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Family culture determines school success

September 4, 2011 By

Responsible, caring parents raise good students, writes Scott Carroll, a teacher turned IT consultant, in the Baltimore Sun. Carroll’s mother didn’t always have money to pay the utility bill or the phone bill, but she managed to pay half-tuition so he could attend a private elementary school. His father didn’t live with the family, but stayed involved in his son’s life.

. . .  you do not need a college degree to know how to insist that your children read books, or at least sit with their faces in a book through some prescribed period of time every day. You do not need a college degree to read to your children persistently. You do not need a college education to know how to require your children to sit at a certain table every school night for a certain prescribed period and at least seem to be completing their assignments. You do not need a college degree to demand of yourself and of your family that standard English, or some earnest attempt thereof, be spoken in the home.

“African-American culture — my culture — has become, progressively, a culture of the athlete, the entertainer, the hustler and the laborer,” Carroll laments.

I had the privilege of teaching for four years in an immaculate building that had just undergone a $27 million restoration, a Baltimore City vocational/technical high school complete with the kind of expensive, computer-aided manufacturing machinery I had seen on campus as an industrial engineering student at Morgan State University and in industry as an industrial engineering intern. Many students showed their appreciation for the very expensive, potentially high-quality education they were being offered for free by setting that building on fire almost weekly, and by cursing freely in the vicinity of and often directly at teachers and administrators alike. When attempts were made at discipline and parents were called in, the parents often exhibited this same behavior while searching for any and every way to blame teachers and the school for their children’s trouble.

An interested, cooperative student will learn in a shack with an old textbook, Carroll writes.

But as long as we continue to send non-studious, socially and intellectually ill-prepared children into our schools — as long as we continue to expect our teachers and our schools, as opposed to our parents and our families, to rear our children — our students and schools will continue to underperform, no matter how much we spend or how many teachers we employ.

“Money is not the problem,” he concludes. “The problem is our lack of a coherent, robust and healthy culture.”

So, what do we do with bad parents’ children?


Filed Under: Education, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Confessions of a bad teacher

September 1, 2011 By

In Confessions of a bad teacher in Salon, publishing executive John Owens recounts his foray into teaching English at a small New York City school.

Assign spelling words or read a short story in class, and it would take all of my wits to keep the texting, talking, sleeping and wrestling in check. But make it 80 words on “Would you give up your cellphone for one year for $500?” and every student — even those who never did any schoolwork — handed in a paper. When I read these essays to the class in dramatic, radio-announcer fashion, there was silence punctuated by hoots of laughter or roars of agreement or disagreement.

It was almost magic. It was really fun. And I often could squeeze in some spelling, even punctuation. But we weren’t always quiet.

And, according to my personnel file at the New York City Department of Education, I was “unprofessional,” “insubordinate” and “culturally insensitive.”

In other words, I was a bad teacher.

Told to control the class “with the force of your personality,” he told his eighth graders to quiet down or stay after school.  After less than 10 minutes standing in the doorway, the principal intervened. She “reported the incident to the police and the Department of Education as ‘corporal punishment’.”  He survived a disciplinary hearing, thanks to a union representative, but the principal put a letter in his file saying he’d “barricaded” the students in the room, endangering their safety.

Offered a job in publishing, Owens quit in mid-February.

He sees himself as a victim of “Crazy Boss Syndrome” in a system that gives principals the power to crush new teachers.

 

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Act up in class, end up in court

August 23, 2011 By

Campus police officers — not principals — are enforcing discipline these days, reports the Washington Post.

Texas police issue thousands of misdemeanor tickets for offensive language, class disruption, schoolyard fights and misbehavior on the school bus. A parent must appear with the child in court. Students may be ordered to perform community service or take a behavior-management class. Fines can total $500.

Six in 10 Texas students were suspended or expelled at least once from seventh grade on, according to a new study. Federal officials say suspensions, expulsions and arrests create a “school-to-prison pipeline.”

“That is something that clearly has to stop,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in Washington alongside Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

It’s not just Texas. In many states, principals are turning to the police to enforce order.

Connecticut is rethinking discipline after students faced court charges for drinking soda, running in the hall and dressing improperly.

A Colorado task force is analyzing school ticketing and law enforcement referrals.

Texas schools adopted ticketing in the 1990′s, the Post reports. As more police officers have been assigned to schools, the number of tickets has soared.

In one highly publicized case a middle school student in Austin was ticketed for class disruption after she sprayed herself with perfume when classmates said she smelled.

In Houston one recent day, a 17-year-old was in court after he and his girlfriend poured milk on each other. “She was mad at me because I broke up with her,” he said.

Ticketing rates vary from 1 percent of students in Pasadena to 11 percent in Galveston, concluded a report by Texas Appleseed, a public interest law center. Children as young as five have been ticketed.

Not surprisingly, students who’ve been suspended, expelled or ticketed are more likely to drop out of high school and get into trouble as adults. But that raises a chicken-and-egg question: Was it the punishment or the crime?

