This is a tale of two buddies, their successes as individuals in the New Salem Educational Initiative, and the way in which their friendship has accelerated their joint academic progress.
First, there is Manuel. Manuel first enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative as a Grade 3 student during the 2009-2010 academic year. At the time, he was functioning only at the Grade 2 level in math and just the Grade 1 level in reading. His mother (Helena) and sister (Francesca) were very worried that Manuel had gotten off to the wrong start at school and that in the future academic failure would prevent him from breaking the pattern of familial poverty that described their own lives as struggling immigrants from Mexico.
I began to lay out a carefully sequenced program of skill acquisition for Manuel. Week followed week in that first academic year of enrollment as Manuel made a remarkable ascent to grade level in math and near grade level in reading. He began to take pride in his performance in school, bringing his papers and report cards so that I could see the steady progress that he was making in that context. This mirrored the progress that Manuel was making in his weekly two-hour sessions in conversations that the two of us had going to and from each session.
In these conversations, Manuel showed an enhanced interest in vocabulary, asking the meaning of words that he read on street and interstate (I-94 and I-35) signs. As we drove along, read the signs, and defined words, I would take the opportunity to introduce words that rhymed with the ones that we were seeing, or logically fit into sentences with these words. Thus was the learning that had taken place in the classroom joined with that which occurred in transport to improve the verbal skills of a young boy who at the beginning of the school year had borne the label of an English Language Learner (ELL).
By the end of academic year 2009-2010, Manuel had recovered one full grade level in math and nearly two full grade levels in reading. Manuel continued his upward trajectory during his second academic year (2010-2011) of enrollment in the New Salem Educational Initiative. During this academic year, Manuel rose to the top of his Grade 4 class at school.
And then there is Marco. Marco also first enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative as a Grade 3 student during that same academic year of 2009-2010, and upon enrollment he, too, was functioning below grade level in both reading and math. And, like Manuel, Marco was classified as an ELL student because of the immigrant status of his family, the members and close friends of which speak only Spanish in Marco’s home.
Marco’s mother, Juanita, speaks limited English. She works on the janitorial staff of a corporate entity in downtown Minneapolis. She has a strong desire to see Marco gain the education that she was never able to secure for herself, either in her native Mexico or in the United States. Juanita was immediately grateful for the opportunity that Marco had to participate in the New Salem Educational Initiative, and she has throughout Marco’s now two-year participation in the Initiative been a strong source of parental support who listens carefully to the report that I give to her after every weekly session.
And Marco himself from the very beginning has been one of the very most enthusiastic students in the New Salem Educational Initiative. When I come out of my late afternoon session every Friday, I inevitably have a message on my cell phone from Marco seeking assurance that the usual Friday session will be held--- as it always is.
Marco has responded to the logically sequenced program of math and reading skill acquisition with a studiousness to match his enthusiasm. Before the end of that first academic year (2009-2010) of participation, Marco quickly rose to full grade level performance in both math and reading. By December of his Grade 4 year (academic year 2010-2011), his second year of participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative, Marco mastered the full array of math and reading skills pertinent to Grade 4. He then proceeded to acquire skills typical for students in Grade 5, passing practice Grade 5 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) in both math and reading, indicating that he will be operating one full grade level above that of actual school enrollment as he enters Grade 5 for the 2011-2012 academic year.
The progress that Manuel and Marco have made as students in the New Salem Educational Initiative has gained acceleration in the fortunate melding of their personalities. Manuel began his sessions with me in a rare single-student session (students generally attend in groups of three to five; although a great deal of instruction is rendered in one-on-one fashion, with students seated individually at their tables, demand is so great that sessions with a total of just one or two students are rare). About two weeks after Manuel started his sessions, Marco enrolled. I immediately noted that Marco was in the same grade as Manuel and that he had the same immigrant roots to Mexico. This made him a candidate for the still unusually lightly attended Friday night session at which time I was providing instruction for Manuel. When I noticed that he had a similarly beaming smile and an apparent enthusiasm for the prospect of attending my sessions, I decided that this was a particularly promising match.
And, indeed, Manuel and Marco immediately became best buddies. On the way to our weekly session, they would trade Pokemon cards and jabber away about what they had learned at school, what was happening in their neighborhoods, and what they had heard from their villages back in Mexico. They spoke mostly in English, but especially when they found out that I understood a great deal of their forays into Spanish, they would switch to that language when topics arose for which the vernacular of their country of origin seemed most appropriate. In our two-hour weekly academic sessions, they loved working together, so in this case I adjusted my typical one-on-one style, and we did a great deal of our math and reading together. I also kept this as the rare two-person group. They had a lot of fun with my approach to learning the multiplication tables, and they especially loved reading together. In this, there was a kind of friendly competition to be the first to answer questions that I posed to assess comprehension.
And the same sort of competition abided to tell the best story that popped into their lively brains as relevant to the subject matter that we were reading:
“Ooo, ooo, yea, I once saw a snake that was six feet long, too. It was in my back yard at the house in Pueblo--- my village in Mexico.,” Marco exclaimed, for example, during our reading of a story about a boy who just gotten away before a cobra struck.
“Ooo, me, too,” Manuel replied, “There was a snake in my back yard last week.”
“What kind of snake?” Marco asked.
“Uhhh… a garden snake,” Manuel admitted a little sheepishly.
But everyone laughed, and we had a great time, and the natural animation that these boys brought to our sessions in their sheer delight of being together amplified not only the fun but, more vital to our purposes, the learning. During such sessions, the enhanced focus Manuel and Marco gave to the material as they engaged in such lively responses, enhanced their reading comprehension and accelerated their vocabulary acquisition.
This is why I am always trying to place students in the same session who are well-matched as to personality and other, sometimes rather intangible, factors that I assess in making my decisions. When group camaraderie does not exist so naturally, I put great energy into creating it, whether in my silly malapropisms with younger students, or the age-appropriate banter that I endeavor to establish with my middle school and high school students. I act always on the conviction that all things consistent with learning that make the environment more hospitable to the student contribute to maximal educational progress for that student.
The tale of the two buddies continued over the summer, as I met with them from time to time on a more flexible schedule, finding them always excited when I would call an impromptu session. In the meantime, back in late May, at the New Salem Educational Initiative Annual Banquet, I honored the two buddies with an award that they so richly deserved: Most Enthusiastic.
Aug 30, 2011
Nathan’s Story: A Child of Poverty Gains a Wealth of Education
Nathan first enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative as a Grade 1 student during the 2009-2010 academic year. He enrolled late in that academic year, in March, by which time his teachers were expressing concerns that he was having problems reading material appropriate to his grade level, thinking that a speech impediment was exacerbating his reading difficulties. Nathan’s teachers also indicated that his math skills had not reached full grade level development by that point in the school year.
Nathan’s mother (Lillian) and male friend (Preston) had just moved to Minneapolis close to the beginning of that academic year, in August 2010. They lived in one of the cheapest rental units in the city, on Newton Avenue North, just south of Glenwood. Lillian and Preston were seeking to make a fresh start in Minneapolis, and they both fervently wanted Nathan to get the kind of education that would allow him to break the cycle of poverty that the two of them had witnessed in their own families.
A variety of factors influence poor school performance, most essentially those rooted in environment and familial circumstances, and those rooted in the natural aptitude of the child. I have always braced for those frequently occurring challenges whereby moving a student to grade level performance requires particularly stringent effort over a period of months and, in a few cases, a year or two.
But possessed of a keen natural intelligence, Nathan did not as it turned out present problems so grave that they could not be quickly addressed with an aggressive program of skill remediation. With strong support from Lillian and Preston, garnered from the firm relationship that I built with the family, Nathan responded with alacrity to the academic program with which I presented him during our two-hour weekly sessions. I was delighted at the speed with which Nathan latched onto me as a mentor, as well as teacher. By the end of academic year 2010-2011 (in just three months time), he rose quickly to grade level in both reading and math. During academic year 2010-2011, Nathan attained Grade 3 performance levels (one grade level above that of school enrollment) in both math and reading.
Nathan got a chance to demonstrate some of his precocity at the late May 2011 New Salem Educational Initiative Annual Banquet. Students in the Initiative gave performances of different kinds throughout the banquet. Some gave their interpretations of various speeches by important figures from African American history. Others showed their ability to read above grade level. Others demonstrated their mastery of college preparatory vocabulary. As for Nathan, who could have shown his ability to do many of these same things, his personal demonstration focused on his mastery, in just his Grade 2 year of school enrollment, of multiplication tables for the numbers 0 through 9; such mastery is generally regarded as a noteworthy accomplishment for students in Grade 3. The crowd was in particular impressed with Nathan’s quickness in giving answers involving the nines (5 X 9 = 45; 7 X 9 = 63; etc.). Having several weeks prior to the banquet mastered the nine trick (e. g., the number before 7 is 6, and 9 minus 6 is 3, so the product of 7 and 9 is 63), Nathan zoomed through his nines with great speed.
Nathan beamed. Lillian and Preston looked as if they would burst with pride amidst the rousing applause. In this way, hope builds on the strong foundation of a promising start in the early grades of the K-12 sequence. Moving to Minneapolis begins to look like a very good move, indeed. A vision of life beyond shabby tenements and dead-end jobs gains clarity. A young life moves in promising directions. This impoverished child, connected to families that have been stuck in cyclical destitution for decades, gains academic momentum along a path that would typically be more descriptive of the route taken by a child of the upper middle class attending a well-regarded suburban or private school.
Whenever we bear witness to such a phenomenon, we should all feel ourselves moving a little closer to true democracy.
Nathan’s mother (Lillian) and male friend (Preston) had just moved to Minneapolis close to the beginning of that academic year, in August 2010. They lived in one of the cheapest rental units in the city, on Newton Avenue North, just south of Glenwood. Lillian and Preston were seeking to make a fresh start in Minneapolis, and they both fervently wanted Nathan to get the kind of education that would allow him to break the cycle of poverty that the two of them had witnessed in their own families.
A variety of factors influence poor school performance, most essentially those rooted in environment and familial circumstances, and those rooted in the natural aptitude of the child. I have always braced for those frequently occurring challenges whereby moving a student to grade level performance requires particularly stringent effort over a period of months and, in a few cases, a year or two.
But possessed of a keen natural intelligence, Nathan did not as it turned out present problems so grave that they could not be quickly addressed with an aggressive program of skill remediation. With strong support from Lillian and Preston, garnered from the firm relationship that I built with the family, Nathan responded with alacrity to the academic program with which I presented him during our two-hour weekly sessions. I was delighted at the speed with which Nathan latched onto me as a mentor, as well as teacher. By the end of academic year 2010-2011 (in just three months time), he rose quickly to grade level in both reading and math. During academic year 2010-2011, Nathan attained Grade 3 performance levels (one grade level above that of school enrollment) in both math and reading.
Nathan got a chance to demonstrate some of his precocity at the late May 2011 New Salem Educational Initiative Annual Banquet. Students in the Initiative gave performances of different kinds throughout the banquet. Some gave their interpretations of various speeches by important figures from African American history. Others showed their ability to read above grade level. Others demonstrated their mastery of college preparatory vocabulary. As for Nathan, who could have shown his ability to do many of these same things, his personal demonstration focused on his mastery, in just his Grade 2 year of school enrollment, of multiplication tables for the numbers 0 through 9; such mastery is generally regarded as a noteworthy accomplishment for students in Grade 3. The crowd was in particular impressed with Nathan’s quickness in giving answers involving the nines (5 X 9 = 45; 7 X 9 = 63; etc.). Having several weeks prior to the banquet mastered the nine trick (e. g., the number before 7 is 6, and 9 minus 6 is 3, so the product of 7 and 9 is 63), Nathan zoomed through his nines with great speed.
Nathan beamed. Lillian and Preston looked as if they would burst with pride amidst the rousing applause. In this way, hope builds on the strong foundation of a promising start in the early grades of the K-12 sequence. Moving to Minneapolis begins to look like a very good move, indeed. A vision of life beyond shabby tenements and dead-end jobs gains clarity. A young life moves in promising directions. This impoverished child, connected to families that have been stuck in cyclical destitution for decades, gains academic momentum along a path that would typically be more descriptive of the route taken by a child of the upper middle class attending a well-regarded suburban or private school.
Whenever we bear witness to such a phenomenon, we should all feel ourselves moving a little closer to true democracy.
The Importance of Shakespeare to Inner City Students
A few months ago, an English professor took a group of unlikely actors under her wing and directed them in an emotionally affecting version of Shakespeare’s classic dramatic tragedy, >Hamlet: Prince of Denmark<. The actors were inmates of Missouri Eastern Correctional Center (MECC), an institution at which I myself taught for a year in the very early 1980s. Among the many affecting deliveries of lines that I heard via a National Public Radio account of that performance were the following, rendered by he who acted the part of Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle and murderer of
Hamlet’s father, the former king of Denmark:
…..Pray can I not;/ Though my inclination be as sharp as will:/ My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent…/ O wretched state! O bosom black as death!/ O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,/ Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay!/ Bow, stubborn knees; and heart with strings/ of steel, Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe!/ All may be well… [Retires and kneels]/ [Rising] My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
Perfect sense it makes that such lines as these from one of the most psychologically rich plays ever written should resonate with those who have struggled with guilt, to be sure, but also with the vast array of emotions that unite us in our humanity: love strongly felt but impeded in fulfillment; betrayal by friends and family; duty strongly felt as necessary but falling short in execution; the paradox of noble humanity caught in existential loneliness; treachery successful as planned by the perpetrator but redounding to the demolition of that very perpetrator.
In listening to the inmates and how affected they were by the play, I was struck by how lamentable it is that Shakespeare is not better taught in our public schools. In my observation, too few teachers of English have the passion for Shakespeare that they themselves should have. Without that passion, they are hard-pressed to engage students with the sheer joy of literature at its best. Then, there tends to prevail among teachers a defeatist attitude whereby they do not think that students will like Shakespeare, even if the teacher herself or himself does understand the greatness and the pleasure in reading such a work as >Hamlet<. And so a great opportunity is wasted to present students with some of the most magnificent explorations of the human psyche ever to appear in print. The issues raised and the emotions explored are done to such striking effect that, properly taught, all students will respond to such a work as Hamlet.
So as I listened to the actors discuss their performances and the resonance of the lines for them personally, I had these thoughts about the wasted opportunity represented by the noted problems of classroom presentation of the material in our public schools. But I also had the thought that if these very inmates had received proper K-12 instruction in the literary beauty and psychological power of Hamlet, the experience might have served as an outlet for their own life frustrations, might have given them insight into their own daily struggles, might have provided them an alternative activity, whether in acting for the school drama club or in continuing to read great literature, that could have deterred them from the life of the street and the path to criminal behavior.
This jibes with my abiding conviction concerning the power of education to transform lives in multiple ways. In a highly practical sense, the more formal education one receives, the greater one’s earning power in the world of work. But just as importantly, education, as the transmission of subject area knowledge across a broad and deep liberal arts curriculum, gives a person a sense of one’s own power in the world. Possessed of broad knowledge, a person can act comfortably and effectively in a great variety of situations; understand a breadth of contemporary issues in considerable detail; make reasoned judgments about events currently unfolding across the great, wide world; and responsibly exercise the great privilege of citizenship in a democracy.
I have seen the study of Shakespeare animate my own students, awakening them to the serious consideration of vital human themes, and giving them the confidence that if they can read and understand the Bard, they can comprehend any reading matter put before them. I know that in many, many cases, this sort of attitude toward the world of knowledge has deterred my inner city students from unseemly activities and given them a better way of viewing themselves in the world. For not a few, this means that they have avoided the fate of those who ended up in Missouri Eastern Correctional Center.
And while I am happy for my students, I also fervently wish that the K-12 experiences of those inmates had given them a greater sense of Shakespeare in particular, a better education in general, and a better fate along the pathways of their one earthly journey.
Hamlet’s father, the former king of Denmark:
…..Pray can I not;/ Though my inclination be as sharp as will:/ My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent…/ O wretched state! O bosom black as death!/ O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,/ Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay!/ Bow, stubborn knees; and heart with strings/ of steel, Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe!/ All may be well… [Retires and kneels]/ [Rising] My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
Perfect sense it makes that such lines as these from one of the most psychologically rich plays ever written should resonate with those who have struggled with guilt, to be sure, but also with the vast array of emotions that unite us in our humanity: love strongly felt but impeded in fulfillment; betrayal by friends and family; duty strongly felt as necessary but falling short in execution; the paradox of noble humanity caught in existential loneliness; treachery successful as planned by the perpetrator but redounding to the demolition of that very perpetrator.
