things that happen. It's comforting because A) I can take comfort in believing that I'm not one of Those People and B) people can be easily permanently sorted into two groups and then we never have to think about it ever again. Neither A nor B are true, is what I think.
So neither is the corollary true-- that there are people who are just pure good 24/7 and you can always trust them to steer you right without you having to think about it. Also not true, I think.
Collectivism Doesn't Necessarily Help
Believing that you've found a group that you can trust blindly is likewise a fool's errand. Because groups are composed of people, and see above.
The hard part of running a group is figuring out how to manage the outliers. Sometimes the one lone voice in the crowd is the person who has a conscience today. Sometimes he's a raging asshat. One should be listened to; the other should be silenced.
I have some trust for the wisdom of groups because I believe that on any given day, most people know right from wrong, good from bad, dumb from smart. It won't be the exact same people every day, but a firm majority should be on track. But you can mess with the wisdom of groups by trying to control the crowd and shut people up. "We won't talk about that" or "Nobody question Fearless Leader" or "We already know how this vote is supposed to turn out" are all signs that a group is fundamentally flawed.
Which doesn't mean the group is evil and easily dismissed. But you can't safely follow blindly.
Never Stop Thinking and Paying Attention
History is full of these humans. John Wesley founded Methodism, and I have no reason to doubt that he was a man of God with a great understanding of the divine. But if he had married your sister, you probably would have ended up punching him in the nose. But that doesn't mean we shut down the Methodist Church.
We've seen binary thinking before, because all of our heroes did some crappy things. JFK, MLK, Ronald Reagan, Donnie and Marie-- all had their less-than-admirable moments/days/years. It's pointless and impossible to try to categorize them as 100% heroes or unadulterated villains.
Oh, But Then--
Yeah, if you can't just blindly follow your heroes, then you're stuck thinking for yourself. And that's going to be long and hard.
The fundamental approach of the reformsters has been to say, "Look! There's a terrible crisis in education! Follow us, and we will carry you out of this dreadful valley of destruction."
We cannot counter that with, "No, you'll lead us to more destruction. We will follow Our Hero over here and He will quickly lead us out of the valley on the correct path." Because it's the exact same fallacy-- the notion that one heroic person can take the correct bold steps and end all this struggle right now.
Bad News
Let me tell you something neither of us wants to hear. The struggle for US public education, the fight to help children, the push to create more social justice-- it's going to continue for the rest of your life. There are going to be victories and defeats. There are going to be great moments and terrible moments. And then it's going to continue. This is not a sprint. It's a very long marathon. And a crazy marathon at that, one where every runner runs her own path, and nobody else can set the path for you.
Oh, Wait-- That's The Good News!
So, do I have heroes? Sure-- they are people who are pretty serious and wise about most things. But I don't imagine they're perfect. I know other people who are sort of serious and occasionally wise, and some who are hard to take serious and rarely (but not never) wise, and all the other possible permutations. All that means to me is that I have to listen and I have to pay attention. (That includes keeping an eye on myself and seeing if I'm a jerk today or not.)
Which is cool, because life then turns out to be fascinating and varied and way more interesting than a puppet show based on monocolored cut-outs. It's also cool because it allows us to stop focusing on the surprise of discovering that a hero did something stupid or the exertion of defending something Dead Wrong that came from someone On Our Side or the tortured denial of trying to prove that a villain didn't just get something right. It keeps us from organizing our whole lives around simply sorting people out into two groups, and let's us focus on what really matters, whatever that might be.
In the battle for education, we need our sense of outrage, our moral sense, our professional sense. Let's not wait for some sort of hero to emerge, and let's not imagine we can win this by beating a single Evil Mastermind. See, I called this a marathon, but really it's more like trying to move a great, giant sled. We are all stationed at different corners of this massive machine and its harness, and consequently we have lot so different ideas of what the challenge looks like. But if we gather our strength, throw it against the load, and keep pushing, we can move it a little bit every day, and it's in the struggle and the movement and the series of small, important victories that we move forward and that we find our best truest selves. It's in that long hard haul that we win victories for our students and get them one step closer to the lives they deserve.
