Attacking the Performance Gap between Black and White Students

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As we have said so often, the performance gap that exists between white students and their black classmates is the single-most glaring fact in all of public education. Our ability to close the gap will be driven not by more standardized testing, not by blaming teachers for their inability to help their students raise test scores, not by the creation of more charter schools with voucher programs to pay for them, not by closing the so-called “failing public schools,” and certainly not by severing the vital relationships between our public schools and the communities they exist to serve.

We must understand why so many black kids fail. What we will discover is that the high rate of failure among poor urban black students is not the result of some genetic deficiency that makes it difficult for them to learn as well as their white classmates. There are far too many examples of accomplished African-Americans, many of whom grew up in poverty in our most challenging neighborhoods, who rose to prominence in virtually every profession in American Society. A black President of the United States is just one of many examples.

The reason why so many African-American students fail is not because they are poor, although being poor creates enormous challenges. The problem is that our focus on poverty, which we feel powerless to control, distracts from actions that are within our power to do.

We all know of examples where poor children have succeeded academically, irrespective of race or family structure. What we need to do is make the effort to understand what distinguishes poor kids who enjoy academic success from poor kids that fail.

While there can be any number of things that come into play in contributing to a child’s success in school, with a special teacher one of the most obvious, the overwhelming majority of such successes flow from a commitment of a parent or guardian who somehow clings to the hope that an quality education offers a way out for their child. It is when parents have lost hope that an education can make a difference that their sons and daughters arrive for their first day of school poorly prepared for academic success and with precious little motivation to learn.

Many of these families have lost faith in American public education and have lost both faith and hope in the American dream. I suggest to you that these are realities over which we have a great deal of control if only we would accept responsibility and try.

The following story taken from my book, Reinventing Education, Hope and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, is true:

“While subbing in an alternative high school classroom (alternative school within the Fort Wayne Community Schools district is where middle and high school students are sent when they are suspended from their regular school), I had a conversation with a young African-American student. He would not work on the worksheet I had given to the class.

“You need to get busy on the assignment,” I said to him.

“I don’t do worksheets,” was his response.

“If you don’t understand the lesson, I’ll be happy to help you with it,” was my answer.

He looked at me and very calmly responded, “I didn’t say I don’t know how to do it, cuz. I said I don’t do worksheets.”

With full-fledged naiveté I asked, “You don’t think you need to learn this material?”

“It’s a complete waste of my time, cuz!” was his answer.

“You don’t think it’s necessary for you to read and write well? How will you get a job to support yourself?”

At no time did he show any emotion during this conversation.

“Cuz, you don’t know nothin’ about what I need to support myself in the hood. You need to back off, Cuz! I don’t need none of what you got!”

As I pointed out in my book, this was not a dumb kid and, in fact, if evaluated within the context of the world in which he exists he would be judged to be highly intelligent. It is also true that this young man was not an exception to the rule but rather one of many in his community. The difference is that these intelligent young kids, irrespective of race, learn what they consider to be important in their lives. The things we teach in our schools are just not on the list of the things that are important to a huge number of our youngsters.

What teachers and members of the community can do, working together in partnership, is begin to change the value placed on education by these youngsters and their parents or guardians.

If you are reading these words, is there any doubt in your mind that teacher and parent working together can be successful in helping a child see the value in an education and develop a motivation to learn? There are no guarantees, of course, and the earlier those partnerships can be formed along the timeline that represents the developmental years of a child, the higher the probability that a child can succeed. Not only will they succeed but they will rise to ever-higher expectations as identified by their teacher and parent. And, what is true for black children is true for all of our nation’s at-risk children.

The next, question, of course, is “but what can we do?”

A CALL TO ACTION: A New Civil Rights Movement Focused on Public Education!

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Education is a civil rights issue today just as it was in the 1950s during the initial years of the historic civil rights movement. Back then, the challenge was breaking down the barriers that prevented black children from attending public schools. Today, the issue is virtually the same but with a new twist.

Southern public schools in particular discriminated against African-American children by denying them entrance into public schools and universities. Today, African-American, Hispanic, and other minority children, along with white children living in urban America already attend public schools. Today’s problem is that our government, both federal and state, are discriminating against public school corporations by siphoning off revenue through voucher programs that allow families to transfer their children to charter schools and other private and parochial schools.

Our government and the corporate reformers who support and encourage them are claiming that charter schools the other alternatives are doing a better job than our public schools and they cloak their advocacy under the blanket of “freedom of choice.” While they promote the development of charter schools and encourage families to take advantage of vouchers they attack our urban public schools with the charge that they are failing and that the blame for such failure rests on the shoulders of public school teachers. Therein lies the fallacy of current corporate and government education reforms.

The simple but compelling fact is that the teachers who populate our charter schools and other private and parochial alternatives are educated in the same colleges and universities and are license pursuant to the same state standards and qualifications as their public-school counterparts. How can we think that whether or not a qualified and licensed teacher will magically perform at a higher level is a function of the fact that they teach in a charter, private or parochial school rather than in a public school in the same community?

