Tag Archives: public school classrooms

Quadrilateral Pegs in the Round Holes of Public Education; Revisited

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Author’s note: In hopes of retaining a presence on social media, while writing my new book, I am selecting a few of the most widely-read blog posts from the past. I hope you enjoy this one.

 

Participating in the dialogue between teachers, principals, superintendents, and other players in our public schools has been enlightening and inspiring on the one hand and frustrating and discouraging on the other. It is wonderful to know there are so many amazing men and women who have dedicated themselves to teach our nation’s children. It is heartbreaking, however, to see how many of these remarkable professionals seem unaware that they are being asked to do one of the most important and most challenging jobs in the world in an environment that has not been significantly altered since I began school 67 years ago. Teachers labor in an education process that has not been adapted to meet the needs of 21st Century children.

It has been a struggle to find an analogy that resonates with teachers, principals, and superintendents so they can see what it looks like to observe them at work, from afar. I know that because I have not been trained as a professional teacher, it is easy for them to discount the merit of my education model as the work of just one more outsider telling teachers how to teach.

My perspective is unique, however, and merits the attention of our nation’s public school policy makers, leaders, and classroom teachers. I am speaking as an advocate for public education and for American public-school teachers and school administrators, not as an adversary. I consider public school teachers to be unsung American heroes and I’m asking you to open your hearts and minds to a new idea. If you see merit in what you read, I am asking you to help spread the word to other educators that there is an idea worthy of consideration.

As a student, I have earned two masters’ degrees, one in psychology and the other in public management. Over a nearly fifty-year career, I have worked with kids for 9 years as a juvenile probation officer and in a volunteer capacity for nearly 20 years. I have lead organizations; taught and have written a book about positive leadership; solved problems; created new and innovative solutions; reinvented production and service delivery processes; have written four book and many articles; have done testing for the military; and, while writing books, have spent ten years working as a substitute teacher in the same public school district from which my own children graduated.  Also, I have been a student of “systems thinking” since reading Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, when it was first published in 1990.

The experience of participating in and observing what happens in public school classrooms as a substitute teacher, was an incredible opportunity to walk in the shoes of public school teachers. What I witnessed as an observer of the public schools of my community are dedicated, hard-working professional men and women, giving their hearts and souls to their students in a system and structure that does not meet the needs of a diverse population of students.

If you can imagine what our nation’s system of highways would look like—given the number of automobiles and trucks on the roads, today—if neither President Eisenhower, in 1956, nor any of his successors had envisioned America’s interstate highway system, you will have an idea of how our public school classrooms and the education process at work within those classrooms look to me, observing from afar.

We are asking good people to educate our nation’s incredibly diverse population of students in the education equivalent of Route 66. These kids will become the men and women who must lead our nation through the unprecedented and unimaginable challenges the balance of the 21st Century will present. Think about the diversity of American public-school students. They represent every color of the human rainbow, speak innumerable languages, come from families both fractured and whole, from every corner of the planet, and with a range of backgrounds with respect to relative affluence and academic preparedness that is as cavernous as America is wide.

Public school educators are striving to do their absolute best for students in an environment in which they lack the support of our federal and many of our state governments and are under attack from education reformers with their focus on “school choice.” These education reformers, policy makers, and the politicians who are influenced by them are destroying our public schools and the communities those schools were built to serve.

As I have written on so many occasions, a handful of charter schools serving a few hundred students at a time, even if they were innovative, will never meet the needs of the millions of American children on whom our nation’s future depends. These charter schools are being funded with revenue siphoned from the coffers that were meant to support our public schools and rely on the same obsolete education process used in the public schools they were intended to replace. Many of these charter schools have failed to meet expectations in community after community.

We already have school buildings in communities throughout the U.S., staffed with the best teachers our colleges and universities can produce, and filled with kids from every community in America. This is where the problem exists and where its challenges must be met. We cannot produce the results these children and their communities need, so desperately however, until we examine the current education process through the lenses of a “systems-thinking” approach. Systems thinking allows us to challenge our assumptions about what we do and why. Only when we have taken the time to understand the flaws in the underlying logic of the existing education process will we be able to alter the way we teach our nation’s most precious assets and the way we support our teachers as they go about their essential work.

