Frontier Desk - Corey Leopold (CC)

Well last Friday afternoon, she was shown nothing but disrespect. Not disrespect from the third graders  she had been teaching daily since about mid year, but from the administration. About 15 minutes before she was supposed to leave for the day she received a call, not from the principal who was still in the building, but from the woman who calls the substitutes for the district. She was told that this would be her last day and that she had 15 minutes to gather her things and leave. No chance to say goodbye to her students, just get her things and go.

It seems that the problem arose because one parent questioned her qualifications to teach. Seems my Mother did not meet some Act 48 requirements to be able to teach more than 90 days for years. I am told this law has been on the books since 2000 and she was never been questioned about it before. Mom had had no contact from this parent and no problems with their child.

I realize that rules are rules, and the law is the law, but I also know my Mother deserved more respect from the Belle Vernon Area administration than she was shown. Substitute teaching is a tough job. No benefits, no retirement, and you only get paid a fraction of what a regular teacher would be paid for the same time. My Mother very rarely refused a call to substitute and she would go above and beyond to do a good job for the students. She should have had someone look her in the face about the situation and been given a chance to make a smoother exit transition both for her and the students.

My Mother was not just a temp at some job, she was a teacher substituting for another teacher. If teaching is still to be considered a noble profession then my Mother deserved treated much, much more nobly. The funny thing is they may have taken away her ability to substitute, but they cannot take away her ability to teach. That she will still do for the dozen kids she tutors one on one after school 4 nights a week.  She only charges ten dollars an hour and her rates have never gone up in over twenty two years of doing it. She tutors because it  is teaching, and a teacher is what and who she is.

Sure, I’m not surprised that he’s no fan of Amy Chua’s style of parenting. But, in all honesty, I expected much more “moral outrage”, and cries for a “kinder, gentler style of parenting”. Heck, I even expected some sort of comment along the lines “if her kids weren’t grown, somebody should be calling child services on her.” Well, that’s something for people to consider with another mom in the headlines – the hot sauce mom that still has people talking on Dr. Phil’s site.

But back to Alan and Amy, instead of scathing commentary, he offered readers some food for thought, possibly fueled by looking at the state of America’s youth through the lens of his own past? Could be. I know that’s what hits me in the face every time I’m faced with a gaggle of unruly kids. We have created a generation of self-important underachievers, sad but true. But the ideologies, psychological theories, and educational initiatives that are arguably the root cause of this problem are largely accepted by liberals. So why is Colmes stepping up and owning up to this as a problem, instead of sweeping it under the rug? It would have been even better if he’d offered a couple tidbits of advice on how to undo the damage, but I’ll take what I can get. Baby steps. First step is admitting there’s a problem, and we got that one! Maybe we should even grant an additional half-step in the right direction since Colmes seems to have half-heartedly accepted Chua’s choice to demand excellence from her children, since his only objection was about “how” to do it.

President Obama stressed investment in the future quite a bit tonight, primarily in two arenas – green technology and education. To be clear, it is absolutely necessary for us to invest in both. That is not subject to debate. However, timing, extent of investment, and how to invest are definitely debatable. First, on green technology, now is not the time to invest a great deal of governmental money. Unless I’ve been missing something really major here, we cannot expect a major return on such an investment in the short-term. We are not teetering on the edge of the next big thing that will allow us to replace the combustion engines in use now en masse, for one thing. We also aren’t close to the point where we can get off our addiction to fossil fuels in general.

Bluntly, we are playing catch up on this, and we should have started exploring alternative fuels in earnest back when OPEC was formed. The fact that the major players in the oil industry are coming out stating that they are investing in alternative fuel research and development should have been taken as a cue. Let them. This is important, so I’ll repeat it. Let the oil industry invest the time and money in alternative fuel research. They have seen the writing on the wall, and don’t want to get cornered out of the market when (not if) demand for their product wanes. It is a market driven decision on their part. Alternative fuel should be very near the last on the list of concerns for our government right now. Right now, we need to do precisely what the President said, and stop giving money to oil companies. (Yes, I know. I must be a RINO for saying that.) But, while cutting money from the government to oil companies, we also have to let the oil companies drill more. We need to achieve energy independence before we transition to alternative sources. We will not pull ourselves out of the economic mess we are in unless we first get out of being held hostage to the whims of OPEC. We need affordable fuel to rebuild our economy – nothing gets made or moved without it. That’s reality. We didn’t start searching for alternatives to oil when we should have, so now we have to deal with that. Green technology will have to wait until we have the money to invest in it. We don’t now. We will tomorrow, provided that we don’t stay under the thumb of foreign powers for the fuel we need now.