The problem is not “choice” and no right thinking American would deny the importance of giving families choices. The problem is that while luring students and their associated revenue away from our public schools our government is making no effort to address the real challenges that such schools face. As they heap more and more blame on teachers and schools for low scores on state competency exams and reduce the revenue upon which these schools depend, more and more teachers are leaving the profession. In many cases it is the most experienced and most capable teachers that are fleeing the field of education making it that much more difficult for the abandoned schools to meet the needs of their students.

Right now African-American citizens and other parents concerned with the quality of their public schools are in possession of a wonderful opportunity to change the reality for their children. Community leaders from each of these groups, working separately and in concert, need to rally their communities in support of their public schools and teachers.

Concurrently, public school teachers, both individually and collectively, need to reach out to the leaders of the local communities and offer to work together to rise to the challenges facing public education. Make no mistake. A partnership between public school teachers and the parents of their communities working together to serve the best interests of children will transform public education as surely as rain will make the flowers grow.

At the national level, we need high profile leaders of all of our minority communities to link together and take a stand on the issue of public education with the same commitment that we witness anew in the movie Selma. We beseech these leaders from business, government, entertainment, and professional athletics to come together on this most important issue and to reach out to the American Federation of Teachers, to the National Education Association, and to such groups as the Bad Ass Teachers Association. At the same time, we need the leaders of the AFT, NEA and BATs to reach out to community leaders.

Not since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues and supporters marched to Selma has there been an issue as important to the future of our nation and its children as exists today with the crisis in public education. Never has there been an opportunity to bring about such transformational change as exists right now, in cities across the United States of America.

If you are reading this message, today, please pass on this call to action to everyone you know. It may be the most important thing you can do for your country.

The Movie “Selma” Could Not Have Been Released at a More Opportune Time

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Given the issues that affect African-Americans, specifically, and other minorities and the poor in general, the release of the movie Selma could not have been timelier. Selma is a movie that is more than just a work of historical significance, it offers a prescription for addressing the challenges of Twenty-first century America.

The focus of African-Americans has been directed to the two most recent incidents in a long history of violence against black males on the part of law enforcement officers. In the midst of the violence that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere and the impassioned plea for justice, many African-American men and women, including many in positions of prominence, adopted the symbolic gesture of raised hands. It was a brilliant move that not only symbolizes the unity of the black community and its supporters on this issue but also provides a visible reminder to African-Americans and others to make good decisions when stopped by a police officer.

I will continue to believe that the overwhelming majority of our nation’s law enforcement officers are dedicated professionals who do their best to keep the peace in every sense of the word. The problem, of course, is that young people who encounter the police in the community or on the streets are no more able to differentiate between good cops and bad than a police officer can distinguish between a young black person who is up to no good and those who are minding their own business.

What we need from both sides is restraint. Sadly, recent attacks against police officers only puts them all on edge, making restraint more difficult to sustain and that much more necessary.

Prior to the two most recent incidents of violence against young blacks by the police, citizens have been coming together and are engaged in an effort to bring an end to the violence that pervades so many American cities. Often, the violence such communities are forced to endure are violence of gang- and crime-related attacks of blacks on blacks or Hispanics on Hispanics, etc.

If the African-American community can capitalize on the unity and cohesiveness created by the issues cited above and channel the anger, they could apply the lessons learned from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the hundreds of other civil rights leaders who changed American society.

One of the goals of the civil rights movement, beyond campaigning for laws against discrimination, was to make the American dream a reality for all children including blacks and other minorities. The fact that this movement changed America is an example of just how powerful such grass-roots movements can be.

Now, a half-century after the height of the civil rights movement, a significant population of African-Americans and other minorities are not participating in the American dream and neither are millions of poor white Americans. Let’s seize this opportunity to shout out a call to action to make the American dream a reality for all American children.

Once the laws of the nation were rewritten to insure that all Americans must treated equally under the law, the key to realizing the American dream for those not born into affluence has been a quality education.

Many American parents have lost trust and faith in both our systems of public education and the American dream much as they have lost faith and hope in our justice system. Because public education failed them, at least in their own minds, they do not teach their children that an education is the key to better opportunities and to a life out of poverty. They do not stress the importance of working hard in school to their children. The children of these parents arrive at school poorly prepared to succeed, academically, and with little or no motivation to learn.

Because of the level of distrust that exists for these parents, when their children have problems at school, they rush to the defense of their children. They do this because they do not believe the teachers have their children’s best interests in mind.

Many African-Americans and others believe that the schools discriminate against their children. There is a strong sense that the entire system of public education is racist. This is a belief that must be put to rest, permanently. Our public schools are not rife with institutional racism in which minorities have no chance and Fort Wayne Community Schools provides a perfect example. FWCS is led by an African-American superintendent, and is populated by African-American administrators, principals, and teachers.

Yes, racist teachers exist just as the U.S. is populated by many citizens who are racist. The overwhelming majority of public school teachers, however, are dedicated professionals who want all of their students to be successful just like the overwhelming majority of African-American men and women are law-abiding citizens and the majority of police officers want to serve the interests of justice.

