Confessions of a “Failing” Teacher

Like most teachers I’ve gotten some praise from my high school students over my 26 years of teaching—a lesson “wasn’t bad,” or a particular class was “sorta interesting.” I’ve even been told that I was a “pretty good teacher.” High praise coming from teenagers.

But the truth is I wasn’t a “good teacher.” I was a “failure,” at least according to America’s “education reformers”—that “odd coalition of corporate-friendly Democrats, right-wing Republicans, Tea Party governors, Wall Street executives, and major foundations” as Diane Ravitch aptly defines them—because the kids I taught consistently lagged behind their peers in every measure, performing well below grade level, failing state standardized tests.

Given the present state of teacher evaluations, with a significant portion allotted to student performance on mandated tests, I’d be in big trouble if I hadn’t left teaching recently. I certainly wouldn’t get any bonus pay. If it were up to the Obama Administration I might not even have a job since I would be one of those teachers who, as the President noted in his 2012 State of the Union address, “just aren’t helping kids.” And if I still taught in New York I’d be facing the prospect of having my name and ratings published in newspapers and on the internet if the Legislature gets its way in what the New York State Union of Teachers called the “name/shame/blame game.”

But I know that I wasn’t a “failure,” and more importantly, that the hundreds of kids I’ve taught weren’t either. My students were mostly young people of color, living in neighborhoods and families destroyed by poverty and substance abuse, racism and violence, physical and sexual abuse. Overall, life—shaped by their mistakes and by conditions they couldn’t control—left them little time for, or interest in education. Frequently that lack of time and interest led to trouble which led to repeated suspensions, expulsions and in some cases, incarceration.  But sometimes trouble translated into being placed in a small community alternative high school or the jailhouse classroom in the county penitentiary, both places I taught in.

By the time they made it to me, my students were pretty damaged. They hated school. They could barely read or do basic math. And forget about writing. “You expect me to write?” more than one teen squawked in horror at me. But eventually they did. They read, piling up grade levels like some Americans pile up debt. They calculated. They even learned the magic of connecting sentences that made sense.

But by the state’s educational rubric, they didn’t cut it. As noteworthy as their successes were—both academically and behaviorally—they were still “failures” and I along with them: success was only validated by passing the standardized tests.

One of the hardest things I had to do was send kids into those tests who weren’t ready. I tried hard beforehand to get them out of it. I’d explain, downright argue at times, with the school administration that although my students had made solid progress it wasn’t enough to tackle the exam and so they should wait and take it next time. It never worked. “It’s the law,” I was told.

Every time I think about Tyler my palms sweat. Tyler was a jailhouse student, lanky, 16, with an Afro picked out to an angel’s halo. But he was no angel, and he had the missing front teeth and two years at the county pen to prove it. When he first came to class he was reading on a second grade level. For some reason he was determined to improve this time round in school. He came every day, took work to his cell every night and returned it completed every morning. Slowly his reading level increased. He was pleased with himself. You could see it in the almost toothless smile he didn’t bother to hide anymore.

But he wasn’t close to test-ready. When I petitioned to delay Tyler’s exam the administrator refused but offered me her idea of comfort, “Look, it’s okay if he fails. Then he’ll be eligible for remediation.” I couldn’t help shooting back, “Sure, send the kid in so he can get shot down one more time.” I prepared Tyler for that test as best as I could. He worked harder than ever. He was psyched. “I’m gonna ace it, Mr. C.”

You know the end of the story. It’s the same for many damaged kids living in poverty and neglect, factors that the pundits say can be overcome by good, dedicated teachers. Once again Tyler “failed.” He never came back to class for remediation.

If Tyler and kids like him are “failures” then I—and all the other teachers who teach in tough places—are too. But I don’t think we should take the rap alone. As long as our educational policies let students like Tyler down in the name of “reform” and “the law,” continuing the “name/shame/blame game” instead of addressing the social conditions that cripple these kids’ lives and learning, then we as a country are failures as well, in need of some serious remediation.

