A Minor Musing About Parent/Teachers' Conferences

I had 21 parents visit me last night. Their students had a combined GPA of 3.4 in my classes. Four of the students earned Cs; five earned Bs; twelve earned As. I have concerns about two who I believe were were not working to the best of their ability.

I expect another 20 or 30 parents to visit me during another round of conferences later this week. The GPA of their students will be similar to the GPA of the students whose parents visited me last night. I will see the parents of 2 or 3 more underperforming students

I know correlation doesn't equal causation, but those numbers have held true for the past 15 years. I'm not going to argue that schools do not have to improve. I'm going to point out that most successful students have help at home that many struggling students don't have. I'm also going to contend Common Core or whatever the reform de jour will be next year is not going to help struggling students who don't have parental support catch up with successful students who do.

Of Schools And Warehouses And Poverty And Homes

Earlier this month conservative columnist George Will wrote:

Abundant data demonstrate that the vast majority of differences in schools’ performances can be explained by qualities of the families from which the children come to school: the amount of homework done at home, the quantity and quality of reading material in the home, the amount of television watched in the home and, the most important variable, the number of parents in the home.

Will carefully dodges the issue of poverty, but his sentences jar nonetheless.  No easy fixes exist to improve the"qualities of the families" that rear children nor should anyone want thought police searching homes to ensure that the "proper quality of reading material [is] in the home."  Further, any discussion of social policies designed to keep two parents who believe themselves incompatible together would make the same-sex marriage debates appear quaintly civil.  More importantly, if someone has the answer to eliminating poverty, one hopes that the solution would have been enacted long ago, but the poor, as they always have been, are still with us.

Today, writing at The American Conservative Rod Dreher builds on Will's point:

My conviction, based on talking over the years to public school teachers in Louisiana and elsewhere that I’ve lived, is that the No. 1 obstacle to effective public education is not lack of money (as many liberals would say), nor teacher’s unions (as many conservatives would say), but the personal, family culture of students. This is not something that any legislature can reform. The state cannot order parents to raise disciplined children who care about their studies. The state cannot command parents to stay together, to support their children, to turn off the TV, and so forth. . . .

The point is, the main problem with public schools is … the public.

Dreher supports Bobby Jindal's voucher program but "with serious reservations."  He contends:

Consider that you are a parent of a child in a failing public school, and that you are desperate to rescue your child. Consider that one of these voucher schools is the only option you have. You and other parents who have no money for private school, but who work to instill discipline and good study habits among your children, may be grateful to get your kids out of the “ghetto” of dysfunctional culture that impedes their education in their public school. Believe me, I wouldn’t want to send my kid to a school that viewed the Book of Genesis as a science text, but you’d better believe I’d choose that school if it had good order conducive to learning over a public school that did not, if those were the only options I had. You probably would too.

Dreher acknowledges that his position "leaves the public school as a warehouse for the children of the socially dysfunctional" and that results of leaving students in a warehouse would be terrible, that those results are superior to the status quo:

Bad news, to be sure — but what is the alternative? To compel working-class and poor children whose parents are trying hard to do the right thing to endure the children of parents who don’t care? Is this what egalitarianism requires? Because the well-off can buy their way out of these conditions. The state of Louisiana, with this voucher program, is offering the children of those who cannot a way out. It might not work, but it’s worth trying.

That still leaves us with a class divide that has become and is increasingly a culture divide. It ought to make us uncomfortable … but not as uncomfortable as the status quo.

Dreher's and Will's observations point to several things that frustrate me about the South Dakota school reform effort.

First, none of the discussion surrounding HB 1234 or SDDOE's regulations dealt with the pernicious effects of poverty or any other aspect of "the public." In fact, the South Dakota legislature seems to consider discussing poverty anathema.

Second, no one has articulated a clear vision for South Dakota schools. Preparing a student to be "college ready" differs from preparing as student "career ready."  Fixing the shortcomings that inadequate familial support causes is a totally different task than either of the others. Everyone seems willing to ignore the fact that one of the traditional functions of the public school has been to help prepare students to participate in a democracy. Is South Dakota's ultimate goal to create basic skills warehouses for most and elite schools for some?