As we speak, led by the corporate community and the federal government, Indiana and other states are aggressively pursuing strategies to not only weaken the bonds between communities and their schools, but are also weakening our public schools. These forces are attacking public school teachers and are blaming them for the problems in public education. It is clear that these are not strategies designed to address the problem of our poorest communities and our most challenged public schools.

This scenario creates a unique opportunity for minority communities to link forces with the public schools in their communities and with the teachers of those schools. In my next post I will propose a number of specific strategies. These strategies will be constructed on the lessons we have learned from the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties.

The essence of that message is that if people want to change the world around them they need to accept responsibility for bringing about those changes rather than wait for someone else to do it for us. Many of these strategies have been detailed in my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America.

Government and Corporate Education Reforms Devastating to Minorities and the Poor

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One can only wonder why the public, particularly the African-American community, has not responded to the threat posed by current educational reforms with the same zeal and anger displayed in response to the tragedies in Ferguson, Missouri and in other communities throughout the U.S.

While symptoms of deep racial enmity will continue to plague our society, at least the senseless targeting of young blacks will no longer go unnoticed. Such incidents are sparks from the static electricity generated by the friction between the races; they are symptoms of an underlying pathology.

Until recently, like many white Americans observing the incidents in Ferguson and elsewhere, I understood the fear and anger of black America at an intellectual level, only. It was not until I became the grandfather of a young black male that I began to feel it at a gut level. That my sweet young grandson may someday be judged by the color of his skin rather than by “the content of his character” is agonizing on a deeper level than I could have ever imagined.

As great as it may be, however, the tragedy of young blacks being profiled by police officers and by our justice system pales in comparison to a tragedy being perpetrated against Americans of all races living in the poorest urban and rural communities of our nation. This tragedy, which is being systematically executed by of our state and federal governments, is the remarkable disassembly of our systems of public education.

It is difficult enough to understand why so many of the leaders of American government and business are committed a “policy of abandonment” of our nation’s most challenged public schools. What is even more difficult to understand, in the midst of this systemic attack against our public schools and teachers, is the apparent apathy on the part of Americans from all segments of our population. It is astonishing that our public school teachers and other public school educators seem to be the only people who see what is happening.

Where are the protests by African-, Hispanic-, and other minority Americans who must surely recognize that an attack against our public school teachers and their schools is also an attack against their children? Where is the outcry from white Americans whose children depend on our rural and urban public schools? Where are protests of local employers in communities throughout our nation who depend on our public schools as a source for their collective workforces? How can we let our public school teachers face this crisis alone?

In communities throughout the United States, with Indiana but one example, state governments are promoting legislative and executive action to siphon scarce dollars away from urban public school corporations in order to fund voucher programs that will benefit only a select group of families. Advocates of such programs are fond of declaring a commitment to such concepts as “choice” and “competition.”

These declarations are nothing more than a pre-meditated deception. Governor Pence claims to want all students to have a choice. Looking at just FWCS, where can 31,000 students go? Are there sufficient classrooms in our community’s parochial, private, and charter schools to absorb 31,000 students? What about the approximate 5,000 special education students. Do the parochial, private, and charter alternatives have the resources to serve this special population? Extrapolate these numbers to the entire State of Indiana.

The problem is not the existence of charter schools and voucher programs rather that such schools and programs are not balanced by a commitment to fix our public schools.

The truth is that while Indiana offers vouchers to insure “choice” for a few of our state’s one million public school students, the state is stripping our public school corporations of vital resources necessary to serve hundreds of thousands of their students. They are attacking our public school teachers with such ferocity that many are opting to leave the teaching profession at a time when fewer and fewer college students are aspiring to become teachers.

Indiana is challenging public schools to compete effectively against charter schools and other private and parochial alternatives while evidence mounts that charter schools, in particular, are not being held to the same standards. Add the fact that our public schools are expected to serve a disproportionately higher population of special needs students and we are creating a recipe for social disaster.

It harkens back to Governor Romney’s “47 percent” remark during his campaign for the presidency. It seems as if our government has decided that there is nothing they can do to fix the problems in our public schools. So, instead of trying to fix the problems of public education, they have chosen to subsidize those families that are motivated to move their kids to a charter, private or public school and let the public schools and their communities fend for themselves.

For our nation, the long term consequences of such a strategy are staggering. The consequences for our poor and minority students border on criminal.

Where are the protests? Where are the shouts of anger and frustration? Where is the support for our public school teachers and other professionals who labor under such adverse circumstances? Does anyone care?

In my next post, I will begin laying out a challenge to public school parents to take a stand in support of their children, their children’s teachers and schools. I will be laying out a specific challenge to our African-American citizens their leaders and also to the leaders and citizens of the Hispanic and other minority populations.

What can one teacher do to stop the dismantling of public education in America?

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During a recent visit with my daughter and her family, I had an opportunity to talk with the husband of a public school teacher from the Cincinnati area. I was disappointed to learn that this young woman was working hard to prepare herself for a new career outside the field of education.

