#failingschools

There is a lawsuit, right now, against Halifax County regarding the way school districts have been structured.  It’s no secret to Halifax residents that gerrymandering is still happening.  District and city lines play a part in preventing certain socioeconomic groups from attending certain schools.  I learned early in my career at Northwest Halifax that there was some “separate but equal” going on.

Years later, safe from termination and harassment, I can say some things I couldn’t say before.  There is so much I never told my students because some of them would have rioted.  I did my best to teach them to stand up for themselves without that level of self-sacrifice.  However, there comes a point where the truth is clear and a revolution must occur.

Halifax County is where the American Revolution truly started so where is that revolutionary spirit now?  I encourage you all to rise up against the three-tiered school district and DEMAND the rights that Martin Luther King Jr. and others fought so hard for.  Allow me to tell you why:

As a former Northwest Halifax High teacher, I started hitting obstacles before I started in 2007.  When the postman learned where I was working, he laughed and wished me luck.  He told me he would be surprised if I was still there after a month.  When I opened my bank account, the lady at the bank whispered to me, “You know their school motto?  Kill whitey.”  

The “city” opinions of the county schools were disheartening and confusing, especially when I attended the back to school day and I was impressed with the loving, yet poor parents I met that night.  So many of these parents were still in their mechanic blues or overalls.  The mothers were in scrubs or, possibly, their Sunday best if they had the time.  These parents clearly had their hands full but, dammit, they still wanted the best for their kids.  So tell me, why do their kids get the shit end of the stick in Halifax?  

Over and over I was blessed with kids in theater and English, who just wanted to succeed but knew they were too far behind to live the dream of being a lawyer or a doctor.  Every morning I looked into beautiful brown eyes and promised them that they were worth more than the county said.  Every afternoon I was using my lunch to help a girl write a resume and apply for jobs.  Despite her 3.8 GPA, the school had put her into the landscaping/horticulture track because her last name was Vazquez.  One day, a young man told me his dream was to be a pediatrician because he had taken care of his little brothers most of his life.  He told me his 1st grade teacher laughed at him when he told her.  He said she told him to aim for something more realistic.  Yet, he tried but his school system and his home life failed him.  No one at home cared if he had good grades and no one stopped other kids from bullying him for being smart.  By middle school he was smoking cigarettes and getting in fights.  By high school he was gang affiliated and armed.  

Let’s talk about two young men, Maurice and Greg.  These young men were on my junior English list my second year.  I was excited to teach them The Crucible and American protest speeches.  

“Them two ain’t gon do shit for you,” a local teacher said to me.  I’m pretty sure she was old enough to remember when Halifax was founded.

“Who?”

“Greg and Maurice.  Greg’s lazy and he’ll give you nothing but trouble.  When Maurice actually shows up, he’ll be high.  I don’t think he can even write.”

I made a mental note that these two needed some TLC when they got to my class.  After about two weeks of respect towards Greg and candy to Maurice, they were a success.  Greg was answering questions during discussion and getting an A.  Maurice was showing up and asking for help with his resume and makeup work.  It seems, with a little respect in education, students will succeed.

Halifax County had the power and means to create schools that don’t perpetuate a cycle but they failed.  Good schools build good citizens.  When a county sends a message to an entire district that they aren’t even worthy of clean water and safe learning conditions, people will do what they have to to survive.  I don’t know where it started but it needs to end.  Halifax County needs to find itself in 2015 and eliminate the three-tier district system.  They need to stop painting over dirty walls and making decisions based on pride.  Halifax County needs to raise its standards and diversify.  It needs a major overhaul and I encourage you all to cry out for it.  

