By Kristin
1) Educate the parents. Children with educated parents do better in school. Provide adult-education classes, for free, that help uneducated parents earn their GED, AA, or a BA. While they're in class in the evening or on the weekend, provide childcare. That childcare can include the arts, tutoring, or athletic activities to enrich the lives of children and support their own success in school.
2) Provide free, quality childcare and preschool to families who would qualify for free and reduced lunch. Free, from birth to kindergarten. We will NEVER be able to close the achievement gap between rich and poor when some kindergarteners know their ABCs and can count to 100 and some kindergarteners don't and can't. Make school success start at birth.
3) Provide free summer school and summer enrichment programs. Children who qualify for free and reduced lunch should have access to a variety of free summer activities, from backpacking trips to international travel to arts, vocational, and athletic camps. Give poor kids the opportunity to gain a little confidence and sophistication that isn't about swagger and pricey gee-gaws.
4) Find a way to fire incompetent or worn out teachers. Develop a program that trains administrators to effectively assess teachers and make them use it. Provide an attractive severance package to move bad teachers out of the profession, and develop an online database of information to keep them out. They are turning students off of school, they are burning out our talented teachers, and they are damaging public education more than drugs, gangs, poverty or state budgets combined.
5) Hire talented, energetic teachers to serve as in-house suspension supervisors. When my students get suspended it is difficult for them to regain their footing, make up missed work, and pass their classes. Nothing positive is happening at home for a teenager who has no adult supervision all day long.
#1 is brilliant; parents are the first teachers a child has, and their support all through school makes a huge difference in a child’s success. What a difference this would make!
I hesitate to defend “incompetent or worn out teachers”, but I have actually done that as a union representative. Incompetent can actually be remedied (sometimes) with mentoring and directed plans for improvement. Incompetent is usually present at the beginning of a career; not many start well but lose their way. If they don’t improve, then let them go.
But what do we do with worn out? Remember the teacher retirement system says for full benefits you must teach until the age of 65. For a young person starting a career at the age of 22, that means 43 years in the classroom. That’s a recipe for wearing people out. The retirement criterion used to be 30 years of service. What was wrong with that?
#2 rings so true for me. I can’t tell you the number of low-income students I’ve had who have been forced to miss school because they have to stay home and babysit younger siblings. It’s such a difficult position for those families who have to sacrifice one child’s education for another’s well being. Free childcare would take care of a large number of our Becca kids.
asdfasdfasdf
Tom, YES, add administrators to #5. You are so completely right.
Great list, Kristin, but can we include administrators to number 4, please? Everyone knows a teacher or two that ruin the lives of children for a year and beyond. But some of us who have had to endure poor principals know that removing a principal makes firing a teacher seem relatively easy.
The simple answer (or one part of a multifaceted answer), Travis: the union.
I appreciate so much of what the union/association does for teachers, but it I’ve seen them protect teachers who should not have been protected.
#4 & #5 are often so closely related. If a school hires competent teachers with a skill in instruction, then the school will not need to fire teachers. However, I fully agree with the idea that teachers who cannot provide superior instruction (and after support and a plan) should be removed.
I have seen many teachers make this statement about removing ineffective teachers. I wonder how many teachers believe this. If it is a great majority, then why is it not happening?
Kristin, I want you in charge. I don’t know as much about the broader system as a whole as you do, just my own experiences in a very socio-economically diverse urban public school, and now my experiences as my son starts in the public school system – but your suggestions seem spot on, but seem to speak to societal issues far greater than can be solved by the school system alone.
Tracey, you raised so many great points that I wanted to sleep on my answer, but then I woke up and Luann had the perfect response! Both of you are right. It shouldn’t be a place kids want to be, but it also shouldn’t be a place where kids feel worthless. I like Luann’s model.
I don’t feel that establishing effective consequences means we’ve already failed. Being in class should be seen as a privilege, one that a child wants to keep.
I agree that suspensions should be tempered with other strategies, but there are some times when kids need a day to cool off, to remember that class is more fun, and to think about what they’ve done and why they’ve been assigned a consequence.