Like so many public school teachers, today, this husband explained his wife’s frustration with the changes that are taking place in public education in Ohio, changes that are making it difficult for her to teach children.

Her husband shared with me that his wife is one of seven or eight teachers at her school who are actively pursuing a career change once the current school year has ended. He also said that his wife’s principal is aware of the fact that she and several of her colleagues are planning to leave and this principal has been pleading with them to reconsider. “You are my best teachers,” he tells them. No doubt this principal is one of many who dread the prospect of leading their schools into an uncertain future without their best teachers.

Can we blame teachers for leaving their profession? Do they not have the right to pursue the best opportunities for which they are qualified? Public school corporations are no different than any other employer. An employer can expect the loyalty of its employees for only as long as that employer can sell them on the importance of the organization’s mission; meet their need for professional and financial fulfillment; and, give them reason to hope for successful outcomes.

Given the degree to which public education is under attack, the school corporations that serve our nation’s most vulnerable communities are being stripped of the power to make any assurances to their faculties, which begs the question of how such corporations, in the absence of a capable faculty, can offer any assurances to their students and their community.

The unpleasant truth with which the American people must come to terms is that our nation’s leaders have created a scenario in which the control over the education of our nation’s children has been placed in the hands of people who have no understanding of the realities of educating children; corporate executives and government officials who function within a logical realm that is corrupted by special interests and who have only their arrogance to guide them.

What kind of future can we have as a democratic society when we have lost our ability to prepare all of our children for the responsibilities of citizenship? What kind of future do the American people want for their children?

The dilemma for the American people is that they do not trust the bill of goods being pushed by corporate and government reformers and, also, that they have lost faith in traditional public education.

Teachers, principals, and superintendents and other educational professionals are the only ones who possess sufficient knowledge to save public education and to offer the American people what they want and need. The American people desperately need professional educators to stand and fight rather than stand by with our hands in our pockets and do nothing or, worse, leave the profession to the reformers.

If professional educators choose to stand and fight rather than flee, we can work together to offer the American people an alternative to the policies of the corporate and government reformers. We can offer them a new reality that is focused on learning and the special relationship that exists between teachers, students and parents. We can offer them a reality in which every child is important and in which no student will be permitted to fail.

It is understandable that individual teachers feel lost and alone and it is natural to feel like there is nothing one person can do. But teachers need not feel alone. They are part of a population of as many as three million professional educators who can come together to create this new reality.

In addition to existing unions and associations at both the state and national level, there is a new group of players in the game: the Bad Ass Teachers Association with a membership of 53,000 professionals and counting. Teachers can become BATS and still be active in their unions and associations, in fact they are encouraged to do so. Get active and demand action!

Teachers are not the only professionals at risk in these challenging times. The future of public school principals and administrators and also the superintendents and other administrative professionals of every public school corporation in the nation are also at risk, particularly those who serve populations in our nation’s most challenging communities.

The leaderships of each of these representative entities must recognize that they are at war for the very survival of public education and mounting a challenge to the corporate and government reformers must become their over-riding priority.

When faced with a common adversary the best strategy is always to unite all those who share a common interest. It is time for the leaders of each and every organization that is committed to public education to step up and find ways to work together to provide the American people with a reason to hope. If we can give them something in which they can believe the people will stand with their children’s teachers. Together, we can reject the forces that are striving to usurp the will of the American people to the great disadvantage of our children.

The future of teachers, public education, and the American people are at stake and the consequences for our failure to stem the tide will be tragic beyond description. In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge For Twenty-First Century America, I offer a blueprint of a plan to create a new reality in education.

Learning is a Process, Not a Competition!

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The way we grade the academic performance of our students in the overwhelming majority of American schools, public or private, suggests that we view the educational process as a competition rather than a pure learning process.

State standards lay out very specific academic expectations for all students beginning in first grade and progressing up to the point that we assess their readiness for graduation at the end of the twelfth grade. Toward the end of the child’s third year, at least here in Indiana, we begin administering the ISTEP+ exams to evaluate whether our students are where the state thinks children should be by the second semester of the third grade and each grade, thereafter.

Given the wide disparity that exists on an academic readiness continuum between young children who arrive for their first day of school, one can only wonder why we would ever consider it realistic that students should all arrive at the same place, relative to state standards, by any arbitrary point in time.

If the ISTEP+ exams and the standardized exams used in other states were meant to be purely diagnostic they could provide useful information that would help teachers adjust their classroom strategies to the unique needs of their students.

The moment, however, that we begin evaluating teachers on the basis of their students’ performance on such exams, it becomes a competition. If we stop and think about it, the same could be said for the grades children receive at the end of each grading period or semester. If those grades were meant to gage which children need more help and which are ready to move on to new material, the grades could be useful tools. We all know that this is not the way it works, however.

We do not set aside the time to provide extra help for students who are unable to demonstrate sufficient mastery of the subject matter unless they are so far behind their classmates that moving them forward seems problematic but, even then, we agonize over the decision. Do we hold them back in spite of the perceived social and emotional consequences to insure that they will have more time and attention to master the subject matter or do we move them forward with their classmates even though we know them to be woefully unprepared for success in each succeeding grade?