All Minority Schools
Last Tuesday the Atlantic became the gazillionth news outlet to report that this coming fall, the student population of the US will be less than 50% white.
There's remarkably little comment on or discussion of this, even in the Atlantic's article. I can think of several reasons for this to go unremarked.
1) It's not exactly news because it's been coming for quite a while. It would be like throwing a party and hollering, "Look we have tree!" when that sapling that's been growing in your yard for decades finally passes the ten foot tall mark. It didn't exactly sneak up on you.
2) People who prefer to think of themselves (and have others think of them) as Not Racist would like to say it doesn't matter. Kids are kids. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. This doesn't change a thing.
3) This has already been the reality on the ground in many places. On the local level, many schools have been there for decades.
4) Lots of people know the information, but aren't sure what it really means.
I will readily place myself in group 4. I teach in a rural/small town school district. On the map, we look like part of Appalachia, but we don't think of ourselves that way. It is highly unlikely that our white students will be a majority minority any time soon. But let me conjecture about some implications for the nation's public school system with no majority majority.
We Need To Talk About Assimilation
A large chunk of US education has always been about a benign form of assimilation. If you wanted to get ahead in the US, you had to learn to adopt not just the knowledge and skill base of the dominant culture, but the ethics and values instead. Which we've generally defined as white, Christian, middle classish. Education as a door to opportunity meant education as a way to learn to act like a "regular American." To fit in. We need to talk about that.
Actually, in economically strapped areas, we've been having a version of this conversation for a while. Is our job as schools to prepare our students to help strengthen this area, or to prepare them to escape it? Because the skills and culture they need to do well here are not exactly the same as what they need to do well "out there." My first year of teaching was in hugely diverse city, but in parent conferences I had Hispanic parents who demanded that I respect their home culture and others who demanded that I not "hold their child back" by expecting anything different from what I expected from the white kids.
In language studies, we talk about idioms, dialects, and standard usage. Dialects let you speak easily with people who share the dialect, but standard usage is supposed to be a version of the language that works everywhere. We used to just call standard usage "correct." We're getting smarter about the biases embedded in that judgment, but we still wrestle with it, and it's the mini version of the challenge we now face.
It's a two-part problem. What should be the role of learning to operate within the dominant culture in education and society, and how do you even identify the dominant culture in a hugely diverse salad such as ours?
Different Schools Are More Different
Demographically, my local school doesn't look much different than it did fifty years ago. If anything it is less diverse than a century ago when the town was filling with Italian and Slovakian immigrants who settled literally on the other side of the tracks in a neighborhood nicknamed "the Bloody Third" (because you know how Those People are always fighting and settling their problems with knives).
We've operated for decades on the assumption that regular American schools look the same-- a bunch of white kids with a smattering of some minority students. In a sense, desegregation was about making all schools look like that-- a bunch of white kids with a smattering of minority students.
But what the demographics of that chart really mean is that the only thing we can say with certainty about a "regular" American school is that it has students in it. Never in American history have individual schools looked more different from each other.
This presents a huge two-part challenge. On the one hand, local schools need to have the flexibility and freedom to fit their schools to their local culture and population. More than ever, one size really does not fit all. My current high school has little or no need for any programs that deal with English Language Learners-- the only student I had in decades who was not a native English speaker was a student who was raised Amish. My first high school had a large population of Hispanic students who were the first generation to speak English; we needed programs to help them. Today we can multiply those differences by a factor of thousands. Our individual schools are dealing with different cultures, different races, different language issues, different economic issues, different, different, different.
That chart is the total for the US, but individual schools are wildly varied slices of that. It has never been less possible to come up with school programming or design that can be unpacked in every school house in America.
At the same time, flexibility cannot be allowed to mean short-changed. A huge appeal of Common Core in some communities has been the promise that, finally, they will not just get a cheap knock-off imitation of the Real Education that the rich kids are getting uptown. CCSS can't deliver on the promise, and opens the door to even more damaging things, but the promise-- the promise really resonates for a lot of folks.
