Urban Schools Need Better Teachers, Not Excuses, to Close the Education Gap

Response to Joel Klein

Urban Schools Need Better Teachers, Not Excuses, to Close the Education Gap

The truth is that America will never fix poverty until it fixes its urban schools

By Joel I. Klein

Posted May 4, 2009

I had a disagreement in a statement made by Joel Klein in his article. His insight was very interesting and good points were addressed. He starts to say that singer mother and grandmothers on food stamps no longer qualifies as a educational handicap. However, the statement on which he says that "..and more the now that we have an African American president who was raised by his single mother and grandparents and whos family was forced to go on food stamps on several occasions. Neither resources nor demography is destiny in the classroom.." Granted, blacks and other minorities ARE evolving and have greater opportunity than ever before. But I think it is unfair to use Barack Obama as the posterchild of eliminating minority poverty and educational gaps. He doesnt once even take into account that Barack Obama's mother was a white woman in addition to his grandparents. Sorry, Mr Klein..but race and generations of unemployment, abuse, discrimination, broken families, etc. will not be FULLY solved by just having an example such as Barack. If you dont incorporate race/culture in addition to disparities/inequities of this to the slightest degree in your Urban school planning...you have a problem that wont be solved.

Sabrina Kinsella

Arizona State Univerity

Grad Student

school and home

I speak as a former teacher and a parent. As a teacher, I saw exactly what everyone is talking about: a home culture that believes education is a waste of time and that belittles the child who wishes to pursue it. Many of the middle schoolers I taught had plans to be drug dealers, etc., as soon as the law released them from mandatory education. I have to say that, for these students, algebra and Shakespeare held no relevance. I also suspect that, given the chance to attend a charter school (which do not exist in this area), I don't believe these families would accept the priviledge for their child, because it would have no value for them. So there is perhaps some truth to the belief that the students in a charter school have a different background than many in public school. I could take a serious detour about the negative effects of mandatory education with no relevance to the lives of students, but will desist.

I should like to add, though, that I am a single parent with two children that I have raised entirely on my own since my younger child's birth eleven years ago. I returned to work when he was 3 weeks old. We have never lived above the poverty level for a family of three. My children are half hispanic, half white, so they are technically in the minority. We live in possibly the poorest state in the nation, where the only way the schools achieve the results demanded by the politicians is to teach the test year round, with no material not on the test. Despite this, my kids are intelligent, well-spoken, educated people with exceptionally large vocabularies and a knowledge base that continually surprises their teachers and other adults. Parents can overcome poor teachers, even while coping with more responsibilities than one person can handle, even while living in poverty. My children have had plenty of poor teachers, adults who can't speak correctly, who don't know basic facts, who are racist and closed-minded and simply self-centered and immature. That will never be an excuse for them not to excell.

Which just goes to show that it isn't all of one or the other - there are no simple, generalized fixes to education. Our nation continues to try to takea "one size fits all" approach to coping with highly individualized human beings. We want a political answer that leaves everyone with the money to spend on sports and entertainment. We think we should pay the people we expect to control and educate our children less than we'd pay a mechanic to repair our car. And we want to shrug off our own responsibilities for our children onto someone else. There will never be a political solution to awakening the intellect and spirit of our kids.

Finnish Model

If tax payers are ready to pay for it. Teachers are ready to proceed withe the Finnish Model.

Two teachers per classroom and smaller class sizes.

No more excuses.

The most significant factor in education

Because the words "schooling" and "education" are often used interchangeably, the research regarding each is often misinterpreted. For example, research tells us that the teacher is the most significant variable in a child's SCHOOLING but socio-economic factors and the education of the mother are the most significant factors in a child's EDUCATION.

Leaders Who Give Us Hope

Although leaders like Mr. Klein fail to grasp the complexity of our educational problems, we do have two important leaders who have an excellent grasp of what it will take to close the education gap: President Barack Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Both men have acknowledged the dual power of good parenting and schooling in their own lives. Indeed Mr. Obama has written of the sarifices made by his mother and grandparents on his behalf. I doubt very much if he thinks the schools alone can close the education gap.

Both men have also shown a profound respect for the work of parents and teachers. In an attempt to improve education for all American children, Mr.Duncan has embarked on a tour of the United States to get feedback from the people who are actually educating children. Now there is a smart man! Instinctively both men understand that insulting the nation's teachers is the absolute worst thing they could do.

President Obama has pledged to improve the education of children by affecting their lives inside and outside of school. He knows that providing health care, preschool, extended time and highly qualified teachers are factors that will likely result in authentic reform and not just smoke and mirrors.

The dictatorship of education

Everytime people discuss education they put all the blame on the teachers, but when you look at the educational system it is basically a dictatorship. Teachers in my state are told by the politicians what to teach, when to teach the topic, how it should be taught, and how long it should take. Then they tell us you have "teacher freedom" to teach the lesson. What freedom. We teach whole language instead of a phonics curriculum then we are asked, why the students read below grade level. (Politicians removed phonics years ago) We are told to teach students math by using manipulatives, but when the students are tested they only have a pencil and paper (maybe a calcuator for some questions). What's wrong with learning the basics. It was good enough for my generation (I'm over 40). All of my friends can read and I grew up in an urban environment just like my students. My son comes home in third grade and is learning about Geometry instead of basic math (multiplication and division). Dictated by the people upstairs.We are told to "modify" assignments for inclusion students but when they take the state tests, there are no modifications, just extra time to complete it. Then there are the outside issues with the parents. Parents come to my school and tell teachers, "I don't know what to do with my child, can you help me." They also look to blame teachers for their child's failures, when the child does no homework, barely does classwork, and falls asleep in class because "they were out all night "hustling."We are expected to be teachers, psychologist,and parents. Don't get me wrong, with all of the problems we have, I still love my job. I love teaching,but to put all of the blame on teachers is just plain stupid. Anytime the economy hits a recession and people are out of work, they start talking about the teachers salary, and the days off. I would like them to come into my classroom and teach the students who are functioning below grade level not because of the teachers, but because the mother decided to hit the crack-pipe. The student who threatens to have me jumped because I want to educate him and tries to get him to stay after school to work on his reading. The student who runs away from home every month and comes back to disrupt the class because he doesn't want to be there. Teach the student who lives in a shelter because their parents were kicked out of their apartment for selling drugs. Last but not least teach the student who is a 15 year old prostitute who tells me she's all about making money anyway possible. I just sit down at the end of an exhausting day, and say a prayer. I wonder what the dictators do at the end of their day.