What this dreaded dichotomy should tell us is that a system that requires educators to make such choices is dysfunctional and ignores the needs of our most vulnerable children, to their great disadvantage.

It makes no more sense to evaluate students on the basis of their ability to keep up with their peers than it does to judge teachers and schools as failures when the percentage of students who are falling behind crosses some arbitrary line of demarcation. Teachers and schools have no control over the aggregate levels of preparation and motivation of the students assigned to their respective schools and classrooms. Even more importantly, students have no control over how well their parents have prepared them for academic success.

What kids who arrive poorly prepared need is a process that acknowledges their unique situations and is structured to give them the time and special attention they need to be successful academically. What teachers and schools require is a process that is designed to give them the latitude necessary to respond to the “special needs” of these children.

Let us take great care not confuse our use of the phrase “special needs.” A student who is developmentally delayed due to environmental circumstances is not the same as a student who has a clearly defined learning disability or an emotional or psychological “disability.” Quite possibly, many students are diagnosed with some learning or emotional disability simply because we have not been cognizant of the fact that they were held to expectations that were unreasonable given their level of preparedness.

In effect, the thing we have been most successful in teaching these students is that they cannot learn as well as the majority of their classmates. The reality is that these kids got off to a late start and the professional educators on whom they depended were unable to recognize and respond to the unique realities of their situations.

The standard response to this dilemma, on the part of many educators, is to throw up their hands in figurative despair and respond “what are we to do?”

The answer to the question “what are we to do?” is relatively simple. We simply need to come to an agreement that the structure and flow of our current educational process has become so brittle, over time, that it no longer meets the needs of an incredibly diverse population of Twenty-first Century students. All that is necessary is to reinvent the structure to give both teachers and their students the time they need to learn within the context of a unique academic path with ever-rising expectations. When these children and their teachers, discover that they can be successful, academically, everything changes from their view of the world to their belief in themselves.

Providing one example of how this can be accomplished is the purpose of my book Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America.

They Are Destroying Public Education Just When We Need It the Most!

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The events in Ferguson Missouri illustrate just how far apart we have drifted as a people. Somehow, we must find a way to repair the damage that has been done and the trust that has been lost and begin closing the gap between the white community and the communities of African-Americans and other minorities, between the rich and poor, the sick and the healthy, and the hopeful and the hopeless.

If we have learned anything from the last sixty years it is that we cannot legislate a change of heart. The only thing we can do is see that every American child; irrespective of race, religion, creed, color, sexual preference, or relative affluence has an opportunity for a quality education. It is only through education that a young man or woman can emerge from childhood with sufficient skill and knowledge to make a place for themselves in the world; to be able to choose from an array of meaningful opportunities; to be able to exert control over their own lives and destinies; and, have sufficient strength of character to persevere through life’s hardships and disappointments.

The federal government, corporate reformers, and state governments across the land are engaged in a relentless attack against public schools, community control of education, and the public school teachers. Now they are even attacking programs for our nation’s special needs children. These powerful men and women are no more qualified to fix public education in America because of their success in business than they are to perform surgery at a local hospital. As for our elected and appointed government officials, maybe they should fix our executive and legislative branches of government before they try to tackle something they know even less about.

It is, however, understandable that these reformers feel compelled to act because our professional educators have not stepped up to acknowledge the deficiencies in our educational process; deficiencies that only they are qualified to address.

The would-be reformers of public education have not taken the time to understand that the problems with education in America exist in spite of the valiant efforts of our public school teachers and not because of them. The reformers aggressively promote standardized testing, a process that distracts educators from what is important, and they drain resources from our most vulnerable community school corporations with vouchers to encourage parents to send their kids to a small number of unproven charter schools and to other parochial and private schools that cannot begin to meet the needs of every child in their communities. To offer what they believe to be a lifeline to parents who want the best for their children is a cruel strategy, indeed, if it can bear the weight of only a small percentage of the families of our communities.

These corporate reformers have not spent time in our public school classrooms so that they can witness, first hand, the deplorable lack of motivation to learn on the part of children across the spectrum of our student populations and they have not made the effort to investigate the absence of parental support in so many of our public schools.

If they did they would discover that many of the parents of our most vulnerable children are themselves victims of an outdated educational process and have no more trust in our systems of education, public or private, than they do in our systems of justice. These reformers would also discover that far too many of these men and women have lost hope and faith in the American dream.

Our systems of public school corporations and the obsolete educational process that functions within may be need a transformation but they provide the only hope to begin narrowing the breach that divides this nation and that we observed so graphically, this week, in an American community. The misguided policies of our corporate and government reformers of education can only divide us even more than we are divided today.

It is time for our professional educators who teach in or manage our public school corporations to step forth and acknowledge that our systems of public education are struggling and to accept responsibility for leading us to a new reality. A new reality in which every child is given the opportunity and the time to learn under the tutelage of qualified teachers, in an environment in which they are evaluated against their own performance rather than against the performance of their classmates.