In listening to the inmates and how affected they were by the play, I was struck by how lamentable it is that Shakespeare is not better taught in our public schools. In my observation, too few teachers of English have the passion for Shakespeare that they themselves should have. Without that passion, they are hard-pressed to engage students with the sheer joy of literature at its best. Then, there tends to prevail among teachers a defeatist attitude whereby they do not think that students will like Shakespeare, even if the teacher herself or himself does understand the greatness and the pleasure in reading such a work as >Hamlet<. And so a great opportunity is wasted to present students with some of the most magnificent explorations of the human psyche ever to appear in print. The issues raised and the emotions explored are done to such striking effect that, properly taught, all students will respond to such a work as Hamlet.
So as I listened to the actors discuss their performances and the resonance of the lines for them personally, I had these thoughts about the wasted opportunity represented by the noted problems of classroom presentation of the material in our public schools. But I also had the thought that if these very inmates had received proper K-12 instruction in the literary beauty and psychological power of Hamlet, the experience might have served as an outlet for their own life frustrations, might have given them insight into their own daily struggles, might have provided them an alternative activity, whether in acting for the school drama club or in continuing to read great literature, that could have deterred them from the life of the street and the path to criminal behavior.
This jibes with my abiding conviction concerning the power of education to transform lives in multiple ways. In a highly practical sense, the more formal education one receives, the greater one’s earning power in the world of work. But just as importantly, education, as the transmission of subject area knowledge across a broad and deep liberal arts curriculum, gives a person a sense of one’s own power in the world. Possessed of broad knowledge, a person can act comfortably and effectively in a great variety of situations; understand a breadth of contemporary issues in considerable detail; make reasoned judgments about events currently unfolding across the great, wide world; and responsibly exercise the great privilege of citizenship in a democracy.
I have seen the study of Shakespeare animate my own students, awakening them to the serious consideration of vital human themes, and giving them the confidence that if they can read and understand the Bard, they can comprehend any reading matter put before them. I know that in many, many cases, this sort of attitude toward the world of knowledge has deterred my inner city students from unseemly activities and given them a better way of viewing themselves in the world. For not a few, this means that they have avoided the fate of those who ended up in Missouri Eastern Correctional Center.
And while I am happy for my students, I also fervently wish that the K-12 experiences of those inmates had given them a greater sense of Shakespeare in particular, a better education in general, and a better fate along the pathways of their one earthly journey.
The Power of Transportation in the New Salem Educational Initiative
Among the features of the New Salem Educational Initiative that contribute to the success of students enrolled in the program is the provision of transportation. The fact that I pick each student up at her or his home before each session, and then deliver the student back home after the session, has several favorable effects.
Taking things chronologically, there is first of all the interaction that occurs as I show up at each door and generally am invited in to talk for a bit. Often from the very beginning of a student’s enrollment, I am able to strike an emotional cord with the presiding adult of the homestead. The family structures of most of my students typically have a mother as the key head of household, but often there are also grandmothers and aunties who have roles in the students’ lives that move across the continuum from supportive but secondary to dominant and primary. And then roughly 20% of the families that I serve do have a dependable male presence, including in a few cases a father matching the middle class ideal, a man who either shares or individually exercises primary authority. I always try right away to understand family dynamics and family roles, which are always key to understanding the lives of the child or adolescent. In time, I typically become something of an adjunct household and even family member, offering counsel, providing links to needed services, and just listening and conversing empathetically the way that good family members do.
Secondly, this sort of conversation continues in the car during transport, as students over time (and usually not all that long from the beginning of enrollment) begin to open up, share concerns, talk about ongoing struggles, and to relate successes in academics, athletics, and other arenas of life. Whether shared by a family member or by the student herself or himself, the information related is something that I treat with great care. If it is something such as an academic triumph (an “A” finally earned on a report card in math, successfully identifying acidity level in a chemical compound from a lab experiment), this is something that I in all likelihood can praise and reinforce as a notable accomplishment to the family. But if the matter involves, for example, a strained family relationship and talking to me is serving as a stress reliever or sounding board, then unless connoting a dangerous situation, I will keep this to myself until I am asked to become more directly involved. All such information, though, gets stored in my memory bank for understanding the student and the family’s life.
Thirdly in the typical chronological sequence, but most germane to the fundamental goals of the New Salem Educational Initiative, there is the tremendous amount that is learned academically while in transport. This runs the gamut from fundamental skill review and even first-time acquisition, to very substantive conversations in which subject area knowledge from across the liberal arts is transmitted. I have found the time in transport to be very valuable for review and acquisition of multiplication tables. On many days, this saves a significant amount of time that would have been devoted to the skill during the formal two hours of the academic session once in the classroom. Similarly, it is a great time to review and acquire vocabulary items, to create sentences using the words, to talk about homophones, homonyms, synonyms, and antonyms that relate to particular vocabulary items.
And as the conversation turns to more purely subject area knowledge, my students find themselves learning many things that they should have long-since learned in school but have not. En route, just to pick some of many, many topics that have come under discussion, my students have learned for the first time the original identities and the ideological evolution of Republicans and Democrats in United States political history. They have learned about the actual functions of the liver, kidneys, and pancreas. They have learned about the nutritive value of vegetables, including why I call carrots, broccoli, and spinach the “power vegetables.” They come of course to know of my great love of Shakespeare, but they also come to know that the greatest playwright of recent decades, August Wilson, was an African American who died just a few years ago having penned classics such as >Fences<, >Piano Lesson<, and >Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom<. And they get some sense of where human beings stand in the scientific scheme of things as they try to grasp a universe that big banged into being about 14 billion years ago, an earth that formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and a creature known as homo sapiens who only about 100,000 years ago got on the evolutionary train that pulled out of Australopithecus station about 4.5 million years ago.
Fourthly in the chronology, with all of that personal matter discussed, skills reviewed, and knowledge transmitted, I drive my students home. I go to the door of each student, and I usually go back inside the home. I summarize what was learned and the progress that the student made. I listen to any further concerns, for the student, or pertinent to the family. And when I drive on to pick up other students, and especially when I drive back to my own home late in the evening, I am full of fresh reminders of the power of transportation in the New Salem Education Initiative.
Taking things chronologically, there is first of all the interaction that occurs as I show up at each door and generally am invited in to talk for a bit. Often from the very beginning of a student’s enrollment, I am able to strike an emotional cord with the presiding adult of the homestead. The family structures of most of my students typically have a mother as the key head of household, but often there are also grandmothers and aunties who have roles in the students’ lives that move across the continuum from supportive but secondary to dominant and primary. And then roughly 20% of the families that I serve do have a dependable male presence, including in a few cases a father matching the middle class ideal, a man who either shares or individually exercises primary authority. I always try right away to understand family dynamics and family roles, which are always key to understanding the lives of the child or adolescent. In time, I typically become something of an adjunct household and even family member, offering counsel, providing links to needed services, and just listening and conversing empathetically the way that good family members do.
Secondly, this sort of conversation continues in the car during transport, as students over time (and usually not all that long from the beginning of enrollment) begin to open up, share concerns, talk about ongoing struggles, and to relate successes in academics, athletics, and other arenas of life. Whether shared by a family member or by the student herself or himself, the information related is something that I treat with great care. If it is something such as an academic triumph (an “A” finally earned on a report card in math, successfully identifying acidity level in a chemical compound from a lab experiment), this is something that I in all likelihood can praise and reinforce as a notable accomplishment to the family. But if the matter involves, for example, a strained family relationship and talking to me is serving as a stress reliever or sounding board, then unless connoting a dangerous situation, I will keep this to myself until I am asked to become more directly involved. All such information, though, gets stored in my memory bank for understanding the student and the family’s life.
Thirdly in the typical chronological sequence, but most germane to the fundamental goals of the New Salem Educational Initiative, there is the tremendous amount that is learned academically while in transport. This runs the gamut from fundamental skill review and even first-time acquisition, to very substantive conversations in which subject area knowledge from across the liberal arts is transmitted. I have found the time in transport to be very valuable for review and acquisition of multiplication tables. On many days, this saves a significant amount of time that would have been devoted to the skill during the formal two hours of the academic session once in the classroom. Similarly, it is a great time to review and acquire vocabulary items, to create sentences using the words, to talk about homophones, homonyms, synonyms, and antonyms that relate to particular vocabulary items.
And as the conversation turns to more purely subject area knowledge, my students find themselves learning many things that they should have long-since learned in school but have not. En route, just to pick some of many, many topics that have come under discussion, my students have learned for the first time the original identities and the ideological evolution of Republicans and Democrats in United States political history. They have learned about the actual functions of the liver, kidneys, and pancreas. They have learned about the nutritive value of vegetables, including why I call carrots, broccoli, and spinach the “power vegetables.” They come of course to know of my great love of Shakespeare, but they also come to know that the greatest playwright of recent decades, August Wilson, was an African American who died just a few years ago having penned classics such as >Fences<, >Piano Lesson<, and >Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom<. And they get some sense of where human beings stand in the scientific scheme of things as they try to grasp a universe that big banged into being about 14 billion years ago, an earth that formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and a creature known as homo sapiens who only about 100,000 years ago got on the evolutionary train that pulled out of Australopithecus station about 4.5 million years ago.
Fourthly in the chronology, with all of that personal matter discussed, skills reviewed, and knowledge transmitted, I drive my students home. I go to the door of each student, and I usually go back inside the home. I summarize what was learned and the progress that the student made. I listen to any further concerns, for the student, or pertinent to the family. And when I drive on to pick up other students, and especially when I drive back to my own home late in the evening, I am full of fresh reminders of the power of transportation in the New Salem Education Initiative.
Aug 26, 2011
The Power of Ongoing Personal Relationships with Families and Students
One of the most splendid moments of my many splendid moments as a teacher came when I complimented Maria for remembering in considerable detail a number of connected items from one of our discussions on government. These items were learned as we moved in transport to and from her regular two-hour weekly session in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
Among those facts that Maria remembered was that the Articles of Confederation served as the first constitutional document of the United States, and that it was a document formulated in 1787 that conceded little power to the central government, reserving almost all powers to the states. She also recalled that the United States Constitution superseded the Articles of Confederation, went into effect in 1789, and detailed a much more complete plan of balanced power between the central government and the governments of the states. Maria remembered all of this, and as I questioned her I could tell that she truly understood that this federal approach to governance differs from lose confederate systems and systems of central government dominance; and she grasped how the United States Constitution in its very balance leaves open room for interpretation in debate and raises controversies, as with the claim of states rights that so informed the history of the American South, becoming a key issue in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
That is a fairly good chunk of United States history and government when comprehended in its totality and for its interrelated parts. Maria had picked up this information entirely in one evening, going to and from the classroom where she attends the two-hour weekly session with her sister and cousin. In the formal sessions, our focus is on math, and on reading for comprehension of subject area material from across the liberal arts curriculum. It would have been possible for Maria to have acquired her knowledge from reading of the latter sort. Because she did, for example, learn about the Reconstruction era and the disappointment felt by Frederick Douglass and other African American leaders as they saw the brutal retrenchment that occurred in the wake of the Compromise of 1877. She also learned about the causes of the Trojan War, the death of Hector near the end of the Iliad, and the origin of the saying, “Achilles’ heel.” And among many other things that Maria learned from reading subject area material was that light is composed of photons, packets of pure energy with no mass, and that light travels at 186,000 miles per second; she learned that this is much faster than the speed of sound, which travels only about 1,000 feet per second as the successive collision of molecules slows the rate at which sound can travel.
But Maria asks good questions as we travel to and from each session. I listen carefully to her questions and provide as much additional subject area knowledge as our fifteen minutes each way allows. Her understanding of the information focused on constitutional history came entirely in transport. I was so impressed with her retention, saying to her,
“You sure are smart.”
To this Maria replied, “You made me think I was smart.”
That was the splendid moment.
Maria has been a student in the New Salem Educational Initiative since she was in Grade 5. She was late into her Grade 6 year when she made the comment just noted. She is now about to enter Grade 9, so the relationship has continued, as it does with all of my students. And with her continuation in the Initiative, Maria’s knowledge base has continued to grow, she’s moved as an English Language Learner (with familial roots to El Salvador) from rudimentary reading skills languishing well below level of school enrollment to gaining full comprehension of Shakespeare’s >A Midsummer Night’s Dream<.
What Maria learns in her two-hour weekly session is augmented powerfully by informal discussion in transport, by the ongoing nature of her participation in the Initiative from year to year, and by the relationship that I have built with Maria’s family. I go inside Maria’s home and speak with whoever is charge (mother, father, or older sister) at the time I arrive, and when I bring Maria back from our academic session I do the same. When I arrive, I ask about the family’s week and pay careful attention to understand if there are any problems that the family may be having, with which I can provide or find help, and that might impede Maria’s capacity to concentrate. When I arrive, I tell the family member of authority what Maria is going to learn in the immediately upcoming session. And when we return, I tell the family member how Maria progressed, and what additional topics we covered; then I will make suggestions for Maria’s continued learning at home during the interval between our sessions.
In this way, Maria learns a great deal of solid academic material in each formal session. She learns a great deal of additional information in transport. And she is inspired and encouraged to explore topics further in the week before her next session. Many weeks, I may drop by just to see how things are going in the two or three days since I’ve seen her. The family knows I care. I respect the family and gain their trust as a confidante. In this fluid process combining formal and informal experiences, Maria gains greater and greater confidence as a student, and she comes alive in a wonderfully accumulating world of knowledge.
So it is that Maria comes to formulate an image of herself as a smart person. She tells me so, and that I made her feel that way. For a teacher, there can be no more splendid moment.
Among those facts that Maria remembered was that the Articles of Confederation served as the first constitutional document of the United States, and that it was a document formulated in 1787 that conceded little power to the central government, reserving almost all powers to the states. She also recalled that the United States Constitution superseded the Articles of Confederation, went into effect in 1789, and detailed a much more complete plan of balanced power between the central government and the governments of the states. Maria remembered all of this, and as I questioned her I could tell that she truly understood that this federal approach to governance differs from lose confederate systems and systems of central government dominance; and she grasped how the United States Constitution in its very balance leaves open room for interpretation in debate and raises controversies, as with the claim of states rights that so informed the history of the American South, becoming a key issue in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
That is a fairly good chunk of United States history and government when comprehended in its totality and for its interrelated parts. Maria had picked up this information entirely in one evening, going to and from the classroom where she attends the two-hour weekly session with her sister and cousin. In the formal sessions, our focus is on math, and on reading for comprehension of subject area material from across the liberal arts curriculum. It would have been possible for Maria to have acquired her knowledge from reading of the latter sort. Because she did, for example, learn about the Reconstruction era and the disappointment felt by Frederick Douglass and other African American leaders as they saw the brutal retrenchment that occurred in the wake of the Compromise of 1877. She also learned about the causes of the Trojan War, the death of Hector near the end of the Iliad, and the origin of the saying, “Achilles’ heel.” And among many other things that Maria learned from reading subject area material was that light is composed of photons, packets of pure energy with no mass, and that light travels at 186,000 miles per second; she learned that this is much faster than the speed of sound, which travels only about 1,000 feet per second as the successive collision of molecules slows the rate at which sound can travel.
But Maria asks good questions as we travel to and from each session. I listen carefully to her questions and provide as much additional subject area knowledge as our fifteen minutes each way allows. Her understanding of the information focused on constitutional history came entirely in transport. I was so impressed with her retention, saying to her,
“You sure are smart.”
To this Maria replied, “You made me think I was smart.”
That was the splendid moment.
Maria has been a student in the New Salem Educational Initiative since she was in Grade 5. She was late into her Grade 6 year when she made the comment just noted. She is now about to enter Grade 9, so the relationship has continued, as it does with all of my students. And with her continuation in the Initiative, Maria’s knowledge base has continued to grow, she’s moved as an English Language Learner (with familial roots to El Salvador) from rudimentary reading skills languishing well below level of school enrollment to gaining full comprehension of Shakespeare’s >A Midsummer Night’s Dream<.