"No Excuses"

In my 42 years of teaching I never met a single person who said that poverty is an excuse for low achievement. What people DO say is that schools ALONE cannot educate the child or close the achievement gap. This is called the pedagogy of common sense.

Education is both formal and informal. To improve it significantly we must improve schools and improve the lives of children outside of school as well. In the simplest of language, what this means is that to educate the disadvantaged child who has untreated asthma, we have to provide him with a good teacher AND a good doctor.

We know a great deal about educating a child. There is a mountain of evidence to show that it takes a partnership between home and school. Almost every parent knows this instinctively. As long as we ignore the obvious, we'll never see the improvement that we seek. All countries with enviable systems of education provide social supports for students.

People like Joel Klein are the ones who are the real obstacles to significant school reform. They tell the public what they want to hear for the purposes of political gain. Many citizens do not want to spend the money necessary to provide every child with quality schools as well as health care and social supports. Politicians like Mr. Klein fool these citizens into thinking that the job can be done by schools alone, thereby saving billions of taxpayer money. I suspect they have other sinister motives as well. After all, their own children have everything they need: health care, summer camp, books at home, schools with ten students in each classroom. They don't care if poor kids have these advantages as well. Just give those other kids a smart teacher and voila - the gap will be closed! Sadly, many people believe this nonsense.

Here's a challenge for Mr.Klein: Go into one of your schools where the scores have gone "way up." Give these students a standardized test that no one has seen. Make sure these tests are administered by examiners from outside the school and collected immediately. Or, if you want to do it more simply (and cheaply), assign an essay to students who received high language scores on the test. I guarantee you will not like the results.

Yes, poor kids can learn and the gap can be closed, but there is no easy or cheap way to do it. (As for "research" that says otherwise,let's see if Harvard or Stanford can duplicate those results.)

We urgently need an Educational Reform

Teachers are not surrogate parents and many parents expect us teachers to raise their children. I've been teaching ESL in a south Texas border town high school and most of my students come from dysfunctional families.They value social status, money, wearing namebrand clothes and making excuses for not turning their assignments nor making good grades. They don't even bring neither paper (notebooks), nor pencils and pens to school.

However, they are not fully to blame. Most of their parents don't have time to come to school and check on their progress, some of them have asked me to "pass" their children, and for many of these parents, we are their last alternative to turn their children's lives around.

It deeply saddens me to see how the American Educational System is falling apart despite of all the resources available. There are many cracks in the system and, unfortunately, making excuses has become one more.

Blaming someone else when there's not the political will to reform the system is the easiest and dumbest thing to do.

I don't think the educational reform is going to happen neither because President Obama promised it during his campaign, not because the Secretary of Education announced it when he took office, nor because my state governor talked about it in a teachers' meeting. Someone has to start making things happening.

I firmly believe our current curricula needs to be reformed, schools policies reviewed, and textbooks updated. Our students need not to be overprotected against controversial topics in school when they are allowed to watch controversial and violent programs in their homes.

I hope more teachers, parents, and students become united in this crusade to improve the schools their children attend which are not only our work place, but have become our second home as well.

To school administrators I humbly ask to listen to their teachers, and be more realistic in addressing our students needs, to review and adopt a more realistic scope and sequence and resouce materials, to set up book adpotion committes and to use more research-based programs and curricula in our schools.

To our legislators and politicians, I request them to get more involved in our schools and learn the problems and needs first hand so you may come up with special educational programs and curricula for students labeled "unteachable". I commend them for getting money for schools, but I think you need to take a closer look at students' populations and the socio-economic issues affecting our communities to introduce the educational reforms we urgently need before education becomes indeed a national security issue.

Authority in the Classroom

If authorities that be want to return authority of the teacher to the classroom there is hope. Unfortunately, the incessant erosion of teachers' authority --whether it be for course content, idealistic expectations that value knowledge over individuals, or support by administrations rather than undercutting by administrations--over several decades has done nothing but weaken high expectations teachers once were able to hold and not feel guilty about.

The public good is not served by constant intrusions into classrooms where quality teachers have been hired in the first place. If quality teachers were not hired, then it is the administration who hired poor quality--and usually submissive--teachers that is to blame.

Unfortunately, the nation has confused the public good with what the public wants, rather than what is good for it. The two are far from equivalent. Teachers must be empowered if they are to serve the public good, not cater to those who are not credentialized as teachers.

It's about the home and the parents

My wife is a teacher, and I have helped out in schools. Schools, the teachers, administrators and buildings, can create the right environment for student achievement. In this, the US has tried for YEARS to fix with money, testing etc.

But what my wife and I have seen, first hand, is that it is the parents and the culture of learning they set that allows the school environment to nurture learning.

Parents say "My kids education is the most important thing", yet never come to school meetings and never talk with their kids about their studies. It is always "someone" else who is responsible for their kid’s education.

Let's make the real change: Everyone stop what they are doing and focus on their own kids and what they are learning. Let's focus on the real place that has not been addressed in this process: THE HOME

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