There have been many innovations in public education in recent decades, but they and other incremental changes have been and will continue to be no more effective within the context of an obsolete education process than repaving the highways of the 1950s would be in meeting the transportation needs of the 21st Century.

I have been working to build an education model that I believe will put both teachers and students in a position to be successful. It is a model that was designed from scratch to be molded around the relationship between teachers and students, enabling all to perform at their optimal level. I am seeking superintendents of a public-school districts willing to test my education model in one of their underperforming elementary schools.

You, our superintendents, know what the data illustrates and you know that what you have been asking your teachers to do has not altered the bottom line with respect to student performance in any meaningful way.  Most importantly, you know the number of elementary schools in your district that are languishing no matter what you do.

Yes, I understand the data produced through standardized competency exams is a totally inappropriate way to assess the performance of our teachers and schools but let us not throw the baby out with the bath water. The results of these standardized tests do tell us one thing of inestimable value.  They tell us that the education process does not work for millions of children no matter how hard our teachers work on behalf of their students .

We often cite poverty, discrimination, and segregation as the reasons why so many of our students fail. The reality is that when we ignore the unique requirements of our students and try to push their quadrilateral pegs through the round holes of public education, we leave the most vulnerable at the mercy of discrimination.

I challenge teachers, principals, and superintendents to ask yourselves whether there is anything you have done differently, over the course of your careers, that has resulted in a significant improvement in the performance of your students, in the aggregate. Yes, you can cite examples of individual students whose lives have been altered, but what about your student body as a whole? Your underperforming elementary schools and their teachers and students are waiting for you to do something different; something that will help them be successful. How about now?

It is time to consider a novel approach in which a new education model is crafted around the important work our teachers and students must do. It is a model designed to support them as they strive to meet the unique needs of an incredibly diverse population of American children.

My education model and white paper, can be examined at my website at: https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/education-model-white-paper/ I am asking you to risk a couple of hours of your valuable time to examine the model, not seeking reasons why it will not work rather striving to imagine what it would be like to teach and learn in such an environment. Are your students and their beleaguered teachers worth the risk of a couple of  hours of your time, given that the value of the upside is incalculable?

At my website you will also find my blog, Education, Hope, and the American Dream with this and almost 250 other articles about the challenges facing public education.

Our goal must be to arm our nation’s young people with the skills and knowledge they will need to be impervious in the face of prejudice and discrimination and to ensure that they have meaningful choices. We can only accomplish this goal if we transform public education in America.

Quadrilateral Pegs through the Round Holes of Public Education

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Participating in the dialogue between teachers, principals, superintendents, and other players in our public schools has been enlightening and inspiring on the one hand and frustrating and discouraging on the other. It is wonderful to know there are so many amazing men and women who have dedicated themselves to teach our nation’s children. It is heartbreaking, however, to see how so many seem to be unaware that they are being asked to do one of the most important and most challenging jobs in the world in an environment that has not been significantly altered in at least a half century and clearly has not been adapted to meet the needs of 21st Century children.

It has been a struggle to find an analogy that resonates with teachers, principals, and superintendents so they can see what it looks like to observe them at work, from afar. I know that many consider me an outsider because I have not been trained as a professional teacher, making it easy for them to make light of my education model. My perspective is unique, however, and merits the attention of our nation’s public school policy makers, leaders, and classroom teachers. I am speaking as an advocate for public education and for American public-school teachers and school administrators, not as an adversary. I consider public school teachers to be unsung American heroes and I’m asking you to open your minds to a new idea.

As a student, I have earned two masters’ degrees, one in psychology and the other in public management. On my own I have been a student of leadership for over forty-five years and have written a book to share what I’ve learned about the power of positive leadership. Also, I have been a student “systems thinking” since reading Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, when it was first published in 1990.

I have had an opportunity to both participate in and observe what happens in public school classrooms from the perspective of a substitute teacher over a period of ten years. I have worked with some of my communities most challenging children as a juvenile probation officer for the first nine years of my career. I have spent 30 years of my career in organizational leadership and consulting where I designed from scratch or reinvented service delivery and other processes to produce acceptable outcomes for the customers of my organizations or for my clients’ organizations. I have both taught and counseled CEOs, managers, and supervisors how to be effective positive leaders of their organizations and its people. I have been both the designer and instructor of multiple employee training programs.