What Maria learns in her two-hour weekly session is augmented powerfully by informal discussion in transport, by the ongoing nature of her participation in the Initiative from year to year, and by the relationship that I have built with Maria’s family. I go inside Maria’s home and speak with whoever is charge (mother, father, or older sister) at the time I arrive, and when I bring Maria back from our academic session I do the same. When I arrive, I ask about the family’s week and pay careful attention to understand if there are any problems that the family may be having, with which I can provide or find help, and that might impede Maria’s capacity to concentrate. When I arrive, I tell the family member of authority what Maria is going to learn in the immediately upcoming session. And when we return, I tell the family member how Maria progressed, and what additional topics we covered; then I will make suggestions for Maria’s continued learning at home during the interval between our sessions.
In this way, Maria learns a great deal of solid academic material in each formal session. She learns a great deal of additional information in transport. And she is inspired and encouraged to explore topics further in the week before her next session. Many weeks, I may drop by just to see how things are going in the two or three days since I’ve seen her. The family knows I care. I respect the family and gain their trust as a confidante. In this fluid process combining formal and informal experiences, Maria gains greater and greater confidence as a student, and she comes alive in a wonderfully accumulating world of knowledge.
So it is that Maria comes to formulate an image of herself as a smart person. She tells me so, and that I made her feel that way. For a teacher, there can be no more splendid moment.
Youth Violence in North Minneapolis: This Does Not Have to Happen
Let us not linger too long wringing our hands and shedding our tears. Be assured, I write this as one who has shed many a tear over the loss of far too many young people shot and killed in North Minneapolis over the last 20 years. But I get deeply angry with every one of these events that brings press coverage, political attention, and many tearful expressions of sorrow--- because this youth violence in North Minneapolis does not have to happen.
We could immediately set about addressing the problems that lead our precious young people to shoot each other by really following through in two ways: 1) connecting with all of the struggling families living in North Minneapolis, listening to them, hearing their concerns, and then communicating to them that we are going to take action;
2) letting these families then know that we will do everything in our power to address their concerns and to provide a vision for a future that holds hope for better lives. In doing the latter we must let our fellow human beings on the Northside know that we will help them access existing services for immediate relief from their day to day difficulties, but that over the long term we will be dedicating ourselves to the improvement of education for their children.
By comparison to the improvement of K-12 education, every other action on our part is just application of the bandaid, the treating of symptom rather than cause. On the Northside, we have to admit to ourselves that for over 30 years, at least since the late 1970s, the public K-12 schools of North Minneapolis have been on a steep decline into failure. From the late 1970s, as great numbers of Jewish and middle class African American people exited North Minneapolis for St. Louis Park and other near suburbs, many of those left behind have been the poorest community members. At the same time, very substantial numbers of in-migrants from gravely challenged communities in Chicago, Gary, and Detroit have moved to access relatively affordable rents and a bit tamer conditions of life in North Minneapolis. These more recent arrivals had little idea of the proud traditions that have abided on the Northside. They would, for example, know very little of the splendid activities of the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House under the direction of W. Gertrude Brown into the 1930s, the lively community life that once centered on old 6th Avenue (today’s Olson Highway), and the excellent education that one could once get at North High School (which through the 1950s was the best high school in Minnesota). As the older, magnificent institutions of the Northside disappeared or became shadows of their former selves, and as North Minneapolis became more residentially dominated by people of significant poverty, the nature of the community and its needs underwent very sharp alteration.
White, middle class educators were overwhelmed amidst these shifts and hopelessly inadequate to the new challenges. There were virtually no African American teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools of the 1970s. Too few African American educators were added during the subsequent decades. Even today, which features a greater presence of African American and other people of color at the administrative level, teachers are overwhelmingly white. More important, there is inadequate understanding from people of middle class backgrounds of all races who are employed by the Minneapolis Pubic Schools to feel in the gut the struggles of people from impoverished conditions and to comprehend the stark challenges that so many students face at home and in the community.
Then there is the problem of teacher quality and approaches to education. Teacher preparation programs are inadequate. There are virtually no teachers who have master’s degrees in legitimate disciplines granted, by way of example, in departments of history, math, biology, and English literature--- rather than in departments of education. There abides too much of the notion that those who preside in classrooms are facilitators for the pursuit of teacher and student interests, rather than expert conveyors of solid knowledge and skills. There are too many DVDs watched out of context, too many unfocused field trips, too many distracting assemblies and pep rallies, too many inadequate substitute teachers, too much turning to the back of the book to answer questions without any understanding of what chapters are actually presenting in the way of subject area knowledge.
Imagine school officials and other concerned people walking the streets of North Minneapolis on a consistent basis and telling people right where they live that, “We care.” Then imagine that we back that rhetoric up with action, immediate and long-term. Imagine young people in love with Shakespeare, August Wilson, the science of the natural world, the beauty of mathematics, and the sheer delight of great paintings and sculpture. Imagine young people so productively occupied in their abundant knowledge and interests that they have no time to shoot each other. Imagine that young people then know that knowledge is not only wonderful for its own sake, but that it also paves the way for success in business, law, medicine, and all endeavors in the world of work to which young people would aspire.
Know then as you know that the sun will come up tomorrow, there would also be a new day dawning in North Minneapolis. And know that you would blessedly have little need for all of that hand-wringing and all of those touching but ineffective tears.
We could immediately set about addressing the problems that lead our precious young people to shoot each other by really following through in two ways: 1) connecting with all of the struggling families living in North Minneapolis, listening to them, hearing their concerns, and then communicating to them that we are going to take action;
2) letting these families then know that we will do everything in our power to address their concerns and to provide a vision for a future that holds hope for better lives. In doing the latter we must let our fellow human beings on the Northside know that we will help them access existing services for immediate relief from their day to day difficulties, but that over the long term we will be dedicating ourselves to the improvement of education for their children.
By comparison to the improvement of K-12 education, every other action on our part is just application of the bandaid, the treating of symptom rather than cause. On the Northside, we have to admit to ourselves that for over 30 years, at least since the late 1970s, the public K-12 schools of North Minneapolis have been on a steep decline into failure. From the late 1970s, as great numbers of Jewish and middle class African American people exited North Minneapolis for St. Louis Park and other near suburbs, many of those left behind have been the poorest community members. At the same time, very substantial numbers of in-migrants from gravely challenged communities in Chicago, Gary, and Detroit have moved to access relatively affordable rents and a bit tamer conditions of life in North Minneapolis. These more recent arrivals had little idea of the proud traditions that have abided on the Northside. They would, for example, know very little of the splendid activities of the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House under the direction of W. Gertrude Brown into the 1930s, the lively community life that once centered on old 6th Avenue (today’s Olson Highway), and the excellent education that one could once get at North High School (which through the 1950s was the best high school in Minnesota). As the older, magnificent institutions of the Northside disappeared or became shadows of their former selves, and as North Minneapolis became more residentially dominated by people of significant poverty, the nature of the community and its needs underwent very sharp alteration.
White, middle class educators were overwhelmed amidst these shifts and hopelessly inadequate to the new challenges. There were virtually no African American teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools of the 1970s. Too few African American educators were added during the subsequent decades. Even today, which features a greater presence of African American and other people of color at the administrative level, teachers are overwhelmingly white. More important, there is inadequate understanding from people of middle class backgrounds of all races who are employed by the Minneapolis Pubic Schools to feel in the gut the struggles of people from impoverished conditions and to comprehend the stark challenges that so many students face at home and in the community.
Then there is the problem of teacher quality and approaches to education. Teacher preparation programs are inadequate. There are virtually no teachers who have master’s degrees in legitimate disciplines granted, by way of example, in departments of history, math, biology, and English literature--- rather than in departments of education. There abides too much of the notion that those who preside in classrooms are facilitators for the pursuit of teacher and student interests, rather than expert conveyors of solid knowledge and skills. There are too many DVDs watched out of context, too many unfocused field trips, too many distracting assemblies and pep rallies, too many inadequate substitute teachers, too much turning to the back of the book to answer questions without any understanding of what chapters are actually presenting in the way of subject area knowledge.
Imagine school officials and other concerned people walking the streets of North Minneapolis on a consistent basis and telling people right where they live that, “We care.” Then imagine that we back that rhetoric up with action, immediate and long-term. Imagine young people in love with Shakespeare, August Wilson, the science of the natural world, the beauty of mathematics, and the sheer delight of great paintings and sculpture. Imagine young people so productively occupied in their abundant knowledge and interests that they have no time to shoot each other. Imagine that young people then know that knowledge is not only wonderful for its own sake, but that it also paves the way for success in business, law, medicine, and all endeavors in the world of work to which young people would aspire.
Know then as you know that the sun will come up tomorrow, there would also be a new day dawning in North Minneapolis. And know that you would blessedly have little need for all of that hand-wringing and all of those touching but ineffective tears.
Aug 24, 2011
How to Meet the Needs of Inner City Students
From at least the late 1970s, urban public schools have not met the needs of inner city students. In large measure the reasons for this failure have been two-fold: 1) inadequate preparation by college and university teacher training programs; and 2) the particular problems of inner city life, concerning which too few educational professionals have much experience or understanding. To cope with the two abiding reasons for the failure of the public schools to meet the needs of inner city youth, officials in the public schools need to do two logical things: 1) assume that conventional teacher training has been of little use, providing for enhanced training in subject area and pedagogy; and 2) establish services as necessary, and links to existing services, that address the needs of inner city families.
Teachers emerge from college and university programs of teacher preparation filled with harmful notions about the nature of education. Professors of education convey the idea that education is not primarily the transmission of knowledge from an expert to the student, but rather an investigation that should follow the particular interests of a classroom facilitator and students. This approach has led to the devaluation of inherited knowledge and thus a dearth of information abiding in the brains of high school seniors as they collect a diploma that signifies very little.
For retraining, teachers should be given sabbaticals and scholarships to return to the university to pursue a master’s degree in a legitimate discipline in departments of natural science, math, social science, and the humanities--- not in departments of education. If they previously have been deemed to be effective as to matters of classroom management and relationship with students, they can then to return to the classroom; if not, they should serve a full year under the guidance of a teacher of deep knowledge and pedagogical excellence.
With a knowledgeable and pedagogically adept teacher in every classroom, school officials should then reach out to students and families in ways that address their greatest needs, in school and right where they live. The high percentage of unnecessary employees in public school central offices should be retrained for useful positions that actually meet the needs of students. Many of these employees should be put to use as professional tutors, who join volunteer tutors in a massive effort to pull students who are struggling out of class for intense one on one instruction in areas of math and reading. Effectively implemented, such tutorial efforts would assure grade level performance by all students in both of these key skill areas.
Other central office employees should be retrained and sent out into the community to connect with families of students with attendance issues, or who manifest any of many problems that could stem from home, neighborhood, or community. There should be school representatives who have a presence on the streets of inner city neighborhoods, talking to students and the people who inhabit their social universe about the importance of education, listening and learning about the concerns of inner city people, inquiring into the life circumstances of students, and serving as links to city and state departments of health and social services.
School representatives who go directly onto the streets and into the homes of students in this way would have to be highly adroit in their approach. It would be important that they not come off as arrogant; rather, they would have to manifest solid knowledge in dealing with life concerns of inner city people while demonstrating genuine empathy in addressing their needs. Over time, strong relationships should be formed, so that each student and her or his family have one person employed by or associated with the school district to whom they know they can turn, in full faith and trust, for help with a problem.
If inner city school districts were to offer these sorts of links to the families of students, right where they live, student attendance in cases of extended absence or truancy would greatly improve. If students knew that they had a teacher of excellence in each classroom, where something of subject area substance is learned every day, she or he would have enhanced motivation for attendance and academic diligence. As with the solution to so many problems, the key initiatives for addressing the needs of inner city students can be easily stated, in this case summarized as 1) excellent teaching and 2) effective family outreach. To achieve the necessary level of teaching excellence and family outreach services, economic and human capital will have to undergo major shifts so as to invest in the necessary training of people who interact face to face with each precious young life.
Such a shift will require great courage in the face of pressures from many people heavily invested in maintaining the status quo. But if the shift were made, we could at last meet our imperative to provide excellent education to all people, regardless of their economic standing or life circumstances. In effectively addressing the needs of inner city youth, we would have taken giant steps toward the attainment of democracy.
Teachers emerge from college and university programs of teacher preparation filled with harmful notions about the nature of education. Professors of education convey the idea that education is not primarily the transmission of knowledge from an expert to the student, but rather an investigation that should follow the particular interests of a classroom facilitator and students. This approach has led to the devaluation of inherited knowledge and thus a dearth of information abiding in the brains of high school seniors as they collect a diploma that signifies very little.
For retraining, teachers should be given sabbaticals and scholarships to return to the university to pursue a master’s degree in a legitimate discipline in departments of natural science, math, social science, and the humanities--- not in departments of education. If they previously have been deemed to be effective as to matters of classroom management and relationship with students, they can then to return to the classroom; if not, they should serve a full year under the guidance of a teacher of deep knowledge and pedagogical excellence.
With a knowledgeable and pedagogically adept teacher in every classroom, school officials should then reach out to students and families in ways that address their greatest needs, in school and right where they live. The high percentage of unnecessary employees in public school central offices should be retrained for useful positions that actually meet the needs of students. Many of these employees should be put to use as professional tutors, who join volunteer tutors in a massive effort to pull students who are struggling out of class for intense one on one instruction in areas of math and reading. Effectively implemented, such tutorial efforts would assure grade level performance by all students in both of these key skill areas.
Other central office employees should be retrained and sent out into the community to connect with families of students with attendance issues, or who manifest any of many problems that could stem from home, neighborhood, or community. There should be school representatives who have a presence on the streets of inner city neighborhoods, talking to students and the people who inhabit their social universe about the importance of education, listening and learning about the concerns of inner city people, inquiring into the life circumstances of students, and serving as links to city and state departments of health and social services.
School representatives who go directly onto the streets and into the homes of students in this way would have to be highly adroit in their approach. It would be important that they not come off as arrogant; rather, they would have to manifest solid knowledge in dealing with life concerns of inner city people while demonstrating genuine empathy in addressing their needs. Over time, strong relationships should be formed, so that each student and her or his family have one person employed by or associated with the school district to whom they know they can turn, in full faith and trust, for help with a problem.
If inner city school districts were to offer these sorts of links to the families of students, right where they live, student attendance in cases of extended absence or truancy would greatly improve. If students knew that they had a teacher of excellence in each classroom, where something of subject area substance is learned every day, she or he would have enhanced motivation for attendance and academic diligence. As with the solution to so many problems, the key initiatives for addressing the needs of inner city students can be easily stated, in this case summarized as 1) excellent teaching and 2) effective family outreach. To achieve the necessary level of teaching excellence and family outreach services, economic and human capital will have to undergo major shifts so as to invest in the necessary training of people who interact face to face with each precious young life.
Such a shift will require great courage in the face of pressures from many people heavily invested in maintaining the status quo. But if the shift were made, we could at last meet our imperative to provide excellent education to all people, regardless of their economic standing or life circumstances. In effectively addressing the needs of inner city youth, we would have taken giant steps toward the attainment of democracy.
Aug 23, 2011
The Responsiblity of Teachers to Embrace History
Americans are a poorly educated people, if by educated we mean well-schooled in a liberal arts curriculum that includes knowledge of history, government, geography, economics, natural science, math, literature, and the fine arts. Knowledge of history is abysmal. This has consequences for the American body politic for every current issue that arises. So what about situations that abide in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Israel, or Syria? What historical events gave rise to the prevailing circumstances in those countries? What do we need to recall from history before determining the present course of United States policy in the context of those circumstances?
The reality is that we can recall very little, because we never learned very much. Within urban America, this absence of historical knowledge obscures understanding on the part of teachers who are thrust into situations that they are tempted to see strictly in contemporary terms, on the basis of what is right before their eyes, rather than from the vantage point of a history that always contributes powerfully to the present. Teachers of African American and other inner city young people would have a much more circumspect view of things if they had better knowledge of American history in general and the subset of African American history in particular.
Turmoil that characterizes a good deal of life at the urban core arose from distinct historical circumstances. Consider the following scenario. Most African Americans have roots to people who were brought from West and Central Africa as slaves. Slavery persisted until 1865, when involuntary servitude was made illegal by the 13th Amendment. After the Civil War, the United States embarked upon a hopeful period known as Reconstruction, which lasted until 1877. Reconstruction was an attempt led by people in the Republican Party to bring African Americans full powers of citizenship; in addition to the 13th Amendment, these leaders oversaw passage of the 14th Amendment bestowing the broad rights of citizenship to all adults, and the 15th Amendment bringing the right to vote to all males, regardless of race (the 19th Amendment would do the same for females in 1920).