The more different our schools become, the more those differences have to be reflected in positive ways. It's not enough to say, "We'll take the education we give the rich kids and just take out the parts that don't fit these Other Kids." If education is clothing, each kid needs an outfit that fits and looks good and the she can feel proud of and is of the same fine quality as everybody else's outfit, and that means we can't shop for everyone off the rack.
Diversity and Empathy
The growth of the minority school population means that we need a more diverse teaching force. Students need to be able to see teachers in front of them that they can imagine growing up to be. Given the diversity within a single classroom, this is a tough challenge to meet. Given the higher-than-average attrition rate for minority teachers, it's a challenge that needs an aggressive and pointed attack. The traditional hiring approach used by most schools for most staffing issues (Wait and Hope We Get Lucky) isn't going to work. It's especially sad that the organization to address this issue loudly is Frickin' Teach for America-- and we know they aren't going to solve it.
But there's another piece of this dynamic. Students can better connect with teachers they feel they have something in common with, people who are like them in some way. Unfortunately, that door seems to swing another way. Our school leaders, legislators, important high poobahs-- they often seem to relate best to schools that have students who are like their own kids.
I don't know how we overcome the empathy gap. I am always frustrated with shows like Undercover Boss or news stories about Board Member McClueless expressing outrage after touring Underfunded Shambles Elemntary School and wonder, "How can you not have had a clue? Why did you need to see this with your own eyes to get it?"
If there were ever an argument for teaching more and more literature, it's in this empathy gap. A country like ours cannot survive if the only people we can talk to, listen to, hear, understand, care about, look out for, take care of are the people who are just like us.
The big takeaway from that chart is that we can no longer approach our nation's schools by aiming at some imaginary white middle class kid (probably a boy) and figuring if we aim at him, tweak things a little here and there for other kids, we'll basically hit everybody.
None of these trends, needs or challenges are new-- we should have been working on them all along. The only thing special about crossing the majority minority line is it gives us a hook on which to hang a conversation that has been ongoing, but which many more people ought to be joining.
1) It's not exactly news because it's been coming for quite a while. It would be like throwing a party and hollering, "Look we have tree!" when that sapling that's been growing in your yard for decades finally passes the ten foot tall mark. It didn't exactly sneak up on you.
2) People who prefer to think of themselves (and have others think of them) as Not Racist would like to say it doesn't matter. Kids are kids. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. This doesn't change a thing.
3) This has already been the reality on the ground in many places. On the local level, many schools have been there for decades.
4) Lots of people know the information, but aren't sure what it really means.
I will readily place myself in group 4. I teach in a rural/small town school district. On the map, we look like part of Appalachia, but we don't think of ourselves that way. It is highly unlikely that our white students will be a majority minority any time soon. But let me conjecture about some implications for the nation's public school system with no majority majority.
We Need To Talk About Assimilation
A large chunk of US education has always been about a benign form of assimilation. If you wanted to get ahead in the US, you had to learn to adopt not just the knowledge and skill base of the dominant culture, but the ethics and values instead. Which we've generally defined as white, Christian, middle classish. Education as a door to opportunity meant education as a way to learn to act like a "regular American." To fit in. We need to talk about that.
Actually, in economically strapped areas, we've been having a version of this conversation for a while. Is our job as schools to prepare our students to help strengthen this area, or to prepare them to escape it? Because the skills and culture they need to do well here are not exactly the same as what they need to do well "out there." My first year of teaching was in hugely diverse city, but in parent conferences I had Hispanic parents who demanded that I respect their home culture and others who demanded that I not "hold their child back" by expecting anything different from what I expected from the white kids.
In language studies, we talk about idioms, dialects, and standard usage. Dialects let you speak easily with people who share the dialect, but standard usage is supposed to be a version of the language that works everywhere. We used to just call standard usage "correct." We're getting smarter about the biases embedded in that judgment, but we still wrestle with it, and it's the mini version of the challenge we now face.
