Tag Archives: motivation to learn

Opening Paragraphs from the Preface of Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream

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The golden age of the United States of America, the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, is nearing an end according to some forecasters of Twenty-first Century trends. The world is in the midst of unprecedented economic, political, cultural, technological, sociological, and ecological changes that will forever transform human society. One of the drivers of American preeminence has been our systems of public education that gave the United States the most well-educated and productive workforce on the planet. As we enter the second decade of the Twenty-first Century, the U.S. is like a professional sports franchise that has seen the quality of its player development program languish over a period of years. That our competitors in the international arena are placing the education of their children at the top of their priority list while the American educational system remains a relic of times past has tragic consequences for Americans and our way of life.

That many of these nations reject the principles of democracy only heightens the magnitude of an already alarming situation. While the American economy is under relentless attack by emerging economies, its system of core values are eroding from within. Culturally, millions of Americans either have become or are becoming disenfranchised. They have lost hope in the American dream, no longer believe they possess control over their own lives and destinies, and no longer believe their government cares what happens to them. The disenfranchised have given up on even the idea of meaningful employment; they are denied access to quality healthcare for themselves and their children; and, they have been chewed up and spit out by the American educational system.

Education, historically viewed as the ticket to the American dream, is no longer relevant to this burgeoning population of our citizens. For these men and women, education has become a ticket to nowhere. As a result, millions of American parents do not teach their children that education is important and do not infuse their children with a moral compass sufficiently strong to withstand the pressure of an ever more powerful peer group. The children of these parents show up at a school that is dreadfully unprepared for them; arrive with little or no motivation to learn; precious little preparation; and, demonstrate no commitment to cooperate with their teachers or abide by rules of behavior. Then, they repeat the cycle, all over again, when they send their own children off to school a generation later.

Response to the Column on Culture and Poverty by Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post

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Bravo for the rejection, by @eugenerobinson of the @washingtonPost, of Rep. Paul Ryan’s assertion that culture is to blame for poverty in the U.S. It is what I have been trying to say in my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, but Robinson has said it better. Such proclamations do, indeed, provide an excuse for doing nothing. Such thinking also provides fodder for corporate reformers of education who want to privatize our schools and minimize the amount of influence a local community will have over the schools their children must attend.

Ironically, when traditional educators challenge such corporate reform agendas they make the same excuses by claiming that poverty is the cause of the problems with public education in America and, yes, I know this sounds counter-intuitive. Blaming poverty gives educators license to lower their expectations because “there really isn’t anything of significance we can do until our government effectively addresses the problems of poverty.”

I wish I could go back and add Robinson’s comment on culture, in the section of my book where I say that the problem with education in America is not poverty, it is the hopelessness that so often accompanies poverty. That hopelessness and powerlessness also contribute to a cultural devaluation of education on the part of a growing population of Americans; citizens who have become effectively disenfranchised and have given up hope that a quality education can create a better life for their children.

I wish I had done a better job of saying that the problems of poverty and educational failure are not the result of the many subcultures of American society; whether African-American, Hispanic-American, or other ethnic groups.

Why can we not recognize that this cultural diversity is not a weakness of American society but rather a strength that adds rich textures, flavors, sounds, and perspectives to a pluralistic democracy.

Blaming poverty for the problems in education, like blaming culture for the existence of poverty, is convoluted logic that blinds us to pragmatic solutions and is nothing more than an excuse for continuing to make the same mistakes we have been repeating for generations. Until we change this thinking our schools will continue to chew up and spit out huge numbers of American school children.

Even though this cultural devaluation is prevalent in many African-American communities in cities and poor rural communities throughout the U.S., it transcends race and exists anywhere that people have given up hope and no longer believe that they can exert control over the outcomes in their lives.

Poverty and the problems with education in America are symptoms of the same pathology as is the cancerous, cultural devaluation of education. They are all functions of hopelessness and powerlessness. The operative question becomes, “why don’t we attack hopelessness relentlessly.”

In my book, I suggest that education not only provides a barometer with which we can measure the severity of the problem, education also provides our society with the best opportunity to alter this reality. Make no mistake, if we continue to allow the spread of hopelessness it has ominous implications for the future of America. This is particularly true given the emergence of whole new economies that are challenging American supremacy in the dynamic and highly competitive world marketplace of the Twenty-first Century.