What I have witnessed as an observer of the public schools of my community are dedicated, hard-working professional men and women, giving their hearts and souls to their students in a system and structure that has not been significantly altered since I started school in the fall of 1951.

If you can imagine, even for a moment, what our nation’s system of highways would look like—given the number of automobiles and trucks on the roads, today—if neither President Eisenhower, in 1956, nor any of his successors had envisioned America’s interstate highway system, you will have an idea of how our public school classrooms and the education process at work within those classrooms look to me, observing from afar.

We are asking good people to educate our nation’s incredibly diverse population of students on the education equivalent of Route 66. These kids are the future men and women who must be prepared to lead our nation through the unprecedented and unimaginable challenges the balance of the 21st Century will present. Think about the diversity of American public-school students. They represent every color of the human rainbow, speak innumerable languages, come from families both fractured and whole from every corner of the planet, and with a range of backgrounds with respect to relative affluence and academic preparedness that is as cavernous as America is wide.

Public school educators are striving to do their absolute best for students in an environment in which they are without the support of our federal and many of our state governments and are under attack from education reformers with their focus on “school choice.” These reformers and the politicians who are influenced by them are destroying our public schools and the communities those schools were built to serve. As I have written on so many occasions, a handful of charter schools serving a few hundred students at a time, even if they were innovative, will never meet the needs of the millions of American children on whom our nation’s future depends. These charter schools that are being funded with revenue siphoned from the coffers that were meant to support our public schools and rely on the same obsolete education process used in the public schools they were intended to replace.

We already have school buildings in communities throughout the U.S., staffed with the best teachers our colleges and universities can produce, and filled with kids. This is where the problem exists and where its challenges must be met. We just need to change the way we teach these kids and the way we support both teachers and students as they go about their essential work.

There have been many innovations in public education in recent decades, but they and other incremental changes will be no more effective within the context of an obsolete education process than repaving the highways of the 1950s would be in meeting today’s transportation needs. It is the education process or system that is obsolete.

Over the past few years, I have worked to build an education model that I believe will put both teachers and students in a position to be successful. It is a model that was designed from scratch to be molded around the relationship between teachers and students, enabling all to perform at their optimal level.

I am seeking a superintendent of a public-school district willing to test my education model in one of its underperforming elementary schools. You know the numbers and, therefore, that what you have been doing has not altered the bottom line with respect to student performance in any meaningful way. Why not consider a novel approach?

My education model and white paper, can be examined at my website at: https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/education-model-white-paper/ along with over 200 articles on public education on my blog. I am asking you to risk a couple of hours of your valuable time. Are your students worth at least that much given that the value of the upside is incalculable?

We often blame poverty, discrimination, and segregation as the reasons why these children fail. The reality is that when we ignore the unique requirements of our students and try to push their quadrilateral pegs through the round holes of public education we are the ones who discriminate. What we are doing has not worked for the last sixty-five years and it will not work for the next sixty-five years. When we let them fail we render them defenseless against discrimination.

Our goal must be to arm these young people with the skills and knowledge they need to be impervious in the face of prejudice and discrimination and to ensure that they have meaningful choices. We can only accomplish this goal if we transform public education in America.

What If We Were Teaching One Student at a Time?

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When we compare teaching in a classroom by a certified teacher to teaching in a more intimate environment like tutoring, things are different.

Academic tutors, often, work with one student at time and frequently with a focus on just one subject area.

Think about the tutoring process. The tutor presents the subject matter to the student; strives to explain the material in a way that the student comprehends; gives them opportunities to practice; provides feedback and clarification followed by more practice; gives them a practice test to see how they are doing; and, finally, sends them off to take a test, often in their regular classroom at school.

These are the same things all teachers do every day in public school classrooms throughout the nation. What is different? The biggest difference is what happens when kids fail.

In the classroom, the teacher’s choices are generally limited and, typically, involves recording the student’s score in a gradebook and then moving the student on to the next lesson, along with his or her classmates.