And that brings me to the other area where we’re playing catch up. Tonight the President said that it is time to start placing teachers on a pedestal as they do in other nations. Just like his predecessor, he made no real mention of how teachers should earn that distinction. Yet again we are faced with an administration that fails to recognize that we cannot expect improvement – let alone excellence – from our children academically if we fail to demand excellence from educators. The countries that consider teaching the highest of professions all have the highest standards for individuals seeking to teach. We do not. Unfortunately, teaching is often considered a fall-back position for people that can’t manage doing anything else. (That is not the rule, but a troubling exception that shouldn’t exist.) Arguably the greatest harm NCLB did was create a “fast track” to teaching – the complete opposite of what it should have been doing. No matter how much I loath the concept of suggesting that the government regulate anything more than it already does, in the case of education, we must demand legislation that addresses the problem of disparate requirements for acquiring a degree in education. We need to set minimum standards for teachers – not just students. But this is nothing new under the sun. It has been proven time and again by nations that have surpassed us in education. Education reform should have been done from the top down, not the bottom up. As for complaints about governmental intrusion into education, perhaps time will show that this is the real way to get the government out of the classroom. If our teachers are better educated and prepared to teach, perhaps we won’t need the government to help students succeed. I don’t know about anyone else, but I think that just having the government demand that only the best and brightest take a place at the front of our classrooms is much less intrusive (and costly) than having it step in to assist students that need help for whatever reason. If we honestly start moving in this direction with education, then we will have a much better chance at settling that alternative energy problem much sooner. Maybe instead of the President’s projections that would put our full transition away from fossil fuels somewhere around when my grandchildren that haven’t been born yet hit middle age, it could happen when my youngest son is still under forty. (My youngest is nine.) The bottom line is we didn’t need to hear about investing in a future decades away. We needed to hear about what we can do now to solve our current problems as quickly as possible. I know, that smacks of the “I want it now” mentality, but that’s reality – we need it now.

During the last administration, there was railing against a huge program that was meant to radically improve the performance of students in this country. Most of the complaints came from teachers’ unions, bemoaning the increase in work load thanks to paperwork, and radical changes in curriculum. They warned they would be left with “teaching to the tests” – they were right. But there was one group of relatively quiet voices crying for the one thing that had the best hope of truly improving our educational system – they wanted increased national standards for colleges and universities in their Education programs. As it is, there really aren’t national standards for teachers to this day – there are performance standards based on the performance of their students, but no basic requirements that every post-secondary institution must require of students wishing to become teachers in the first place. So here we are, wondering why we aren’t seeing great improvements in academics nationwide, while doing the same thing we’ve been doing for years. (Isn’t there an adage about the insanity of expecting different results from the same actions?) If only that little quiet group had been a bit louder, and suggested that the solution was much easier than what was already on the table. It’s not like it doesn’t make sense – if you have better teachers, you’ll have better students, right?

Now, we have a new administration hell bent on fixing health care. They managed to pass a law and everything. Of course, they had to pass it before anyone could honestly understand everything that was in it. Before the bill was passed, there was already something that was the same in our health care system no matter where you went in this country. Every health care provider and insurance company in the nation uses the same system for recording everything – all ailments and treatments use the same codes no matter where you are. That may not seem very important all by itself, but it is meaningful. Because of that, the only difference between the various insurance companies’ paperwork is the name of the company on the letterhead.

So, if one would decide “hey, why don’t we make it possible for all insurance companies to do business anywhere they like in the U.S.”, it wouldn’t be very difficult. To protect the public from predatory practices by the industry, one would only have to make a list of basic standards all companies would have to meet. And one very important thing that would need to be in that list would be a rule against insurance companies refusing to pay for economical solutions doctors come up with for people’s problems. Like no one would be screaming over the fact that a flat-footed child could not have inserts for his shoes in an attempt to cure his condition – insurance companies couldn’t tell doctors that they must opt for expensive surgeries in cases like that. That example is a very crude summation of our current problems with health care after all. Insurance companies are controlling the system, not health care providers. Accountants are telling doctors what to do. Bureaucracy. So the solution, according to this administration, is to make more bureaucracy?

