At my son’s high school they are
changing from a trimester system to a semester system. They
are also starting a new get-tough “tardy program”. When my
son informed me of this, my response was a sarcastic “Wow!
This will solve all the problems.”
Almost no one denies we have big
problems in our public schools, and there is no shortage of
things to point accusatory fingers at: the teachers, the
administrators, the parents, the rules, funding, demographics,
drugs, and on and on and on. I realize that efforts have been
and are being made to address these situations; but there is
one huge underlying problem that prevents us from really
getting anywhere. I’m going to describe that problem and
suggest ways to solve it, but I’m going to start with a
story. Please bear with me.
In my first grade class picture,
taken in Challis, Idaho, many years ago, there we are with
Mrs. Bradley. She looks like what she was: the wife of a
rancher who taught school. I think she loved us all—I know we
all loved her. I don’t believe she had any special training;
I doubt she’d been to college, but she made sure we all
learned the first grade materials and were ready to continue
with the second grade the next year. We were all really happy
when we found out she would also be our second grade teacher.
But this story isn’t really
about Mrs. Bradley. In that picture with her are about 25
little kids, first graders. And there is also one great big
hulking kid who looks like he should be in about the sixth
grade. That was Nick Piva. Nick was Basque. He had arrived
in the United States the summer before. He was old enough to
be in the sixth grade, but he didn’t speak English.
So they stuck him in with us
first graders. He did the same schoolwork we did; he went to
lunch with us; he had recess at the same time we did. He was
a first grader. The work was probably pretty easy for him.
He didn’t require a special tutor or special language
instructor. He learned English from the rest of us, and we
thought of Nick as one of us, a first grader.
I was surprised, when I started
the second grade, to learn that Nick was now a seventh
grader! I don’t know if he struggled academically after
that. What I do remember is that by the time that we were in
the fourth or fifth grade, Nick was a star on the basketball
team and that it was kind of nice to go to a game and feel
like somebody from our class was out there making those
baskets.
Nick went on to graduate with
his class, and he became a productive member of the
community. He didn’t go to college, but almost no one from
that little rural community did in those days.
My point here is that, so far as
I know, Nick Piva never suffered one bit from having spent
what should have been his sixth grade year with a bunch of
first graders. Nor did we first graders suffer from him being
in our class. I will argue that what our school did with him
was the best possible solution.
My best friend in the first
grade was Chuckey Jensen. Chuckey had been held back the year
before; Mrs. Bradley didn’t think he was ready to go into the
second grade. When I started the first grade I was almost
seven years old (my birthday is in October). My parents had
kept me out the year before because they hadn’t thought I was
ready to start school yet.
The guiding principle was that
students must be ready to succeed at the next level before
passing from one grade to the next. This paradigm has been
largely replaced by the tacit understanding that we must pass
them along to the next grade no matter what.
The reasoning seems to be that
for the first seven or eight years we are pretty much teaching
the same thing over and over again anyway and that at some
point along the way each student will somehow become
interested or “catch fire” or “take off and run with it”. I
suspect most students realize, by the time they reach the
fifth grade, that they don’t have to do very much or try very
hard in order to pass on to the next grade along with the rest
of their classmates. This makes it very hard if not
absolutely impossible for teachers to have anything like high
standards.
Instead of challenging students,
we nurture their self-esteem. (This is why many college
students, when told their work is grossly inadequate,
immediately complain that they aren’t doing well because they
don’t happen to be one of the teacher’s favorites.) Let’s
take the case of Nick Piva. It would be unthinkable given the
current paradigm to stick him in with the first graders. We’d
put him with other students his age. We might get a
specialist to work with him. We would try above all else not
to threaten his ethnicity. It wouldn’t be long before he
learned that it didn’t much matter—there would be lots of
other kids not doing much or trying very hard who were passed
along to the next grade at the end of each year. He’d fit
into that group just fine.
When students reach high school,
we play catch up by putting the ones who seem to be doing
better in “advanced” classes; but a tremendous amount of
damage has already been done. I wonder how many of the
students in the “dummy track” are there because they were
never challenged, because they never had to face either doing
satisfactory work or failing. I wonder how much the
scholastic abilities of the students in the “college track”
have suffered and atrophied from seven or eight years of
watered down curriculum and pedagogy.
It is a very difficult
situation. Teachers, administrators, parents, students, they
all have my sincerest sympathy and understanding. If a
teacher finds himself or herself teaching a class where a
large percentage of the students have not attained the
academic skills to be at that class level, it is asking the
near impossible for him or her to not only bring them up to
the level they need to proceed, but also to teach them all
they need to know in order to pass on to the next level. I
think teachers generally do the best they can, but their only
real option is not to have very high standards.
If a teacher fails students, we
tend to blame the teacher. If a student has been passed along
for several years without gaining the corresponding academic
skills for those levels, it isn’t really fair to change the
rules and make him or her conform to higher expectations.
Parents who find they have a son or daughter failing after
having been passed along up to that point generally find it
convenient and reasonable to blame the teacher or the
administrators or the system in general. So, about the only
real option teachers have is to do the best they can with what
they have to work with and then pass them along and let
somebody else worry about them.
Briefly put, we’ve been trying
to build on failure. If a student does poorly in the first
grade, we are nice to him and pass him on to the second grade
and hope he will do better. And unless there is some miracle,
things spiral downwards from there.
We need to begin building on
success. We need to be more honest with ourselves and with
our students. Students who don’t do passing work need to
fail. Students who do excellent work should be praised and
used as examples. We need to introduce competition in the
schoolroom. We need to back up our teachers so they have some
disciplinary teeth to work with so that they aren’t spending
something like 40% of their time keeping order in the
classroom and doing paperwork.
In Oregon, the benchmark tests
are a start, but they are not a substitute for a demanding
curriculum and high academic standards. We need those too.
The teachers have to teach, and the students have to learn. I
imagine there are standardized tests designed to show at what
grade level students are performing. We should give every one
of our students those tests to find out what level we can put
them where they have a good chance of succeeding, and if that
means putting fifth graders in with the first graders, that’s
what we need to do. Then we have to challenge them to learn,
praise them when they do, and come down hard on them when they
don’t.