In a tutoring relationship, when a student has failed to achieve a targeted degree of mastery over the lesson material the tutor’s response is different because their defined expectations are different. Their job is not yet complete. The expectation is that the tutor will help the student achieve mastery and nothing short of that outcome is acceptable.

Subsequent to poor performance, the tutor goes back to work with the student, possibly utilizing another method of presentation with plenty of opportunities for the student to practice, get feedback, take additional practice tests, etc. until he or she is ready to move on. Always, the tutor is there to help their charge in any way they can.

Understand that the overwhelming majority of classroom teachers would love to spend more time with every student who struggles with the material and they do so, whenever circumstances permit. The problem, of course, is that circumstances rarely permit.

The classroom teacher is always a certified teacher while the tutor may or may not be. Certified teachers are every bit as capable as the tutor, often more so. The traditional educational process is simply not structured in a way that a teacher, routinely, is able or expected to slow down for just one student. Rather, teacher accountability is focused on the number of their students who are able to pass state, standardized competency exams.

Our conclusion is that the only reason classroom teachers do not devote extra time for every student who needs it is because the American educational process is not structured in a way that it would support both teacher and student in such activity, and also because it is not a core expectation of teachers. Teachers are not given sufficient flexibility. That some kids fail is nothing more than a consequence of current educational policy.

Try to imagine what a different place school would be if every student was given the time and support necessary to achieve a score of 85 percent or better in all of their classes.

Most teachers reading this post will respond that it is naïve to think that such a reality is even possible. Given current expectations and the way the educational process is structured, they are correct.

Change the rules of the game, however, and the way in which the game is scored and what seemed impossible now becomes relatively easy.

From a systems-engineering perspective, bringing about such change is relatively easy. The challenge is opening the hearts and minds of policymakers, principals, and teachers so that they begin to believe such realities are possible.

How Do We Subtract Failure from the Public Education Equation?

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Failure is a debilitating thing for anyone but it is particularly hard on children. Nevertheless, failure is key component of the traditional American educational process and the very fact that kids can fail leads to a reality in which far too many of them do. We need to ask ourselves, why is this necessary? Why should any child have to deal with failure?

Let us examine the definition of the word “fail.” Merriam Webster defines “fail” to mean “to end without success.”

For the purpose of public education, we can define “fail” as “unable to demonstrate mastery over given subject matter.” In our present educational process we have given the lesson; we have given students a fair opportunity to practice; and, finally, we assess their level of mastery by asking the student to demonstrate that mastery on a test. The grade the student earns and that goes into the gradebook is a reflection of their performance on that instrument of measurement. So far, so good.

The problem with the American educational process in an overwhelming number of public school classrooms is not that some kids did well on the test and other kids did poorly. Rather it is that, however the child performs, we declare our job done with respect to that particular lesson, lesson module, chapter, grading period, semester, or school year.

The question that needs to be posed is, “Why would we ever be satisfied with an unacceptable outcome for any of our students?”

These are children, after all. They are unique individuals—children of creation—and they each have equal value in the eyes of both the Creation and the law. Is there any reason in the world to compare them against their classmates and to declare that some are better or worse than others?

Is there any reason to believe that because students did not grasp a given lesson as quickly and easily as some of their classmates that they are incapable of learning? Yet, this is what happens in our classrooms. We finish one lesson and we move onto the next and each child is given a grade to reflect their level of mastery over the material at that point in time.

When we push kids along to a new lesson while they are still struggling to understand the old, they begin to view themselves as less capable than their classmates. This experience influences the way the child thinks of himself or herself and diminishes his or her self-esteem. When this happens over and over again, the effect is devastating. Is it any wonder that some of these kids reach a point at which they stop trying because they no longer believe that success is attainable? Is there ever a time when this could be considered an acceptable outcome?

If our job is to determine which children can learn the most in the fastest measure of time then the educational process in place today is perfectly structured.

If, however, our objective is to help every child learn as much he or she can as quickly as he or she is able then the educational process is working at cross purposes with our objective.

Each child deserves the time they need to experience that special moment when the material clicks in their mind and they understand. Only then should they be asked to move on to new material. Once a pattern of success begins to manifest itself in the child’s mind, everything changes. With each success it becomes easier to succeed on the next lesson.

Think about the difference this would make in the child’s self-perception.

