I may be out of step, but I do not believe there is a crisis in education.  There is a crisis of remembering what it was like when one was young.  I have returned to college after six years of retirement.  I am working on a BA in Creative Writing and I have had to take some two hundred level courses.  That has put me into class with students who have generally been out of high school for one to three years.  After 32 years working in public and private schools I am facing the products of the failing American school system.
     It has been an interesting year and I have learned many things I should have learned earlier in my life.  I am finding the university classes challenging and full of new information filling gaps in my understandings and knowledge base.  While I am more focused than I was when I began work toward my initial degree, I am finding many of my classmates to be just as focused and willing to work hard for a good grade.  There are also students in my classes who were just like I was when I began, confused, unfocused and working to complete their program and get out into the real world.  The point I am making is I do not see students who are less prepared than I or any different from the students I encountered in my first go round in college over  forty five years ago.
     Sometimes, when speaking with my peers I wonder why they were so different than I when we were young.  I realize now that it a memory gap.  The 'good old days' were superior to these days.  The funny thing is I get the feeling that the 20 year old students in class with me today will feel the same way when they are older.  I bet there are many different ways of looking at this situation.

Right Words

        Teaching is a skill that requires more than exposition of information.  Teachers work with young, impressionable people who are vulnerable to the words they hear.  Children are still learning about sarcasm, irony and hyperbole.  Those who work with them must always be careful of the way they use words with their students.  The following story illustrates an unintended positive result from a teacher's words.

        Jolie was a pretty typical teenager from my point of view, even though I really don’t remember her well.  She was undergoing a cognitive and physical transformation like most of the sixteen year old studnets in my U.S. History class.   She didn’t particularly like school, like most of my students, but she wasn’t oppositional.  She dressed appropriately, from a teacher’s point of view.  She didn’t have any of the outward characteristics that marked her as a risk taking narcissistic adolescent. No spiked hair, sexuality or crazy colors.   She was chatty and polite.  I remember she sat at the front and to the right of the podium in the large classroom I had been assigned.  She did her work, but missed more school than a learner can afford and still succeed.  I don’t remember what grade she got or even if she finished the school year.  I do know she transformed me as a teacher.  

Now my brain gets fuzzy and I can not tell you much more about her.  I spent my time practicing effective teaching and although I truly enjoyed my students, I didn’t really involve myself in their lives.  I had three kids of my own, 130 other students, two dogs, one wife and a soccer team I coached.  I was a pretty typical high school teacher, who after 15 years of teaching had found a rhythm that satisfied my life.  I had discussions with my students about life, behavior, schooling and other topics that many teenagers find more interesting than U.S. History.  I considered myself student centered, but in retrospect I was curriculum oriented and under pressure to present a certain amount of information on a schedule determined by our department chairman.

I began my teaching career in the Marine Corps teaching electronics.  I learned how to pour information into a brain and use discipline to make my students listen to me.  When I began teaching I was a follower of B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist.  Data in according to rules, apply certain formulas for information retention, and mix in the proper balance of discipline and reward.  That was my philosophy and it applied to all students,.  

After I was discharged I followed my wife’s suggestion and became a school teacher, like her.  I went to the university and encountered other ways of thinking about teaching; I was introduced to other philosophies, open schools, and alternative methods of discipline.  When I went into the classroom I continued to teach the way the Marine Corps had trained me to teach.    

I did not truly understand the power of words.  I thought if I loudly and firmly that was enough.  But, what we say to children and how we say it can have powerful effects over their thinking for many years.  It is sort of like one day finding a plant growing in your garden that you don’t remember planting.  One of the clearest examples of this was shown to me by the eight year old son of a friend.  We were playing a game of Boce, before we began he and I had a discussion about cheating.  My parting words were, “Cheaters are losers!”  After my side lost the game Dylan announced that I was a cheater.  That wasn’t what I meant for him to learn.  See what I mean, words are powerful and teachers have innumerable opportunities to grow unintended plants.

By the time Jolie had become a student in my class I had learned many ways of teaching my subject and managing my class, but I still did not understand the unintended consequences of words.  I did chat with my students from time to time.  I was not such an effective teacher that every moment was spent on content.  I tried to give my students time to make their own meaning of the information, and we often had conversations about things that were troubling them.  They were always interested in news about views of society about teens, romance, risk-taking, and other tidbits I tried to incorporate into my classes.  By now I knew that ordering adolescents around is like stacking ping pong balls and didn’t use the same type of bombastic language I used just after my discharge.  I realize now I was on a journey of discovery about education that was part of my maturation process.  Jolie helped me to complete that process.

