problems in education

I realized today when I was talking to a few folks that I have a better understanding of why public education has had significant problems. I will list a few below.
1. Top down legislation. Education is legislated by lawyers, big businessmen, and politicians. These vocations often do not seek the best for all, they seek the best from their perspective for their constituency. They are often far separated from education, children, and especially teachers. If teachers and principals were able to create legislation and vote on it, education may look much different.
2. Student home life. If students have a bad home life, it is tough to get them to engage in school. Also, studies repeatedly show that the more attention a child gets early in life, the better off they are in school, with language learning, retention, and reading. The more books in a home, the better the students’ chances at school success. This has led to multiple studies on the benefits of pre-k education. The scary part about this is that pre-k does give students more education earlier, but it also puts them in the care of a nurturing educated person instead of a potentially uneducated person and an unstable environment.
3. In my classes – 8th grade level math – students are affected strongly by their peers. In 5th grade, the TAGed kids get pulled out for extra work in classes. When moved to Middle School, they get higher level classes, with all their peers. There still exist a group of students who do not pass the tests, and they get put into grade level classes. By the time 8th grade rolls around, the TAG students are in their own classes and succeeding in every way possible. Many of the lower level kids have passed their math classes, but not passed their SOLs. This means that lower level classes consist of behavior problems (who miss so much school they can’t pass), kids with tough home lives (who also miss school, but who simply started out with less social and intellectual capital), and Special Education kids (who have learning disabilities or learned behaviors that give them accommodations). These grade level students don’t have many academic leaders to look to, and they often have discipline problems to show them how to misbehave. This causes more problems than many people can imagine.
4. Killing new teachers. New teachers that come into school systems are often given kids who don’t want to learn, don’t know how to learn, and get so frustrated with school that they want to give up. This is especially true in math. With the system I described above, new teaches generally get grade level students – the hardest to motivate and educate. In the name of ease of preparation, teachers are given the same class, which means that they may have three blocks of grade level students. This is simply exhausting. People who are career switchers have to have a strong vision and passion for change through education to be willing to often make less money, but put up with much apathy. This causes new teachers, like me, to give up and find private sector jobs. If the nation wants the best and the brightest to be teachers, we have to treat them like they really are the best and brightest.

consumerism and education

I think I have touched on consumption as a way of life for Americans here and there in my previous journals, but want to spend a bit more time addressing the issue. In Three Billion New Capitalists, consumption is addressed through the lens of economic policy that encouraged spending after world war 2. Saving was known to be good for the individual, but spending was good for America, so should be done. With a focus on spending and consumption, more jobs could be created, and with more jobs being created, more money could be spent, and ideally, an endless cycle of economic growth would ensue. After WWII, economic growth was astounding and consumption became a way of life. September 11, is one of the defining moments in the lives of Generation X and Y and the millennials. A defining moment that I remember and that is noted in Three Billion… is the comment of George H.W. Bush, when he encouraged people to keep spending money to keep America strong. It was a shocking statement to me. I scoffed, but it seems that most of America kept on spending.
Every day, I see teenagers using electronic equipment that their parents have somehow afforded to buy them, and I wonder how they can afford the items. These kids aren’t the best students in the school. Some of them are the worst. The thing that holds true though, is that they almost all have cell phones with unlimited texting, they all have an mp3 player, and times I have asked about how many video game systems or tvs are in their homes, they have more than 1 video games system, and many more than 1 tv, and usually an HD TV or flat panel tv.
I continue to wonder why any student who has every privilege at home but fails in school has any reason to work hard. If there is no incentive to work, why work?
With the increase in consumption often comes the commoditization of items that are being consumed. So a question we can ask is, how is education being commoditized for students? Are students simply treating the information that they are being taught as if it is a ringtone? Many times it seems students want to use the skill that they are taught for the moment, and forget it the next. Behaviors taught by economics of Americans may be applying to education.