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

Education Reform: Failing Schools, Failing Lives

No matter how tough politicians and education pundits talk the obstacles remain. Massachusetts is a good example. The Boston Globe reports that among 3^rd graders last year, minority and low income students were twice as likely as white students to score lowest in the state’s standardized tests. These are discouraging numbers for everyone, and they are pretty much replicated nationally. They raise the question: Why after all these years of No Child Left Behind are we still struggling to achieve parity between rich and poor students, between white and minority children?

Nobody is satisfied with our schools, and there’s blame all round as experts scramble for solutions: We label schools as failing. We fire whole teachings staffs. We tweak curricula. We script teachers’ every move. We increase the school day and student seat time at the expense of art, music and recreation. Still things don’t improve.

Maybe we’re not listening to the right people. Somebody like Dick Gregory, for example. Yeah, Dick Gregory. You may remember him (if you’re old enough)—African American comedian, civil rights activist, 1968 presidential candidate, author, and nutrition guru? His list of accomplishments doesn’t include education specialist, but he knew quite a lot about why schools fail and about the “achievement gap.” He went to one of those failing schools and was trapped in that gap.

Most of my students—kids serving time in an adult county jail where I taught high school—didn’t know who Dick Gregory was when I announced that we were going to read a short chapter entitled “Shame” from his autobiography. At first they weren’t interested. They assumed (like so many teenagers) that the reading, any reading would be boring. Then when I mentioned that he was black, and had marched with Dr. King there was a spark of curiosity. It was enough to get us into the chapter. After that they were hooked.

In a page and a half, Gregory tells the reader (and America if we would only listen) why poor kids of color fail in school. In heartbreaking detail he writes about being in the third grade filled with shame—the shame of poverty, of being a “welfare kid,” of being abandoned by his father, of living in the projects, of wearing dirty clothes because once again there wasn’t any hot water, of having little food, and of living with rats and bugs.

When my locked-up students read that he was a “troublemaker” in school, the little kid who spent more time in the corner facing the wall than he did at his desk, none of them was surprised. And when Gregory wonders out loud why the teacher didn’t understand that maybe he caused trouble not because he was bad or stupid but because he was poor and hungry and too tired to concentrate you could hear the whispered, “Ya got that right,” followed by, “bitch” when she berates him in front of the class, talking about “you and your kind.”

The reading may seem dated to those of us comfortable with the gifts of life; after all that was back in the late 30s. But my students had no problem with what Gregory described. Most of them lived similar lives, although I would venture to say, much harsher and more embattled ones. They grew up in neighborhoods overrun with drugs, guns and random violence, in households fractured by unemployment, disease and substance abuse. My students went to schools that never had enough books or supplies or staff to go around, in falling down buildings in neighborhoods unsafe to walk. A friend of mine works in a school where it’s not unusual that kids can’t play outside at recess because of drive-by-shootings.

If it wasn’t good in Dick Gregory’s day, it’s far from good for minority students today. The 2010 Census confirms this: Black children are three times as likely to be poor as white children. Forty percent of black children are born into poor families compared with 8% of white children. An even more alarming statistic is that an African American boy born in the past decade has a 1-in-3 chance of being incarcerated in his lifetime.

There’s a poignant moment in Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools when he goes into an East St. Louis grade school classroom that is dirty, dilapidated, and overcrowded. At one point Kozol reports that as he came into a classroom a young boy looked up at him with an expression that asked, “What did I do to deserve this?” The “achievement gap”—which is just that young boy’s unspoken question in a different form—will never be closed until our policymakers, educational and otherwise, aggressively address the underlying issues of poverty and racism that cripple every aspect of poor and minority children’s lives.  Maybe those policymakers need to stop talking and listen for a change to people who know a lot more than they do about failing schools, and about failing lives.

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

 

Education Reform and Juvenile Justice: The Children Still Left Behind

Statewide test day and Damian was psyched. He didn’t sleep much the night before from worrying. Still, he was there on time, ready to go. Now he sat hunched over his desk, head down, lips moving as he read, his pen carefully inching across the paper.