I’ve been complaining about government interference in education for years. But forget the government. There’s a new clueless interloper on the scene. She’s been around forever, but she’s just recently gained the power of a government agency. She is the overprotective, overinvolved mom. Let’s be clear. I believe parents have a say in their children’s education. I believe they should complain if a teacher is doing something wrong or treating their child unfairly. I am a parent, and I would not sit idly by if my child was receiving less than a quality education or was being mistreated. That’s not what I’m talking about. I am also not referring to the majority of parents who reasonably contact teachers and administrators with their concerns, discuss situations, and offer fair solutions or advice. I’m referring to parents who worship their children to the point that they unknowingly handicap them and effectively destroy any chance of them receiving useful skills or an education that will serve them their entire lives simply because they can’t bear to see their child struggle. We’ve all met them. They complain about every grade, write their children’s papers, excuse them when they want to stay home and play video games, demand testing as soon as their child says an assignment is too difficult, and blame the teacher when their child continues to fail all their subjects, or in some cases, merely don’t receive As. Unfortunately, some struggle is required for learning anything new. If a child never struggles in a class, they are not thinking, being challenged, or doing any of the work necessary to learn a new skill. They are merely doing what they already know how to do.

In the past teachers were trusted to institute their own guidelines, within reason, to suit their style, the children’s needs, and their subject matter. The same model does not work in every class. With the passing of new programs and laws such as No Child Left Behind and the new Common Core Standards, came a host of rules and regulations of how a teacher should teach and grade. Our classes are lumped into categories such as English, Science, Math, and History, among others, regardless of their specialty. Each of these categories has their own standards, which may or may not make sense in the specific class. All of these standards have the same weight, regardless of their real world importance, and a standard for turning things in on time or turning in things at all, does not exist, even though in the real world for which we are preparing students, no one cares what a person knows if they are unwilling to produce any action. However, in school, it no longer matters what a student does, only what they know, and it is the teacher’s sole responsibility to figure out what they do know if the student is unwilling to share that information.

Add to this the fact that teachers are the only ones held accountable for what the student learns, and we have some very overworked and frustrated teachers shaking their heads at the system. Obviously, there is no motivation for the student, and this also is seen as the fault of the teacher. Of course, scores drop and desperate administrators dealing with angry parents and threatening superintendents implement one experiment after another trying to stem the flood of apathy and poor test scores. No system sticks around long enough to get an accurate evaluation over a period of time because as soon as little Johnny complains that he doesn’t like it, our overprotective mom rushes to the superintendent to rescue him. For some reason beyond my comprehension, some superintendents and administrators cower in fear at the angry parent and immediately give in, ordering the teacher to make it easier on Johnny while threatening that the teacher had better not let Johnny’s test scores slip. If you aren’t one of these parents, maybe you’re thinking I’m exaggerating. I assure you, I am not.

Recently a situation like this happened on a grand scale affecting every teacher in my building. A couple of years ago, the teachers at the school where I work were forced to implement a modified form of Standards Based Grading. If you aren’t familiar with it, it is a system where no points are accumulated and formative homework is not counted. Students are given letter grades on summative assessments that fall into the Common Core Standards. They are allowed to re-do these assessments, erasing earlier grades that were not passing, re-take every test, ignore deadlines on assignments (because we only care about what they know), and any poor grades would be replaced by newer grades as they learn. This made things much easier for students and much harder for teachers. Teachers now have to spend hours at home creating new tests for re-takes and re-grading tests, papers, and projects while also grading the new work that comes in. Most teachers thought that this was unreasonable and too easy for the students, so we implemented a few rules to make it more challenging and to create some incentive to do the work. We made some restrictions. For example, if a student has an F in one standard, he would not be able to receive higher than a C in that category. Each category is calculated together to receive the overall class grade. If a student failed an entire standard, he could not receive higher than a C in the class. Also, we made a rule that if a student took a test over and did worse, then they would receive the most recent grade.

