On the day I graduated from High School in 1969, I felt well educated and prepared to make my way in the world. After that day, I never thought much about the local school systems, not even when my own kids were attending school. It worked for me and I assumed it worked for them and still works today. In retrospect, I can now see that when my kids were in school, 80’s to mid-90’s, that a kid could get a good education if they worked hard, but schools seemed to have lowered their standards.
Now that my granddaughter has entered the school system, I’ve given it a closer look and I’m not at all happy with what I see. She started in the public school system at the ripe old age of four with Pre-K, followed by a year in Head Start, then Kindergarten. By that time, she knew her ABC’s, could write her name and count to 100. She grew bored with school until the teacher started using her as a teacher’s aide, helping students that were falling behind.
In the first grade, she grew tired of being the teacher’s aide after a couple months. She said she wasn’t learning anything new. Her dad talked to the principal and school counselor and they decided to let her sit-in with a second grade class for math and science. After a month, she was sitting-in with the second grade class all day.
Even though she finished the year in the second grade, passing every subject, she wasn’t given credit for the second grade. She was to be placed in a second grade class the following year as if she had failed. Hard work on her part was rewarded by repeating the second grade. Her dad put her in a private school for the next year.
Besides the education issue, there was the discipline issue. My granddaughter is very small for her age. In her four years in public school, she was bullied some each year. She would rarely tell her dad about it. He could tell something was wrong by her demeanor and have to work it out of her. In Kindergarten, two sisters in her class would repeatedly pull her hair and push her down on the playground. Once they took her shoes. Her dad had to intervene to get it stopped. In another incident, she was teased so bad about her thick eyebrows (her tormentors called them a uni-brow) she went home and shaved her eyebrows off.
Then there was the environment in the classroom. Each year there were several students with behavior problems. This would disrupt the classroom requiring an abnormal amount of attention from the teacher leaving the other students on their own. The worst situation was her second grade class where one student would “go off” on occasion. The students all knew the drill when this happened; they would get out of their desk and stand against the wall while the teacher called the office for the principal or counselor to come remove the student from class. The next day the student would be back.
We’re into the third month of private school. I can see a difference on the days I pick her up from school. She is happy. She can tell me every time I ask something new she learned that day. She reads more. She does her homework without a fuss. She isn’t ridiculed or bullied for being smart, she is recognized.
So why aren’t public schools like this? They were when I started school in 1957. What changed? Plenty of books have been written explaining or justifying how this happened. My own personal opinion, it falls into two general areas:
- Schools aren’t about education, they are about providing jobs.
- Schools have become a social experiment to try to provide equal outcome.
I touched on number 1 in Zuckerberg’s Millions to Newark Schools . And there are plenty of stories on the internet about what unions are doing to big city school systems.
The second is more complicated. It seems to me that standards have gone down in order to make students appear more successful. That behavior that was unacceptable years ago is now normal. The results, the school environment is not conducive to learning and kids that graduate are not prepared to be successful in college or life. Maybe the standards have been lowered because lax discipline has made learning too difficult for most kids.
Charter schools and traditional schools enforce higher discipline standards and don’t suffer the distractions to learning. They also don’t suffer incompetent teachers, they replace them. Maybe this is why charter schools (and private schools) turn out a better product.
An excellent article on this subject was written by Thomas Sowell: Ignoring the Obvious .
Other columns and articles by Thomas Sowell: Thomas Sowell Archives
So if removing disruptive students from the classroom is the answer, what do you do with them? My first thought was put them in a school that is staffed for students with behavior problems. By that I mean plenty of security to insure students toe the line and can’t hurt each other or themselves. But that will only prepare them for a life in a gang or prison. So this can’t be the answer. But leaving them in the classroom with students that want to learn isn’t the answer either.
I have nowhere near the knowledge to solve this problem, but there has to be a way. To believe otherwise is to doom millions of kids to failure. In Dale Russakoff’s book about Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to fix the Newark School system, the author relates multiple individual success stories. In these incidents, teachers, counselors and principals worked tirelessly to successfully turn around extremely trouble students. Unfortunately, because of the time and resources required, they were only able to help one or two students per school out of the hundreds that needed help.
To apply the same amount of resources to each at risk student would require a huge expenditure. But aren’t we already expending huge amounts of money for little return? The proposed 2015 budget for the Newark District School System was $990 million. That’s ten million short of a billion dollars. All this money buys a 67% graduation rate. Budget divided by number of students in the system (35,543) is an expenditure of $27,853 per student.
Maybe instead of dumping millions of dollars into the top of the education system, where it’s filtered to death before it reaches the individual school level, it should be given directly to the school principal with the guidance: make your school successful. Each school is different with different challenges. Let the principal decide where the money would be best spent for their school: tutors, counselors, mentors, security, after school programs, etc.
We need to try something different because what we are doing now is definitely not working.