But in the Compromise of 1877, Republicans backing Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to pull back federal troops from the South, in exchange for contested votes in Florida that otherwise might have gone to Democrat Samuel Tilden in the presidential election of 1876. Thus, there was no mechanism for enforcing rights of citizenship for African Americans in the South. The United States Supreme Court reinforced the misery with its >Plessy v. Ferguson< (1896) decision, opening the way for Black Codes and other measures in a system of segregation known as Jim Crow. Many African Americans could find no work except under crop sharing arrangements with plantation and other agricultural property owners, so that much of the South regressed to a state of life for African Americans that was reminiscent of the days of slavery, with additional nasty features of life such as lynching and roaming mobs such as the Ku Klux Klan.
Under these horrid conditions of life, thousands of African Americans began the Northern Migration from the South to the North, intensifying during a period from 1915 into the Great Depression years of the 1930s. Another great wave of African American migration northward ensued during the 1950s and 1960s, and in the 1970s Midwestern cities such as Des Moines and Minneapolis began to receive in-migrants from such northern cities as Detroit, Chicago, and Gary (Indiana). Migrants to the North had found work conditions better, but they were disappointed to find social and, especially, residential, discrimination that pointed them to certain communities, where they often settled alongside eastern Europeans, southern Europeans, and Jews, people whose residences were also limited under restricted housing covenants.
With the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, there was a notable exit by middle class whites and African Americans from the urban core toward the suburbs. Those left behind were often the poorest community members, who also had to make way for the arrivals from other northern and Midwestern cities who were seeking some relief from worsening conditions of life. They needed, though, the cheap rentals and some sense of cultural continuity offered by the areas of the city settled during the restricted covenant period. But the problems that often attend those mired in conditions of poverty abided and were made worse by the phenomenon of crack cocaine about 1980 and increased gang activity during the 1980s and 1990s.
White teachers dominated the public schools at the urban core. Having been accustomed to communities that had included many poor people with middle class values and aspirations, these teachers now had to confront the problems of people whose life circumstances were more clearly those of an underclass. These teachers were overwhelmed. The school systems in which they worked were overwhelmed. Neither has recovered to this day in 2011. Urban school systems have never responded to the needs of distinctly different populations that came to dominate the inner city by the 1980s.
Until teachers of inner city students get a better grip on the history that has created the conditions of the present, and develop means of addressing those conditions, they will be hard-pressed properly to educate the children for whom they have responsibility.
The reality is that we can recall very little, because we never learned very much. Within urban America, this absence of historical knowledge obscures understanding on the part of teachers who are thrust into situations that they are tempted to see strictly in contemporary terms, on the basis of what is right before their eyes, rather than from the vantage point of a history that always contributes powerfully to the present. Teachers of African American and other inner city young people would have a much more circumspect view of things if they had better knowledge of American history in general and the subset of African American history in particular.
Turmoil that characterizes a good deal of life at the urban core arose from distinct historical circumstances. Consider the following scenario. Most African Americans have roots to people who were brought from West and Central Africa as slaves. Slavery persisted until 1865, when involuntary servitude was made illegal by the 13th Amendment. After the Civil War, the United States embarked upon a hopeful period known as Reconstruction, which lasted until 1877. Reconstruction was an attempt led by people in the Republican Party to bring African Americans full powers of citizenship; in addition to the 13th Amendment, these leaders oversaw passage of the 14th Amendment bestowing the broad rights of citizenship to all adults, and the 15th Amendment bringing the right to vote to all males, regardless of race (the 19th Amendment would do the same for females in 1920).
But in the Compromise of 1877, Republicans backing Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to pull back federal troops from the South, in exchange for contested votes in Florida that otherwise might have gone to Democrat Samuel Tilden in the presidential election of 1876. Thus, there was no mechanism for enforcing rights of citizenship for African Americans in the South. The United States Supreme Court reinforced the misery with its >Plessy v. Ferguson< (1896) decision, opening the way for Black Codes and other measures in a system of segregation known as Jim Crow. Many African Americans could find no work except under crop sharing arrangements with plantation and other agricultural property owners, so that much of the South regressed to a state of life for African Americans that was reminiscent of the days of slavery, with additional nasty features of life such as lynching and roaming mobs such as the Ku Klux Klan.
Under these horrid conditions of life, thousands of African Americans began the Northern Migration from the South to the North, intensifying during a period from 1915 into the Great Depression years of the 1930s. Another great wave of African American migration northward ensued during the 1950s and 1960s, and in the 1970s Midwestern cities such as Des Moines and Minneapolis began to receive in-migrants from such northern cities as Detroit, Chicago, and Gary (Indiana). Migrants to the North had found work conditions better, but they were disappointed to find social and, especially, residential, discrimination that pointed them to certain communities, where they often settled alongside eastern Europeans, southern Europeans, and Jews, people whose residences were also limited under restricted housing covenants.
With the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, there was a notable exit by middle class whites and African Americans from the urban core toward the suburbs. Those left behind were often the poorest community members, who also had to make way for the arrivals from other northern and Midwestern cities who were seeking some relief from worsening conditions of life. They needed, though, the cheap rentals and some sense of cultural continuity offered by the areas of the city settled during the restricted covenant period. But the problems that often attend those mired in conditions of poverty abided and were made worse by the phenomenon of crack cocaine about 1980 and increased gang activity during the 1980s and 1990s.
White teachers dominated the public schools at the urban core. Having been accustomed to communities that had included many poor people with middle class values and aspirations, these teachers now had to confront the problems of people whose life circumstances were more clearly those of an underclass. These teachers were overwhelmed. The school systems in which they worked were overwhelmed. Neither has recovered to this day in 2011. Urban school systems have never responded to the needs of distinctly different populations that came to dominate the inner city by the 1980s.
Until teachers of inner city students get a better grip on the history that has created the conditions of the present, and develop means of addressing those conditions, they will be hard-pressed properly to educate the children for whom they have responsibility.
It takes a Village, But Where Are the Villagers?
Remember Adrianna, a composite character from a previous article, constructed from a type that I have known in a number of cases in the course of my many years teaching inner city young people. She was born with an IQ of 125, tending toward gifted, and she began school all smiles. Throughout her K-2 years she demonstrated such a precociousness that teachers and her mother (Bertha) discussed jumping Adrianna ahead to Grade 4; they decided, instead, that she would participate in the “Gifted and Talented” program while continuing her socialization process with people her own age.
Bertha died when Adrianna was in Grade 5, and this set off a series of events whereby this highly intelligent girl and formerly avid student became a high school dropout, connected to the life of the street, pregnant by age 16. She had sought help from counselors and teachers, but little help had been forthcoming. Her family circumstances had certainly impeded her along a once promising path, but her village (community members and school staff) had also been inadequately responsive.
So we say that it takes a village, but where were the villagers in the case of Adrianna? Where are the villagers in the cases of so many young people of the inner city? Why do so few people have the sense of social responsibility that would be necessary if we were ever truly to live by the “it takes a village” ethos? The answer lies largely in the fact that in the United States we live by the conceit that we are rugged individualists who can pull ourselves up by the bootstraps when we run into trouble. If we need help, we are supposed to look mainly to family for help. We say, in fact, that family is all-important in bringing a child up the right way, and in tending to the needs of the young person while she or he is still at home. We have a social welfare system, but by comparison to the corresponding programs of Europe and scattered other countries of the world, our welfare initiatives are attenuated and offered grudgingly.
Our public school educators fall back on the family responsibility argument when students do not excel academically, or when problems of family and community bear down so hard on the life of a precious young person that staying in school becomes difficult. Especially when confronted with the failure of so many children of color, children from dysfunctional families, and children from economically challenged homes, those who dwell within the education establishment are wont to say, “But the children bring so many problems into the school that are not of the school’s making.”
What would be our response if, when we went to the doctor, she or he told us that, sorry, we had smoked too much, exercised too little, eaten the wrong foods, or just plain been born with an unlucky body? What if attorneys told us that, sorry, we just shouldn’t have committed the crime? If we are all rugged individualists who can depend on ourselves for help, or if our families should have been expected to deter us from medical and legal problems, these arguments would be entirely justified. But we go seeking the help of such professionals confident that they will assist us, without falling back on the argument that they can’t do anything for us until we or our families take more responsibility for our own predicaments.
And so it should be for people who claim to be educational professionals. If students come to school burdened by problems that stem from ineffective families and individual failings, then that is the nature of the particular clients in question. True professionals create programs that truly help the student get back on track. Any teacher worthy of the name will find a way to nurture the challenged student toward grade level performance in math and reading, and will impart a solid knowledge base to that student across a liberal arts curriculum that includes also natural science, history, government, geography, economics, literature, and the fine arts. Because if that student comes to school the victim of a familial or social disease, the educator who effects the cure stops the disease in its tracks, so that that young person goes on to prosper, nurturing in turn her or his own children, ending the cycle of poverty, becoming an asset rather than a burden to the village.
So abandoning the conceit of the rugged individualist and taking up the role of villager in the long run benefits the village itself. When families struggle, conscientious villagers come around. They take over, offering food for the body, the brain, and the soul. They make sure that the children of the family go forward to live happy and useful lives. And in so doing the responsible villager knows that while engaged in an act of altruism, the villager herself or himself receives multiple benefits, as well.
And thus we would all live higher quality lives if more effective public educators were to emerge. Most especially, we would reap benefit upon benefit if each teacher embraced the role of true professional and did everything that she or he needs to do to make sure that each student is the recipient of an excellent education.
Bertha died when Adrianna was in Grade 5, and this set off a series of events whereby this highly intelligent girl and formerly avid student became a high school dropout, connected to the life of the street, pregnant by age 16. She had sought help from counselors and teachers, but little help had been forthcoming. Her family circumstances had certainly impeded her along a once promising path, but her village (community members and school staff) had also been inadequately responsive.
So we say that it takes a village, but where were the villagers in the case of Adrianna? Where are the villagers in the cases of so many young people of the inner city? Why do so few people have the sense of social responsibility that would be necessary if we were ever truly to live by the “it takes a village” ethos? The answer lies largely in the fact that in the United States we live by the conceit that we are rugged individualists who can pull ourselves up by the bootstraps when we run into trouble. If we need help, we are supposed to look mainly to family for help. We say, in fact, that family is all-important in bringing a child up the right way, and in tending to the needs of the young person while she or he is still at home. We have a social welfare system, but by comparison to the corresponding programs of Europe and scattered other countries of the world, our welfare initiatives are attenuated and offered grudgingly.
Our public school educators fall back on the family responsibility argument when students do not excel academically, or when problems of family and community bear down so hard on the life of a precious young person that staying in school becomes difficult. Especially when confronted with the failure of so many children of color, children from dysfunctional families, and children from economically challenged homes, those who dwell within the education establishment are wont to say, “But the children bring so many problems into the school that are not of the school’s making.”
What would be our response if, when we went to the doctor, she or he told us that, sorry, we had smoked too much, exercised too little, eaten the wrong foods, or just plain been born with an unlucky body? What if attorneys told us that, sorry, we just shouldn’t have committed the crime? If we are all rugged individualists who can depend on ourselves for help, or if our families should have been expected to deter us from medical and legal problems, these arguments would be entirely justified. But we go seeking the help of such professionals confident that they will assist us, without falling back on the argument that they can’t do anything for us until we or our families take more responsibility for our own predicaments.
And so it should be for people who claim to be educational professionals. If students come to school burdened by problems that stem from ineffective families and individual failings, then that is the nature of the particular clients in question. True professionals create programs that truly help the student get back on track. Any teacher worthy of the name will find a way to nurture the challenged student toward grade level performance in math and reading, and will impart a solid knowledge base to that student across a liberal arts curriculum that includes also natural science, history, government, geography, economics, literature, and the fine arts. Because if that student comes to school the victim of a familial or social disease, the educator who effects the cure stops the disease in its tracks, so that that young person goes on to prosper, nurturing in turn her or his own children, ending the cycle of poverty, becoming an asset rather than a burden to the village.
So abandoning the conceit of the rugged individualist and taking up the role of villager in the long run benefits the village itself. When families struggle, conscientious villagers come around. They take over, offering food for the body, the brain, and the soul. They make sure that the children of the family go forward to live happy and useful lives. And in so doing the responsible villager knows that while engaged in an act of altruism, the villager herself or himself receives multiple benefits, as well.
And thus we would all live higher quality lives if more effective public educators were to emerge. Most especially, we would reap benefit upon benefit if each teacher embraced the role of true professional and did everything that she or he needs to do to make sure that each student is the recipient of an excellent education.
An Education Disrupted, a Life Wasted
Call her Adrianna. She is a composite character, constructed from a type that I have known in a number of cases in the course of my many years teaching inner city young people. Adrianna was born with an IQ of 125, well above average, tending toward gifted. She began school all smiles, just loving the routine, reveling in her mastery of the alphabet, radiant when she began to put those letters together to make words, triumphant when the words came together as sentences, paragraphs, whole stories, and then the magic world of reading became hers for exploration. And then there were those magic numbers. She learned rapidly, faster than most people in her kindergarten class, to count to ten, then to 100, then by 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s.
And this pattern continued through Grade 2, by which time Adrianna had fully mastered addition and subtraction, long grasped the concept of regrouping, and gone forward to learn from older friends and relatives the fundamentals of multiplication and division. And she was delighting in reading children’s classics such as “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and “From Tiger to Anansi.” Adrianna also ran across the tale, “The People Could Fly,” which had a powerful effect on her and led her to look for books that told about slavery and the fate of her people in the many decades thereafter. There was discussion of perhaps moving Adrianna on to Grade 4, but her mother decided along with the school staff that she would participate in the “Gifted and Talented” program while continuing her socialization process with people her own age.
Adrianna’s mother, Bertha, was a good woman who toiled as a clerk in a discount store for eight hours four days a week. She had a hard time getting fulltime work, so she accessed the social service system for help; food stamps became especially important, and her children all had free lunch through the public schools. Over the years there were times when she had to fall back on welfare (AFDC, then TANF), but she avoided that whenever she could. In addition to Adrianna, Bertha had two other children, a son name Houston, who was a year and a half younger than Adrianna; and a daughter, Patricia, who was two years older. Adrianna and Patricia had the same father; Bertha gave birth to Houston by another man. Neither male had ever established a presence. Houston’s dad looked in for awhile, and Patricia had a faint memory of having seen her dad. But Adrianna had never known her father at all.
Bertha died unexpectedly from complications of diabetes and kidney failure when Adrianna was in Grade 5. Houston’s dad was located, and although he soon moved to another city, Houston’s paternal grandmother took responsibility for the young boy. Adrianna and Patricia moved in with their maternal grandmother, Caroline. Caroline was a sweet woman who loved the girls, but she struggled with emphysema, and her parenting skills had atrophied over the years. She had no control over Patricia, who by this time was in Grade 7, just 13 years old, but in her budding beauty susceptible to the attentions of boys three and four years older. Patricia became pregnant halfway through her Grade 8 year. She stayed in school until she had nearly completed Grade 10, but by then her baby needed more and more of her attention. She got a job at a fast food restaurant, but the work was just part-time and Caroline struggled when she had to tend to the baby alone. Other family members, cousins and aunties, helped, but Patricia found herself staying at home a lot, too.
Meanwhile, Adrianna held on desperately to the solace of school. She continued her precocious academic path through Grade 7, consistently appearing on the “A” honor roll, reading voraciously, and helping others in her class when algebraic equations were first introduced. But in Grade 8, Patricia called upon Adrianna more and more to help take care of the baby. Caroline was sick a lot, in and out of the hospital, so that Adrianna missed a lot of those Grade 7 school days to take care of her grandmother. Adrianna found keeping up with her homework difficult, but she managed to make “B’s” and “C’s,” and she was hoping to get back on a better track as she entered Grade 9 for high school.
But things got worse. Family responsibilities mounted. At school Adrianna tried to get help sorting through the difficulties of her life, but she found counselors occupied with other matters and teachers unable to give her the help that she needed keeping up with geometry and biology. Adrianna never showed up for regular high school classes in Grade 10. She tried an alternative high school for awhile, but then she gave up there, too. She continued to read, finding her way to the plays of August Wilson and the poetry of Maya Angelou, but this was her only intellectual outlet. She also found her way to the street, to the wrong kinds of friends, to reefer and then harder drugs. She was flattered when a young man drew close and seemed to offer pleasure when so much real fun had gone out of life. But all that attention got her was her own baby, at a time when she was only 16 years of age.
