Tag Archives: public school

Check out my column in this mornings Fort Wayne Journal Gazette “All pulling together, we can defeat poverty!

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Published: July 24, 2014 3:00 a.m.

All pulling together, we can defeat poverty

Hawkins

Citing a U.S. Census Bureau report, The Journal Gazette recently reported that 77 million Americans, nearly a quarter of the population, live in what have been designated as poverty areas and that this population has increased significantly over the past decade. A poverty area is a census tract in which 20 percent or more of the households have incomes below the poverty level.

The relationship between poverty and the failure of so many of our public school students is central to the debate between corporate and government reformers of public education and those who defend traditional public education in America.

Reformers are pushing for privatization of our schools; Common Core; standardized testing to hold teachers and schools accountable; and vouchers to help parents pay for their school of choice. It is ironic that the reformers are focused on enticing the most motivated families away from our “failing schools” while doing little or nothing to fix those schools or to help the families who remain in them. We have described this as the “politics of abandonment.”

The defenders of traditional public education insist that our schools are better than ever and suggest that it is unreasonable to expect more from our public schools until we do something about poverty, which they consider the biggest cause of academic failure. These well-meaning Americans, most of whom are educators, are engaged in what could be described as the “politics of intransigence.”

Neither side seems to recognize that poverty and failing schools are symptoms of the same pathology, nor do they understand how their actions contribute.

This current chapter in the history of poverty has evolved, since the end of World War II, as the population of people for whom neither the free-market economy nor the system of public education has worked has mushroomed. Over time, these Americans have become increasingly less hopeful and more powerless in the face of the challenges of life. What we have also seen is that attempts on the part of a benevolent government to soften the blow have failed to alter the reality for this population. What those efforts have created are dependencies.

We cannot continue to support those dependencies, nor can we simply abandon this population without our society reaching a tipping point after which the people who produce economic value will be unable to support those who do not. If the U.S. is to compete successfully in the dynamic world marketplace of the 21st century, we desperately need the best efforts of virtually every American man and woman.

What we must do is to attack the fabric of hopelessness and powerlessness under which so many Americans have been draped. Here is what we can do if only we work together:

We can repackage and resell the American dream to give people hope that they can, indeed, have a better future.

We can develop an educational process that will teach children that success is a process all can master. We can create this in such a way that it gives teachers the time and resources they need to teach children how to be successful.

We can teach parents how powerful parents and teachers can be, working together as partners and how, with a little help from teachers, they can literally change the world for their children.

Finally, we can create a sense of community in which we are united behind a set of shared values; a community in which we do care about one another and in which we are all willing to help.

We cannot accomplish any of these things, however, until we stop the runaway train of misguided reforms before it can damage, forever, our way of life.

 

 

 

Mel Hawkins, of Fort Wayne, is the author of “Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America.” He wrote this for The Journal Gazette.

So where do we begin the process of implementing our strategic plan of action to transform public education in America?

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We believe that, first and foremost, with the reminder that the time for talk and complaining has come to an end. The only thing that will stop the “runaway train of misguided reforms” is action by Americans united behind a common mission.

The key to that transformation of public education and to giving every single American child the best possible chance for a quality education is parents and teachers working as partners committed to supporting one another in every possible way. This most important of objectives cannot be accomplished with Americans working unilaterally. Such an endeavor must begin somewhere. We believe it must start with a strategic action plan, behind which people can join together in support.

We need a plan to transform public education in America. In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, I offer such a plan: a blueprint to transform both the structure of public education and educational process that works within that structure. I am asking Americans to utilize this blueprint as a point of embarkation.

Understand that this strategic plan is not carpetbag of quick fixes and incremental changes, rather it is a comprehensive, coordinated, and interdependent plan to address public education as an integral whole.

We think it can best begin with teachers because no organized group of Americans is more intimately involved in education, no group has more firsthand knowledge and experience, and no group has more at stake than teachers. That being said, let us be as clear as possible in saying that this is an issue in which every citizen, individually or collectively, has a stake and where each has a very specific role to play.

We ask teacher associations and teachers’ unions in each of the fifty states, and also the national offices of these organizations, to adopt this strategic plan and blueprint as part of the official mission of their organization and we believe the plan to be consistent with the established missions of each of these separate entities.

Once adopted as a central core of the mission of each teacher association and teachers’ union, we ask that those organizations use the full power and influence of their organizations to make it happen.

We ask the leaderships of these entities and each of their members to begin calling upon their elected representatives at every level and branch of government to make education the number one priority on the American agenda and to ask every American parent to partner with the teachers of their sons and daughters to give them the future that not only do they deserve but upon which entire society depends.

Within each of the jurisdictions of these teacher associations and unions, we ask that the leadership of these entities begin presenting the plan to each and every public school district and soliciting their agreement to formally review the plan for implementation in each of their respective schools. We ask that these associations and unions also reach out to private and parochial schools, and charter schools as every child needs the best opportunity that we are able to give.