Of course that alone would not necessarily make health care affordable for all. Perhaps we could take a page from the book of the insurance companies on this one. Maybe we could do away with insurance groups as we know them. We all understand that a company with thousands of employees pays less per person for insurance than one with just hundreds of employees. How about basing premiums on the number of individuals a given insurance company handles? Throw in the ability for companies to compete across state lines for business, and offering incentives to the public for keeping savings accounts for health care expenses, and maybe we’d have something. But the problem is, it wouldn’t be controlled by the government beyond insurance companies being fined – or shut down in extreme cases – for not meeting those minimum national standards.

Common sense relies on finding the simplest solution to a given problem. We have moved well beyond the point where common sense is anything but a joke to elected officials. All of the solutions offered above have probably been mentioned by others along the way. But they have also been mentioned by children. Contrary to what many may think, children are not stupid – they are just more simplistic. When they attack a problem, they don’t tend to take the long way around – nor do they take into account questionable situations like crafting an answer in a way that benefits them the most (unless you are talking about conning the latest video game out of a grandparent, of course.) As we age, we forget that simplicity, and particularly in the world of politics and government, that works to our disadvantage. We start from the most complex solutions first, and if we’re smart enough to realize our folly, we go back and simplify. (That’s assuming that we get anywhere in the first place, since we’re so enamored with infighting.) Perhaps the real change we need to look for is people that attack problems like children – identify the problem, identify the desired result, and then figure out the easiest way to reach that outcome. Parents often call it “taking the easy way out”, but in government, it should be called “not creating bureaucracies to justify the existence of our own jobs.”

Today, Jennifer Marshall at The Foundry suggests the solution to our education woes lies in removing the Fed from the equation. She is absolutely right that schools should be beholden to local stakeholders in education before the Federal or even the State Departments of Education. Parents should have far more control than they do now, and school choice should be the law of the land. However, there is one place the Federal Government needs to be involved more than it already is.

Now, before anyone gets all upset or excited about the possibility that I’m stepping away from my belief in fiscal conservatism, my suggestion should not increase bureaucracy. Well, it would, if it weren’t already so bloated, but I digress. The Federal Government continues to fail in one very important facet of education – while demanding higher standards from students, it has not significantly stated a desire for the same from educators. While there are some very good programs in our colleges and universities for potential teachers, there are many that are not. We still need to take a page from the books of countries that are outperforming us in education. Those countries have extremely high standards for becoming educators in the first place. NCLB actually back-pedaled, creating easier routes to the classroom for potential teachers.

I humbly suggest that the cure to our educational ills is two-fold – reducing bureaucracy in education as suggested by Marshall, and creating (much higher) nationwide standards for teachers.

So, let’s start with the MSNBC coverage. As usual, they got someone that they felt could be considered an expert of sorts on the issue of across the board firings of teachers in failing schools. I went back to MSNBC today, and searched for the name of their expert on this – Zeph Capo, the government liaison for the Houston Federation of Teachers. (I learned his title from a Houston Press blog. Yes, the link is worth a look as you’ll see!) Either the folks at MSNBC were trying to pull a fast one, or they thought it was highly unlikely that anyone would bother to look up the credentials of Zeph Capo. Whatever their motives, I found it profoundly irresponsible to choose a man who just went through a battle with his own school district to prevent them from making incompetence grounds for dismissing a teacher there.

And that is what this whole situation is about – incompetence. Back to Central Falls High School, and all those teachers and staff that were given their walking papers, what you get when you bother to read the local coverage is a story about greed. The school administration wanted to go another route. They wanted to do a program that would have required a much more pro-active approach to teaching in that school – something that was sorely needed, since under half of the students were graduating. The school district offered the teachers $30 an hour for extra time needed to help the students – bear in mind, this isn’t a good school, in a good neighborhood, with an affluent community supporting its needs. The administration moved to the clean sweep option offered by the Federal government when the teachers demanded $90 an hour for their precious time. Personally, I think it was very kind for the district to offer them a dime for any overtime needed to fix the problems the teachers had created in the first place!

And back to our good friend Zeph Capo, he had a few precious gems to offer about all of this. To paraphrase, since his speech on MSNBC was splattered with “uhs” and “ums” – “It is inappropriate for President to make judgment calls about local school districts…There’s no research to say that these wholesale firings of teachers and staff do anything to improve academic improvement…School districts and school boards can support their teachers, they can support their kids. We can try to get a handle on the testing mania that is taking over our school systems…Teachers and students are more than a test score.”