We must transform the educational process in America from a system that is focused on failure to one that acknowledges the cavernous disparity with respect to the level of motivation and preparation that young children carry with them on their first day of school. We must have a system that puts teachers in a position to help their students learn how to be successful rather than the current system that sets up huge numbers of children for failure and humiliation. And, then, we wonder why they begin to lose hope that an education provides a pathway to better opportunities.

We must urge Americans of all backgrounds and economic circumstances to believe that we are anything but powerless to change the outcomes that flow from our society’s shortcomings.

Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, offers a blueprint for change that outlines thirty-three specific action strategies for transforming American public education and also for infusing hope and faith in the American dream in the hearts and minds of every American man, woman, and child.

Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error, A Journaled Review by Mel Hawkins, 2nd Installment

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Ravitch’s Chapter 1 “Our Schools are at Risk”

Ravitch begins this monumental work by staking out the battlefield and categorically rejecting the assertions of “leading members of our political class and our media elite” that public education is broken.

They say that our children are not learning enough and that the “crisis is so profound that half measures and tweaks will not work. Schools must be closed and large numbers of teachers fired. Anyone who doubts this is unaware of the dimensions of the crisis or has a vested interest in defending the status quo.”

They are wrong, Ravitch says!

They say that teachers, principals, and teachers’ unions must “shoulder the blame” for low test scores. They must be held accountable on the basis of objective evaluations.” These reforms, Ravitch continues, insist that “Students must be given choices other than traditional public schools, such as charter schools, vouchers, and online schools.”
They consider themselves, Ravitch continues, to be “championing the cause of minorities . . . the civil rights movement of our day.”

She notes that these advocates appeal “to values Americans have traditionally cherished—choice, freedom, optimism, and a latent distrust of government.”

Ravitch declares, emphatically, “There is only one problem with this narrative. It is wrong.”

“Public education is not broken.” Ravitch explains. “It is not failing or declining.” She adds that the solutions of what she terms as “the corporate reformers” are wrong. She explains that “our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation.”

She says that “the solutions proposed by the self-proclaimed reformers have not worked as promised. They have failed even by their own most highly valued measure, which is test scores. At the same time, the reformers solutions have had a destructive impact on education as a whole.”

Ravitch continues her attack with such statements as, “strike at the heart of our nation’s most valued institutions.” “Liberals, progressives, well-meaning people have lent their support to a project that is antithetical to liberalism and progressivism. By supporting market-based ‘reforms’ they have allied themselves with those who seek to destroy public education.” She sites, “implacable hostility toward the public sector” advocating “the transfer of public funds to private management and the creation of thousands of deregulated, unsupervised, and unaccountable schools have opened the public coffers to profiteering, fraud, and small entreprenuers.”

Let me say, emphatically, that the “reformers” she is attacking are absolutely right at the outset of what they say, when they identify as the scope of the problem and they are terribly wrong on the other. Public education is broken and it does threaten our very future as a society. It might work well for an elite component of the population of American children but it works counter to the best interests of a significant portion of our children, and is a disaster for the rest.

Let me add with equal emphasis that they are absolutely wrong in what they are asking us to do to fix it.
On the other hand, although Ravitch comes tantalizingly close, she misinterprets the reasons for the problems with public education, which just happen to be the same problems facing our society as a whole. As a result, what she would have us do is to continue to make the same mistakes we have made for the last half century or more.
Ravitch insists, as do so many others, that the problems with education in America are rooted in poverty and racial segregation and in this she is wrong.

Poverty is not a cause it is a symptom very much like the failures of public education are a symptom of underlying cultural forces sweeping across our society. Similarly, racial segregation is as symptom of those same forces. Segregation is no longer decreed by law rather it results from choices that are made by American men and women, no doubt by default, in the face of the cultural forces to which we refer.

At the risk of over-simplifying, I can say that those cultural forces transcend both race and affluence. The first of these destructive forces is a blanket of hopelessness and powerlessness that is smothering a burgeoning population of Americans who are white, black, and every color in between. These men and women are poor to be sure but poverty is just a condition of their existence. It is the hopelessness and powerlessness that led them into poverty and that keeps them there. Sadly, they teach their children to feel hopeless and powerless and as a result, their children are unable to alter the condition of poverty in which they have been reared. Poverty is a condition, hopelessness and powerlessness are states of mind.