When a child finds themselves at a point where they no longer see the sense in trying it is, indeed, a failure but it is a failure on the part of the educational process and not on the part of the child.

Our current educational process is structured to produce disparate outcomes and we will not be able to alter this reality until we change the way we teach and the context within which we teach. We need to re-invent the educational process until it is structured to produce the outcomes we seek: that all children learn as much as the can as fast as they are able.

My book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America offers a blue print for a structure that will produce such outcomes.

Relationship between teacher and student trumps everything!

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“I wish my teacher knew that I love her with all my heart!” was how one third grader in Colorado completed the assignment reported on ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir.

If we want all American school children to get the quality education they deserve, and that our society so desperately needs them to achieve, we must give them what they need to be successful. We can identify four things that are not only essential but they trump everything else. What we need our political leaders to come to understand, whether here in Indiana or anywhere throughout the U.S. is that standardized testing is not one of these four things.

The first thing children need is to be treated as individuals on a dedicated learning path that is tailored to their unique starting point. As every professional educator will attest, the level of preparation and motivation children bring with them on their very first day of school is as diverse as the population of parents who gave birth to them. Beginning with such a focus not only puts a child on a path on which they can be successful, it sends a subtle but powerful message that they are special and that they are valued. Nothing gives the child the absolute best opportunity to be successful and nothing helps a child develop a healthy self-esteem more than being accepted for who they are; not how they stack up to their classmates.

The second most critical component of educational success is that each child is placed in an environment in which they can enjoy a nurturing, positive, life-affirming relationship with a teacher who will love them and care for them unconditionally. We want every child to experience the joy of the special relationship that most of us recall when we think back on our favorite teacher. While this component might be second on our list, it is second only because of chronology. Creating an environment that fosters such caring relationships between teacher and child is, overwhelmingly, the most important thing we can do to assure that the child receives the highest quality education of which they are capable. Yes, I understand that some children are easier to love than others but the universal truth is that “the child who is hardest to love is the one who needs it the most.”

The third thing the child needs is the assurance that they will get off to a good start and this requires that they begin learning how to be successful, from the very outset. This can be accomplished by creating a situation in which a child is not permitted to fail. Because we have placed them on a unique learning curve, it does not matter how a given child compares to other members of his or her class. We need to create an environment in which each and every child is given the time they need to learn each and every lesson, every step along the way. We simply must not permit them to fail. One of the things our current educational process does most successfully is to teach children how to fail. If we can, instead, begin teaching them that they can and will succeed it is amazing how success replicates itself every step along the way. It changes the equation to one in which the child’s success is a given.

The fourth essential component is that we need to engage parents as partners in the education of their sons and daughters. If we can pull the parents into the special relationship we strive to create between a child and his or her teacher we create an environment in which anything is possible and where every obstacle can be overcome. A warm, nurturing, and positive triumvirate between parents, children, and their teachers creates the most powerful motivational force in the world.

Many public school teachers will read this list and nod their head that these are important but will then go back to what they have been doing, whether or not it has been successful. The problem is that these four components are so far from the reality from most public school classrooms, particularly those in our most challenging schools and communities, that they are viewed as unreal; as abstractions.

What every professional educator must be challenged to believe at the very core of their being is that these components are not abstractions. They are real, and they can be created in each and every public school classroom in America, if only we step back and examine not only the way we do everything and why, but also the way we structure the process that supports and facilitates what we do. Each of these components is achievable and manageable; they are attainable solutions to a human engineering problem that requires only that we structure the educational process to support our most critical objectives.

In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge For Twenty-First Century America, I offer a blueprint for an educational process that relies on these components as a foundation for everything else it does.

I can imagine nothing that would validate a teacher’s existence more than hearing one their students say, “I wish my teacher knew that I love her with all my heart.”

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.

Will More Minority Teachers Make a Difference?

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Will more minority teachers make a difference in the performance gap between white students and their minority classmates or will we have to close the performance gap in order to get more minority teachers?