Creating such a reality is our only hope for a future in which our aggregate dreams can be realized.

Vote to Support Public Education

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Your vote for public education has never mattered more. Please vote and ask everyone you know who supports public Schools and teachers to also vote.

A to F Grading Makes No More Sense for Our Children than It Does for Public Schools!

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When we grade schools “A to F” on the basis of standardized test scores like ISTEP+ in Indiana it is as “Absurd” at one end of the grading continuum as it is “Farcical” at the other. This is especially true when the powers that implemented the “A to F” measure envisioned that so-called “failing schools” would be gradually shut down with the kids shuttled off to charter schools from which they could expect immediate turnaround.

If that logic is not “Absurd” I do not know what is and most professional educators concur.

It was also envisioned that the failing schools could be transformed by getting rid of bad teachers and their unions, replacing them with less-educated teachers trained to embrace the use of more sophisticated technologies that would, again, transform the quality of education.

If that logic is not “Farcical” I do not know what is and most professional educators agree.

Most of those same educators would be just as critical of “A to F” grading for the students in their classrooms but the “A to F” mindset has been in place for so long that it has become engrained. It has become one of those fundamental assumptions that defy logic.

Many schools corporations have experimented with other grading methodologies, particularly at the primary level. As far back as the early 1950s, my local school district began using a “V to U” grading system which was essentially the same.

Today, the overwhelming majority of report cards that are sent home to parents throughout the U.S. utilize “A to F”. Is it our intention that we will shut down the children who are given “Fs” and are considered failing?

Of course it is not, but what we are asked to do with these kids is not much more effective. As they move from grade to grade (the word “grade” has become part of our lexicon and subtly shapes our thinking even here) we struggle to know what to do with “F” students. Holding them back is believed to have negative emotional and psychological consequences but moving them along with their classmates is just as problematic.

For generations, most of these children would become drop outs before high school graduation and enter the society as adults poorly prepared to accept the responsibilities of citizenship. In more recent times, our schools have worked hard to keep these young people in school but the ultimate outcome of being poorly prepared is still the norm for far too many of these kids.

This is the reality that the critics of public education point out, with great passion, and it is the driving motivation behind the corporate reform movement that began in the business community and has been aggressively sold to federal and state government through one of the most powerful and effective “lobbying” strategies in history.

The problem is that it is all based upon an erroneous, rarely challenged assumption about what it is that kids need, today. Whether poverty, hopelessness on the part of parents, diluted values, the unprecedented power of the 21st Century peer group, or some combination of the above what these kids need cannot be provided by privatized schools with teachers who are trained rather than educated, and using the wonders of modern technology.

Modern technology can play a powerful role in the hands of a qualified teacher if we took the time to understand what we need it to do for us. Simply distributing tablets and IPads and using digital learning tools will not magically cure what ails 21st Century education.

What kids need are more time and attention from people who care and who have the time to develop trusting and nurturing relations with them. They need us to treat them as unique individuals coming to us at a unique point on their physical, emotional, and intellectual developmental continuum. They need us to teach them how to learn, successfully, which takes longer for some than others, and they need our protection against the failure and humiliation that diminish self-esteem.

And, they need even more from us. The absolute best chance a child can have is when parents and teachers work together as partners on a child’s behalf. When parents do not embrace such relationships with their children’s teachers it is not sufficient to put our heads down and think we can do it on our own.

We must do more to close the distance between our teachers and schools and parents and their communities. We need to sell them on the idea that their child can grow up in a world where they have a menu of positive choices from which to choose that will not only provide a good life for them but will also help them fulfill their civic responsibilities.

Reaching out to the disenfranchised to pull them in is a formidable challenge, indeed, but it is nothing more than a human engineering problem that has a solution that is within our power to achieve.

In the interim, we cannot allow a single child to fail on a single lesson.

We have no expectation that every child that enters kindergarten will arrive at the same destination at the end of their thirteen years of schooling but yet public school teachers are asked to work within a structured educational process that forces them to move students down comparable paths at relative speeds. Our job must be to make certain that students learn as much as they are able within the time they are under our protective wings and that they can use what they learn effectively on the next lesson module and as they face the challenges of citizenship.

Many teachers cannot envision how this could happen within the current structure and they are correct; the structure of the educational process must be altered if we wish to alter its outcomes. Making such alterations is not all that difficult if we are willing to step back and view the process objectively. The truth is, particularly at the primary level, we could start doing things differently, almost immediately; with little or no cost.

Forget “A to F” and shift our focus to an expectation that nothing less than an A or B is acceptable (85 percent or better mastery of subject matter). Let us remember that intellectual development is only one aspect of a child’s development and it works interdependently with their emotional and physical development. Public education must not degenerate into force-feeding content into a child’s brain like they are a computer that just needs more data to process; which is pretty much where we seem to be heading.

What our children and their parents need is that special relationship that many of us had with a favorite teacher whose care and affection we could trust, absolutely.