Waynesboro and achievment

What happens in 10 years when globalization has continued? What happens in 20 years as China continues to grow and jobs continue to be outsourced? How do schools continue to push ahead and improve student performance?
Waynesboro has changed significantly some for the better, and some for the worse. Outsourcing has cost the city jobs, and it has affected the socioeconomics accordingly. Waynesboro was an industrial town – you could graduate from high school or get your GED, get a job at the local factory, and get paid enough to be middle class or even middle-upper class. That job would give you a pension and for the most part, guarantee your way of life. As jobs have moved over seas and automation has reduced jobs, the guarantee of a good life has gone by the wayside. The primary source of jobs is now retail. Industry has not returned, partly because it is not cost effective to build new factories in the US.
The dirge of the community at this point is the youth. A select group of students exist who are called “gifted and talented”. These students will generally be successful, go to college, graduate, and leave the area because there aren’t many job opportunities. The other end of the student spectrum are the grade level students. Those who struggle to pass classes, struggle to pass exams, and generally seem apathetic about success and their futures.
What motivates them to succeed? Many of their parents work factory jobs or warehouse jobs, which give them a decent standard of living (although the kids may rarely see their parents). These students have everything they want, and more than they need. They don’t see their parent’s lives as desirable, but they don’t have a realistic vision for anything better. I have asked on many occasions how many video game systems are their homes, and the answer is often 4-5. I ask how many TV’s, and they not only tell me how many, but how many flat screen or HD TV’s they have. Until the students need something or have a desire for something that their circumstances can not provide for them, they will have no reason to achieve at a higher levels.
This problem is social, economic, and systemic. Socially, they seen nothing wrong with their circumstances, and people who speak and act the way they do are often found on the TV shows they watch, specifically on channels like MTV. Economics work on incentives. If there is no incentive to perform, why perform? There is not incentive, so there is no reason to do better than they have done before. Systemically, credit and the welfare system have provided goods for nothing, and all the money you can get, as long as you can pay a minimal monthly payment. We are now seeing the problems of the housing credit problems and this will continue to wreak havoc on the economy. Maybe the new found credit crunch will remove the possibility of high end consumer goods from lower socioeconomic people, and cause students to raise performance to achieve a better life. Who knows….

Football and injury

Statistics offered early on in the Social Foundations class showed the sports that had the most injuries per 100 participants. The top of the list was football, with 18.8 injuries per 100 players. It is hard to imagine how many kids and teenagers are involved in football in the United States. There are pee-wee leagues, quarterback clubs, middle school teams, JV teams, and varsity teams. Kids start playing football at 6 and 7 years old, and many play until they are 18. This statistic says that nearly 1 in 5 of the people who play football are injured in the course of a year. The injuries reported are both major and minor, but they have to be reported. I know from the experience of playing sports through my youth, that I didn’t always go to the hospital, a doctor, or even a trainer when I had a sport related injury. So the numbers could probably increase a bit if there was a way to measure unreported sprains and strains.
The question this raises in my mind is, ”Why would any parent let their child play football? And why would any child want to play football?” Approaching these questions from different angles allows for many different answers that all have elements of truth, and create a strong culture supporting not only the playing of football, but of other sports that can cause injuries.
One approach – football as a developer of masculinity. How better to get your son to be tough than to put him on a football field where he has to run into kids, tackle them, or try to avoid them or slough them off to avoid falling down. Football trains kids to take each other down, unless you have the ball, then you do all you can to not fall down. Kids are trained to be fast and move quickly, but the primary goal of football seems to be toughness. The toughest players either stay up longer, or take the most people down.
Another approach – football as big business. In the world of capitalism gone wild, profiting off just about anything is good. To play football, you need more supplies than baseball, basketball, and soccer. You need mouth guards, a helmet, different pads to cater to different positions, and spikes. The scary part about this is that most of the goods you need to play football are for safety – yet football has the highest injuries per 100 participants. The business is important not only through goods sold, but also through endorsements and sponsorships. If a town has a great football team, the school may get many donations so that signs can be hung at games. College football programs can end up funding other sports programs due to the amount of money generated by a successful year. The NFL is probably the pinnacle of football marketing and business. Millions and possibly billions of dollars are made every year by the NFL on jerseys, footballs, jackets, hats, shirts, tickets, etc. Football is not just a sport, it is a business that no matter how dangerous to its participants, will continue because it is a well run business.
Football as a social history. Some kids probably play football because their parents tell them they will play. Their dad may have played high school ball and will want his son to carry the torch. A big part of the social history is the identification with a team – especially a successful team. Shows like Friday Night Lights and movies like Remember The Titans show the parental intensity when it comes to football, and they do a decent job of illustrating it. I have seen 8th grade students whom I have not doubt want to play football, but whose fathers have taken it to another level. The father may never make it to a teacher conference, but will never miss a football game. This is most true for fathers who played on the same team when they were younger. They see their identity wrapped up in the sport and their son, and it seems the father wants to live vicariously through their sons.
What about your rep’? I thought the idea of having a reputation was a joke, and having a good reputation meant that you did well in school, not that you were tough. Unfortunately, being a football player and even more, being a good football player means that you have a rep. Your rep is that you are tough, because you hit people 5 days a week, and you are in the weight room on top of that. To play football, you must be able to take a hit. Not only that, but you have a team of 30 other guys who may “get your back” should something bad happen. There is protection with a football team.
Wise parents or wise teenagers would choose to not play football, simply because it is dangerous, and the risk of injury is very high. Not surprisingly, social history, big business, and social identities would be at stake if football was ever made illegal in schools and universities.