The second of the forces is that many American men and women, or more specifically, mothers and fathers, many of whom do not live in poverty have succumbed to a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness with respect to their ability to maintain control and influence over their children. The children of these people have fallen under the influence of their peers and of the powerful forces of a diverse menu of media that exert far more influence over the minds and attitudes of these young people than do their parents.

These kids can be found in any public school in the U.S. Just ask teachers to point them out for you. They are bright youngsters whose parents have thrown up their hands in figurative despair because they can’t make them behave, cannot get them to take school seriously, cannot get them to bed at a decent hour, cannot control whom they choose for friends, cannot control the amount of time they spend playing video games, surfing the net, or talking, texting, tweeting, facebooking, and sometimes even emailing their friends. When these kids get to school, the teachers, working without the support of the parents, struggle to get them to behave, pay attention, or take their school work seriously. Even though some of these kids earn passing grades, they perform so far below their potential that opportunity cost of what they should be learning has drastic consequences for the balance of their lives.

We have been striving to solve the problem of poverty for generations. President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty to no avail. We have created welfare laws intended to provide the basics for families but instead created an entitlement mentality.

Concerned professional in all of the social sciences have spent enormous energy just as federal and state government have spent trillions of dollars trying to “extend the advantages” to the poor that are enjoyed by the affluent. This is exactly what welfare has been trying to do for generations, now, with disastrous results.

We all know an adage that has become so cliché they we ignore its wisdom. “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

It is absolutely imperative that we shift the emphasis of everything we do and every dollar we spend way from “extending advantages” and focus those resources, instead, on attacking the hopelessness and powerlessness that are the true root causes of poverty, racial segregation, the failure of our systems of public education, and of the violence that has converted many urban neighborhoods to war zones.

If Ravitch were to step back and re-examine her assumptions what a powerful force she could be given the platform at her command.

As we continue through Reign of Error, we will strive to point out what a difference this alternate perspective would make and what opportunities it would create.

The other noteworthy and troubling phenomenon that his occurring is that both sides of the great educational debate are engaged in a dangerous exchange of slogans and catch phrases that blind us to the truth. In following Ravitch’s blog which has so much traffic that I have had to create a separate location on my computer to store the emails announcing the latest posts and comments; what I am seeing is that the words “reform” and “reformer” are becoming what I like to refer to as “trigger bytes” to which Americans react with prejudice with Pavlovian consistency. It is similar to such words as “socialism,” “communism,” and “socialized medicine.” When people hear these trigger bytes used in the attack of an idea, their minds shut down with stunning abruptness, and they no longer listen to what those with a different point of view have to say.

We are faced with some of the most important choices in the history of our nation and we need to keep our wits about us if we hope to weather the challenges of the Twenty-first Century and beyond.

Reign of Error, by Diane Ravitch, a Journaled Review by Mel Hawkins, Entry #1

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This is the first installment of what will be a journaled review of Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch; her latest and possibly most important work.

In her Intro, Diane Ravitch says that her purpose is to answer 4 questions:

1. Is American Education in crisis?
2. Is American education failing and declining
3. What is the evidence for the reforms now being promoted by the federal government and adopted in many states
4. What should we do to improve our schools and the lives of children?

Ravitch says that American education is in crisis “because of persistent, orchestrated attacks on them and their teachers and principals, and attacks on the very principle of public responsibility for public education.” She adds that “these attacks create a false sense of crisis and serve the interests of those who want to privatize the public schools.”

This statement begs the question of why did the orchestrators of such attacks find it necessary to attack public education in the first place? While I agree with her that the evolving focus on privatization is a bad thing, there must be some acknowledgement of responsibility for the outcomes to which these unidentified forces are reacting.

While it is natural for educators to be defensive and feel unfairly blamed while in the midst of the criticisms raining down on them, claiming the criticisms to be unfair without addressing the outcomes about which the critics are concerned is simply not acceptable. Educators are no more able to fairly judge, unilaterally, the efficacy of their product than members of a production line in a manufacturing operation are able to judge the performance of the goods they produce outside the context of the customer who pays for those goods.

The only people who can fairly judge the value of education are the people who rely on the ability of public school students to perform in the marketplace upon completion of their schooling. As a former employer, I can tell you that it became increasingly difficult to find young men and women who have the minimal academic skills necessary to do the work for which we were prepared to pay them. Employers have a right to pass judgment on the performance of our public schools.