The educational reforms that are sweeping the nation will destroy us as surely as Mother Nature will punish us if we continue to abuse our environment. Current educational reforms are like a powerful tug boat pulling a safe harbor ever farther away from a dock that has broken loose and is drifting from shore. It is a dock that is full of people who have become separate and apart from the whole and who have become hopeless and powerless. Every time we send a child out into this sea, unprepared, what is left for them but to scramble on to that already over-crowded dock?

The one thing of which we can be sure is that the farther apart we drift the more tragic will be the consequences for the future of our society.

Reject “A to F” for schools, teachers, and children and reinvent our educational process. My book. Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge For Twenty-First Century America, will show exactly how this can be accomplished.

Giving Hope to Our Public School Teachers

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Last evening, when three members of the leadership team of the Bad Ass Teachers Association made a guest visit to Justin Oakley’s “Just let me Teach” on the IndianaTalks internet radio network there was discussion about getting more public school teachers to join the BATs and to stay active in their unions. It was suggested that many teachers are losing faith in their unions and are not remaining active.

No one knows better than the Bad Ass Teachers Association that American teachers are more discouraged than ever. Everywhere they turn they are under attack and it is easy to understand that they are losing hope that what they are doing for their students is making a difference and that their efforts are appreciated. That many teachers in Indiana and throughout the U.S. live in fear of losing their jobs if ISTEP+ and other standardized test results do not improve borders on criminal, particularly since most educators know that the infamous A to F grading system for Indiana’s schools really stands for “Absurd to Farcical.”

It is difficult to maintain a positive frame of mind when teachers are being blamed for problems over which have little or no control and when they are asked to work in environments in which they are as much victims of a system as their students.

What teachers need more than anything is hope that a better day is coming but to whom do they turn for hope and leadership?

They cannot look to their state and federal governments or the business community because these seemingly unassailable forces are linked together in what can only be perceived by the teaching profession as a relentless quest to destroy public education.

Many are losing hope that their unions and associations can withstand the withering assault on basic purposes that unions were created to serve.

Even the wonderful organization that we know as the Bad Ass Teachers Association and their rallying cry that “we’re not going to take it anymore,” are viewed with skepticism by some. What good does it do, some teachers ask, to stand up and shout that we’re not going to take it when, the reality is that teachers feel such a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness that anything they say can make a difference.

As appealing as the mantra of the BATs may be, I hear some teachers saying that no one wants to hear us complain, they want answers!

Teachers can rally around candidates for public office, whether local school boards, or state or federal executive or legislative offices but almost always find themselves supporting candidates who are as short on experience in public office, or in building a successful election campaign strategies as they are short on funding. And, almost always, these candidates for office find themselves running against opponents with strong support of mainstream political parties, powerful political action committees, and a movement that professes to be working to save American children from the shortcomings or our public school corporations.

We live in hope that the miracle of Glenda Ritz’s election to Indiana’s office of Superintendent of Public Instruction was a turning point but how often can we expect the stars to be so perfectly aligned as they were on that election night that we recall with such fondness? Are we to be content to celebrate candidate Zephyr Teachout’s recent primary election defeat in New York City because she won 34 percent of the vote and raised awareness?

We listen with rapt attention to the celebrated champions of public education like Diane Ravitch and Linda Darling Hammond who stand for teachers and other educators and who speak with eloquence. Sadly, these few heroic champions must somehow offset the power and momentum of the corporate reformers like Bill Gates, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama and the legions of multi-billion dollar businesses and foundations who line up in support to the demise of public education.

The problem is that the champions of the cause for public education and our public schools and their teachers offer so little upon which we can all take hope. These champions cry out that the problems of public education are nothing more than a myth and that our public schools are performing better each year, even if in small increments.

The problem is that such protestations, no matter how eloquent the appeal, ring hollow to the overwhelming number of Americans and even to an overwhelming number of the teachers on behalf of whom such advocacy is offered. It is a message that has precious little credibility.

Advocacy Groups for the support of Public Education can be found in States all over the U.S. with Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education; Indiana Coalition for Public Education just two examples here in Indiana.

Why don’t these advocates and the leadership of our various unions, associations, and other organizations working on behalf of public schools and their students and teachers shout loudly that,

Yes! Public Education in America is in crisis but it is a crisis that exists in spite of the valiant efforts of teachers not because of those efforts.

Why do they not stand and proclaim that:

Professional educators are the only ones who truly understand what needs to be done to return the status of public education to its rightful place as one of the essential components of a democratic society and a healthy economy.

Why do they not shout out that they have:

a real solution to the challenges of public education that will protect rather than damage the all-important relationships between our public schools and their communities, not to mention our students.

Why do they not:

develop an action strategy to transform the educational process and present it to the professional educators to enlist their support and commitment to a real and achievable solution?

And, most importantly, why do they not begin:

the process of selling that solution to the American people?

In recent posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and in a recent tweet on Twitter I shared a message from a poster of Michael J. Fox that read:

If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.

Our teachers know exactly what must be done to turn our schools around so they meet the needs of all American children and not just those who have an affinity for academic endeavors.

Our teachers know that the educational process is flawed when we don’t assess where a child is when they report for their first day of school and then expect them to move down the same path with a diverse classroom of other children on the same chronological schedule.