The year after Jolie was in my class I could not recall her features and barely remembered her name.  She however remembered me.  One day  before Christmas break I entered my office and there on my desk was a letter from Jolie.  I must confess that what she said was the result of unintentional gardening, but what blossomed was truly wonderful.  She explained that she had been depressed, dropped out of school, and continued a downward spiral that eventually caused her to attempt suicide.  I say attempt with relief and joy, for what a loss each young life is.  What was truly wonderful was her explanation for her recovery and decision to live.  She explained that I told her things in class that upon reflection gave her hope and confidence about herself and her future.  

Jolie’s note gave me hope that I was accomplishing something worthwhile.  It is true if you can save one child it is worth any effort you have put into others.    She caused me to understand that kindness is the most important thing we can teach.   It is not the curriculum that matters, it is how we treat our children that is important.  With the right words we can create a garden of beauty.

Debunking PISA

I have been disappointed with America's response to reforming our education system. The things we need to do have been lost in irrelevant arguments about the problems. It seems as if the talking points for reform are the same as those of people who wish to destroy our public education system and replace it with a system of private schools fueled by vouchers.  Now, I am not opposed to vouchers.  I think it could be a better system of financing our schools than our current system.  I believe that vouchers could unleash educational entrepreneurs and give parents more control over their children's education.  Vouchers will only work after we have leveled the playing field for all American children.

The problem with vouchers and current reform is that corporate greed is at the heart of the movement.  I believe that vouchers are the dream of corporations getting their hands on all the federal and state money expended on education.  Anytime the feds spend money, corporations line up with their hands out like beggars because they know the federal government is easy to fool and they want that money.

We are all being fooled into believing that America's education system is failing everyone by the movement that wants to take over public education in order to enrich their shareholders and CEOs.  Unfortunately, much of the charter movement has been co-opted by this movement already.  Who benefits by nationwide standardized testing?  Who benefits by controlled standardized curriculums?  Not the small school district in the middle of Kansas who have particular needs and the know how to solve their problems!

Why do we believe that all of our schools are failing?  After years of research and anti poverty advocates like Ruby Payne and Jonathon Kozol, we still miss the point that what is failing are schools that serve a high percentage of children living in poverty, not all schools.  Vouchers, charters and high expectations will not solve this problem.

Stephen Krashen's article The Tiger Mom, and Inaccurate Reporting in the blog Schools Matter addresses this problem by pointing out the inaccurate reporting about education in Time Magazine's article Tiger Mom: Is Tougher Parenting Really the Answer written by Amy Chua .  Time Magazine reports that the indication our schools are failing can be found in America's scores on the PISA, an international test that places American children in the middle of other countries' overall scores on this standardized test.  He points out that when adjusted for poverty levels, our children from middle class homes score at the top and those children who live in poverty are at the bottom of the test results.

The article It's The Poverty Stupid! published by the National Association of Secondary School Prinicpals points out the following statistics about the PISA and  poverty.

 Of all the nations participating in the PISA assessment, the U.S. has, by far, the largest number of students living in poverty--21.7%. The next closest nations in terms of poverty levels are the United Kingdom and New Zealand have poverty rates that are 75% of ours.

·      U.S. students in schools with 10% or less poverty are number one country in the world.

·      U.S. students in schools with 10-24.9% poverty are third behind Korea, and Finland.

·      U.S. students in schools with 25-50% poverty are tenth in the world.

·      U.S. students in schools with greater than 50% poverty are near the bottom.

·      There were other surprises. Germany with less than half our poverty, scored below the U.S. as did France with less than a third our poverty and Sweden with a low 3.6% poverty rate.

America is number one at raising children who live in poverty!  Our response after years of failed programs to eradicate poverty is to simply say that poverty is not an excuse for poor academic perfomance.  That may be true, but the effects of poverty upon our children is signigicant.  All of the indicators of poor brain development are enhanced by living in poverty.  As Stephen Krashen so aptly writes:

Poverty means poor nutrition, substandard health care, environmental toxins, and little access to books; all of these factors have a strong negative impact on school success. The problem is poverty, not the quality of our schools.

Eric Medina in his work as a molecular biologist reports that Healthy brains require good nutrition, sleep, and little stress.   Many children from impoverished neighborhoods and homes do not come to school ready to learn because of their environment.  I find it difficult to understand why American's are so reluctant to attack the underlying cause of our problems and search for new solutions yet so willing  to embrace repackaged 19th century methods of education.  It is probably because that 19th century method of education has caused our thinking to remain static while technology and innovation march into the future.  That is what those who propose to destroy America's public education system want, a simple answer to a complex problem.  As long as poverty is not even on the table as a point of discussion in educational reform, we will continue to have many children who can not succeed in our schools.