We ask that the plan be presented to the faculties of the education departments of every institution of higher learning within their state or jurisdiction. We also recommend that they present the plan to every chamber of commerce. In each case the objective will be to educate both the leadership and memberships of these entities and asking them to endorse the plan and establishing its support as part of their ongoing mission.

At the national level we propose that the leaderships of each of these national organizations make the a similar commitment to take the plan to every professional association with education as its central mission; to every organization and foundation with educational reform as a primary agenda item; to labor organizations in every industry in the nation; and to every organization and trade association representing every major industry. We also ask that they lobby our elected and appointed officials of our federal government using the full resources at their disposal.

As we move forward, gaining momentum and broadening the grassroots support for our strategic plan, we will ask every American citizen and each and every one of their respective organizations and alliances to clamor for our federal, state, and local governments to declare education the most important item on the American agenda and to challenge every American mother and father to accept responsibility as full partners in the education of their children.

What follows in the next post are thirty-three (33) action items to carry out the implementation of this newly established strategic plan of action, one school district or organization at time until it is the reality in every school district and every private, parochial, and charter school in the United States. The action items are divided into two groups. The first is for implementation within our schools to transform the educational process. The second group will be focused on soliciting the support of the community at every level and venue.

The plan is constructed in such a way that it can evolve as our professional educators learn what works best in their particular environment. It is a plan that is designed to be a learning and adaptive process. The only aspects of the plan that are non-negotiable are our commitment to give each child an opportunity for a quality education and to preserve and protect the relationship between our schools and the communities they exist to serve.

Finally, we challenge the reader not to be overwhelmed by the enormity of our challenge. It is nothing more than a human engineering problem. Much like the construction of a skyscraper, dam, or suspension bridge it requires only that we manage all of the components of the process, per the blueprint, one phase at a time. If we approach it thus, a successful outcome is a forgone conclusion.

The Vergara Ruling in California will do more harm than good!

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Wouldn’t it be more productive to focus our energy and attention on supporting and protecting our good public school teachers?

It seems that we always focus on the negative. Bad teachers can already be fired, tenure or not. Tenure does not prevent school corporations from dismissing incompetent teachers it simply requires that they take the time to do it right and to make a well-documented case.

At a time when teachers are already under attack, falsely accused of being the cause of the failure of so many American students, this decision comes across as more of a “witch hunt” (or witch/warlock hunt if we want to be politically correct) than as a reasoned decision in an attempt to address our nation’s most important issue – the crisis in education!

It is similar to what happens so often in the work place when a few problem employees abuse the rules and privileges of their employer. In these instances, management rushes in to create more rules or take away privileges and the only people they impact are the good employees who come to work every day and do the best job of which they are capable. The new rules and restriction of privileges are like water off the proverbial duck’s back to the abusers because the problem employees do not care and will not abide by the rules, new or old.

In education we are in a state of public panic in which government officials, corporate reformers, and other policy makers are rushing around like incorrigible children, looking for someone at whom to lash out—looking for someone to blame. Teachers just happen to be the most obvious target.

Few if any of these officials and reformers, and also judges, have ever spent so much as a single day in a public school classroom, striving to understand the challenges with which our teachers are confronted.

Instead, they see teachers as easy targets. They tell themselves and the world that they are taking bold action and they puff out their chests in false pride over their bravado, oblivious to the great harm they do.

Not only do they hurt all of the good public school teachers who come to work every autumn to continue an important and seemingly impossible job from which the majority of us would abruptly shirk. What they also do is distract us from taking the time to understand the dynamics of our educational process and taking meaningful action to fix real problems.

If the critics of teachers would take the time to walk in the shoes of our public school teacher these high profile reformers, officials, and policy makers would see that teachers are as much the victims of the  dysfunctional system that is American public education as are the students whom they strive to teach under what are often adverse circumstances. They would see minimal support from parents in our most challenging schools and an alarming lack of motivation to learn on the part of the children of those parents.

They would see the damage that is done when they provide incentives, in the form of vouchers for the small number of families who are motivated to take advantage of them, to abandon our most challenged public schools. In the process they leave the teachers and students of those abandoned schools in their wake to deal with the unforeseen and often invisible consequences of their action. They also deprive those abandoned schools and their teachers of much needed revenue.

It is the symbolic equivalent of washing their hands of the problems facing those schools and their teachers and, most of all, our nation’s most vulnerable kids.

This is unacceptable and it will not do! It is time for teachers to rally together and fight to put a stop to the misguided and paralyzing reform initiatives of people who know not what they do!

It is time for teacher unions and associations to re-examine their mission and work together with school administrations to develop meaningful measures to improve teacher skills on the one hand and to develop measures of true accountability on the other.