 

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,

60% of Texas students suspended at least once

July 20, 2011 By

Nearly 60 percent of Texas students were suspended or expelled from at least one class in middle and high school during a six-year study. Blacks and emotionally disabled students were more likely to be disciplined, concludes Breaking School Rules, a study by the Council of State Governments Justice Center and the Public Research Institute of Texas A&M University.

Schools with similar students in terms of race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status had very different suspension and expulsion rates.

The study didn’t examine whether schools that suspend fewer students have alternative ways of dealing with disruption, nor did it try to evaluate school safety.

Not surprisingly, students who were disciplined were less likely to graduate and more likely to be arrested. Thirty-one percent of students disciplined one or more times repeated their grade at least once.

 

 

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Central Falls teacher: Why I quit

June 7, 2011 By

A research scientist who became a science teacher at Rhode Island’s troubled Central Falls High, Dale Dearnley explains: Why I Resigned on GoLocalProv. A perennially low-scoring school, Central Falls fired — and then rehired — its teachers as part of a turnaround effort.

Her number one reason for leaving is “the absence of discipline and accountability.” The district approved a behavior system based on “restorative practices,” but failed to implement it consistently.

Chaos is the norm, interruption of education is consistent, and the environment is toxic.

Being sent to the “Restorative Room” is how students are held accountable for infractions from cutting class and disrupting lessons to threatening teachers and assault. I have heard from many students that they enjoy going to the Restorative Room because they can socialize with their friends, joke around with a so-called “behavior specialist, ” and their only academic responsibility is to complete a word search puzzle. If “restorative practices” were working, then students would not resort to extreme vulgarities and hate speech in response to simple directions and the routines of an orderly, productive classroom.

For five years, the high school has had no science curriculum, Dearnley writes.  Teachers were promised a chance to develop a curriculum. Instead, they get pre-packed science “kits ” from a contractor.

Teachers are “afraid to speak up because of fear of retribution,” she writes. When a student threatened to kill her, he was assigned to the Restorative Room for the remainder of the day. An administrator told her it wasn’t a police matter and reprimanded her for using the student’s full name in the school’s incident report.

Letting students get away with cursing and threatening teachers is a form of child neglect and abuse, Dearnley argues.

Filed Under: Education, Violence Tagged With: , , , , ,

Unsafe at Philly schools

April 6, 2011 By

Violence plagues Philadelphia schools, reports the Inquirer in its Assault on Learning series.

Teacher Christopher Paslay suggests ways to make schools safer, including requiring conflict resolution classes, rethinking arbitrary discipline policies, opening alternative schools designed for  disruptive students and offering vocational options to students who aren’t motivated by college-prep classes. Schools should “respect everyone’s right to learn,” he argues.

The needs and challenges of the troubled few shouldn’t take precedence over the education of the many. Resources are limited, and the rights of all children – especially those who are diligently pursuing their schooling – must not be compromised.

In addition, he writes, schools should “teach students to be responsible for their own behavior, rather than conditioning them to blame their misdeeds on outside forces.”

Cartoonist Signe Wilkinson, the mother of a Philadelphia teacher, wants parents to step up.

Filed Under: Education, Parenting, Violence Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Fixing America’s worst schools

March 30, 2011 By

Fixing “America’s worst schools” is no picnic, even with federal grants, reports the Christian Science Monitor.  Most of the story deals with Wendell Phillips Academy on Chicago’s South Side, where 27 percent of ninth graders read at the third grade level or below.

With a U.S. history class of only 10 juniors and seniors, Joyce Randolph has spent weeks discussing: Just how revolutionary was the American Revolution? She asks students to rephrase the question.

Finally she gets a response from one young man: “Did the Revolution bring about significant change?”

“Awesome!” says Ms. Randolph, as she points to another student. “Curtis, what does ‘significant’ mean?”

She’s met with a blank stare. Silence.

Last year, less than 5 percent of Phillips students met state academic standards. Fights were frequent.

Chicago Public Schools gave control of the school — and $5 million in federal turnaround grants over the next five years — to the Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL).  The principal and all the teachers were fired. The new principal, Terrance Little, rehired only the two ROTC teachers. He instituted uniforms and a dress code, and a zero-tolerance policy for fighting. When he visited Phillips last year, it was a “zoo,” Little says.

“There was food fighting in the cafeterias, and kids were always fighting in the hallways,” recalls Eric Darko, a soft-spoken senior from Ghana, as he builds a complex tower after school for a Science Olympiad. “It was horrible bad. We didn’t learn anything.” This year, he says, things are better. “The teachers are always on time and on track.”

Freshmen now stay at school an extra hour each day. Little also made the grading scale tougher after seeing A students with abysmal ACT scores.

I used to be an AP student on the honor roll, and now I’ve got an F,” says Tyrice McClaren, who is eating an unappetizing looking chicken sandwich from the cafeteria.

The new teachers have agreed to common teaching practices, such as starting each class with a “Do now” assignment and ending with an “exit slip” on which students are asked how well they understood the material. They try to keep their expectations high.