Third, no one has identified a single school district that contains terrible schools or droves of incompetent teachers.  I've taught at one of the state's smallest public schools and one of its largest.  I've sent my step-children through a public school.  Every teacher was an imperfect human, but there was never a second when my wife or I would have considered sending them "to a school that viewed the Book of Genesis as a science text."  That's an admittedly low bar, but the young'uns have been able to successfully compete at out-of-state colleges. One graduated from a private institution in three years.

Fourth, the legislation and policies are cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all policies that Scott Walker, and Bobby Jindal embrace. There's no evidence that a rural state like South Dakota has the same issues that a state decimated by Katrina faces. No one contends that political corruption endemic to Louisiana occurs in South Dakota; why would one assume that other states' other social institutions share similar weakness?

Schools are not perfect.  Neither is the larger public,  Reform done in isolation will fail; so will efforts that accept warehouses for the majority and elite schools for the rest. Politicians in South Dakota and the rest of the country, however, seem willing to look at only half of the problem and accept an either/or solution.

On Work And School

Examining work or the type of city certain types of work produce seems to be a major blogosphere meme today.

At the Madville Times, Cory writes about the Perm, Russia and that city's change from a manufacturing center to an artistic mecca.  Cory concludes that one need not "be a paint-spattered dreamer to recognize the value of the arts in revitalizing a city."

Meanwhile big boy blogger Andrew Sullivan points to an Allison Arieff column that examines how employers have changed the spaces employees work in and policies about infants at the workplace along with other work practices.  Arieff concludes,

Time. It’s no less important than space. Workers are more and more productive, but they’re becoming so at a harder-to-measure but easy-to-observe cost. We shouldn’t be rethinking the cubicle or corner office but rather rethinking all aspects of work: What careers are viable (and how should we train people for them?) Might companies and their employees be able to re-envision what loyalty looks like in an era where the average time spent in a job is hovering in the range of one to four years? If a post-consumer economy is truly coming, as many from Larry Summers to the collaborative consumption evangelist Rachel Botsman predict, what might it look like? And how will it affect our relationship to earning a paycheck? In other words, how can the workplace evolve to respond to the contemporary realities of work culture?

Sullivan also directs readers to a David Roberts column about "medium chillers" who would be willing to work fewer hours if they didn't need a full time job to afford health insurance.  He also writes about "killers," those who want want to start the next great American corporation.  Roberts concludes,

I suspect there are many, many medium chillers who would be happy working 30-hour weeks and trading the extra income for leisure time. Or perhaps they'd like to share a job. Or maybe they'd like to work more when they need money and less when they don't -- just "work and get paid for it" when they need to. Those options aren't workable for most people today because of the specter of health insurance. To deviate from the 40-hour employee model is to take on risk beyond what all but a few brave souls are willing to bear.

Similarly, there are all sorts of people who might like to be "killers" and start their own business or invent something new but are inhibited from taking the leap by the fear of losing or not being able to afford health insurance. Plenty of people take that chance, of course, but how many more would there be if that risk were taken out of the equation?

Roberts also points to a Wil Wilkinson post.  Wilkinson writes,

David Ellerman, one of my favourite challenging thinkers,  argues that the employer-employee relationship is more like the master-slave relationship than we are inclined to believe. I know this sounds a little crazy, and I don't entirely buy his argument. But take a look; he's on to something. Philosophical questions of self-ownership and the alienability of labour aside, I am convinced that autonomy is profoundly important to most of us, and that the sort of self-rental involved in the employment relation is regularly experienced as a lamentable loss of autonomy, if not humiliating subjection. I think a lot of us would rather not work for somebody else. It's not necessarily that we're burgeoning entrepreneurs eager to start small businesses. It just sucks to have a boss. And I think many young people are staying in college or heading to grad school not so much to improve their job prospects later, but to postpone entering into an arrangement in which "enough money is made out of you to buy an automobile for some other fellow's son", in F. Scott Fitzgerald's words.

I'll be back in the classroom soon.  Nearly everyone except Diane Ravitch and me believes that schools exist to prepare people to do a job.  I have tried to help people prepare for work, but I have been something of an abject failure.  In 2000, I know that I didn't explain to any of my students how to properly use a laptop at Starbucks and tweet responses to one's employer.  Now that I think about it, I didn't meet that objective in 2005 either.  Most importantly, I've never done anything to help people get on with the primary purpose of work: playing Angry Birds.