First of all, it is quite appropriate for the President to make judgment calls of that kind, simply because when we, as a country, slip in the academic rankings worldwide, he takes the heat for it. If the districts won’t fix it, or can’t because they’re hogtied by unions, then the State and Federal governments have to step in. As for no research on wholesale firings, that’s absolutely true for only one reason – until now, it hasn’t been done because the teacher unions have been protecting bad teachers from the axe for years. When you’re looking at under 50% graduation rates in a given school, it’s fair to guess that there aren’t very many teachers in that institution that are managing to actually teach anything. The testing mania is the only game in town to evaluate schools – something we know we need to do because we’re not keeping up in the educational competition worldwide. Students that have problems taking standardized tests have options, but they take time and extra work on the part of the teachers. Oh, I forgot. The teachers’ time is too precious to waste on stupid things like helping students.

But while things are circling the drain in Rhode Island, there’s a ray of hope in Chicago, Illinois. In Englewood, there’s a school where all 107 graduating seniors this year are going on to four-year colleges. At Urban Prep Academy for Young Men, if you buy what the Zeph Capo’s of this world believe about education, they are achieving the impossible. Instead of striving for mediocrity, they are reaching for the stars.

I am the product of Catholic education. In our classrooms, students that did well were also taught to teach. We were encouraged to help our peers when they struggled in class, and were taught the skills to do that. Through that education, I learned that there are two types of teachers – ones that consider teaching a way to make a living, and ones that consider teaching a way of life. The young gentlemen that are privileged to attend Urban Prep Academy for Young Men have the latter. So was I.

Unfortunately, the successful schools don’t get the same amount of press coverage as the failing ones. (I’m guilty of that here.) At the very least, they deserve more so that the administrators of failing schools know where to look for ideas – find solutions to their problems in institutions that are excelling. As for the teachers’ unions, their time is over unless they stop protecting incompetent educators. Not everyone is meant to be teacher – many that are today should leave the profession. Until the unions start encouraging people that really don’t belong in a classroom to move on, they are the enemy to progress in education. While they were busy trying to get better wages and benefits for their members, they forgot why their members were supposed to be there in the first place – to prepare the next generation to take its place in the world. That in itself is failure.

First, I will grant that there are several educational theorists in the Ivory Tower that are probably Marxists. But, like anything else in the world of educational academia, theories get watered down severely on the path to implementation, with the most radical theorems ending up in the circular file. Let’s not forget that there are still school boards out there, and there are still parents that bother to attend meetings and loudly voice their opinions when it comes to the education of their little darlings. That said, truly radical change in the educational system of this country will never happen in a single leap – ever.

Now, to address some of the absurdities mentioned in the article that was brought to my attention this morning:

Some of the basic tenants of critical pedagogy are:

ALL education is inherently political…

A social and educational vision of justice and equality should be the foundation for all education

Race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and physical ability are important domains of oppression

The purpose of education is the alleviation of oppression and human suffering

Schools must not hurt students–good schools don’t blame students for their failures

Good schools don’t judge the beliefs students have about their life’s experiences

Part of the role of any educator involves becoming a researcher into social oppression

Education must promote emancipatory change

First, the term is “tenets”, not “tenants”, but maybe showing a command of the English language isn’t a prerequisite when it comes to writing a critique on educational theory in some people’s minds. Nitpicking aside, let’s start with the first tenet: “ALL education is inherently political”. Other than the fact that I find it comical that someone who is bothering to complain about the theories in the first place on political grounds is saying this, this is recognition of the condition of life in general. Life is political, even in the classroom. Anyone who doubts that doesn’t remember their school years, and if they have children, don’t know what in the world goes on during each school day. Cliques are the “political groupings” in the school setting, and every person in the school carries their personal political baggage with them each and every day. If educators would attempt to ignore that fact, they would lose their ability to teach because none of the students would think that they have any sense of reality. Only the Kindergarten and maybe the First Grade teachers would manage to have enough respect from their students to teach even a single concept. (Stating that from experience, since my youngest child is currently in Second Grade, and I am already seeing the signs of politicking amongst his classmates.) Divorcing politics from education would be an attempt to deny the very nature of human beings – we are political by nature, in that we seek the approval of others in our actions, naturally gravitate toward like-minded individuals, and avoid those that are “too” different.