In her class, Randolph uses a “document-based questions” curriculum, which asks students to examine historical papers for evidence. Originally designed for Advanced Placement students, it is a rigorous program that she believes pushes them to think critically. On the other hand, she notes, her class is still on the American Revolution in February . . .

It seems hopeless.  Twenty-seven percent of the ninth graders read at the third grade level or below.

Update:  Student misbehavior pushes teachers out of the profession,writes Will Fitzhugh. Students who want to learn are cheated, because their teachers have to spend so much time trying to control disruptive students. He wants to push out disruptive students.

It should be easy to send disruptive students home with access to online classes. They’re not likely to learn much, but their former teachers and classmates would benefit.

Phillips Academy’s new principal abolished in-school suspension and boosted the expulsion rate to control fighting and other zoo-like behavior.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Suspended for chivalry

March 5, 2011 By

An “A” student at a Virginia middle school received a one-day suspension  for opening an exterior door for a woman whose hands were full. The school recently installed a $10,800 security system.

All of the schools’ doors are locked during the day. Visitors must ring a buzzer and look into a camera before office personnel can let them in.

According to an e-mail sent to the Tidewater News, the student knew the visitor.

You can’t be too careful, writes Radley Balko on Hit & Run. “Your average middle school, high school, or college can expect to see an on-campus shooting about once every 12,000 years.”

Filed Under: Zero Tolerance Tagged With: , , ,

‘Disparate impact’ debate on discipline

February 17, 2011 By

Educators criticized — and defended — the use of  “disparate impact” in school discipline cases in a hearing before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, reports Ed Week.

Obama administration officials announced last spring that they’ll question discipline policies disproportionately affect blacks, Hispanics or some other subgroups, even if there’s no intent to discriminate. However, discipline policies would be “out of compliance only if an equally sound policy would have less of a disparate impact.”

At the Feb. 11 briefing, Ricardo Soto, the deputy assistant secretary for the Education Department’s office for civil rights, said, “there is no universal, one-size-fits-all approach to discipline that will be right for every school or all students.” However, the department will release new federal guidance on school discipline this year.

Commissioner Todd F. Gaziano told Soto the new approach puts “an extremely heavy burden on the school to justify any disparity.”  Educators might avoid imposing warranted discipline to avoid overrepresentation, Gaziano said.

Allen Zollman, a teacher of English as a second language at an urban middle school in Pennsylvania that he did not name, said he . . . is opposed to having to give “a thought to disparate impact” if he needs to remove a disruptive student from class, saying he views it as a constraint on effective discipline.

Should his school require such a policy, Mr. Zollman said, he would respond in one of three ways: disregard it and continue to refer whatever students he sees fit for disciplinary action, do nothing and tolerate chaos in his classroom, or take an early retirement from teaching.

Jamie Frank, who said she has been a teacher for 11 years in the suburban Washington area, said she worked in a district that stopped failing students who cut class because the policy was disproportionately affecting some groups of students. Teachers were required to reteach and retest students who’d missed class and give them time to make up work, she said.

Some district administrators supported the administration’s new policy.

For example, Hertica Y. Martin, the executive director of elementary and secondary education for Minnesota’s Rochester public schools, reported that from the 2007-08 to 2009-10 school years, the district reduced an overrepresentation of expelled African-American males. She credited a disciplinary approach gaining traction in schools nationwide, called Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support, with helping to support fairer disciplinary action. She also emphasized the importance of classes about racial and ethnic diversity that the school district has provided to teachers, with titles such as The Role of Whiteness and The Culturally Relevant Classroom.

It’s possible expulsions fell because the discipline model worked well. Or teachers got the message to go easy on black male students.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

What’s love of learning got to do with it?

February 13, 2011 By

It’s great if children “love learning,” but it’s not a goal, writes Mark Bauerlein on Brainstorm. In his State of the Union speech, President Obama called for parents to instill a love of learning — and to push “hard work and discipline” and achievement in math and science. Not all kids are going to love it.

How many conscientious, education-conscious parents who limit TV time and monitor homework end up with children who declare, “I hate math!”? Furthermore, if the “love of learning” message is explicit, young children may extend it into a new and damaging corollary: “If I don’t like it, it isn’t worth learning.” (I’ve heard this termed the “Sesame Street effect.”) That is, an absence of love turns into a justification for blowing off homework.

In addition to excess sentimentality, “love of learning” is too abstract, Bauerlein argues.

. . . children don’t love learning per se. They love history and stories and cell biology. They want to know about what happened at Little Round Top, or to find out how Odysseus escapes from Polyphemus, or observe a cell divide. In fact, the same student might love to collect and classify tree leaves and hate to read a poem. . . .  In emphasizing love of learning, the process of education, we under-appreciate the specific content that inspires the feeling. We should, instead, urge parents to instill a love of numbers and words and ideas and natural things . . .

Parents should tell children that learning is important, not necessarily lovable, Bauerlein concludes.

Filed Under: Children, Education, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , ,
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