But Johnny didn’t like that. Now it would be risky to keep taking the same tests over again without studying. In addition, Johnny didn’t like it when he had two Bs and two As and ended up with a B in the class even though the two As were in categories that hardly mattered, and the Bs were in important categories. Johnny thought he deserved an A because—well, just because. Johnny ran home and complained to his mom, and she was furious. She’d take care of that mean teacher trying to educate her son by actually holding him accountable for his work. So Johnny’s mom got a few parents together and went to the school board and superintendent. They demanded records from the overworked administrators and harassed the teachers. They circulated petitions and filed complaints. By the way, Johnny was already receiving free tutoring from the teacher after the teacher was supposed to be home with her family. The teacher was also providing notes for Johnny because Johnny has a hard time copying words off the board when he is playing games on his phone. Johnny also got to use the teacher’s notes on his tests because he has trouble remembering stuff for his modified tests. He only has to read half of his novel because he can’t concentrate on reading when he is almost to the next level of his video game. But anyway, I digress. Johnny’s mom chewed out the superintendent about the mean teachers at his school, and the superintendent asked her what she would like to happen. Johnny’s mom said she wanted all the grades to be rounded up, no restrictions about Fs hurting grades, and she wanted only Johnny’s highest grades to count on his test re-takes. She also demanded that her new rules should be retroactive, and the teachers should have to go back and change all the grades from the previous semester to fit the new rules if the student asked (the grades that were done exactly as the administration dictated before). The superintendent said, “Of course,” and ordered all the teachers to comply. He also made sure the teachers knew that their test scores had better not drop, or they would receive a poor evaluation. It’s too bad Johnny’s mom doesn’t demand a smaller class size, but she never mentions the fact that there are 45 students in his class because she voted against the measure that would have reduced it. She doesn’t want that school to get any more of her money than they already do. Besides, the superintendent says that class size doesn’t matter “if you’re a good enough teacher.”

True story. Johnny is not one boy but represents many. Johnny’s mom is not one parent but a vocal minority. I don’t blame the students. They are good kids, and I love them. It’s human nature for them to take advantage of the system they are caught in, and I applaud the ones who resist the urge, who do their best and work hard despite it—and they do exist, but even they often admit that they have lost motivation and a great deal of their work ethic in this system. This is why I hear from college professors more and more that the biggest problem with incoming college students in our area is no longer what they don’t know, but their expectation of being coddled. They expect to turn things in late for full credit, they expect to miss class with no repercussions on their grades, and expect to re-do assignments and tests. In short they are not prepared for college in ways beyond academic knowledge. Unfortunately for Johnny, his mom holds no sway with the college professor.

As the system continues to spiral out of control, quality, experienced teachers are being driven out of education faster than new ones can graduate. I fear that by the time my students have children in school, school will have become nothing more than a daycare center catering to their every whim and staffed by paraprofessionals making minimum wage. Quality teachers with advanced degrees will not linger forever in a field that devalues them, holds them to ridiculous evaluation standards that are wholly out of their control, and subjects them to taking orders and abuse from overprotective parents who know absolutely nothing about educating their children.

Something has to be done about this mentality of scapegoating the teacher, blaming her for the actions of everyone around her and ignoring the enormous sacrifice she daily makes to educate other people’s children. States and districts pile more and more meaningless busywork on the already stretched teacher while, at the same time, removing all responsibilities from the students. We ignore the fact that most teachers work between 60 and 70 hours per week while being paid for 40. We demand that they provide individual instruction in a class of 45 students, which by the way, is impossible, yet part of her yearly evaluation. We hold her responsible for someone else’s motivation level, while removing most methods of creating this motivation. We make her accountable for things completely out of her control like whether or not the student communicates with his parent about grades or the student taking the initiative to seek out learning opportunities on his own. Why are we so eager to take away all responsibility from our children and place it on the teacher? Does anyone really think that is good for kids? If so, I hope they are prepared to support their children well into their thirties. As for the rest of us, we need to give back to teachers their autonomy and control over that for which they are held accountable. It is not fair to demand results, and then tie their hands in achieving those results. The crisis in our education system has reached critical mass, and we, as teachers, will no longer passively accept the blame.—Christina Knowles