Why am I writing

So I am taking a class in the Social Foundations of Education at UVA. I have to try to journal about how the social foundations perspective helps me see problems more clearly, and I am going to try and publish most of what I write. Hopefully by December, I will have many posts available, and will be a little more focused.

Please interact with the ideas, especially if you are on the left or right, and if you have ideas that would change education in America for the better.

NCLB and the social foundations

It is interesting to consider the perspective of the Social Foundations and the NCLB acts. While NCLB has yielded some results, overall, it appears to be a failure. Walk into any school and if you mention the magic four letters, the reaction you get is overly caustic, with very few teachers admitting the few positives. I will attempt to look at it from a few different perspectives, but also consider my place as a public school teacher.
Through conversation, my own readings, and my vocation I have learned that the letters SOL and NCLB take charge of many aspects of education. They strike fear into administrators, especially when the letters AYP come into play (usually due to the crackdown on out of school suspensions of discipline problems). I am already being tainted by my school perspective.
When talking with some die hard democrats and union members, I quickly realized that from their perspective, public schools are the most important social equalizer, that private schooling is for social elites and should receive no funding because “it is the public schools’ money!”, and that NCLB is simply a catalyst for the privatization of education along with the privatization of everything but the USA’s military budget (thanks to the Neo-cons). “Vouchers” are as bad as the worst 4 letter word of which you can think, and every teacher is underpaid, as are all the school staff. Because of all of the above reasons, we have no choice but to vote democrat to prevent losing our jobs, whether we are good at them or not.
It is very rare to hear the voice of a free-market capitalist in a public school, and often a very unwelcome one. This is especially true when it comes to funding. From reading , the free market capitalist sees education as an entrepreneurial dream world, and that it can be used to spend government money more effectively, and increase the earnings of those involved, especially those who do education the best. It would create a world of Anderson Consulting and DeLoitte and Touche, but instead of consulting, they would be creating educational centers of excellence, where parents would send their students to excel. The best at streamlining and maximizing both efficiency and cost would become the big box retailer of education. When one school starts dying, a successful bigger company can swoop down, take over, and reform the place. So in the eyes of the conservative free-market capitalists, NCLB is indeed the path toward privatizing education, and the deadlines couldn’t come faster! Why see private takeover as a bad thing when the private takeover comes in and can yield results!
I think I tend to be a fence sitter, it sure can be uncomfortable in certain crowds, but I dislike the bias of both sides. I was lucky to receive a private school education. My parents thought it was best for me, and K-12, I attended the same school. It offered SAT prep courses, and AP courses if I chose them. I had small class numbers, especially when it came to advanced courses, and that is a huge benefit! My parents paid for all 13 years for both my sister and I, and I think it was a good decision. I think education there was unique, and presented a communal environment that many public schools lose due to the number of elementary schools feeding into middle schools and high schools where friendships can be split from year to year depending on where a student lives.
As a current public school teacher, I buy into education as an equalizer. If privatization did happen in education, I think we would quickly see an aristocratic regime return where wealthy schools and poor schools exist. Poor schools would receive more money to pay for better teachers, but they would still be stuck with students whose parents don’t care and expect everything to be given to their child. It would not change parental responsibility, other than the fact that the parents would have to choose the school for their children.
I think the social foundations perspective gives a sense of balance to the problem of educating the masses. It sees the problems of inequality in public education. It sees the good that mass testing has brought to American educational research. It also recognizes that not every kid takes multiple choice tests well. It sees that the problem is beyond teaching methodology and insufficient school supplies, and that a primary problem is in the homes of the children. It takes culture into account and sees that consumption is of primary concern to both the government and to the majority of Americans, despite the problems it is currently causing the American economy. Are you a fence sitter too?

school discipline - who has failed?