It's a two-part problem. What should be the role of learning to operate within the dominant culture in education and society, and how do you even identify the dominant culture in a hugely diverse salad such as ours?
Different Schools Are More Different
Demographically, my local school doesn't look much different than it did fifty years ago. If anything it is less diverse than a century ago when the town was filling with Italian and Slovakian immigrants who settled literally on the other side of the tracks in a neighborhood nicknamed "the Bloody Third" (because you know how Those People are always fighting and settling their problems with knives).
We've operated for decades on the assumption that regular American schools look the same-- a bunch of white kids with a smattering of some minority students. In a sense, desegregation was about making all schools look like that-- a bunch of white kids with a smattering of minority students.
But what the demographics of that chart really mean is that the only thing we can say with certainty about a "regular" American school is that it has students in it. Never in American history have individual schools looked more different from each other.
This presents a huge two-part challenge. On the one hand, local schools need to have the flexibility and freedom to fit their schools to their local culture and population. More than ever, one size really does not fit all. My current high school has little or no need for any programs that deal with English Language Learners-- the only student I had in decades who was not a native English speaker was a student who was raised Amish. My first high school had a large population of Hispanic students who were the first generation to speak English; we needed programs to help them. Today we can multiply those differences by a factor of thousands. Our individual schools are dealing with different cultures, different races, different language issues, different economic issues, different, different, different.
That chart is the total for the US, but individual schools are wildly varied slices of that. It has never been less possible to come up with school programming or design that can be unpacked in every school house in America.
At the same time, flexibility cannot be allowed to mean short-changed. A huge appeal of Common Core in some communities has been the promise that, finally, they will not just get a cheap knock-off imitation of the Real Education that the rich kids are getting uptown. CCSS can't deliver on the promise, and opens the door to even more damaging things, but the promise-- the promise really resonates for a lot of folks.
The more different our schools become, the more those differences have to be reflected in positive ways. It's not enough to say, "We'll take the education we give the rich kids and just take out the parts that don't fit these Other Kids." If education is clothing, each kid needs an outfit that fits and looks good and the she can feel proud of and is of the same fine quality as everybody else's outfit, and that means we can't shop for everyone off the rack.
Diversity and Empathy
The growth of the minority school population means that we need a more diverse teaching force. Students need to be able to see teachers in front of them that they can imagine growing up to be. Given the diversity within a single classroom, this is a tough challenge to meet. Given the higher-than-average attrition rate for minority teachers, it's a challenge that needs an aggressive and pointed attack. The traditional hiring approach used by most schools for most staffing issues (Wait and Hope We Get Lucky) isn't going to work. It's especially sad that the organization to address this issue loudly is Frickin' Teach for America-- and we know they aren't going to solve it.
But there's another piece of this dynamic. Students can better connect with teachers they feel they have something in common with, people who are like them in some way. Unfortunately, that door seems to swing another way. Our school leaders, legislators, important high poobahs-- they often seem to relate best to schools that have students who are like their own kids.
I don't know how we overcome the empathy gap. I am always frustrated with shows like Undercover Boss or news stories about Board Member McClueless expressing outrage after touring Underfunded Shambles Elemntary School and wonder, "How can you not have had a clue? Why did you need to see this with your own eyes to get it?"
If there were ever an argument for teaching more and more literature, it's in this empathy gap. A country like ours cannot survive if the only people we can talk to, listen to, hear, understand, care about, look out for, take care of are the people who are just like us.
The big takeaway from that chart is that we can no longer approach our nation's schools by aiming at some imaginary white middle class kid (probably a boy) and figuring if we aim at him, tweak things a little here and there for other kids, we'll basically hit everybody.
None of these trends, needs or challenges are new-- we should have been working on them all along. The only thing special about crossing the majority minority line is it gives us a hook on which to hang a conversation that has been ongoing, but which many more people ought to be joining.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)