The next one is bothersome to say the least. “A social and educational vision of justice and equality should be the foundation for all education.” Why anyone at this point in this nation’s development would find this objectionable is disturbing. However, I’ll grant a little bit of understanding simply because there’s a buzz phrase in there – social justice. That is a term that has become bastardized, and is obviously being taken in the context of organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (or at least I hope that’s the case.) In educational theory, this is typically considered on a much smaller scale, particularly in practice. It is meant to encourage educators and administrators to treat all students equally within the school environment. Students should know that if they do something wrong, no matter what all of them will receive the same treatment – conversely, the same treatment if they do something right. There should be no “special treatment” that isn’t specifically attached to circumstances that are beyond the students’ control – i.e., students with disabilities such as autism may not end up with the same punishment as other students for acting up in the classroom, but that’s only because such actions are biologically beyond the control of the student. The goal of this tenet is that students will go out into the world with a reasonable sense of what is right and wrong – at least that’s a very basic analysis of it.

“Race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and physical ability are important domains of oppression.” Denying reality is a certain guarantee that students will not take educators seriously. The reality of society is that race, class, gender, sexuality, religion and physical ability can be oppressive. There are still situations where these circumstance affect the way society treats individuals. Education is called the great equalizer because it is meant to help individuals overcome real or perceived barriers to success. These are the “perceived” barriers. And that also addresses the next one: “The purpose of education is the alleviation of oppression and human suffering.” Education is meant to open doors of opportunity, and that alleviates oppression and suffering.

Objections to this next one infuriate parents of children that need even the slightest bit of educational support. “Schools must not hurt students–good schools don’t blame students for their failures.” Contrary to what some people might think, this isn’t about coddling students that have the ability to do well, but are just not trying. This is about recognizing when students are not learning because they need to be taught in a different way from their peers. Special education, tutoring, individual educational plans, and all of the rest of the various educational support programs are being addressed here. This is merely recognition of the fact that not all students learn the same way, and that it is important to assist students that have different needs – not ignore them, and let them fail.

This next one is probably objectionable only part of the time. “Good schools don’t judge the beliefs students have about their life’s experiences.” It’s probably bad to avoid judging students when their beliefs and experiences are different – look out if anyone judges students that happen to agree with the ones that believe in this nonsensical view of educational theory.

“Part of the role of any educator involves becoming a researcher into social oppression.” Educators more often than not won’t have a clue about the problems faced by their students. There are the exceptions – ones that had “been there, and done that.” But for the rest, educators need to know where their students are coming from, or they will lose credibility. Call it “researched empathy” if you like. Bottom line is that an upper-middle-class white teacher will not be effective in an inner-city classroom unless that teacher takes the time to learn about what the students’ lives are really like. Conversely, that same teacher teaching in an affluent, mostly white suburban school will not be able to teach students about what they will probably encounter in the “real world.” Oh, I forgot. Class and race are never oppressive, right?

Finally, “Education must promote emancipatory change.” The greatest gift of freedom is the ability to expand one’s world through education. Education itself is meant to be freeing. Learning how to do a job frees one from the oppression of occupational mediocrity or failure. To put it in more capitalistic terms, if our nation as a whole is better educated, we can emancipate ourselves from the oppression of being ranked as less than number one in business and technology. We can free ourselves of the need for social programs outside of caring for retired citizens and veterans (disabled or not, since there is no way we can ever honestly repay them for their service.)

That said, for all the screaming that educational theories such as this are “Marxist” and will sap this nation of its strength, the arguments fall flat in the face of what the real goals are. Educational equity is not the enemy – it is the path to greatness. If it wasn’t, why was “No Child Left Behind” so important? NCLB wasn’t nearly as effective as anyone had hoped. The ones in the Ivory Tower sat down and worked on ways to make it better, and we ended up with theories like this. Evaluating them in the context of the world of politics is bluntly ludicrous. Although everything is political, the political world is not equipped to evaluate these theories fairly. They are meant to be evaluated in the context of educational scholarship. These tenets are merely a recognition of the laundry list of shortcomings of our educational system as a whole. Some of the tenets should be applied and implemented in all schools – some shouldn’t. All of them should be kept in mind when it comes to making decisions on how to manage our educational systems. One thing that isn’t mentioned is the one thing that all educators and administrators do when it comes to evaluating theories like this – they take what they know would be useful to them and implement it, and leave the rest, either permanently, or for future consideration. They recognize that there is no such thing as a “one size fits all” theory out there for our schools. Perhaps that’s why NCLB didn’t do so well.