I know I agree with Cory; communities should emphasize the arts and recruit artistic types. I also agree with Arieff; we need to rethink "all aspects of work."  I tend to agree with Roberts and Wilkinson as well; we might be better off if workers changed their view of work and put in fewer hours.  I'm certain those workers would be healthier working 32 hours a week.  If I were a betting man, I'd bet that economic conditions will force Americans to change their view of the 40 hour week and full-time employment, but that's a subject for a different post.

If I act on Arieff's, Roberts's, and Wilkinson's insights in the classroom, however, I am setting myself up for unpleasantness.  Wilkinson quotes Fitzgerald; I'll turn to Tolstoy.

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already; without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.

There's not a parent, administrator, or local employer who is not convinced that she knows "beyond a shadow of a doubt" what the workplace and the real world is all about.  Right now, few will agree that Arieff, Roberts, or Wilkinson are making correct assessments.  I have no idea what those same people will believe 2021.

The best any teacher can do is to promote curiosity, flexibility, and independent thinking.  Students who possess those qualities should be able to adapt and thrive in any workplace enviornment.  They'll even be able to dodge those employers who believe that workers who "think too much" are "dangerous."

Yet Another Restart

School started.  Papers piled up.  I got tired or rushed or something  I didn't post.  More importantly, I didn't really think about much serious stuff.  I didn't really think about anything except grading essays and quizzes.  I did veg out in front of the TV a bit, but vegetating and thinking ain't the same.  It's tough to blog if one doesn't think first, even if the thinking is about something frivolous.

Last week, I got to return to the Plains.  The little drip necessitated my being by myself in a car for at least 14 hours.  I actually got to think a bit.  The topics changed, but every train of thought seemed to come back to the same question:  what the heck are we doing?

On the political front, I saw dozens of commercials in two states.  Ninety percent took the same tone.  My opponent is out of touch with residents and therefore evil.  I guess it's no longer possible to disagree agreeably.

According to a Slate article, classrooms need to change for the 21st Century.  the contrarian in me forced me to think about he minimal tools I would need to get the job done.  It turns out that I could live with 19th and 20th Century tools. 

Students would need to bring paper and writing tools.  I would need some sort of chalkboard. Whiteboards are nice, but each board basically is place to write notes so that students can copy them.  I think I could teach all the classes I need to with with the following literature. 

A Doll House
Ken Burns The Civil War mini-series
Macbeth
Some random collections of Superman, Spider-Man, and The Avengers.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Bible
The Big Sleep
The Complete Flannery O'Connor 
The Complete Robert Frost
The Iliad
The Killer Angels
The Odyssey

I believe these works have relevance and would allow for great discussion and writing assignments.  The classroom doesn't have to be high tech.  It has to have tools that teachers and students can use.

A Little Candle In The Darkness

This Thomas Friedman editorial quotes this Robert Samuelson editorial about the failures of school reform.  Samuelson and by extension Friedman's get to the crux of one of education's main problems.

The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation. Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren't motivated, even capable teachers may fail.

Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a "good" college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure. The unstated assumption of much school "reform" is that if students aren't motivated, it's mainly the fault of schools and teachers. The reality is that, as high schools have become more inclusive (in 1950, 40 percent of 17-year-olds had dropped out, compared with about 25 percent today) and adolescent culture has strengthened, the authority of teachers and schools has eroded. That applies more to high schools than to elementary schools, helping explain why early achievement gains evaporate.

 Samuelson's conclusion is spot on.

Against these realities, school "reform" rhetoric is blissfully evasive. It is often an exercise in extravagant expectations. Even if George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind program had been phenomenally successful (it wasn't), many thousands of children would have been left behind. Now Duncan routinely urges "a great teacher" in every classroom. That would be about 3.7 million "great" teachers -- a feat akin to having every college football team composed of all-Americans. With this sort of intellectual rigor, what school "reform" promises is more disillusion.

The problems facing education are structural.  All parties share blame; it's good to see someone finally including students in the equation.

Of Dogs And Students

I own copies of First Break All The Rules:  What The World's Great Managers Do Differently, Now Discover Your Strengths, Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Teach with Your Strengths:  How Great Teachers Inspire Their Students, and Strengths Finder 2.0.  Each of these books assert that people have different aptitudes and they should find ways to maximize their strengths instead of always working overcome weaknesses.  To use a sports analogy, these books assert Ichiro Suzuki shouldn't try to hit 40 home runs in a season and Jim Thome shouldn't try to steal 40 bases.  Ichiro is a great singles hitter and base stealer and Thome is a great power hitter.  Both men will be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame because they stick to their strengths.