On Monday, May 5th and article was released by the Associated Press and published by newspapers throughout the U.S. The article, about diversity among teachers, is interesting not only because the data is revealing but also because it gives us an opportunity to broaden the dialogue about the performance gap in education between white and minority students. This performance gap is the single most glaring fact in all of education and yet it is rarely discussed in any depth other than to make passing reference to it. Then, it is explained away with a series of clichés that have evolved from unverified assumptions that are influenced more by our prejudices than by reasoned observation and research.

We will not have solved the problems of public education until the performance gap has been significantly closed and ultimately eliminated and we cannot close the performance gap until we examine it scientifically and unapologetically.

Yes, it makes sense that it would be a good thing if more students “can look and see someone who looks just like them, that they can relate to,” as suggested by Kevin Gilbert, in the Associated Press article. It seems somewhat of a stretch, however, to conclude, as Gilbert does, that “Nothing can help motivate our students more than to see success standing right in front of them.”

If Gilbert, a professional educator in Mississippi and board member of the National Education Association, was correct we would expect that minority students would perform at a high level whenever they found themselves in a classroom with a teacher of the same race or ethnic background as themselves.

There is little documented evidence to support Gilbert’s assertion and we can only speculate what would be the impact on the “performance gap” if we could somehow increase the number of minority teachers in American public school classrooms.

My daughter’s experience, teaching in an all-black elementary school in Washington DC provides an example. Other than my daughter, every other teacher in the school was African-American. Her school was one of the lowest performing schools in one of our nation’s lowest-performing school districts. The racial makeup of the collective faculty had no appreciable effect on a reality in which only a handful of students were motivated to learn and where the parents of those few students appeared to be the only parents who cared or accepted even a modicum of responsibility for the success of their sons and daughters.

The teachers whom my daughter came to know and be inspired by were not drawn from the bottom of the barrel of qualified teachers, they were dedicated men and women who gave their all to help as many students as they could in the midst of one of the most dreadful teaching environments in the U.S.

Irrespective of race or ethnicity, what almost any teacher working in a public school classroom will tell you is that the overwhelming majority of their students could be successful if only they cared and if only they would try. These same teachers would add that without the support of parents it is incredibly difficult to break through the indifference.

For those readers who will be quick to suggest that it is the teachers who do not care, unless they have walked in the shoes of their children’s teachers they know not of what they speak. The overwhelming majority of our public school teachers care very much, even in the face of years of frustration and disillusionment.

Putting more minority teachers in American public school classrooms may or may not have an impact on the performance gap but, clearly, if only we could close the performance gap between white students and their minority counterparts there would be many more minority teachers to fill those classrooms. We can also say with confidence that the overwhelming majority of public school districts would love to have more minority candidates from which to choose when attempting to fill teaching vacancies.

Below are a few facts from the National Center for Educational Statistics about both the performance gap in education and also about the number of minority students who go on to college; the population from which future teachers can be recruited.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) measures the percentage of 8th grade American students earning an assessment level of “proficient and above” in math and reading. The NAEP defines “proficient” as having “demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject-matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real-world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to the subject matter.” Since it is vital that the knowledge and skills a student acquires transfers to life as an adult, the phrase “application of such knowledge to real-world situations” is particularly noteworthy.

In 2012, of the students in 8th grade math, 44 percent of white students were assessed as “proficient or above,” compared to only 13 percent of black students and 20 percent of Hispanic students. In reading, the scores were similar as 43 percent of white students were assessed at “proficient or above,” compared to 15 and 19 percent of black and Hispanic students, respectively. Clearly the performance gap is as real as it is ominous. That we would consider 44 percent to be an acceptable level of achievement is sad commentary on American education.

When looking at students enrolled in 4-year colleges and universities in the same year, 59 percent were white, 15 percent black, and 16 percent Hispanic. I suspect it is not a coincidence that the numbers are similar to the percentage of students assessed at “proficient or above” on the NAEP Assessments.

When looking at students earning bachelor degrees in the 2011-12 school year, 70 percent of the graduates were white while only 10.7 were African-American students, and 9.8 percent Hispanic. Clearly, not as many minority students are making it through to graduation compared to their white classmates.

Given that not every college graduate chooses a career in education, we should not be surprised that minority teachers are under-represented in American public school classrooms. It is a reality that can only be altered by closing the performance gap and this is where we must place our focus. Everything else is a diversion that obstructs our progress.