I came into school today, and in the midst of the rush—the adolescent interpretation of personal space, the voices layered on top of one another, the morning chaos—one of my seventh grade students proudly showed me her newly-tattooed arm.
Glossy with Vaseline—embedded awkwardly into her plump but not yet grown forearm in a large but delicate cursive—was the name of her brother. You see, last week, he was shot in the back of the head. She had called me, crying, explaining that she would not be able to make it to school that day.
That same week, another of my students lost a father to an unknown cause largely assumed to be alcohol overdose. Yet another student, in the hallway, expressed how frustrated and tired she was of her mom’s punches—but that the Department of Child and Family Services would only make things worse, so please, don’t call them. Two weeks before that, one of our ninth graders was shot and killed at home by his eight-year-old brother.
Please, do not misinterpret this retelling of events. I am not attempting to make exotic—or worse yet, glorify—the role of violence in the lives of my students; nor my own position as teacher and mentor. Lord knows enough has been done to overvalue the trope of the white woman savior (remember Dangerous Minds?), and I am not that woman. My students do not all live in disaster. They do not all come from instability. And when they do, my students certainly do not always turn to me. In fact, more often than not, they do not turn to me at all.
Rather, I am trying to illustrate a brutal reality, which is that this work is incredibly hard work. It is slow, it is dirty, it is draining and always, it is imperfect; because in the cacophony of adolescence, of life—and frequently, of unfortunate pain—there is still a job to be done. My students must learn how to read, write and think critically. They must defy statistics, but maintain credibility. In the words of one of my colleagues, they must compete for their lives. And this is not hyperbole.
I was recently invited to a roundtable conversation with the exceedingly controversial former chancellor of the Washington, DC schools, Michelle Rhee. I was invited because I was considered a “reform-minded teacher.” I could not help but laugh; what in the world is a reform-minded teacher? Or better yet, what would a non-reform-minded teacher look like?
The circumstance immediately took me back to a talk Jonathan Kozol gave where he mentioned that one of the biggest jokes in education was the talk of reform, as if this construct was somehow something new with each passing generation, that dredges up the same worn terminology. According to Kozol, educators have been attempting to reform education for the 35 years that he has been working in educational advocacy—and yet, the system continues to fail, arguably in greater extremity with each passing generation. Charles M. Payne argues a similar point in his book So Much Reform So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools.
You can track this conversation of reform over time, from when the need to compete against Russia during the 1950s and the beginning of the Cold War led to the development of “Math and Science Academies,” to the movement towards classrooms without walls or grades in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, “reform” was the trend towards creating students who were competitive in the global marketplace. It also denoted the beginnings of standardization. Competing with the drive for standardization was the small schools and community schools movement, which attempted to recreate the school as a centerpiece not only of the student’s life, but also of the lives of families, and other community members. This movement was only to be followed by dogmatic assertions of “rigorous,” “data driven,” and “standards-based” instruction of the No Child Left Behind era.
In its current incarnation, school reform advocates have opened a myriad of public charter schools. With little oversight, schools are able to hire uncertified teachers, “push out” students who are not the right fit for the school, and perpetuate the practice of creating “turn-around schools.” This is where the entire staff of a school is fired, down to the janitors. After a whole new staff is hired, the same kids are brought back in—as if somehow, by wiping the school clean the students too will be wiped of their lived experiences and start to succeed.
Students spend more time taking standardized tests and less time receiving actual instruction than ever before. And yet, as Payne notes, in all of this reform, there is so little change. Why in the world are we surprised? While people stand around aghast, my students still need to compete for their lives by doing something as rudimentary as learning how to read in the seventh grade. If they are lucky, their only distraction from the task at hand is the distraction provided by their developmental biology: hormones raging, tempers flaring. However, in the event that they are unlucky, they are coming into school after the loss of a loved one with a new tattoo at 12 years old. Regardless, my task remains the same.
I suppose this leads to the why; the ever-elusive, but all-important why. In a society that has figured out how to do so much, why have we not figured out how to adequately educate our youth? And, furthermore, why are we not genuinely outraged by our own ineptitude?
In my most cynical moments, I am tempted to believe that the answer to this question is of an insidious nature. That the children who are supposed to get educated, do get educated, and as for the rest of our country’s children, well, an uneducated populace can actually be quite useful. On my more charitable days, I think the answer has more to do with the culture of education, and the larger social questions this brings up, than it does some evil master plan to keep us all compliant. In order to even begin addressing improving the educational opportunities for our young people, we need to be able to openly talk about the roles that race, class and culture play in education. This conversation has been essentially stifled by the focus instead on the more comfortable, politically correct dialogue around standards, data and rigor.
The culture of education is defined and informed by the cultures of those who participate in it. Like it or not, this includes our students, their families, other educators, administrators and communities at large. The reality is, we may not always agree with the decisions made by the other participants in this discursive system, but that does not mean these decisions inform the culture of education any less. Nor does it mean that these other players who shape our system of education ought to be disenfranchised and alienated from the conversation.
Education is not a stagnant thing, waiting to be changed and corrected. This is a massive system, constantly evolving and developing, and in a state of perpetual reform. There is no silver bullet or one-stop solution to what ails our system, but rather, hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of legitimate voices who need to be heard and valued, but are currently ignored. Until we accept this reality, we will not service the people who are ultimately at the center of this debate: our children. My students, tattoos and all, still need to learn how to read in order to have a chance of surviving.