As an tester responsible for administering the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), I am in a position to judge the efficacy of an educational system that produces so many young men and women who are either unable to meet the minimum requirements for enlistment eligibility or who, if eligible, are able to perform the work required of them after induction in only the lowest career areas.

If teachers, particularly of middle and high school students, were able to set aside worries about who is to blame for the problem, they would be in a great position to tell us that far too many students are either unwilling or unable, either, to do the academic work on the one hand or display good citizenship on the other.

The question is not whether or not our systems of public education are in crisis, because it most surely is, rather it is what and who are responsible for the crisis.

Sadly, most of these critics assign responsibility for the poor performance of our public schools on the wrong things. We blame poverty, we blame racial discrimination and segregation, and we blame our teachers and our schools.

As was noted in my initial review of Ravitch’s book, as well as in my own book and blog, we misinterpret the causes of the disappointing performance of our public schools. Because of our incorrect assessment, we fail to see that teachers, rather than bearing the brunt of the responsibility for what is clearly a crisis in public education, are as much victims of the system as are their students.

As is always the case, if we are unable to come up with an accurate diagnosis of the problem, we are rarely able to identify meaningful solutions.

Were we able to discover and agree on the true causes of our educational crisis we would know, with a high degree of certainty that testing, privatization, vouchers and other tools to give parents more choices are not the solution to the problems of public education. These things make it more difficult for teachers and schools to do their important work rather than easier.

The true causes, as we have so frequently pointed out, are 1) a growing cultural disdain for the value of education on the part of far too many American parents and the resulting lack of a strong motivation to learn on the part of their children, and 2) that the educational process that has evolved, over the last century or more, is poorly designed and structured to produce the outcomes we so desperately need. The American educational process is the equivalent of early twentieth-century design and technology striving to compete in the Twenty-first Century. No amount of tinkering with the system with incremental modifications will work. The system must be reinvented to produce the outcomes we need from it.

Let us return to Ravitch’s purpose which was to answer her four questions. The American systems of public education are clearly in crisis and it is failing to meet the needs of both American school children and the society which will someday depend on their contributions.

As far as question number three is concerned, there is no evidence for the reform initiatives being promoted by the federal government and other policy-making forces as they are all premised on faulty logic. Any solution constructed on a faulty foundation must, inevitably, crumble.

The answer to question number four is that we must do nothing “to improve our schools and the lives of our children?” until we take the time to understand the root causes of the problems of public education in America. For that reason, finding the root causes is the categorical imperative of our time.

It was for this very purpose that my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America was written.

Ravitch, correctly, goes on to say that our schools are not “fine just as they are.” She then lists what she believes “American education needs,” and while none of these things are bad for our public schools, not a single one of them addresses the root causes for our system’s problems. As a result, they will not only make no appreciable difference, they will be harmful because of the opportunity cost they engender as they keep us from doing what we should be doing.

The sad thing is, that we already have the capability to fix public education in America even though it will be a formidable challenge.

Ravitch is absolutely correct, however, when she says that “The purpose of elementary and secondary education is to develop the minds and character of young children and adolescents and help them grow up to become healthy, knowledgeable, and competent citizens.”

She is also correct that the solution is to give schools and their teachers the resources that they need to do their jobs. We simply must rethink what those resources are.

Another area where Ravitch and other opponents of many of the “privatization” reform initiatives are wrong is in seemingly suggesting that schools and teachers should not be held accountable through the independent measurement of outcomes. As we will discuss later on, we need to develop an integrated quality system much like modern business organizations have done. What the skeptics will discover, if they make an effort to understand how such systems work, is that such quality systems actually help rather than hinder the worker’s ability to do his or her job. The same will be most assuredly true for teachers.

What if We Are Asking the Wrong Question about Public Education in America?

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When we talk about public education and the challenges it faces and when we talk about reform initiatives there is a question at the center of those discussions. That question is: Why do children fail? Or, “What are the characteristics of the children who perform poorly in school?” Or, more often, “Who is to blame for the failure of education in America?”

We then talk about poverty, racial discrimination and segregation, deteriorating urban and rural communities: and, we talk about bad schools and bad teachers, teachers unions, about giving people choices with charter schools and vouchers; about Common Core; about holding teachers and schools accountable and standardized competency examinations. In the last couple of decades we have begun talking about the privatization of education and other related issues having to do with taking education from the control of communities and making it more accountable much like businesses are held accountable.