He was like any other kid in his grade taking the mandated English exam. The only difference was that he was locked up in an adult county jail in Westchester, NY where I taught high school for ten years, and he was reading—and barely writing—on a 4th grade level, which was up from the 2nd grade level he came in with.

Damian was a tall, thin 17 year old with a bushed-out Afro who had been in and out of juvenile placements since childhood—foster care; group homes; detention centers; jails. As a result, he had as many gaps in his education as he had in his mouth from missing teeth, most prominently his front two. The list of his educational diagnoses was almost as long as his rap sheet. Mentally Retarded. Learning disabled. Behavioral disorder. ADD/HD. Oppositional personality. Yet as badly as he’d done in school, a part of him always valued education.

Over the months I had him in class, something clicked for Damian. He never missed a day. He worked hard, asked for homework—and did it. His progress was daily. Soon, his reading rose from that humiliating 2^nd grade level to 3^rd to 4^th grade. The kid was on the move. But something else was happening. When Damian first came to class, he never looked anyone in the face and hid what he called his “baby work.” Now he was more self-confident. He was proud of his improvement and suddenly saw himself as a learner.

Then the mandated end-of-year state tests came round.

When I was told that Damian had to take the English exam I was as uncomprehending as he must have felt sometimes trying to decipher a page of print.

“It’s got to be a mistake,” I said to our on-site test administrator. “The kid’s reading on a 4^th grade level. Maybe on paper he’s an 11^th grader, but he doesn’t have the credits or the skills for the 11^th grade.”

“It’s not a mistake,” she explained. “He’s enrolled in high school. Technically, he’s 11^th grade; so he has to take the test.”

Then she tried to soften the regulation by explaining the reasoning behind it: a student was required to take the test and fail it in order to be eligible for remediation classes. I didn’t bother to interpret back to her what I heard: Damian had to fail a test we all knew he would fail in order to prove that he would fail it so he could get “remediation.” Kids, especially kids like Damian, don’t think like educational pundits. It was easy to imagine the damage this latest failure would do to his burgeoning self-confidence as a learner.

Unfortunately, he’d already been told that he was scheduled to take the exam before I talked to him. When I suggested that he might not feel ready to take the test, that it was okay if he didn’t show up, he could take it another time, he looked at me as though I was every white teacher he’d ever had who’d told him that he’d never succeed so why bother. After that I knew he’d be there on test day.

The Comprehensive English exam is two days, a total of 6 hours. Damian was there both days, for every minute of those 6 hours, doing the best he could. It was painful to watch.

I wish Damian was the only example of such mandated failure. But there are lots of Damians in classrooms across the country in places as diverse as jails, psych hospitals, rehabs, juvenile detention centers, special ed classes who find themselves in similar situations. Now that Obama’s educational reforms are continuing where Bush’s left off with their reliance on standardized test results as the prime measure of educational success, I’m afraid that there will be many more kids, and teachers, facing similar struggles.

I am not recommending social promotion. Nor am I suggesting “feel good” education. I wouldn’t insult kids like Damian. Students should be held to rigorous academic standards. However, teachers—and there are many of who are fiercely dedicated to this hard-to-reach population—should be allowed some flexibility to evaluate their students’ readiness and plan accordingly. That local flexibility can’t happen under the present reform blueprint. And given all that is at stake—money, autonomy, prestige, reputations—superintendents, principals, and supervisors will adhere, perhaps reluctantly, to these lock-step standards rather than advocate for the needs of these vulnerable kids and their teachers in their districts.

Certainly gains have been made nationwide. But all of us—teachers, parents and school administrators—should share, on a local and national level, the concern many civil rights groups such as the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition have recently expressed: that the very students these reforms were meant to keep in school—poor, disaffected, disenfranchised, minority kids—will continue to be left out and left behind.

Originally posted on Huffington Post