Glossy with Vaseline—embedded awkwardly into her plump but not yet grown forearm in a large but delicate cursive—was the name of her brother. You see, last week, he was shot in the back of the head. She had called me, crying, explaining that she would not be able to make it to school that day.
That same week, another of my students lost a father to an unknown cause largely assumed to be alcohol overdose. Yet another student, in the hallway, expressed how frustrated and tired she was of her mom’s punches—but that the Department of Child and Family Services would only make things worse, so please, don’t call them. Two weeks before that, one of our ninth graders was shot and killed at home by his eight-year-old brother.
Please, do not misinterpret this retelling of events. I am not attempting to make exotic—or worse yet, glorify—the role of violence in the lives of my students; nor my own position as teacher and mentor. Lord knows enough has been done to overvalue the trope of the white woman savior (remember Dangerous Minds?), and I am not that woman. My students do not all live in disaster. They do not all come from instability. And when they do, my students certainly do not always turn to me. In fact, more often than not, they do not turn to me at all.
Rather, I am trying to illustrate a brutal reality, which is that this work is incredibly hard work. It is slow, it is dirty, it is draining and always, it is imperfect; because in the cacophony of adolescence, of life—and frequently, of unfortunate pain—there is still a job to be done. My students must learn how to read, write and think critically. They must defy statistics, but maintain credibility. In the words of one of my colleagues, they must compete for their lives. And this is not hyperbole.
I was recently invited to a roundtable conversation with the exceedingly controversial former chancellor of the Washington, DC schools, Michelle Rhee. I was invited because I was considered a “reform-minded teacher.” I could not help but laugh; what in the world is a reform-minded teacher? Or better yet, what would a non-reform-minded teacher look like?
The circumstance immediately took me back to a talk Jonathan Kozol gave where he mentioned that one of the biggest jokes in education was the talk of reform, as if this construct was somehow something new with each passing generation, that dredges up the same worn terminology. According to Kozol, educators have been attempting to reform education for the 35 years that he has been working in educational advocacy—and yet, the system continues to fail, arguably in greater extremity with each passing generation. Charles M. Payne argues a similar point in his book So Much Reform So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools.
You can track this conversation of reform over time, from when the need to compete against Russia during the 1950s and the beginning of the Cold War led to the development of “Math and Science Academies,” to the movement towards classrooms without walls or grades in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, “reform” was the trend towards creating students who were competitive in the global marketplace. It also denoted the beginnings of standardization. Competing with the drive for standardization was the small schools and community schools movement, which attempted to recreate the school as a centerpiece not only of the student’s life, but also of the lives of families, and other community members. This movement was only to be followed by dogmatic assertions of “rigorous,” “data driven,” and “standards-based” instruction of the No Child Left Behind era.
In its current incarnation, school reform advocates have opened a myriad of public charter schools. With little oversight, schools are able to hire uncertified teachers, “push out” students who are not the right fit for the school, and perpetuate the practice of creating “turn-around schools.” This is where the entire staff of a school is fired, down to the janitors. After a whole new staff is hired, the same kids are brought back in—as if somehow, by wiping the school clean the students too will be wiped of their lived experiences and start to succeed.
Students spend more time taking standardized tests and less time receiving actual instruction than ever before. And yet, as Payne notes, in all of this reform, there is so little change. Why in the world are we surprised? While people stand around aghast, my students still need to compete for their lives by doing something as rudimentary as learning how to read in the seventh grade. If they are lucky, their only distraction from the task at hand is the distraction provided by their developmental biology: hormones raging, tempers flaring. However, in the event that they are unlucky, they are coming into school after the loss of a loved one with a new tattoo at 12 years old. Regardless, my task remains the same.
I suppose this leads to the why; the ever-elusive, but all-important why. In a society that has figured out how to do so much, why have we not figured out how to adequately educate our youth? And, furthermore, why are we not genuinely outraged by our own ineptitude?
In my most cynical moments, I am tempted to believe that the answer to this question is of an insidious nature. That the children who are supposed to get educated, do get educated, and as for the rest of our country’s children, well, an uneducated populace can actually be quite useful. On my more charitable days, I think the answer has more to do with the culture of education, and the larger social questions this brings up, than it does some evil master plan to keep us all compliant. In order to even begin addressing improving the educational opportunities for our young people, we need to be able to openly talk about the roles that race, class and culture play in education. This conversation has been essentially stifled by the focus instead on the more comfortable, politically correct dialogue around standards, data and rigor.
The culture of education is defined and informed by the cultures of those who participate in it. Like it or not, this includes our students, their families, other educators, administrators and communities at large. The reality is, we may not always agree with the decisions made by the other participants in this discursive system, but that does not mean these decisions inform the culture of education any less. Nor does it mean that these other players who shape our system of education ought to be disenfranchised and alienated from the conversation.
Education is not a stagnant thing, waiting to be changed and corrected. This is a massive system, constantly evolving and developing, and in a state of perpetual reform. There is no silver bullet or one-stop solution to what ails our system, but rather, hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of legitimate voices who need to be heard and valued, but are currently ignored. Until we accept this reality, we will not service the people who are ultimately at the center of this debate: our children. My students, tattoos and all, still need to learn how to read in order to have a chance of surviving.