What if “Why do children fail and who is to blame?” are the wrong questions? Maybe we are looking at the problems of education from the wrong perspective.

Returning to the challenges of education in America, consider a different question, for just a moment.
“Why do children succeed in school?” Or, more specifically, “what do successful students have in common and what can we learn from those common characteristics?”

We will likely discover that it is not affluence because, while there are many successful students who are affluent there are also poor children who excel academically. Conversely, there are affluent students who fail as badly as some of their economically disadvantaged classmates.

We will discover that it is not race, because the list of the academically excellent includes white children, and black children, and children with skins that span all of the hues and colors in between.

We will learn that it is not fractured families because there are children who excel in school who live in single-parent homes or with families that are otherwise distressed just as there are children from intact families who fail, miserably.

We will learn that it is not bad neighborhoods because there are children from the most dreadful surroundings who somehow perform well in school just as there are children at the other end of the performance continuum who live in the best neighborhoods in America.

We will also discover that it is not bad schools populated by bad teachers, because students from both ends of the performance continuum can be found in our best and in our worst performing schools.

The one single characteristic that most links our best students, wherever we find them, is that they are supported by parent(s) or guardian(s) who are determined that their children will get the best possible education and who consider themselves to be partners, sharing responsibility with teachers and principals for the education of their children.
Now, flip the question around and ask, what are the common characteristics of children who are failing in school? If we are honest with ourselves we will discover that the single most common characteristic of children who struggle academically is that they are not supported by parents who are determined that their children will receive a good education. Many parents of struggling children might vocalize that education is important but they do none of things that determined parents do. They do not talk constantly about the importance of education. They do not make certain that their child has resources that will help them be successful in school. They do not ask, routinely, “How was school today?” nor do they ask to see homework or tests and other papers sent home by their child’s teacher. They do not call and talk to their child’s teacher to see how their son or daughter is doing or to ask what they can do to help and support the child? They do not go to parent/teacher conferences or back-to-school night. Whatever they might be vocalizing their actions provide no evidence that a real commitment exists or that the parent recognizes and accepts responsibility as a partner in the educational process.

Think for a moment, about how the answers to this new set of questions changes, profoundly, everything we think we know about the educational process.

The problem with education in America is that we have a burgeoning population of American mothers and fathers who live under a stifling blanket of hopelessness and powerlessness. These men and women are effectively disenfranchised and no longer believe in the American Dream for themselves or for their children. As a result, they do not stress the importance of education to their children and they make little if any effort to prepare their children for learning; they offer no support to the educators of their children and, in fact, view their children’s teachers and principals as adversaries. Many of these parents have lost control over their children and can no longer claim status as the guiding influence in the daily lives of their sons and daughters.

Because the quality of the education our children receive will determine whether or not the U.S. can maintain any semblance of a competitive advantage as we proceed through the balance of the Twenty-first Century, we are facing two challenges:

1. The first is that we must utilize every resource at our disposal to pull parents into the process as fully participating partners in the education of their sons and daughters. It is the absence of this partnership that results in the lowest level of motivation to learn on the part American children in generations and this is a reality that must be altered at all cost.

2. The second is that we must be willing to admit that our current educational process is poorly structured to get the results we so desperately need to achieve. It is a system that sets the overwhelming majority of students up for failure and humiliation simply because it starts all children out on the same academic path, regardless of the cavernous disparity in the preparation they bring to their first day of school, and it judges their performance against that of their classmates. We must create a reality in which children are given sufficient time to master their subjects before they are permitted to move on because we have no illusions that they all will have achieved the same things by the end of twelve years of formal education. We do not need them to achieve the same things. What we need is that they will have learned as much as they are able to learn and that they will be able to apply what they have learned when they enter the next stage of their lives, whatever that may be.

The first challenge is formidable because it demands that we strive to change the culture of American society to one in which the American dream is real and achievable, if not for every man and woman in the nation, at least for their children. It will require that we quit bickering and, instead, come together to achieve a common objective.

The second challenge offers no excuses for failure because the educational leaders in each of our fifty states has the authority to change, by decree, the educational process in their state.

If we continue down the same path, we place our entire future as a society in jeopardy.

Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch; A Review by Mel Hawkins November 5, 2013

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Reign of Error, by Diane Ravitch is a powerful work by a woman who is one of the most articulate voices in the field of education in America. On one hand she is dead on in her assessment of many of the current reform initiatives from privatization of education; to reliance on competency testing as the primary assessment tool of students, teachers, and their schools: and, the practice heaping the majority of the blame for the problems of education in America on teachers and schools. She offers eloquent rejections of privatization of schools, the concepts of charter schools, vouchers, Common Core, as well as the head long dash to implement broad and largely untested reforms initiatives. Thank you, Dr. Ravitch.

When it comes to helping us determine what we should do differently, I came away disappointed. What a missed opportunity and she comes so close to the truth; so close to utilizing her remarkable platform to provide the dynamic leadership our nation so desperately needs. While I will continue to hold her in high esteem, she is caught, as are so many of her colleagues, in what I like to think of as a paradigm rift in which she is constrained by her assumptions and preconceptions. This is surprising in someone who was able to look back to a prior and quite popular work and recant her “earlier support for what is now known as the “reform” agenda.” Not an easy thing for a writer of any ilk to do, let alone someone of Ravitch’s stature. It is a testament to her character.

My hope is that this review will prompt Ravitch to take a few additional steps back to where she can view our systems of education as an integral whole and, then, challenge her underlying assumptions about why so many American children are failing and what we need to do to alter that reality.

Let us examine a few examples of how simple truths can escape the scrutiny of even the best and brightest of our stars.

Ravitch starts out with the statement that “Yes, we have problems, but those problems are concentrated where poverty and racial segregation are concentrated.” This is conventional wisdom in its purest form. We have been blaming the problems of our society—not just our schools—on poverty, racial segregation and discrimination, and deteriorating neighborhoods for so long that we that it has become an unspoken truth; a unalterable given.

What I want to suggest to Dr. Ravitch and others is that while there is, indeed, an interdependent relationship between poverty, racial segregation, deteriorating neighborhoods, fractured families, drugs and violence; that relationship is not causal. Consider the idea that educational failure, poverty, and deteriorating neighborhoods and all of the associated problems are symptoms of the same pathology; one that transcends race and relative affluence.
Is it not true that there are many children from families who are not poor whose academic performance is as bad as their impoverished classmates? Is it not true that, even though the single greatest disparity with respect to academic performance is the gap that exists between white and black students, there are many African American students who pass their state competency exams and excel academically? Conversely, is it not true that there are children from affluent families living in vibrant, middle class neighborhoods who are performing just as badly as their classmates from deteriorating urban and rural communities? Is it not true that there are many children from intact families who are failing just as miserably as their classmates from families that are, in some way, fractured?
Consider the possibility that there may be forces at work below the horizons of conventional thinking that are influencing all of these demographic groups; forces that transcend them all.

In my own book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge of Twenty-First Century America, a book in which Ravitch is quoted several times, I suggest that the problem with education in America is a burgeoning population of American citizens who have lost hope and faith in the American dream. These men and women have become effectively disenfranchised. By this I mean that these men and women, many of whom are mothers and fathers, live under a blanket of hopelessness and powerlessness. They no longer believe that they possess the power to control the outcomes in their lives. The American dream does not exist for these citizens and, therefore, it does not exist for their children. This is a cultural phenomenon.

These mothers and fathers are products of the same dysfunctional education system to which they are asked to send their children. They send their children willingly, not because they believe education to be a ticket to the American Dream rather because it gives them eight or more hours a day, 36 to 40 weeks per year when they are relieved of the obligation to be responsible for their children. These mothers and fathers do not teach their children that education is a path to a better life and is worthy of their hard efforts and sacrifices. As a result these youngsters show up for their first day of school with precious little preparation and little or no motivation to learn. In spite of our best intentions, the American educational process is poorly prepared to handle the challenges that these children and their apathetic parents present, placing teachers in an almost impossible situation.

In spite of what experts like Dr. Ravitch and so many of our policy makers wish to believe, no matter how diligently we strive and how much money we spend, we cannot undo for this expanding population of children the damage that results from a culture of hopelessness and powerlessness. Our existing educational process is not only poorly prepared to respond to the challenges these students present but it sets children up for failure and humiliation. The result is that by the time these kids reach middle school, if not before, they are as turned off and apathetic as their parents. In a few years, these youngsters will be sending their own children off to school with the same lack of motivation and commitment.