After the second week of the Social Foundations class, I was walking down the hall and saw a white male teacher approach a black male student about shoving a female student in the hall. As I walked up, I saw the student getting angry and shutting out the teacher, but I saw the teacher’s frustration level rising and felt that there was not much good happening. I approached the student and as gently as I could, set my hand on his shoulder and asked him to respect the teacher and look at him. The student briefly complied, but when the teacher continued to speak in frustration, the student quickly shut down and would not comply with the teacher. At that point, I asked the student to walk with me to the office. He quickly started saying loudly, “If you touch me again, we are going to have a problem.” I assured him that I would not touch him as long as he continued to the principal’s office. As he walked down the hall, he threw his binder down the hall and continued to offer his threat of giving me a problem.
After the principal had the student in her office, I went to speak with the teacher who initially confronted the student. We were speaking about discipline, and how it often fails both the victim of the offense and offender. Resolution is rarely found, restoration is seen as the offender never offering an apology or having any chance to be forgiven. Discipline is carried out apart from the victim(s) and offers an unhealthy detachment for the offender.
My co-worker and I decided to try a different approach. Instead of letting the student simply go to the office and receive his punishment, he went and spent 30 minutes talking to the student, understanding his perspective, receiving an apology, and forgiving the student. The principal came to me to ask what I felt the disciplinary action should be. My co-worker and I had spoke, and decided that if the student had changed his attitude and apologized to both of us, could re-enter class, and we made that choice to give a different perspective on life than this student had encountered before. The principal decided to give him in school suspension for primarily as a social discipline to show the student’s friends that his behavior is not acceptable.
At the end of the day, my co-worker and I talked about the perspective of the student. This student may be in a gang, which puts him highly at risk, and puts him in a social environment where backing down from a challenge is unacceptable. With this teacher’s confrontation being in front of one of the student’s friends, the student’s social environment tells him to never back down. My co-worker upon reflection realized that he was bound and determined to get the student to respect him, and nothing was going to stop him. With the attitudes that were entering the confrontation, nothing positive could have come from it. I simply stepped in at the wrong time for the student, and deflected his anger and frustration from my co-worker to myself.
I would love to be able to say that my co-worker sitting and crying with the student and forgiving him caused a change in behavior, but I can’t. The student was supposed to apologize to me when I visited him and also cried with him, and seek me or my coworker when he was struggling. He was smiling at us and waving at us at the end of the day. Unfortunately, I never received my apology, and his niceness to us didn’t last long. I received phone calls from his grandmother the next school day questioning why I had “thrown him into the wall” and how her son could be in trouble if I did that. His social circles continued to dictate his actions, over and above an attempt at showing him a better way.
The next week, he was in trouble again, but this time he punched a hearing impaired student for bumping into him in a hallway and threatened another student who was dating his girlfriend’s sister. After those incidents, the principal suspended him for 10 days and he now must go before the superintendent before he may return.
My co-worker and I tried to use inquiry and perspectives to help find a different method to discipline the student. My co-worker thought that he could get his point through to this student by raising his voice, but that was a mistake. We wanted him to be a part of the process to help him see what needed to happen for him to succeed. Unfortunately, it is too little, and too late. Discipline that is reactive and punitive has combined with an adversarial social environment in this student’s life to create a problematic mixture.
Ways the Social Foundations perspective changes my ideas on student discipline: More people must be involved in the process. In the place of people advocating for their own position, students and faculty should be involved in the process. This will take much more time, but will provide a healthier and more holistic approach to each student. It may also give time for emotions to subside. It would also give a place for feelings of victims to be expressed and potentially model healthy communication between peers and between faculty and students. This improvement in communication could lead to a decrease in misunderstanding that is caused by quick and overly judgmental thoughts and decisions. The idea of taking a longer time to decide on punishment is scary in a school, because discipline is often thought to be best when quick and firm.