Adrianna never finished high school, her family failed her, but if it takes a village, then her village had also failed her--- the people of her community and her school. She still had that 125 IQ, but it was hard to view her circumstances in any other way than in the context of a wasted life.
And this pattern continued through Grade 2, by which time Adrianna had fully mastered addition and subtraction, long grasped the concept of regrouping, and gone forward to learn from older friends and relatives the fundamentals of multiplication and division. And she was delighting in reading children’s classics such as “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and “From Tiger to Anansi.” Adrianna also ran across the tale, “The People Could Fly,” which had a powerful effect on her and led her to look for books that told about slavery and the fate of her people in the many decades thereafter. There was discussion of perhaps moving Adrianna on to Grade 4, but her mother decided along with the school staff that she would participate in the “Gifted and Talented” program while continuing her socialization process with people her own age.
Adrianna’s mother, Bertha, was a good woman who toiled as a clerk in a discount store for eight hours four days a week. She had a hard time getting fulltime work, so she accessed the social service system for help; food stamps became especially important, and her children all had free lunch through the public schools. Over the years there were times when she had to fall back on welfare (AFDC, then TANF), but she avoided that whenever she could. In addition to Adrianna, Bertha had two other children, a son name Houston, who was a year and a half younger than Adrianna; and a daughter, Patricia, who was two years older. Adrianna and Patricia had the same father; Bertha gave birth to Houston by another man. Neither male had ever established a presence. Houston’s dad looked in for awhile, and Patricia had a faint memory of having seen her dad. But Adrianna had never known her father at all.
Bertha died unexpectedly from complications of diabetes and kidney failure when Adrianna was in Grade 5. Houston’s dad was located, and although he soon moved to another city, Houston’s paternal grandmother took responsibility for the young boy. Adrianna and Patricia moved in with their maternal grandmother, Caroline. Caroline was a sweet woman who loved the girls, but she struggled with emphysema, and her parenting skills had atrophied over the years. She had no control over Patricia, who by this time was in Grade 7, just 13 years old, but in her budding beauty susceptible to the attentions of boys three and four years older. Patricia became pregnant halfway through her Grade 8 year. She stayed in school until she had nearly completed Grade 10, but by then her baby needed more and more of her attention. She got a job at a fast food restaurant, but the work was just part-time and Caroline struggled when she had to tend to the baby alone. Other family members, cousins and aunties, helped, but Patricia found herself staying at home a lot, too.
Meanwhile, Adrianna held on desperately to the solace of school. She continued her precocious academic path through Grade 7, consistently appearing on the “A” honor roll, reading voraciously, and helping others in her class when algebraic equations were first introduced. But in Grade 8, Patricia called upon Adrianna more and more to help take care of the baby. Caroline was sick a lot, in and out of the hospital, so that Adrianna missed a lot of those Grade 7 school days to take care of her grandmother. Adrianna found keeping up with her homework difficult, but she managed to make “B’s” and “C’s,” and she was hoping to get back on a better track as she entered Grade 9 for high school.
But things got worse. Family responsibilities mounted. At school Adrianna tried to get help sorting through the difficulties of her life, but she found counselors occupied with other matters and teachers unable to give her the help that she needed keeping up with geometry and biology. Adrianna never showed up for regular high school classes in Grade 10. She tried an alternative high school for awhile, but then she gave up there, too. She continued to read, finding her way to the plays of August Wilson and the poetry of Maya Angelou, but this was her only intellectual outlet. She also found her way to the street, to the wrong kinds of friends, to reefer and then harder drugs. She was flattered when a young man drew close and seemed to offer pleasure when so much real fun had gone out of life. But all that attention got her was her own baby, at a time when she was only 16 years of age.
Adrianna never finished high school, her family failed her, but if it takes a village, then her village had also failed her--- the people of her community and her school. She still had that 125 IQ, but it was hard to view her circumstances in any other way than in the context of a wasted life.
Aug 22, 2011
Preparing Inner City Students for the ACT
As we contemplate getting more students from the inner city ready for college, we must face the difficulties of that task and do what we need to do to overcome them. We need a much better math program in our urban schools. By the end of Grade 3, all students should have mastered the four basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) using multiple digits and correctly opting for the appropriate operation in word problems. This means of course that mastery of multiplication tables 0-9 should take place no later than the Grade 3 year--- an assumption that we lamentably cannot make in the public schools at the present time.
In the course of the Grade 4-7 years, students should master fractions, decimals, percents, ratios, proportions, simple probability, and data presentation with charts, tables and graphs. In Grade 8 students should master algebra I, and by Grade 11 students should have added algebra II, geometry, and at least some trigonometry; it would be helpful by that point for students to have the opportunity to take calculus. By this time, students should have also been given a proper science sequence that culminates with rigorous biology and chemistry courses, and ideally with the opportunity to take physics.
Then there is the matter of preparing students to take those parts of the ACT that require verbal skills (writing and reading). Reading is perhaps the most difficult area for which to prepare students in inner city schools for success on the ACT. To illustrate the fundamental problem, consider the following portion of a passage from a practice ACT, an excerpt from Joseph Conrad’s short story, “Gaspar Ruiz: A Romantic Tale”:
Gaspar Ruiz had an acquiescent soul. But it was now stirred to revolt by his dislike to die the death of a traitor…
Lieutenant Santierra, little more than a boy at the time, and unused as yet to the sanguinary imbecilities of a state of war, had lingered nearby…
“My strength is as nothing against a mounted man with a lasso,” Gaspar Ruiz protested eagerly. “He dragged me behind his horse for half a mile.”
At this excellent reason, the sergeant only laughed contemptuously. The young officer hurried away after the Commandante. Presently, the adjutant of the castle came by. He was a truculent, raw-boned man in a ragged uniform. His spluttering voice issued out of a flat yellow face…”Drive the scoundrels in there.”
My experience has been that just this portion, representing only about 25% of the passage from Conrad’s work included in the ACT practice reading exam, is replete with vocabulary items that most inner city high school students do not know. Very often words that middle class people might take for granted are not readily
understood by youth from challenged urban environments. Thus, the words,
"revolt," "lieutenant," "mounted," "lasso," "sergeant," "Commandante,"
"spluttering," and "scoundrels" are not to be assumed as fully understood by high school students of the inner city. Then there are those words that are definitely
so problematic as to distract or confuse even the best contextual readers among students from challenged inner city communities: "acquiescent," "sanguinary,"
"imbecilities," "contemptuously," "adjutant", and "truculent." This means that there are a total of 13 words in this passage alone that might cause some difficulty, with at least 6 of these likely to cause a serious impediment to comprehension.
Some of this is undoubtedly true for students in public schools of the United States, whatever their socioeconomic descriptors. But increasingly middle class and upper class families hire private tutors who train students specifically for enhanced performance on the ACT. This would include explicit vocabulary instruction, reading comprehension strategies, and test-taking skills. Students from challenged inner city environments seldom get this kind of training.
The matter of vocabulary presents a particularly tangible way of getting at the disparities in equal educational opportunity that exist according to social class and community of residence. The inner city environment, often dominated by ebonics, in fact features a lively, metaphorical, emotionally expressive way of communication. This manner of communication can rise to heights of brilliant poetry. But it is not the vernacular of the middle class culture that dominates employment environments, whether in business, academia, or the professions. And it is not the vocabulary emphasized on the ACT, nor should it be. The ACT serves as an accurate indicator of success in colleges and universities, which in turn offer preparation for work, citizenship, and culture as dominated in the general society by the middle and upper classes.
If we wish to make of our society a genuine democracy, we must recognize the responsibility that educators have in giving students a good, well-rounded liberal arts education throughout the K-12 years. All students, whatever their socioeconomic descriptors, deserve an education that imparts to them the knowledge base to succeed on the ACT, including the level of vocabulary that students must master to succeed on that exam and in the classrooms of colleges and universities.
In the course of the Grade 4-7 years, students should master fractions, decimals, percents, ratios, proportions, simple probability, and data presentation with charts, tables and graphs. In Grade 8 students should master algebra I, and by Grade 11 students should have added algebra II, geometry, and at least some trigonometry; it would be helpful by that point for students to have the opportunity to take calculus. By this time, students should have also been given a proper science sequence that culminates with rigorous biology and chemistry courses, and ideally with the opportunity to take physics.
Then there is the matter of preparing students to take those parts of the ACT that require verbal skills (writing and reading). Reading is perhaps the most difficult area for which to prepare students in inner city schools for success on the ACT. To illustrate the fundamental problem, consider the following portion of a passage from a practice ACT, an excerpt from Joseph Conrad’s short story, “Gaspar Ruiz: A Romantic Tale”:
Gaspar Ruiz had an acquiescent soul. But it was now stirred to revolt by his dislike to die the death of a traitor…
Lieutenant Santierra, little more than a boy at the time, and unused as yet to the sanguinary imbecilities of a state of war, had lingered nearby…
“My strength is as nothing against a mounted man with a lasso,” Gaspar Ruiz protested eagerly. “He dragged me behind his horse for half a mile.”
At this excellent reason, the sergeant only laughed contemptuously. The young officer hurried away after the Commandante. Presently, the adjutant of the castle came by. He was a truculent, raw-boned man in a ragged uniform. His spluttering voice issued out of a flat yellow face…”Drive the scoundrels in there.”
My experience has been that just this portion, representing only about 25% of the passage from Conrad’s work included in the ACT practice reading exam, is replete with vocabulary items that most inner city high school students do not know. Very often words that middle class people might take for granted are not readily
understood by youth from challenged urban environments. Thus, the words,
"revolt," "lieutenant," "mounted," "lasso," "sergeant," "Commandante,"
"spluttering," and "scoundrels" are not to be assumed as fully understood by high school students of the inner city. Then there are those words that are definitely
so problematic as to distract or confuse even the best contextual readers among students from challenged inner city communities: "acquiescent," "sanguinary,"
"imbecilities," "contemptuously," "adjutant", and "truculent." This means that there are a total of 13 words in this passage alone that might cause some difficulty, with at least 6 of these likely to cause a serious impediment to comprehension.
Some of this is undoubtedly true for students in public schools of the United States, whatever their socioeconomic descriptors. But increasingly middle class and upper class families hire private tutors who train students specifically for enhanced performance on the ACT. This would include explicit vocabulary instruction, reading comprehension strategies, and test-taking skills. Students from challenged inner city environments seldom get this kind of training.
The matter of vocabulary presents a particularly tangible way of getting at the disparities in equal educational opportunity that exist according to social class and community of residence. The inner city environment, often dominated by ebonics, in fact features a lively, metaphorical, emotionally expressive way of communication. This manner of communication can rise to heights of brilliant poetry. But it is not the vernacular of the middle class culture that dominates employment environments, whether in business, academia, or the professions. And it is not the vocabulary emphasized on the ACT, nor should it be. The ACT serves as an accurate indicator of success in colleges and universities, which in turn offer preparation for work, citizenship, and culture as dominated in the general society by the middle and upper classes.
If we wish to make of our society a genuine democracy, we must recognize the responsibility that educators have in giving students a good, well-rounded liberal arts education throughout the K-12 years. All students, whatever their socioeconomic descriptors, deserve an education that imparts to them the knowledge base to succeed on the ACT, including the level of vocabulary that students must master to succeed on that exam and in the classrooms of colleges and universities.
Young Shakespeareans of North Minneapolis
On the North Side of Minneapolis there assembled this summer a foursome of students whose life descriptors would not typically make one think of the Shakespearean enthusiast. All will be Grade 9 students during academic year 2011-2012.
There is, for example, Raul. Raul enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative late in his Grade 6 year. At the time he was failing math and generally floundering in his subjects at school. His family is from Ecuador and speaks Spanish at home. Raul came immediately under my supervision in a minimum of one two-hour academic session every week, moving through a logically sequenced program of skill development in math and reading. Within two months Raul had pulled his math grade up to a “C-,” was doing better in each subject at school, and was manifesting no anger management problems. By his Grade 8 year, Raul was consistently making the “B” honor roll and in math was making “B’s” and eventually “A’s.” In the meantime, on the way to and from each weekly session (I provide transportation to all of my students) Raul was continuing to ask me questions aplenty in his insatiable curiosity and intense pursuit of knowledge. One day a question about Shakespeare resulted in my guiding him toward >Hamlet<, >King Lear<, and >A Midsummer Night’s Dream<; before academic year’s end he had read the two tragedies in their entire Elizabethan versions and awaited a chance that would soon come with the comedy.
Consider also the case of Maria, another native Spanish speaker, in this case from El Salvador. Maria had enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative as a Grade 5 student during 2007-2008. At the time she was functioning two grade levels below that of school enrollment in math, two years below standard in reading. By her Grade 7 year, Maria had pulled fully up to grade level in both key skill areas and had embarked on a college track course of study. She responded with alacrity to a wide ranging program in the liberal arts, always listening with great intensity to my comments on the worlds of history, government, literature, natural science, and the fine arts. Shakespeare also came into her consciousness, and she began aggressive college-level vocabulary instruction in anticipation of the day when she would take on something as challenging as the Bard.
Then there is Samantha, a native of Nigeria whose first language is Yoruba. She was a respectful but rather indifferent student when she first enrolled in the Initiative during her Grade 5 year of 2007-2008. She was functioning one grade level below that of school enrollment in both math and reading. By academic year’s end, Samantha was functioning at grade level in both key skill areas. By Grade 7 Samantha had reached a take-off point of high ambition, moving through advanced vocabulary lists and reading material, exploring diverse material from across the liberal arts curriculum. Her ears also perked up when our conversation turned to Shakespeare; she had relatives studying in Great Britain, and the Bard’s name rang a bell.
And there is Marianna, the most remarkable of all of these fabulous students. She began studying in the New Salem Educational Initiative when she was in Grade 3, floundering in school and failing to show grade level results in either math or reading. By her Grade 5 year she was securely at grade level, taking an elevated interest in all subjects, including classical literature; she began at that point to read selections from Shakespearean plays such as >Romeo and Juliet<. With her longtime tenure in the Initiative, by Grade 6 Marianna was moving well along in a course of college preparatory study of the sort one would expect of upper middle class children at private schools
But none of these students is even middle class. They all come from impoverished families, including two cases of serious familial dysfunction. But they all responded to an aggressive program of skill development, enthusiastic teaching, ambitious academic goals, and the close relationship that their teacher in the Initiative was forging with their families. During this summer 2011-2012, I led these students in a reading of >A Midsummer Night’s Dream<. We discussed every verbal nuance, the many references to classical mythology, and the chief thematic elements. Then we traveled to the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona, Minnesota, to see a splendid performance of the play.
At the play, these inner city students laughed as hard as if they were seeing a teen gross-out comedy. They were more attentive than many of the adults in attendance. They talked excitedly on our way back to Minneapolis and expressed a strong desire to return the following summer to see >Hamlet< and >Two Gentlemen of Verona<. These Shakespeareans of inner city Minneapolis should remind us all that students of any economic background and any life circumstance can succeed when we treat them seriously as students, provide the instruction that underscores that seriousness, and establish elevated goals along a path that they traverse in logical sequence toward the academic summit.
There is, for example, Raul. Raul enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative late in his Grade 6 year. At the time he was failing math and generally floundering in his subjects at school. His family is from Ecuador and speaks Spanish at home. Raul came immediately under my supervision in a minimum of one two-hour academic session every week, moving through a logically sequenced program of skill development in math and reading. Within two months Raul had pulled his math grade up to a “C-,” was doing better in each subject at school, and was manifesting no anger management problems. By his Grade 8 year, Raul was consistently making the “B” honor roll and in math was making “B’s” and eventually “A’s.” In the meantime, on the way to and from each weekly session (I provide transportation to all of my students) Raul was continuing to ask me questions aplenty in his insatiable curiosity and intense pursuit of knowledge. One day a question about Shakespeare resulted in my guiding him toward >Hamlet<, >King Lear<, and >A Midsummer Night’s Dream<; before academic year’s end he had read the two tragedies in their entire Elizabethan versions and awaited a chance that would soon come with the comedy.