Now, let us think about some of the exceptions that every professional educator has seen, where a student from poor and often fractured families, living in the midst of the most dreadful poverty in America, who show up at school with a seemingly inexplicable motivation to learn and to get the best possible education. We can recognize these boys and girls not only because they, themselves, stand out from the midst of their classmates but also because they almost always have a mother, father, or grandparent who encourages them to work hard and who shows up for parent/teacher conferences, who accepts responsibility as partners in the education of their children, and who support the teachers of their children.

More than anything teachers and schools can do it is the partnership of these remarkable caregivers and the motivation of their sons and daughters that are the difference makers in education. Add a dedicated teacher to the equation and magical things happen and it makes not the slightest difference whether buildings and classrooms in which these forces come together are modern or antiquated. Modern, attractive, and well-designed facilities might help but they are not the difference-makers in education.
Somehow, we need to carry a message to all mothers, fathers, and caregivers that their children can benefit from the same magic.

We acknowledge that this is not an easy sell and it is especially difficult if all we have to offer these skeptical guardians is the same dysfunctional educational process from which they emerged, battered, bruised, and beaten. Somehow, we must offer these parents and their children something new and exciting.

Here again, Ravitch comes so tantalizingly close to the secret. She recognizes that “what works are the very opportunities that advantaged families provide for their children.” She goes on to identify “. . . with adequate resources, children get advantages that enable them to arrive in school healthy and ready to learn.” And she mentions the importance of “Discerning, affluent parents demand schools with full curricula, experienced staffs, rich programs in the arts, libraries, well maintained campuses, and small classes.”

These few sentences point to the incredibly subtle yet profound logical leap that diverts us from the truth. We allow ourselves to get hung up on the importance of “affluence” when the relative economic status of families is almost totally inconsequential.

What is most important is that these parents demand substance and, to a lesser extent, that they have been taught to “discern” the difference between things that are consequential from those that are not. Yes, affluence makes life easier for both parents and children but the percentage of children who do well in school with parents who care and accept responsibility will be far higher than the percentage of students who do well because their parents are affluent.

Most important of all is the idea of parents demanding excellence. We do not demand things that we do not value no matter how affluent we might be. Neither will we value things that seem unimaginable or impossible. Without hope and faith, the power to create our own outcomes will elude us.

It is absolutely improbable to believe that we can give every parent in the U.S. the affluence to create an advantage for their children. We have neither the resources nor the necessary mechanics to make such things happen. We do have the power, however, to do something that is even more important. Even if it is too late for the parents, we can help every mother, father, and legal guardian learn how to hope; to believe in the possibility of something better for their children. Although it would certainly help to have sufficient resources at our disposal, all we really require are two things, 1) the willingness to believe that giving hope is possible, and 2) the commitment to make it happen.
Hope, faith, confidence, commitment, energy, determination, and momentum—as powerful as they can be—can melt into a puddle of self-doubt and timidity if not rewarded, consistently. Somehow we must create a reality in which our children can learn how to be successful. In the business world, we structure organizations to produce the results we need. In education, the process is structured with a focus on failure.

Ravitch identifies the importance of setting age-appropriate goals; blending work and play, art and academics; creating an intimate learning environment in which students get the attention they need; limiting focus on testing to diagnostics to determine next steps; and rejecting the concept of judging educators on the basis of test scores. While all are worthy objectives, the system as it is currently structured is not set up to support these priorities.

If we are to have any chance of turning our systems of education around so that our nation can compete in the ever-more demanding world marketplace of the Twenty-first Century we must change the way we think about education. With a new vision in place, we must re-structure the educational process to:

• Establish pulling parents into the process as full partners with the teachers of their children as our top priority;
• Assess the unique starting point of every child that arrives at the door of our schools;
• Tailor a unique educational path for each child;
• Commit to helping these children progress along that path at the best speed of which they are capable;
• Never push them ahead before they are well-prepared to be successful on subsequent subject matter;
• Abandon our senseless practice of expecting children to move forward at the same pace and measuring their performance against the performance of other classmates,
• Commit to teaching these children that success is a process which each of them can master,
• Eliminate reliance on standardized competency examinations given once a year, in favor of small quizzes given often throughout the school year to assess not only their mastery of the material but also their readiness to move on,
• Create a structure that makes it easier for teachers to forge close, long-term, personal relationships with both students and parents.