Re: #5. Agree completely that kids need in-school suspension rather than staying home with no supervision. However, it still needs to be a place kids don’t want to be. A district near mine when I taught in another state had a great setup. An empty, unused classroom was converted to a study hall, with individual study carrels. There was no clock. No phones or mp3 players would be allowed; back then, it was Walkmans. There was no clock. Teachers were great about providing work for kids, so they were busy. A retired HS SS teacher monitored the room. She sat at the desk and knitted, and helped keep kids on track and working. They got a bathroom break mid-morning and mid-afternoon.They were taken to the cafeteria to get lunch at noon, which they brought back to their study carrel and ate alone, without talking. No kid wanted to be there, believe me. Behaviors changed after one session there – very few repeat offenders. Students came to appreciate their regular classes.
Watching your class remotely would be a great option – I”m remembering that we have unlimited money on this one!
Bravo on # 1- 4 – especially 2 and 3. I wonder what can be done to prevent the suspensions…? Hiring a person specifically to supervise suspensions just seems like we’ve already failed. Plus, I worry that the experience of spending your time with a talented and energetic teacher could be more positive than your time in the classroom and that could easily backfire. I think it’s important to look at why kids are getting suspended. We did that at our school.
After a year of seeing so many of our kids get suspended, we decided that we would save the suspension for the most serious offenses. Too many of our kids were getting suspended for spontaneous bad decision making, such as fighting out on the playground. Once we suspended one kid for fighting, we had to do it every time it came up. Instead we came up with creative ways to keep them in the classroom and do cleaning-type jobs around the school during recesses. Maybe that doesn’t work as well at the high school level. How about an in-school suspension where your class is played live for you on a monitor? You’re isolated from your friends, but you’re still “attending” class in some sense. We should have the technology to figure that out, and if we don’t, the sky’s the limit, right?
J. Broekman, thanks for the tip on the great fiction site.
Mark, another factor in the compulsory debate is that no one is more mindless about ticking of requirements towards graduation than some of our most successful university-bound students. They are willing to do what they’re told because they’re working towards a distant reward. Sometimes I think our “problem” students who goof off and cut class are being more honest about whether or not their time is being wasted.
I don’t know about sending an 8th grader into the work force. Just because a child isn’t doing well in school doesn’t mean school isn’t important, it means something isn’t fitting right. I don’t think the answer is make school voluntary. I think the answer is make school valuable.
I absolutely agree with you about the risk of the diploma becoming meaningless. Every year I see more and more kids get key requirements waived so they can walk across the stage with their friends.
I like the premise behind #1, but I wonder if the issue isn’t a lack of education or even lack of access to education, but the mindset cultivated by past negative experiences in school that education is not worthwhile.
I think it is interesting that in none of these lists have we seen the suggestion that public education not be compulsory. I think I was Luann who suggested that we recognize some kids don’t need high school. If we really think about it, part of the reason secondary schools are dysfunctional is because they are (at times) holding pens for kids who don’t want to be there and are just putting in time until they clear the hoops to graduate or are old enough to drop out.
What is the value of the high school diploma, anyway, if the standards are made lower and lower in order to enable “everyone” to be able to pass? Why not let people enter the workforce after the 8th grade? It might make the next generation value education a bit more…
Ira Socol posted a (short fiction) story recently that made the same point as #5, only better. You can read it at http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2009/08/fiction-interlude-back-to-school.html
Too many people see a child’s education as something that happens between 8 and 3, only in the classroom. Your points about creating an stronger learning environment outside the classroom are excellent. It takes more than a good teacher to help a kid succeed in school. Health, attitude, experience, diet, and family role models are essential. The trick now is changing public attitude enough to make this a funding priority.
Hear, hear. Regarding number 3, I can hear voices saying, “That’s extra.” I contend it is essential. “Enrichment” is so often the medium through which the cognitive development of children grows, and that increased capacity, together with knowledge and confidence, contributes to achievement. I wonder how, as a society, we can build a collective appreciation for the breadth and depth of learning that happens beyond the walls of the classroom and the desire to give that to every child.