Marion Brady, guest blogging at the Washington Post's Answer Sheet, puts a canine spin on using strengths.  Brady observes that "among the people for whom herding sheep is serious business, there is general agreement that Border Collies are better at doing what needs to be done than any other dog. They have ‘the knack.’"  Lest he be accused of being a "breedist" or whatever the PC term would be for unjustly favoring one breed over the other, Brady points out "[i]f you’re lost in a snowstorm in the Alps, you don’t need a Border Collie. You need a big, strong dog with a really good nose, lots of fur, wide feet that don’t sink too deeply into snow, and an unerring sense of direction for returning with help. You need a Saint Bernard."  He also points out that the Fox Terrier is great at protecting chicken coops. 

Brady concludes, "It isn’t that many different breeds can’t be taught to herd, lead high-altitude rescue efforts, or kill foxes. They can. It’s just that teaching all dogs to do things which one particular breed can do better than any other doesn’t make much sense."

Brady continues the analogy to condemn NCLB.

. . . . If that fact makes you optimistic about the future of education in America, think again about dogs.

There are all kinds of things they can do besides herd, rescue, and engage foxes. They can sniff luggage for bombs. Chase felons. Stand guard duty. Retrieve downed game birds. Guide the blind. Detect certain diseases. Locate earthquake survivors. Entertain audiences. Play nice with little kids. Go for help if Little Nell falls down a well.

So, with No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top as models, let’s set performance standards for these and all other canine capabilities and train all dogs to meet them. All 400 breeds. All skills. Leave No Dog Behind!

Two-hundred-pound Mastiffs may have a little trouble with the chase-the-fox-down-the-hole standard, and Chihuahuas will probably have difficulty with the tackle-the-felon-and-pin-him-to-the-ground standard. But, hey, no excuses! Standards are standards! Leave No Dog Behind

Brady is preaching to a choir of at least one when he illustrates that people's strengths differ, and that NCLB is idiocy.  He does, however, ignore the fact that schools failed to teach students to emphasize their strengths and focused instead on fixing weaknesses long before NCLB.  The number of remedial classes has always exceeded the number of advanced classes.  Students with no aptitude for algebra were forced to take Algebra II or another advanced math class to get a diploma.  Students who can't see symbolic stars when hit with the symbolic hammer were forced to take four literature classes in order to graduate.

Let me offer a caveat here.  Public education should provide students with the basics necessary to function in the contemporary world.  Our increasingly fragmented society might be better served if more people shared knowledge of the same literature.  Some required classes are necessary.

Even with that caveat, the students who excel at finding out what's wrong with a car engine probably should be encouraged to develop that skill.  Students with a great personality but an below average intellect should be taught how use those people skills to their advantage.  Both types of students probably should be allowed to skip an fourth literature class or a third science class.  Instead, they should be taught how to prevent an employer from taking advantage of them.  They should be taught how to make themselves so valuable as a mechanic or waitress or salesperson that no one will even think about firing them even if they are in a low level job.

Brady will probably be excoriated for comparing students for dogs.  Some PC folk will probably be upset because I'm saying that some students have a better intellect than others.  It's not in vogue to make such assertions.  Apparently, people are all interchangeable parts that can learn everything and be proficient in everything.  If that's true, Ichiro should swing for the fences tonight,  and Chihuahuas should be used as seeing eye dogs.

Quote Of The Day

But lately I’ve grown increasingly cynical about the assertions of charter-school advocates that the most pressing problem facing our public education system is the plethora of lazy, incompetent teachers who cannot be fired under any circumstances. As Steve Brill wrote for The New York Times Magazine last week: “Indeed, the core of the reformers’ argument, and the essence of the Obama approach to the Race to the Top, is that a slew of research over the last decade has discovered that what makes the most difference is the quality of the teachers and the principals who supervise them.” Maybe it’s because I was a teacher’s pet growing up, or because of my undying love for school supplies, but a lot of this sounds to me more like a full court press to break the admittedly powerful teachers’ unions than simply an effort to improve public schooling. (Raina Kelley, "In Defense of Teachers," 5/28/10)

I live in a state where the teaching union is anything but powerful, so it seems to me that reform is basically an effort to break teachers.  By the way, doesn't everyone love school supplies?