Each of these things is possible if only we structure the educational process in a manner that fosters these objectives. In Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, I offer the reader a detailed action plan to accomplish these and other objectives designed to transform our educational process while preserving the important relationships between schools and their community.

As I go back to reread Diane Ravitch’s, Reign of Error, I will continue to review the work using a journaled approach offering an ongoing commentary. You are cordially invited to follow along.

Welcome to The Leader (Thinking Exponentially: Leadership, Education, and the American Dream)

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Thinking Exponentially: Leadership, Education, and the American Dream is a blog by Mel Hawkins, a writer and retired leadership consultant.

The mission of this new blog, which will be replace The Positive Leadership Blog and the Reconstructhealthcare Blog,  is to encourage its readers to think exponentially (outside the box) about the challenges facing the U.S. in this new Twenty-first Century. The blog will focus on the issue that the number of Americans who have lost faith in our democracy and who no longer believe in the American Dream has placed our nation in the greatest jeopardy we have faced since the Civil War, almost 150 years ago. Articles on positive leadership, education, healthcare, and the American Dream will be offered.

Literally tens of millions of Americans have lost their hope and faith in the American dream and no longer believe that they have control over their lives and destinies. These American men and women are becoming disenfranchised and they are disengaging from active participation as productive citizens at a time when our nation can least afford it.

Liberals argue that it is unconscionable to cut these people off. They push to find new sources of revenue in order to continue to support the poor and the disadvantaged. They suggest that such revenue must inevitably come from the increased taxation of affluent Americans. Under this leadership, federal spending continues to rise.

Conservatives counter that we need to shut these men, women, and families off because the nation can no longer afford to leverage our children’s future in order to care for the dependent. These men and women campaign against any and all tax increases, preferring instead to make drastic cuts in such programs as unemployment compensation, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. That most Medicare and Social Security benefits flow to Americans over 65 years of age who have labored over their lifetimes to earn such benefits is nothing short of tragic.

Sadly, neither the liberal nor the conservative strategies of the past will work in the Twenty-first Century. They are as outmoded, today, as the horse and buggy were a century ago.

When Governor Romney, during his 2012 candidacy for the presidency, suggested that 49 percent of Americans are dependent on the government, he was referring not only to the disenfranchised but also to that segment of the population that hovers treacherously close to the line that separates the hopeful from the hopeless.  What does it say about a society that is perfectly willing to write off virtually half of its people as not worthy of our concern and attention?

How can we possibly think we can compete effectively with the China and the other players in the international economic arena if we are literally dragging half of the American people along behind us?

What we need, instead, is to find a way to re-engage the disengaged. We need to get them off welfare and into decent paying jobs with which they can support their families. We need to re-sell the American dream to these Americans so that they will not only strive to achieve the dream for themselves but will also encourage their children to pursue it. We need these mothers and fathers to teach their children the importance of an education so that those youngsters arrive at school with both a motivation to learn and with parents who are prepared to stand behind both their children and their teachers.

We need to find a real solution to the problems of access to quality medical care rather than the well-intentioned but impossible Affordable Care Act.

Even though China, Europe, India, Japan, and other Asian rim nations are challenging us on every front, economically, educationally, and politically, our enemy is not the people of other nations. Our enemy resides within our own hearts and minds, and we must find solutions in those same hearts and minds. Our problems as a nation flow from our prejudices and our fundamental assumptions about the universe and mankind’s place therein. Our enemy exists within our unwillingness to embrace our diversity whether measured by the color of our skin, the languages of our cultural heritage, by our religious faiths, or by our view of the universe. We must challenge one another to embrace our diversity. That diversity is and has long been our nation’s greatest strength.

You are invited to:

Subscribe to this blog,

Read the articles on positive leadership, education, healthcare, hope, and the American Dream.

Read the books by this author that lay the foundation for a strategic plan,

Make a commitment to become an active advocate for positive strategies to transform our society, and

To invite your families, friends, colleagues, and associates to join you in this commitment and to begin by also subscribing to this blog.

 

It is not our futures we are talking about. We are talking about the futures of our children, our grandchildren, and our children’s grandchildren.

None of us can accomplish much by ourselves but if we come together there is nothing on this Earth that can stop us.