Consider also the case of Maria, another native Spanish speaker, in this case from El Salvador. Maria had enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative as a Grade 5 student during 2007-2008. At the time she was functioning two grade levels below that of school enrollment in math, two years below standard in reading. By her Grade 7 year, Maria had pulled fully up to grade level in both key skill areas and had embarked on a college track course of study. She responded with alacrity to a wide ranging program in the liberal arts, always listening with great intensity to my comments on the worlds of history, government, literature, natural science, and the fine arts. Shakespeare also came into her consciousness, and she began aggressive college-level vocabulary instruction in anticipation of the day when she would take on something as challenging as the Bard.
Then there is Samantha, a native of Nigeria whose first language is Yoruba. She was a respectful but rather indifferent student when she first enrolled in the Initiative during her Grade 5 year of 2007-2008. She was functioning one grade level below that of school enrollment in both math and reading. By academic year’s end, Samantha was functioning at grade level in both key skill areas. By Grade 7 Samantha had reached a take-off point of high ambition, moving through advanced vocabulary lists and reading material, exploring diverse material from across the liberal arts curriculum. Her ears also perked up when our conversation turned to Shakespeare; she had relatives studying in Great Britain, and the Bard’s name rang a bell.
And there is Marianna, the most remarkable of all of these fabulous students. She began studying in the New Salem Educational Initiative when she was in Grade 3, floundering in school and failing to show grade level results in either math or reading. By her Grade 5 year she was securely at grade level, taking an elevated interest in all subjects, including classical literature; she began at that point to read selections from Shakespearean plays such as >Romeo and Juliet<. With her longtime tenure in the Initiative, by Grade 6 Marianna was moving well along in a course of college preparatory study of the sort one would expect of upper middle class children at private schools
But none of these students is even middle class. They all come from impoverished families, including two cases of serious familial dysfunction. But they all responded to an aggressive program of skill development, enthusiastic teaching, ambitious academic goals, and the close relationship that their teacher in the Initiative was forging with their families. During this summer 2011-2012, I led these students in a reading of >A Midsummer Night’s Dream<. We discussed every verbal nuance, the many references to classical mythology, and the chief thematic elements. Then we traveled to the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona, Minnesota, to see a splendid performance of the play.
At the play, these inner city students laughed as hard as if they were seeing a teen gross-out comedy. They were more attentive than many of the adults in attendance. They talked excitedly on our way back to Minneapolis and expressed a strong desire to return the following summer to see >Hamlet< and >Two Gentlemen of Verona<. These Shakespeareans of inner city Minneapolis should remind us all that students of any economic background and any life circumstance can succeed when we treat them seriously as students, provide the instruction that underscores that seriousness, and establish elevated goals along a path that they traverse in logical sequence toward the academic summit.
Seizing the Opportunity of the K-2 Years
I call her Snodgrass, because it’s one of the silly things I do that gets her attention and makes her laugh. She has a more conventional name, of course, but for data privacy reasons we will call her Marcia in this article.
Marcia will be going into Grade 2 for the 2011-2012 academic year. She began studying with me as director and teacher of the New Salem Educational Initiative when she was in Grade K, continuing for a second year as a Grade 1 student during 2010-2011. Thus, this will be her third academic year of enrollment in the New Salem Educational Initiative. The New Salem Educational Initiative offers Marcia (and its 104 other students) the opportunity to attend weekly two-hour sessions of intense instruction in math, reading, and a broad course of study in the liberal arts. Students all come from impoverished homes and in school have fallen well below grade level. By the end of their first year of attendance, they have usually achieved grade level performance and by the end of their second year they are generally ready to proceed to an advanced track of college preparatory study.
Moving students from backgrounds of impoverishment and familial dysfunction to grade level performance and above takes a great deal of highly focused attention on the part of the student, and a great deal of adroit effort on the part of the teacher. The goal is attainable for all students. The task becomes much easier when we can get a student into the program at the young age at which Marcia entered. At this stage, students are wide open in their receptivity to information of all sorts, and they crave adult approval. In Marcia’s case, she had observed three other family members go off each week in transport to the New Salem Educational Initiative. She was primed and ready to have the rewarding experience that all of these students had enjoyed. Every Saturday morning she piled into my car (transportation is provided for all students) with a big smile, asking, “Hey, Gary, what are we going to learn today?”
In response, I would tell her, “Oh, we’re going to read a poem about ‘swinging up in the air so blue,’ then we’re going to read about Tigger coming to a forest for breakfast, then I’d like you to read about how Native Americans crossed a land bridge thousands of years ago. How does that sound to you?”
“Great!” she would say.
“And then we’re going to review carrying and borrowing--- you, know, regrouping--- in addition and subtraction. Okay?”
“Ooo, yea, that’s fun!” would be Marcia’s reply.
Midway through her Grade 1 year, Marcia had read an array of classical children’s literature, and she had fully mastered all math skills appropriate to her grade level. Then she had moved on in both reading and math material to tasks typical of the Grade 2 student. This summer I have continued to work with her, moving forward with instruction in multiplication. As she enters Grade 2, Marcia has fully mastered her multiplication tables for the factors 0 through 9, well ahead of the pace that holds this as a goal for Grade 3 students. Overhearing her older relatives working on advanced college preparatory items, she has even startled us all by picking up the proper definitions of words such as “jocular,” “quintessential,” and “malapropism.”
Herein we see the opportunity for teachers of students at the K-2 level. Students are eager for substantive education. They want to please adults, and they respond readily to a personality that conveys a love of children and willingness to be silly and funny while offering solid subject area material in natural science, history, literature, the fine arts, and math. These are years in which teachers should rush in and be sure and provide this education before devoting too much time to classroom parties, “free time,” DVDs, unfocused field trips, and school assemblies. Whatever value these latter sorts of activities may have, they should be far back in the list of priorities, relegated to unnecessary options paling in significance to the responsibility of offering a solid academic course of instruction to children when they are most receptive to information coming from adults.
If students come out of Grade 2 in full control of grade level skills in math and reading, with the latter put to service in an array of subject area material in natural science, history, and literature, they are on course for success. They yearn for the knowledge, and they deserve the success. Teachers of K-2 students should therefore be especially mindful of the responsibility that they bear. There is every reason to anticipate future academic and therefore life success for the students whom they properly prepare, even as there is the distinct possibility for disaster in the futures of students for whom a magnificent opportunity is squandered.
Marcia will be going into Grade 2 for the 2011-2012 academic year. She began studying with me as director and teacher of the New Salem Educational Initiative when she was in Grade K, continuing for a second year as a Grade 1 student during 2010-2011. Thus, this will be her third academic year of enrollment in the New Salem Educational Initiative. The New Salem Educational Initiative offers Marcia (and its 104 other students) the opportunity to attend weekly two-hour sessions of intense instruction in math, reading, and a broad course of study in the liberal arts. Students all come from impoverished homes and in school have fallen well below grade level. By the end of their first year of attendance, they have usually achieved grade level performance and by the end of their second year they are generally ready to proceed to an advanced track of college preparatory study.
Moving students from backgrounds of impoverishment and familial dysfunction to grade level performance and above takes a great deal of highly focused attention on the part of the student, and a great deal of adroit effort on the part of the teacher. The goal is attainable for all students. The task becomes much easier when we can get a student into the program at the young age at which Marcia entered. At this stage, students are wide open in their receptivity to information of all sorts, and they crave adult approval. In Marcia’s case, she had observed three other family members go off each week in transport to the New Salem Educational Initiative. She was primed and ready to have the rewarding experience that all of these students had enjoyed. Every Saturday morning she piled into my car (transportation is provided for all students) with a big smile, asking, “Hey, Gary, what are we going to learn today?”
In response, I would tell her, “Oh, we’re going to read a poem about ‘swinging up in the air so blue,’ then we’re going to read about Tigger coming to a forest for breakfast, then I’d like you to read about how Native Americans crossed a land bridge thousands of years ago. How does that sound to you?”
“Great!” she would say.
“And then we’re going to review carrying and borrowing--- you, know, regrouping--- in addition and subtraction. Okay?”
“Ooo, yea, that’s fun!” would be Marcia’s reply.
Midway through her Grade 1 year, Marcia had read an array of classical children’s literature, and she had fully mastered all math skills appropriate to her grade level. Then she had moved on in both reading and math material to tasks typical of the Grade 2 student. This summer I have continued to work with her, moving forward with instruction in multiplication. As she enters Grade 2, Marcia has fully mastered her multiplication tables for the factors 0 through 9, well ahead of the pace that holds this as a goal for Grade 3 students. Overhearing her older relatives working on advanced college preparatory items, she has even startled us all by picking up the proper definitions of words such as “jocular,” “quintessential,” and “malapropism.”
Herein we see the opportunity for teachers of students at the K-2 level. Students are eager for substantive education. They want to please adults, and they respond readily to a personality that conveys a love of children and willingness to be silly and funny while offering solid subject area material in natural science, history, literature, the fine arts, and math. These are years in which teachers should rush in and be sure and provide this education before devoting too much time to classroom parties, “free time,” DVDs, unfocused field trips, and school assemblies. Whatever value these latter sorts of activities may have, they should be far back in the list of priorities, relegated to unnecessary options paling in significance to the responsibility of offering a solid academic course of instruction to children when they are most receptive to information coming from adults.
If students come out of Grade 2 in full control of grade level skills in math and reading, with the latter put to service in an array of subject area material in natural science, history, and literature, they are on course for success. They yearn for the knowledge, and they deserve the success. Teachers of K-2 students should therefore be especially mindful of the responsibility that they bear. There is every reason to anticipate future academic and therefore life success for the students whom they properly prepare, even as there is the distinct possibility for disaster in the futures of students for whom a magnificent opportunity is squandered.
Aug 19, 2011
In Praise of No Child Left Behind
As we watch No Child Left Behind blow away in the political winds, we should do so with shame and lamentation. This has been the most hopeful piece of legislation in the history of American education, drifting away on adverse political currents not because it failed but because it succeeded so splendidly.
Let us examine the facts regarding, and counter all of the specious charges levied against, No Child Left Behind. The legislation was proposed by George W. Bush in June 2001 and signed into law in January 2002 after coauthors in the House of Representatives (Democrat George Miller and Republican John Boehner) and the United States Senate (Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican Judd Gregg) oversaw overwhelming approval (384-45 in the House, 91-8 in the Senate). The law is the prevailing version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that first went into effect during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson in 1965. The essentials of the law are the requirements that data on student progress must be disaggregated to indicate performance of students according to ethnicity, gender, economic status, national origin, and special needs. If students in each category do not meet certain minimum academic standards, a school is put on notice that it is not making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).
If a school is not making AYP, it gets a year to improve its program. For each school that for the second year in a row does not make AYP, a school district must offer the opportunity for students to move to another school. A third year of failure to make AYP dictates that free tutoring must be offered. The fourth year of failure to make AYP requires that free tutoring must continue, and the school is notified that it will face restructuring if student performance does not improve. The fifth year of not making AYP results in restructuring or closing the school, with a restructuring plan or closing occurring in the sixth year.
No Child Left Behind grew out of a movement on the part of many reformers for standards-based education, whereby students at each grade level are tested to determine who is and who is not functioning at grade level, particularly in math and reading. Under the pressures exerted by No Child Left Behind, a few schools have succeeded in improving, but most have not. The latter situation is not surprising, given the mediocrity of so many teachers and the lack of a coherent curriculum throughout the K-12 years. All of this predictably makes teachers’ unions and other entities of the education establishment extremely uncomfortable, which is how they should feel when faced with public recognition of their failure to offer an education to all students worthy of a democracy.
One by one, we can dismiss the specious assertions regarding No Child Left Behind that have emanated from the education establishment:
Assertion #1: The law has brought too much emphasis on standardized testing.
The Reality: Standardized tests represent the most objective, reliable means of fairly judging a particular student’s knowledge or skill base. If teachers “teach to the test,” that is fine, because a properly constructed test features the key material to be learned at a given grade level, and teaching to the test assures that substantive academic content is offered at many schools that year after year have presented little academic content at all.
Assertion #2: No Child Left Behind has imposed unfunded mandates and federal intrusion into public school systems, which have thereby lost local control.
The Reality: In fact, the sort of training that teachers and administrators receive from education professors is highly similar across the country, so that local control has always been an illusion. The education establishment functions identically from one supposedly independent school system to another. Many of the mandates brought by No Child Left Behind are actually well-funded and more generous than they should be. Why should any additional funding really be necessary when the basic requirement is to provide grade level appropriate education to all students?
Assertion #3: Too much focus on reading and math results in a “narrowing of the curriculum.”
The Reality: In fact, there is little in the way of a curriculum at the K-5 level; teachers are generally free to teach what they want, and they generally do not teach much at all in history, government, economics, natural science, literature, and the fine arts. Educators at the middle school level devalue subject area content in favor of student socialization skills. Subject area courses at the typical high school are frequently poorly taught, but not narrowed by No Child Left Behind.
Assertion #4: The sanctions against schools imposed by No Child Left Behind are too punitive, penalizing even many good schools because a few students lag behind.
The Reality: In fact, the standards set forth by No Child Left Behind are applied to all schools fairly, holding them accountable for properly educating students of every economic and ethnic category. This is precisely what disaggregation of the data is supposed to do; any school that fails to educate students of all descriptors is not a good school, whatever its previous reputation.
No Child Left Behind is in political trouble because it is the most serious challenge in United States history to the failed K-12 schools run by the education establishment. That establishment is backed by powerful lobbies, and many politicians receive hefty campaign contributions by the education establishment that these lobbies represent.
So understand this: No Child Left Behind has been a splendid success in shining a bright spotlight on the shortcomings of K-12 schools in the United States. It is the education establishment that has failed in the challenge presented by No Child Left Behind, a challenge simply to bring all students in K-12 school systems throughout the United States up to grade level standards in math and reading. Such standards must be met, by all students, from the richest to the poorest of the poor, in any country that aspires to genuine democracy.
Let us examine the facts regarding, and counter all of the specious charges levied against, No Child Left Behind. The legislation was proposed by George W. Bush in June 2001 and signed into law in January 2002 after coauthors in the House of Representatives (Democrat George Miller and Republican John Boehner) and the United States Senate (Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican Judd Gregg) oversaw overwhelming approval (384-45 in the House, 91-8 in the Senate). The law is the prevailing version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that first went into effect during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson in 1965. The essentials of the law are the requirements that data on student progress must be disaggregated to indicate performance of students according to ethnicity, gender, economic status, national origin, and special needs. If students in each category do not meet certain minimum academic standards, a school is put on notice that it is not making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).
If a school is not making AYP, it gets a year to improve its program. For each school that for the second year in a row does not make AYP, a school district must offer the opportunity for students to move to another school. A third year of failure to make AYP dictates that free tutoring must be offered. The fourth year of failure to make AYP requires that free tutoring must continue, and the school is notified that it will face restructuring if student performance does not improve. The fifth year of not making AYP results in restructuring or closing the school, with a restructuring plan or closing occurring in the sixth year.
No Child Left Behind grew out of a movement on the part of many reformers for standards-based education, whereby students at each grade level are tested to determine who is and who is not functioning at grade level, particularly in math and reading. Under the pressures exerted by No Child Left Behind, a few schools have succeeded in improving, but most have not. The latter situation is not surprising, given the mediocrity of so many teachers and the lack of a coherent curriculum throughout the K-12 years. All of this predictably makes teachers’ unions and other entities of the education establishment extremely uncomfortable, which is how they should feel when faced with public recognition of their failure to offer an education to all students worthy of a democracy.
One by one, we can dismiss the specious assertions regarding No Child Left Behind that have emanated from the education establishment:
Assertion #1: The law has brought too much emphasis on standardized testing.
The Reality: Standardized tests represent the most objective, reliable means of fairly judging a particular student’s knowledge or skill base. If teachers “teach to the test,” that is fine, because a properly constructed test features the key material to be learned at a given grade level, and teaching to the test assures that substantive academic content is offered at many schools that year after year have presented little academic content at all.
Assertion #2: No Child Left Behind has imposed unfunded mandates and federal intrusion into public school systems, which have thereby lost local control.
The Reality: In fact, the sort of training that teachers and administrators receive from education professors is highly similar across the country, so that local control has always been an illusion. The education establishment functions identically from one supposedly independent school system to another. Many of the mandates brought by No Child Left Behind are actually well-funded and more generous than they should be. Why should any additional funding really be necessary when the basic requirement is to provide grade level appropriate education to all students?