Just last night, on “Just Let Me Teach” a program host by Justin Oakley on Indiana Talks, an online radio network, a caller told us about a peer review program called PAR in Anderson, Indiana. It is a program making real strides to improve rather than harm our public schools and their teachers. It is a program in which teachers and administrators are working together to create real, meaningful, and sustainable accountability.

These are the kind of programs our elected officials and so-called reformers should be supporting and replicating all over the nation.

And, why are these high profile leaders not talking about the important role that parents play in the education of their children? Why are they not brainstorming with local educators to come up with meaningful programs to reach out into our communities and pull parents in as partners in the education of their children? Why are we not taking the obscene amount of money that is being squandered on meaningless reforms and investing it, instead, in a nationwide initiative to Pull Parents in as Partners?

We need to recognize that the absolute most important things we can do to fix the systemic deficiencies in the American educational process is for teachers, both individually and collectively to partner up with school administrators to work on teacher training and accountability while, in our classrooms, parents and teachers partner up to give our nation’s children the best education possible!

 

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.

Vignette #2 – Fort Wayne, IN – Middle School Social Studies – Substitute Teacher

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The five language arts classes all had a packet of worksheets that they were to work on during class but which were not due until Monday.

For many students, the moment you say something isn’t due until the next day their first reaction is to put off working. “It’s not due today, so I’ll do it later.”

All of these classes required an initial effort to convince them to settle down but once settled they worked well for the entire period. One of the incentives I offer students when there seems to be sufficient work to keep them busy for most of the period, is to promise them five to ten minutes of free time at the end of the period, provided they cooperate. Each of these classes received some free time.

As usual, there were a number of students in each class who did not work very hard but they did, at least, make a show of doing the assignment.

After a great day, the last period was a different story. This particular middle school ends the day with a 25-minute period that is called SSR (Sustained Silent Reading). On this day the students were to finish watching the movie Shrek, which they had begun the previous day.

Problems began as soon as students began arriving.

The telephone began ringing as students arrived and while I was taking the call an argument erupted between two students. One student apparently has a history of problems as he was seated, by himself, at a small table against the front wall. He was a tall, thin youngster who wore big glasses with thick lenses. Not infrequently, students of this ilk are the target for harassment by many of the other students.

I approached the students right away and separated them. The second student was quite angry and did not want to settle down. He insisted that the other boy had thrown his calculator into the trash and he was insisting that the boy dig it out of the tall waste basket. The accused student did not deny that he had tossed the calculator rather he insisted that the incident had begun when the other boy hit him. Several times the second student would say that he was going to get the other boy kicked out of school. He said that one more referral and the boy would be suspended.

As the two would not stop arguing, I took them out in the hall way but, in spite of my efforts, the argument only got louder and more heated. Finally, I sent the second student to the office just to get them separated. I immediately went to the phone to notify the office of my action, explaining that I could not determine who was the instigator but just needed to separate the boys. What I did not explain is that my gut instincts told me that the second boy was harassing the first and that this is probably an ongoing pattern. In the meantime, students were bounding around the classroom engaged in a full menu of horseplay with only a handful seated at their desks. I then began to try to get them in their seats so I could take attendance. Another student had started the DVD player but, although the movie was playing, only a few were watching. Taking attendance was complicated by the fact that the seating chart was full of scratched out names with others inserted and there were few last names. I never did get all of the students in their seats nor did I finish attendance.

By this time one student was chasing another around the classroom. The lead student dived to the floor and the other grabbed his shoe and jerked it off of his foot and tried to throw it into the waste basket. Before I could intervene a handful of other students had joined the fray. As I was attempting to restore order, I heard the telephone ring, which given the noise level in the room was, itself, remarkable. By the time I got to the T.V., which was directly above the telephone, lowered the volume and then picked up the phone, the ruckus throughout the room had escalated.

The telephone call was from another teacher who was attempting to reach the individual for whom I was subbing.
During the call three additional students had joined the two who were chasing and wrestling each other. When I was able to separate the five students who, thankfully, were engaged in rough play rather than actually fighting in anger, I glanced at the clock and it was 2:32. The last period of the day ends at 2:35. It was then that I noticed that a full third of the students were gone. They had taken advantage of the diversion and had left early. It was then that end of the day announcements began, many of which were bus changes. The remaining students, many of whom were heading for the door, paid no attention at all to the announcements. The noise in the room was still so loud it is doubtful that they could have heard the announcements had they tried.

By the time the bell rang, only four students were still in their seats, waiting patiently. Although I was too preoccupied during the abbreviated period to notice, I have no doubt that these same four students sat quietly in their seats for the entire twenty-five minutes of the period. These four pupils are examples of the other heroes in our public school systems. They sit quietly amidst the turmoil, doing their best to follow directions and do their assignments, often unnoticed by their teacher. At the end of the period these same students go on to their next classes where they do the same thing, day after day.