Our teachers know that the educational process is flawed when they are unable to give children enough time to learn and instead are told that their job on that lesson is done and then give the student a “C,” “D,” or “F” and ask them to move on to the next lesson; a lesson at which they are even less prepared to succeed.

Our teachers know that the solution is to give children the time they need to learn and that, in the final analysis, what matters is not how long it took a child to learn but rather than they did learn and can now apply what they learned to future subject matter and eventually to solve the everyday problems of living in a complex democratic society.

Our teachers know that standardized testing is not a measure of a child’s level of knowledge or understanding any more that it is a measure of a teacher or school’s effectiveness. A test is snapshot of a student’s grasp of given subject matter at a fixed point of time and is useful only if it determines first, whether or not a student needs more time and assistance from his or her teachers, and second; where that attention should be directed if, indeed, it is needed.

Our teachers know that the most important determinant of a child’s success in school is the level of support and participation of the child’s parents or guardians working as partners with the teacher on behalf of the student. Teachers know the system is flawed when so many young parents have no faith or trust in our schools because they are, themselves, victims of an educational process that did not give them what they so desperately needed when they were kids.

Our teachers understand that we need to reach out to these parents and pull them in as partners in the educational process, to help them learn to trust that the school and teacher are there to help them help their child prepare for the rest of their lives.

Our teachers know that each child needs to feel that they are special and have relationships with people in their lives whom they can both love and trust. Teachers understand that the child who is hardest to love and demands the most attention is the child that needs it the most. Our teachers understand that every child needs to have experienced what many of us recall when we think back to our most favorite teachers. Our teachers understand that the educational process is flawed when it is not structured to support the development of the vital relationships between our children, their parents, and teachers.

Our teachers know the educational process is flawed when children have given up on learning and are no longer willing to try; choosing to act out instead. Our teachers understand that the solution to keep children engaged in learning as a natural, fun, and exciting adventure is to teach them that they can learn. Teachers understand that kids must experience the joy of success rather than repeated failure and humiliation.

Our teachers understand that our educational process is flawed when they lack the resources to spend their time and energy where it can do the most good rather than be bogged down in meaningless record-keeping, bureaucratic demands, and political interference. Teachers know that they need technology that empowers teachers rather than limit their freedom and creativity and mitigate their value.

Our teachers know all of these things so when are we going to empower them to do that which only they can do?

If we want to give teachers hope that they can live out their careers as a professional involved in the noble and loving act of giving of themselves to their students and families we must rethink what it is that we want to accomplish in education and reinvent the educational process to support that purpose.

These are ideas around which teachers can rally. It is something that they can reach out and touch and feel and that they can sell to the parents of their students and to their communities. It is something that is real and achievable and about which they can be enthusiastic and energetic and then be re-energized and re-enthused with every celebrated accomplishment.

The sad reality is that the educational process in place throughout our system of schools, both public and private, is flawed and that everyone knows it. Every time we shout out in loud denial all we accomplish is to confirm that that the assertions and allegations that public education is failing are frightfully and inarguably true.

Employers all over the U.S. know it when they struggle to find capable employees who can not only do good work but can also accept responsibility for doing their best. They know it when they must spend millions upon millions of dollars screening applicants to find a precious few who can do the job right from the get go and must also spend millions more to re-train and re-educate those who cannot.

The corporate reformers and the government officials who pander to them and who are laboring to privatize education did not wake up one morning having experienced an epiphany that there were huge profits to be earned by taking over America’s schools. They discovered that little truth only after they were compelled by their anger and frustration to address what they considered to be the monumental failure of public education in America because no one else seemed prepared to step up and accept responsibility for taking action.

Our military services know the educational process is flawed when a full quarter of the young men and women who are candidates for enlistment into the Armed Services cannot meet the minimum qualifications for enlistment and when many more are unable to score high enough on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to qualify for the increasingly more skilled and technical jobs that need to be done at a high level of proficiency.

Our communities of the poor and minorities who live separate and apart from mainstream American society know that the performance gap that exist between their children and white, middleclass students is staggering in its breadth and scope and, most of all, in its consequences. The growing cultural disdain for the importance of education in the lives of their children is nothing more than a consequence of a prolonged case of hopelessness and powerlessness on the part of these parents that anything they do will make a difference for their children.

Most of all, as I have pointed out in my book Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge For Twenty-First Century America and in articles published in my blog Education, Hope and the American Dream, and elsewhere, our teachers know in their hearts and minds that the educational process is, indeed, failing in spite of their labor and sacrifices. They know that the warn-out insistence that the failure of our public schools is a myth is, itself, a myth the perpetuation of which can only have tragic consequences for our nation’s and our children’s futures.

We must open our hearts and minds to the idea that our professional educators are the only people who can solve the problems of public education. They are waiting for their leaders and advocates to stand up an offer a solution in which teachers and the American people can both believe and trust.

American teachers, the unsung heroes in the battle for the future of our way of life, are at the edge of desperation waiting for their leaders to stand up for the truth.

What are we waiting for?