Assertion #3: Too much focus on reading and math results in a “narrowing of the curriculum.”
The Reality: In fact, there is little in the way of a curriculum at the K-5 level; teachers are generally free to teach what they want, and they generally do not teach much at all in history, government, economics, natural science, literature, and the fine arts. Educators at the middle school level devalue subject area content in favor of student socialization skills. Subject area courses at the typical high school are frequently poorly taught, but not narrowed by No Child Left Behind.
Assertion #4: The sanctions against schools imposed by No Child Left Behind are too punitive, penalizing even many good schools because a few students lag behind.
The Reality: In fact, the standards set forth by No Child Left Behind are applied to all schools fairly, holding them accountable for properly educating students of every economic and ethnic category. This is precisely what disaggregation of the data is supposed to do; any school that fails to educate students of all descriptors is not a good school, whatever its previous reputation.
No Child Left Behind is in political trouble because it is the most serious challenge in United States history to the failed K-12 schools run by the education establishment. That establishment is backed by powerful lobbies, and many politicians receive hefty campaign contributions by the education establishment that these lobbies represent.
So understand this: No Child Left Behind has been a splendid success in shining a bright spotlight on the shortcomings of K-12 schools in the United States. It is the education establishment that has failed in the challenge presented by No Child Left Behind, a challenge simply to bring all students in K-12 school systems throughout the United States up to grade level standards in math and reading. Such standards must be met, by all students, from the richest to the poorest of the poor, in any country that aspires to genuine democracy.
Aug 11, 2011
Treating Each Life as Precious and the Commitment as Permanent
Among the features of the New Salem Educational Initiative that secure the success of students enrolled in the program, two essential features are given emphasis in this article: 1) We treat each life as precious. 2) We signal from the beginning that the commitment to each precious young life is forever.
Any teacher worthy of the name embraces each student as if she or he is a rare treasure to be handled carefully and polished to its finest sheen. Each student is intelligent, each student is capable of grade level performance, and each student is then capable of rising above grade level performance to embark securely on a college-bound track. This is true for the Grade K (kindergarten) student who enters into a schedule of weekly two-hour academic sessions and thus has the benefit of the academically ambitious program of the New Salem Educational Initiative from the very beginning. It is also true of the Grade 7 student who comes to me functioning at, say, a Grade 4 math level and a Grade 3 reading level. Even with those severe deficits, the ascent to grade level is typically accomplished within an academic year or two, at which point there is still time to get on the track bound for success in college. If a student enters the program of the New Salem Educational Initiative at Grade 11 or 12, the task becomes much more difficult, but the challenge is still embraced. Great emphasis is placed on an aggressive program of skill remediation and intense training to pass the required high school Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments in writing, reading, and math. It is typically realistically too late to train that student for an acceptable performance on the ACT or SAT for four-year college matriculation; but, with continued support from the New Salem Educational Initiative, attendance for such a student at a community college is possible, and with two years of continued academic training achieved, enrollment in a good four-year college becomes a viable endeavor.
So each student's academic situation is different upon entrance into the New Slaedm Educational Initiative. This is true for the student's life circumstances, as well as her or his academic skills. The opportunity presents itself in each case to treat this precious young life as unique, worthy, something to be cherished. For indeed each life is a treasure that during childhood and adolescence is polished to a bright shine--- or effectively cast aside, forever looking dull and unappreciated. So any educator worthy of the name embraces the peculiar circumstances prevailing in the life of this young person, brimming with potential if the full array of talents are properly tapped. Each life matters. Each person deserves her or his chance for success in life. Education is critical to life success. In a democracy, therefore, full commitment to each K-12 student must be made.
And, consistent with the second feature of the New Salem Educational Initiative given emphasis today, the commitment must be forever. Eight years of the program's existence have now yielded several students who have graduated from the weekly two-hour small group program and are or will soon be matriculating at colleges and universities. I am in touch with them all, as I always told them that I would be. I have worked with each of these students in the summer to bring their skills to ever higher levels, as I always told them that I would do. These particular students all enrolled at relatively late stages in their K-12 experience, so getting them ready for success in college has required intense effort. But they are all on course to move forward successfully in their college programs, and all have much more magnified opportunities in life because of a commitment that 1) treated each life as unique and precious; and 2) was made in the context of permanence.
As a rule, children who enroll in the New Salem Educational Initiative as elementary (K-5) students have embarked on a program whereby attendance at an Ivy League or equivalent university is possible. Students who enroll at the middle school (6-8) level or the Grade 9 and 10 levels of high school have viable chances of attending good colleges and universities. Students who enroll at the Grade 11 or 12 level, assuming the typical academic deficits of Minneapolis Public Schools students from impoverished or familial dysfunctional backgrounds, have viable chances through intense skill remediation to attend two-year colleges with a vision of going on to earn a bachelor's degree at a four-year college or university.
In each case, the life prospects of the student has been enhanced because we
1)treated the young person as a precious being worth of great care and love; and
2) because the caring and love have been given throughout the relationship, enduring to the present and committed permanently into the future. As teachers fulfilling our mission in a democracy this is our obligation and our great privilege.
Any teacher worthy of the name embraces each student as if she or he is a rare treasure to be handled carefully and polished to its finest sheen. Each student is intelligent, each student is capable of grade level performance, and each student is then capable of rising above grade level performance to embark securely on a college-bound track. This is true for the Grade K (kindergarten) student who enters into a schedule of weekly two-hour academic sessions and thus has the benefit of the academically ambitious program of the New Salem Educational Initiative from the very beginning. It is also true of the Grade 7 student who comes to me functioning at, say, a Grade 4 math level and a Grade 3 reading level. Even with those severe deficits, the ascent to grade level is typically accomplished within an academic year or two, at which point there is still time to get on the track bound for success in college. If a student enters the program of the New Salem Educational Initiative at Grade 11 or 12, the task becomes much more difficult, but the challenge is still embraced. Great emphasis is placed on an aggressive program of skill remediation and intense training to pass the required high school Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments in writing, reading, and math. It is typically realistically too late to train that student for an acceptable performance on the ACT or SAT for four-year college matriculation; but, with continued support from the New Salem Educational Initiative, attendance for such a student at a community college is possible, and with two years of continued academic training achieved, enrollment in a good four-year college becomes a viable endeavor.
So each student's academic situation is different upon entrance into the New Slaedm Educational Initiative. This is true for the student's life circumstances, as well as her or his academic skills. The opportunity presents itself in each case to treat this precious young life as unique, worthy, something to be cherished. For indeed each life is a treasure that during childhood and adolescence is polished to a bright shine--- or effectively cast aside, forever looking dull and unappreciated. So any educator worthy of the name embraces the peculiar circumstances prevailing in the life of this young person, brimming with potential if the full array of talents are properly tapped. Each life matters. Each person deserves her or his chance for success in life. Education is critical to life success. In a democracy, therefore, full commitment to each K-12 student must be made.
And, consistent with the second feature of the New Salem Educational Initiative given emphasis today, the commitment must be forever. Eight years of the program's existence have now yielded several students who have graduated from the weekly two-hour small group program and are or will soon be matriculating at colleges and universities. I am in touch with them all, as I always told them that I would be. I have worked with each of these students in the summer to bring their skills to ever higher levels, as I always told them that I would do. These particular students all enrolled at relatively late stages in their K-12 experience, so getting them ready for success in college has required intense effort. But they are all on course to move forward successfully in their college programs, and all have much more magnified opportunities in life because of a commitment that 1) treated each life as unique and precious; and 2) was made in the context of permanence.
As a rule, children who enroll in the New Salem Educational Initiative as elementary (K-5) students have embarked on a program whereby attendance at an Ivy League or equivalent university is possible. Students who enroll at the middle school (6-8) level or the Grade 9 and 10 levels of high school have viable chances of attending good colleges and universities. Students who enroll at the Grade 11 or 12 level, assuming the typical academic deficits of Minneapolis Public Schools students from impoverished or familial dysfunctional backgrounds, have viable chances through intense skill remediation to attend two-year colleges with a vision of going on to earn a bachelor's degree at a four-year college or university.
In each case, the life prospects of the student has been enhanced because we
1)treated the young person as a precious being worth of great care and love; and
2) because the caring and love have been given throughout the relationship, enduring to the present and committed permanently into the future. As teachers fulfilling our mission in a democracy this is our obligation and our great privilege.
Aug 9, 2011
It's Education, Stupid
We pay all the time, in many ways, for our lack of a decent K-12 system of education in the United States. This is true in the full meaning of the latter federal entity, meaning all of the states in the nation, including Minnesota. We would do well to adapt an expression from the 1992 Clinton campaign and remind ourselves that while in electoral politics, "It's the economy, stupid," on a broader and even more important societal scale, "It's education, stupid."
When another young life is taken at 22nd and Dupont in North Minneapolis, "It's education, stupid." Almost certainly all of the young people involved have been poorly educated, have poor life prospects, may not really believe that they will live beyond the age of 21, and are adrift in wasted lives for lack of knowledge of the sort that can be applied productively in the world. "It's education, stupid."
When politicians cannot agree on a deficit and debt ceiling deal, even of the inconclusive sort, until the final hours before the deadline, "It's education, stupid." Too many of the politicians themselves never had much of an education in economics, so those on the left are beholden to Paul Kruger for their information, those of the Tea Party are beholden to right wing commentators and unexamined popular notions, and more old-line Republicans fall back on assumptions that have been expounded by the Wall Street Journal and won them favor with corporate political backers. In the public at large, there is considerable confusion over the distinction between deficit and debt, the difference between familial and governmental economics, the exact role of executive versus legislative branches in budgetary decision-making, the exact function of the Federal Reserve as an entity and as an actor for facililatating economic policy, or the exact roles of the Treasury Department versus the President's Council of Economic Advisers. So legislation is crafted in considerable ignorance and evaluated by the public and the electorate in woeful ignorance. "It's education, stupid."
When No Child Left Behind legislation gets to the point at which it is functioning magnificently, putting the uncomfortable spotlight on schools that have failed many students for decades, ill-educated journalists of no significant analytical and research capacity have little that they can do aside from repeating the unexamined shibboleths of the education establishment. And so we have another need to be reminded, "It's education, stupid." We hear and see repeated, as if mantras, empty-headed phrases such as "teaching to the test," "narrowing the curriculum," "unfairly punishing schools," and other such nonsense. Ill-educated and non-analytical journalists become dependent on the very people who have ill-served our students for so long. "It's education, stupid."
If we had even a good system of K-12 education in the United States and in the state of Minnesota, we would have fewer inner city young people living wasted lives, politicians and a body politic with some genuine understanding of basic economic principles and institutions, and journalists capable of being something other than the mouthpiece of vested interests. But we do not have a thoroughgoing sense of the importance of a well-balanced liberal arts education in the United States; we wander on forever claiming that we want an "excellent education" for our children without ever getting around to defining an "excellent education," much less constructing the kinds of institutions that would be capable of actually delivering high quality education. So in these and many other realms we suffer from a lack of knowledge and a paucity of clear thinking on matters relevant to the paramount issue of our time.
Because, to be sure, in the broad societal realm we suffer every day, in so many ways, for failing to understand that "It's education, stupid."
When another young life is taken at 22nd and Dupont in North Minneapolis, "It's education, stupid." Almost certainly all of the young people involved have been poorly educated, have poor life prospects, may not really believe that they will live beyond the age of 21, and are adrift in wasted lives for lack of knowledge of the sort that can be applied productively in the world. "It's education, stupid."
When politicians cannot agree on a deficit and debt ceiling deal, even of the inconclusive sort, until the final hours before the deadline, "It's education, stupid." Too many of the politicians themselves never had much of an education in economics, so those on the left are beholden to Paul Kruger for their information, those of the Tea Party are beholden to right wing commentators and unexamined popular notions, and more old-line Republicans fall back on assumptions that have been expounded by the Wall Street Journal and won them favor with corporate political backers. In the public at large, there is considerable confusion over the distinction between deficit and debt, the difference between familial and governmental economics, the exact role of executive versus legislative branches in budgetary decision-making, the exact function of the Federal Reserve as an entity and as an actor for facililatating economic policy, or the exact roles of the Treasury Department versus the President's Council of Economic Advisers. So legislation is crafted in considerable ignorance and evaluated by the public and the electorate in woeful ignorance. "It's education, stupid."
When No Child Left Behind legislation gets to the point at which it is functioning magnificently, putting the uncomfortable spotlight on schools that have failed many students for decades, ill-educated journalists of no significant analytical and research capacity have little that they can do aside from repeating the unexamined shibboleths of the education establishment. And so we have another need to be reminded, "It's education, stupid." We hear and see repeated, as if mantras, empty-headed phrases such as "teaching to the test," "narrowing the curriculum," "unfairly punishing schools," and other such nonsense. Ill-educated and non-analytical journalists become dependent on the very people who have ill-served our students for so long. "It's education, stupid."
If we had even a good system of K-12 education in the United States and in the state of Minnesota, we would have fewer inner city young people living wasted lives, politicians and a body politic with some genuine understanding of basic economic principles and institutions, and journalists capable of being something other than the mouthpiece of vested interests. But we do not have a thoroughgoing sense of the importance of a well-balanced liberal arts education in the United States; we wander on forever claiming that we want an "excellent education" for our children without ever getting around to defining an "excellent education," much less constructing the kinds of institutions that would be capable of actually delivering high quality education. So in these and many other realms we suffer from a lack of knowledge and a paucity of clear thinking on matters relevant to the paramount issue of our time.
Because, to be sure, in the broad societal realm we suffer every day, in so many ways, for failing to understand that "It's education, stupid."
Aug 5, 2011
Closing the Achievement Gap and Attaining Educational Excellence: Embracing the Challenge and Getting Students to the Excellent Teacher
The mission of K-12 public education holds no room for excuses. Children and adolescents from impoverished or dysfunctional families bring challenges to school that the genuine educator will embrace.
There is much in the design of the New Salem Educational Initiative from which the public schools can extrapolate for purposes of meeting the challenges. When eight years ago I started this program of total academic support for inner city young people, I knew that I would be providing transportation. I knew that I would go right up to the doorstep of the household wherein the student dwelled, talk with members of the family, get a sense of any current familial concerns, walk the student to the car, hold the academic session, then return the student in like manner--- checking in again with the family.
The advantages of proceeding in this way are multiple, most notably the high likelihood of near perfect attendance that this routine allows. The approach reduces the parental forgetfulness or distractedness factor in failing to get a student to a session. Even if the parent has forgotten that the day and time is that designated for the academic session, a relationship properly cultivated allows me to locate the student, articulate the reminder, and eventually transport the student to the session. In a significant number of cases, students may actually live or stay frequently in more than one household. So in many instances I have arrived at a designated address only to find that the student is currently staying somewhere else, so off I go to find the student at that place. This is the kind of on-the-ground, take no chances quality that pervades the approach of the New Salem Educational Initiative. In this instance it virtually guarantees perfect attendance; even if the rare instance occurs in which I don't get the student in the car for transport on the designated day, I reschedule on the spot and no session is missed. All of this is again abetted by the excellent relationships that I develop with the families of my students, so that one feature of the program strengthens another feature, and all features coalesce around the all-important objective of getting the student into a classroom wherein a teacher of excellence presides.
So two of these mutually reinforcing programmatic features are 1) the provision of transportation and 2) the development of strong relationships with the families of students. A third feature has to do with my knowledge of inner city communities in general and North Minneapolis in particular. I am comfortable with people of every walk of life and in many international outposts, and on one level I insist that my students eventually learn the linguistic conventions and mores of mainstream middle class society in the United States; but I am also able to converse and relate to children and adolescents in the vernacular of people living at the urban core, children often operating upon inner city African American linguistic conventions, or other ethnic groups heavily influenced by ebonics. But I also draw upon my experience in Hmong, Hispanic, and other cultures to make what other linguistic adjustments are necessasry.
And this ability to communicate across many cultures and ethnicities involves more than just words that are actually spoken. It also involves the tone and cadence of the voice, body language, and sheer comfort with the culture of reference. This is not easily taught; it is best acquired through deep experiences, across as many years as possible, on the ground and in the homes of people with mores similar to those from which a student population is drawn.
