A Time to Leave

My high school math teacher was an ex-principal with an eccentric streak. Luckily for his students, the eccentricity was beneficial. We always received little 5 minute life lectures in the midst of x=y and factoring. He was my math teacher for four years, so those 5 minute lectures added up.

I recall one of those life lecture moments when one of my friends dropped the algebra class that he was failing to take an alternative math class. He wasn't in the room at the time, but my teacher used him as an extended example of how we all "hit a wall" at some point in our lives and how that was good, really good, because we learned our limits and what we could do well, and not so well. Or not at all. It was the first time that I can recall a teacher treating failure, an F, as anything but, well, failure. Suddenly, there was something positive and valuable to be learned from failure. And you lived past it. And moved on.

Jim, a senior in one of my elective classes, learned that lesson this semester. He is capable and bright, but lazy would be giving too much credit to his efforts. So, with several failed classes making a May 2006 graduation impossible, Jim's parents decided that it was time to call it quits.

They withdrew Jim from school and gave him several options: homeschooling, alternative school, or GED preparation. In Jim's case, I can't say I disagree. This was one of those walls that Jim was beating his head against. He wanted to graduate, but really had no interest or motivation in the learning to be done on the way to walking down the aisle. He would have struggled some, surrendered far too easily, and failed most of his classes this semester as well. No prophet needed for that prediction.

Perhaps this too isn't failure, just learning limits and making difficult choices. I'm sure there will be something positive in the decisions that Jim will be making and in the efforts he will make to finalize that diploma. He will live past it, and move on.

School doesn't solve everything.

"Schools to Evaluate Business"

Don't you wish? Wouldn't that be a shocking headline? But business thinks it is qualified to rate schools. Let's drift off a moment and turn the tables, rating business performance. . . .

How would schools rate businesses? Well, let's see. For a starter, do businesses offer opportunities for lifelong learning?
Do they offer equal opportunities to all employees?
Do they employ on the basis of merit and skill, regardless of "who you know"?
Do they motivate employees by making every day an interesting, engaging experience?
If employees start slacking off and don't complete their work, do they keep trying to get the employee involved?
Do they blame themselves for lazy employees because the work is just too boring and routine?
Do they tell employees, "Do you just want to sit around your whole life working? You should work hard here so you can have more time off to learn things."
Do businesses model good citizenship skills and democratic participation in the workplace?
Do businesses contact the families of employees to keep them regularly updated on how they are doing?
Is the workplace heterogeneous or "tracked?"
Does every supervisor have about 30 employees that they are responsible for checking their work every day and offering feedback for improvement?
Does business treat its employees as "customers?"
Do CEOs come into different work areas to see how things are going and understand what is taking place in the workplace?
Do businesses invest in schools to better compete in the global economy?
Do businesses provide schools with the needed technology so students learn the necessary skills?
Do buinesses "graduate", that is, retire the same number of employees they hire? Or is it closer to a 50%, 40%, 20% "graduation rate?"
How many businesses actually succeed?
Are minorities equally represented in each workplace?
Do they close the gaps between minority employee knowledge and skill and non-minority?
Do they equally promote women in the workplace?
Can schools work to double the number of talented employees leaving their jobs in order to teach, say by the year 2015?
How committed is business to public education?
Do businesses raise a workforce to value education for its own sake?
Do businesses have liberal time-off policies to allow workers to be involved in their children's education?
Do they pay for continuing education?
Do they have full pay for maternity/paternity leave? After all, these are the future students of the country.
Do businesses actively promote and campaign for mill levy's and school funding?

It's the Governance, Stupid

Democracy. Citizenship. Patriotism. The Constitution. These are all things that we are supposed to be demonstrating and teaching to our students. That burden falls particularly heavy on social studies teachers with history and civics classes. There is always some kind of outcry in the wilderness about how illiterate students are about their rights, responsibilities, knowledge of government. Yet, what do we model in the very buildings that students inhabit for their education? Authoritarianism. Obligations. Fear. Little in the way of free speech for students (or faculty for that matter).

Legislatures have tried to craft solutions by fiat. In Colorado, US History is a required class to pass before graduation. Civics is also now required. There was an bill to force the recitation of the Pledge. Am I alone in seeing the irony in this?

School reform isn't just about getting all students to read. And what passes for reform is often anything but. Yet, for the most part, we continue with a bureaucratic factory model of school governance that enables one position, the principal, to dictate the environment and conditions of a school. It's the same problem as with monarchies, you're stuck with the one you get. Pray hard that they are a benevolent dictator.

I have been in enough buildings to see this in operation many times over. A new principal arrives and a school either flourishes or takes a dive. And the quality of education is inevitably connected. Real structural reform isn't about creating charter schools or vouchers, but about democratizing the governance of schools. A school must be a community project that does not depend on the skill and ability and personality of one person. If we can do it for charter schools, why are we so gun-shy about accomplishing it for public schools? Let's practice democracy rather than simply mouth it. Let's have students participate in the real thing, rather than demand they recite the Preamble to a Constitution we can't seem to practice in that same classroom.

There are many forms democracy and constitutionalism could take in a school or set of schools. And that is the conversation that we should be having. Let's remake schools as living, breathing democratic communities. Let's fight and bicker and compromise and have schools as the hatcheries of democracy that they should be.

Only then will public education in the US be "reformed."

Denial, Prohibitionism, and Other Things Alcoholic

Constitutional prohibition failed miserably once, on a grand scale to be sure. But we keep on trying. Like Pil(grim) colonists, not the ones with the hats and turkey of myth, but the ones that expelled Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Thomas Hooker, our puritanism far outweighs our god-given common sense, and senses. We trickle from our holy celebrations of Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwaanza to the Bacchanal of a dizzy new year's beginning.

The myth that an age limit of 18 or 21 will stop teenage drinking is pervasive. The federal government has pushed the states to enact the 21 age limit by threatening to withhold highway funds. Yet, car crashes remain the number 1 killer of 15-20 year olds with alcohol involved in more than a third of those accidents.

An informal survey of many of my students demonstrates that easily half of the students in the class readily admit to using, if not abusing, alcohol. It's easy to get to. Liquor stores often sell to underage customers. If not, big brother or a friend will often get it for them. Or, easier still, it is in great supply at home or in a friend's home. Some parents are willing to tolerate their kids drinking, or simply ignore it. And if it isn't available at home, attending a party is the quickest way to find the flow. It is still the most socially acceptable lawbreaking activity after speeding.

The gap between the legal puritanism and the reality that we deny is so large that it is difficult to believe that we can persist in the denial. Teenagers see it. But, for those that choose to drink, or see it as a forbidden pleasure, the denial serves a purpose. They certainly aren't anxious to point the hypocrisy out. The problem is that the legal puritanism is standing in the way of other possible ways of confronting the issue. It has always seemed ironic, or perhaps strangely predictive that the Prohibition amendments were the 18th and 21st. But the debate over those numbers, 18 and 21 as ages appropriate for alcohol obscures the fundamental problem of addiction and treatment. If we are happy with our moral stance in law and practical failure with students then we will blissfully stride forward with denial. If not, we better start talking and listening to students. We are all implicated.

I'm certainly not advocating anything. Just the facts, ma'am.

Recommended Resolutions

Forget The World is Flat.

Teacher Man by Frank McCourt.

Read it.