People write long tomes on what it takes academically to reach and teach inner city young people and thus close the achievement gap. But here again, the matter is best reduced to simply stated features that are difficult to achieve, but which require more in the way of action than discussion. The public schools very well may never go about the task of reaching the inner city child and adolescent in the exact same manner as I do, but the fundamental successful features are there for extrapolation and application by the public schools.
To fully embrace the challenges of reaching urban youth from impoverished or dysfunctional life circumstances, institutions of education must adapt the following interlocking features: 1) get students into the classroom by going with assertive transportational intent right where the student lives; 2) communicate with families about their own concerns, even as the importance of attendance to academic achievement is impressed upon them; 3) ensure that the teacher in the classroom to which the student is being transported has both command of the academic knowledge base and the cultural nuance to reach the student in her or his brain and heart.
The public education of K-12 students allows for no excuses. It is fundamental to a democracy. All students, from the many backgrounds that the word "all" suggests, must be provided with a high quality public education. Thus it is incumbent on public systems of education to adapt the principles that have proven so successful in imparting an excellent education to students from impoverished and dysfunctional familial situations.
There is much in the design of the New Salem Educational Initiative from which the public schools can extrapolate for purposes of meeting the challenges. When eight years ago I started this program of total academic support for inner city young people, I knew that I would be providing transportation. I knew that I would go right up to the doorstep of the household wherein the student dwelled, talk with members of the family, get a sense of any current familial concerns, walk the student to the car, hold the academic session, then return the student in like manner--- checking in again with the family.
The advantages of proceeding in this way are multiple, most notably the high likelihood of near perfect attendance that this routine allows. The approach reduces the parental forgetfulness or distractedness factor in failing to get a student to a session. Even if the parent has forgotten that the day and time is that designated for the academic session, a relationship properly cultivated allows me to locate the student, articulate the reminder, and eventually transport the student to the session. In a significant number of cases, students may actually live or stay frequently in more than one household. So in many instances I have arrived at a designated address only to find that the student is currently staying somewhere else, so off I go to find the student at that place. This is the kind of on-the-ground, take no chances quality that pervades the approach of the New Salem Educational Initiative. In this instance it virtually guarantees perfect attendance; even if the rare instance occurs in which I don't get the student in the car for transport on the designated day, I reschedule on the spot and no session is missed. All of this is again abetted by the excellent relationships that I develop with the families of my students, so that one feature of the program strengthens another feature, and all features coalesce around the all-important objective of getting the student into a classroom wherein a teacher of excellence presides.
So two of these mutually reinforcing programmatic features are 1) the provision of transportation and 2) the development of strong relationships with the families of students. A third feature has to do with my knowledge of inner city communities in general and North Minneapolis in particular. I am comfortable with people of every walk of life and in many international outposts, and on one level I insist that my students eventually learn the linguistic conventions and mores of mainstream middle class society in the United States; but I am also able to converse and relate to children and adolescents in the vernacular of people living at the urban core, children often operating upon inner city African American linguistic conventions, or other ethnic groups heavily influenced by ebonics. But I also draw upon my experience in Hmong, Hispanic, and other cultures to make what other linguistic adjustments are necessasry.
And this ability to communicate across many cultures and ethnicities involves more than just words that are actually spoken. It also involves the tone and cadence of the voice, body language, and sheer comfort with the culture of reference. This is not easily taught; it is best acquired through deep experiences, across as many years as possible, on the ground and in the homes of people with mores similar to those from which a student population is drawn.
People write long tomes on what it takes academically to reach and teach inner city young people and thus close the achievement gap. But here again, the matter is best reduced to simply stated features that are difficult to achieve, but which require more in the way of action than discussion. The public schools very well may never go about the task of reaching the inner city child and adolescent in the exact same manner as I do, but the fundamental successful features are there for extrapolation and application by the public schools.
To fully embrace the challenges of reaching urban youth from impoverished or dysfunctional life circumstances, institutions of education must adapt the following interlocking features: 1) get students into the classroom by going with assertive transportational intent right where the student lives; 2) communicate with families about their own concerns, even as the importance of attendance to academic achievement is impressed upon them; 3) ensure that the teacher in the classroom to which the student is being transported has both command of the academic knowledge base and the cultural nuance to reach the student in her or his brain and heart.
The public education of K-12 students allows for no excuses. It is fundamental to a democracy. All students, from the many backgrounds that the word "all" suggests, must be provided with a high quality public education. Thus it is incumbent on public systems of education to adapt the principles that have proven so successful in imparting an excellent education to students from impoverished and dysfunctional familial situations.
Aug 4, 2011
Closing the Achievement Gap and Delivering High Quality Education: The Need to Stop Talking and Just Get the Job Done
We overtalk the matter of education reform and the achievement gap, and we do too little. I increasingly observe that what we need to do is very clear, that we need to cut way back on the verbal exchanges about the key issues with regard to educational advancement in our K-12 schools, and that we need to start applying the elbow grease in much greater quantities. But that is an implicit problem. Adults tend to want to make themselves feel very smart by intellectualizing about matters of educational philosophy, rather than simply to sit down beside a child and teach her or him what that student needs to know at the relevant grade level.
Take math, for example. Math education professors and others tend to discuss approaches to math instruction as if such discussion involves some really perplexing issues. Often such discussion assumes that students need to be drawn to math through games and projects and activities that make math fun and engaging. Of course, this is one of many matters in which adults have vested interests in the education of K-12 young people, because math education professors (as opposed to professors of math as a legitimate discipline)would have no jobs if enough people realized what actually needs to be done rather than discussed.
At the kindergarten through Grade 2 level, students need to learn how to add and subtract, including eventually the knowledge of how to "regroup" (carry and borrow). Along the way they also should acquire knowledge of such things as calendars and time recognition (clocks and watches), but these latter things tend to fall into place when the strong number sense implied by addition and subtraction is acquired.
Most of my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative who begin studying with me as kindergarten or Grade 1 students tend to acquire all of the above skills by Grade 2 and to move on to multiplication. I have students as young as those at Grade 1 who have mastered their multiplication tables from 0 through 9, a skill that traditionally has been taught at Grade 3.
So my veteran students are ready at Grade 3 to move on to multi-digit multiplication and division. From there they progress as fast as time and care allow through a sequence of skills involving fractions, decimals, percents, proportions, ratios, and probability. They learn how to deal with increasingly sophisticated data, graphs, and tables. By Grade 6, my veteran students are ready for algebra and geometry of the sort that traditionally has been taught at Grades 9 and 10. So engaging in these subjects at such a young age, they gain the intellectual weight and ballast to thrive when they get to algebra and geometry in school, and they are laying the foundation for success in trigonometry and calculus.
Many employers would be thrilled if they had more applicants who know math at the level mastered by most of my students by Grade 6. How do I impart knowledge of math to my students? I just show them what to do. This is what would deeply disturb many math education professors and those who would like to discuss math instruction as if students do not like math and as if math instruction is some recondite matter for adult intellectualizing. It isn't. When I teach students addition and subtraction by sitting down beside them and sketching out problems on a yellow pad, they get it. They like it. Success builds on success, and they want more. No tricks or time-wastng projects are necessary. Well-selected word problems obviate the necessity for time-consuming projects, and my students get all the real-world application that they need. With addition and subtraction mastered, I proceed with multiplication along the lines detailed in another article. And so it goes on my yellow pad through division, fractions, decimals, percentages, proportions, ratios, probability, and tables and graphs; and from there to the skills relevant to algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus.
Similarly, as my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative learn to become better readers, they read a wide variety of material from fiction, poetry, history, government, economics, and the natural sciences. These subjects lead to interesting discussions in the classroom and in transport to and from the academic sessions, involving additional topics from such fields as geography, psychology, and philosophy.
So this is what it takes to impart high quality education to students: a well-educated teacher willing to apply the elbow grease in time-efficient applications, and comfortable discussing a wide variety of subjects.
The next time you are tempted to overintellectualize about matters of pedagogy and educational philosophy, save your breath. Instead, go sit down beside a child and start explaining. You'll then find out how much young people yearn for substantive knowledge, how appreciative they are, and how they don't need your tricks: They just need your knowledge, your time, and your love.
Take math, for example. Math education professors and others tend to discuss approaches to math instruction as if such discussion involves some really perplexing issues. Often such discussion assumes that students need to be drawn to math through games and projects and activities that make math fun and engaging. Of course, this is one of many matters in which adults have vested interests in the education of K-12 young people, because math education professors (as opposed to professors of math as a legitimate discipline)would have no jobs if enough people realized what actually needs to be done rather than discussed.
At the kindergarten through Grade 2 level, students need to learn how to add and subtract, including eventually the knowledge of how to "regroup" (carry and borrow). Along the way they also should acquire knowledge of such things as calendars and time recognition (clocks and watches), but these latter things tend to fall into place when the strong number sense implied by addition and subtraction is acquired.
Most of my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative who begin studying with me as kindergarten or Grade 1 students tend to acquire all of the above skills by Grade 2 and to move on to multiplication. I have students as young as those at Grade 1 who have mastered their multiplication tables from 0 through 9, a skill that traditionally has been taught at Grade 3.
So my veteran students are ready at Grade 3 to move on to multi-digit multiplication and division. From there they progress as fast as time and care allow through a sequence of skills involving fractions, decimals, percents, proportions, ratios, and probability. They learn how to deal with increasingly sophisticated data, graphs, and tables. By Grade 6, my veteran students are ready for algebra and geometry of the sort that traditionally has been taught at Grades 9 and 10. So engaging in these subjects at such a young age, they gain the intellectual weight and ballast to thrive when they get to algebra and geometry in school, and they are laying the foundation for success in trigonometry and calculus.
Many employers would be thrilled if they had more applicants who know math at the level mastered by most of my students by Grade 6. How do I impart knowledge of math to my students? I just show them what to do. This is what would deeply disturb many math education professors and those who would like to discuss math instruction as if students do not like math and as if math instruction is some recondite matter for adult intellectualizing. It isn't. When I teach students addition and subtraction by sitting down beside them and sketching out problems on a yellow pad, they get it. They like it. Success builds on success, and they want more. No tricks or time-wastng projects are necessary. Well-selected word problems obviate the necessity for time-consuming projects, and my students get all the real-world application that they need. With addition and subtraction mastered, I proceed with multiplication along the lines detailed in another article. And so it goes on my yellow pad through division, fractions, decimals, percentages, proportions, ratios, probability, and tables and graphs; and from there to the skills relevant to algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus.
Similarly, as my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative learn to become better readers, they read a wide variety of material from fiction, poetry, history, government, economics, and the natural sciences. These subjects lead to interesting discussions in the classroom and in transport to and from the academic sessions, involving additional topics from such fields as geography, psychology, and philosophy.
So this is what it takes to impart high quality education to students: a well-educated teacher willing to apply the elbow grease in time-efficient applications, and comfortable discussing a wide variety of subjects.
The next time you are tempted to overintellectualize about matters of pedagogy and educational philosophy, save your breath. Instead, go sit down beside a child and start explaining. You'll then find out how much young people yearn for substantive knowledge, how appreciative they are, and how they don't need your tricks: They just need your knowledge, your time, and your love.
Aug 3, 2011
Focusing LIke a Laser on Training Excellent Teachers
The reform of K-12 education in the United States remains a topic of considerable discusssion in the political ether of the nation of note, but much of the discussion is misaimed and peripheral to any effort that would attain the desired end. The painful truth about K-12 reform, as it is usually termed, is that what we really need is revolution (complete restructuring, or what Michelle Rhee euphemistically calls "transformative reform"), not mere reform. And the revolution, the needed overhaul, the total change that must ensue is simply stated but difficult to achieve. It really begins and ends with a higher quality of teacher, a classroom-tested bearer of at least a master's degree in a legitimate discipline (not attained in departments of education but in departments of natural science, social science, and the humanities), a true professional.
So there you have it. As with most important problems, the needed program is or should be simply stated, but it is difficult to achieve. And, as in those other cases, our chronic problem in addressing the issue at hand is that we do not address the issue at hand: Rather, we create countless distractions for ourselves, some of which are intellectually interesting and sometimes make people feel very smart through extensive discussion--- but constitute wasted effort contributive not one whit toward the solution of the truly important matter putatively under discussion.
Thus it is that in education we create many discussions, apparently very interesting to adults who like to haggle verbally, but which have no possibility of advancing a high quality education for children and adolescents. So, for example, if you have ever thought that better education will be attained through smaller schools, larger schools, classrooms with boys only, classrooms with girls only, exciting curricula focused on the arts or science or math, schools created by and run by parents or teachers or communities--- think again. Whatever virtues such educational initiatives may or may not have, they are not germane to the topic of attaining educational excellence.
Because if schools founded on such beliefs and strategems lack well-trained teachers, all founders. Excellent teachers are the key to attaining excellent education. I have in a previous article defined an excellent education as a rich liberal arts curriculum delivered by excellent teachers. Of the two main features of an excellent education, excellent teachers are by far the most important. Because truly excellent teachers who are experts in their fields of study could write their own curriculum and deliver meaningful subject area content in history, literature, natural science, economics, history, and the fine arts all as a matter of their own training and intellectual inclination.
Celebrate and despair. Achieving educational excellence is just that easy and just that hard. Almost everyone with whom I have discourse--- and I have lively discussions with people representative of many walks of life and strains of ethnicity--- are a long way from even grasping the advanced level of training of teachers for which I advocate (see previous articles, especially concerning the definition of an excellent teacher), much less being ready, willing, and able to apply the elbow grease needed to get the job done.
We would have to dismantle all current programs of teacher training to attain the quality of teaching that would be necessary to attain educational excellence. That would require enormous effort and cut against many entrenched polical interests. Then we would have to institute the program of teacher training for which I have advocated in previous articles. That would require more enormous effort. Thus it is that I cite the necessity of pursuing "transformative educational reform" (revolution) of a kind that we must have but have many miles to go before readying ourselves for the task.
But understand this: We will have no meaningful change in our K-12 system of education until we focus like a laser on improving teacher training. Any other discussions are intellectual pastimes for adults that will accomplish nothing at all for the students themselves, who want and are capable of so much more.
So there you have it. As with most important problems, the needed program is or should be simply stated, but it is difficult to achieve. And, as in those other cases, our chronic problem in addressing the issue at hand is that we do not address the issue at hand: Rather, we create countless distractions for ourselves, some of which are intellectually interesting and sometimes make people feel very smart through extensive discussion--- but constitute wasted effort contributive not one whit toward the solution of the truly important matter putatively under discussion.
Thus it is that in education we create many discussions, apparently very interesting to adults who like to haggle verbally, but which have no possibility of advancing a high quality education for children and adolescents. So, for example, if you have ever thought that better education will be attained through smaller schools, larger schools, classrooms with boys only, classrooms with girls only, exciting curricula focused on the arts or science or math, schools created by and run by parents or teachers or communities--- think again. Whatever virtues such educational initiatives may or may not have, they are not germane to the topic of attaining educational excellence.
Because if schools founded on such beliefs and strategems lack well-trained teachers, all founders. Excellent teachers are the key to attaining excellent education. I have in a previous article defined an excellent education as a rich liberal arts curriculum delivered by excellent teachers. Of the two main features of an excellent education, excellent teachers are by far the most important. Because truly excellent teachers who are experts in their fields of study could write their own curriculum and deliver meaningful subject area content in history, literature, natural science, economics, history, and the fine arts all as a matter of their own training and intellectual inclination.
Celebrate and despair. Achieving educational excellence is just that easy and just that hard. Almost everyone with whom I have discourse--- and I have lively discussions with people representative of many walks of life and strains of ethnicity--- are a long way from even grasping the advanced level of training of teachers for which I advocate (see previous articles, especially concerning the definition of an excellent teacher), much less being ready, willing, and able to apply the elbow grease needed to get the job done.
We would have to dismantle all current programs of teacher training to attain the quality of teaching that would be necessary to attain educational excellence. That would require enormous effort and cut against many entrenched polical interests. Then we would have to institute the program of teacher training for which I have advocated in previous articles. That would require more enormous effort. Thus it is that I cite the necessity of pursuing "transformative educational reform" (revolution) of a kind that we must have but have many miles to go before readying ourselves for the task.
But understand this: We will have no meaningful change in our K-12 system of education until we focus like a laser on improving teacher training. Any other discussions are intellectual pastimes for adults that will accomplish nothing at all for the students themselves, who want and are capable of so much more.
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