What Education Reformers Tend to Overlook

I teach high school in Camden, New Jersey — cited, yet again, as the second most dangerous city in the nation.

"I could never work where you do," this guy said to me at a social gathering I attended not very long ago. It was a friend of a friend who had been teaching in a suburban school district for over twenty years and whom I had just met. There were several teachers at this party because we teachers, like fish, tend to travel in schools (I hear the groan from here!). "Why not?" I asked. He looked at me as though the answer was obvious. "It's Camden," he said chuckling.

"And...?" I said.

He looked around the five of us who were standing in the kitchen. He was looking for help and wasn't getting any. Then, in a more serious tone, he said, "Well, being white..."

"Being white?" I said as if I misheard.

"Yeah. Being white I couldn't tell the kids, you know, what to do," he said.

"Why not?" I said.

"They're not going to listen to some white guy," he said.

I looked at my own complexion and then back at my acquaintance. "That has never been an issue for me," I said.

"But I hear the pay is good," he said as if I hadn't just addressed his last point. He was a classic overtalker, someone who will keep yapping with little regard to anything anyone else says. "Combat pay, that's what you guys get, combat pay." Was this attitude why inner city schools are plagued with such teacher turnover problems? Do people really believe you need to be a certain race to be effective with a certain population? And if that's so, do they also believe the inverse is true? Was this irrational and ignorant fear, subtle racism or inherent guilt?

"The idea that inner city teachers make more money than teachers in the suburbs is ludicrous," I said.

"Look at test scores," he overtalked. "They're always lower in the inner city. You know why? Because the kids are so bad that these schools have to waste money on higher salaries, combat pay."

"Combat pay is a myth! And you want to talk test scores?" I said. "On a practice assessment test once supplied by the state, the writing prompt for the persuasive writing section begins with a scenario: After a soccer championship, the fans, in celebration, charge the field and many cut pieces of the goal nets to take as souvenirs leaving the nets as tattered threads. The principal, so it goes, says that the money for the repair of the goals will come from all the school's clubs. The task is to write a letter to the board of education agreeing or disagreeing with this decision," I said in a single breath.

"Yeah? So?" He said.

"Soccer isn't exactly a big sport in the inner city. But in the suburbs..." I let my voice trail off.

"Doesn't matter," he began. "A test is a test is a test. The state standardized tests are the only way to measure achievement across the board."

"It's only one way," I said.

"It's the only one that counts," he said. "And all kids have the same opportunity to pass. These kids just don't take the opportunities that come their way."

"I'll grant you that there are inner city kids who live up to the expectation society and the suburbs have put upon them, but in no way do these kids all have the same educational opportunities. There are kids who have to care for their siblings because a single parent is off working her second or even third job. Others aren't sure if there will be a meal when they get home. Many walk the streets in fear and live in houses with bars on the windows to protect what little they have. Many do not have a desk with ample light and parents who have gone to college, parents whose parents have gone to college standing close by to help them with their homework. The opportunities are as far apart as their economic status," I said.

"Aw, you're just rationalizing because your test scores aren't as good as the suburbs," he said.

"You know what real school reform would be? Maybe school districts shouldn't hire teachers. Maybe the state should. Then a teacher could work at one school for a few years and then be transferred to another for a few more years and so on. Then a teacher could work in both the more wealthy suburbs and the inner cities putting their real teaching skills to the test. If a teacher can get high test scores from their students in the most affluent districts, let's see those same teachers do it in the least," I said.

This friend of a friend sipped his drink and looked at me and chuckled, "A lot of teachers think like you when they first start teaching. Don't worry; you'll get like the rest of us. You'll grow out of it," he said.

"That's funny," I responded. "Teachers have been telling me that for years."

Holly Jolly Holiday Final

This time of year always reminds me of that great feeling of finishing that last fall semester final.  Regardless of the outcome, the cessation of academic stress is gratefully replaced by the sensation of holiday stress and a few weeks of time found.

I’m thinking about finals because I’ve just heard on the radio Burl Ives’ rendition of “Holly Jolly Christmas."  Whenever I hear that song, I cannot help but think about my biology final at Atlantic Cape Community College in southern New Jersey because the professor looked just like Burl Ives, though, to tell the truth, he resembled more the snowman on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

I dreaded my biology final.  Every time I’d try to study for it, I would easily find more a more pressing activity like cutting my toenails.  It wasn’t that I disliked the course; I just wasn’t into it.  What made it even worse for me was the professor seemed to take the approach that everyone in the class was destined for a career in medicine or some sort of scientific hodge-podge which couldn’t have been further from my own aspirations.  Science has never been a favorite subject of mine.  I would much rather dissect fiction than frogs. 

The morning of my biology final I woke up with a high fever.  I had two finals scheduled for that day:  Psychology of Adolescence/Adulthood and Biology of Our World, and I thought I would have been fine if I could only stop shivering.  I popped a couple of Tylenol and drove to campus.

Midway through my Psych final my chest began burning with every inhale, I struggled to hold back coughs, and the little dots on the Scan-Tron form started moving around in dizzying swirling patterns.  I randomly filled in the last five questions to put an end to the misery.  But I still had a second exam in a half an hour.  When I broke into uncontrollable fits of coughing, I realized I had little choice.

I walked into my professor’s office and explained to him my situation.  Keeping to the other side of his desk, he jotted down his home phone number and told me to call him as soon as I felt better.

Four days later, two days before Christmas, I called him expecting to schedule a make-up exam for sometime during the first week of the spring semester.  Instead he asked me what I was doing that afternoon and gave me directions to his home.

At his front door, I held out a doctor’s note, written evidence of my bronchitis, but he only smiled, bid me entrance and led me into his kitchen.  The house was decorated for the holiday for both sight and smell.  Hints of cinnamon and nutmeg lingered about boughs of garland, laurel and holly.

The professor offered me a seat at the table and asked if I liked mulled cider.  I confessed that I had never tasted it.  Cider was only served cold in my house, I told him.  He smiled again, walked over to the counter and lifted the lid off of a crock-pot.  What I had taken for a scented candle when I entered the house was actually the aroma emanating from this potion.  He placed an oversized coffee mug in front of me and then handed me a stapled packet of papers.  Enjoy, he said and then left the room.

I reached maybe the third question when his wife walked into the kitchen, placed a plate of holiday cookies and some napkins on the table, said she had some last minute shopping to do, wished me luck, and left the room.  For the next hour and a half I worked on the exam interrupted only once when my professor refilled my cup and told me to help myself to more if I so desired.

When I was done, I took my test into his living room.  The professor was sitting in an easy chair reading a book next to a Franklin Stove with doors ajar enough to show a glowing flame.  The whole scene seemed almost too cliché to me, and yet there it was. 

I thanked my professor for his trouble.  He insisted that it was his pleasure, and he wished me a merry Christmas. 

On my drive home “Holly Jolly Christmas” came on the radio. 

Maybe it was the fact that what I presumed as a stogy science professor treated an undergrad in a gen-ed class with empathy and genuine kindness that had made a life-long impression on me, or maybe it was the image of the snowman that told me the story of Rudolph every year of my life sipping a mug of mulled cider, nibbling on a Christmas cookie and grading my exam because without any degree of certainty, I couldn’t name one thing that was on that test. 

They Don't Call It a Number Two for Nothing

Every great society throughout history has had its vulnerabilities.  The Trojans had their horse.  The Romans had their hedonistic excesses.  The Russians had their inequality of classes and the French had all their heavy sauces and thick creamy pastries.  It seems that one of America's vulnerabilities has been under our noses all along, but no one seemed to notice:  the number 2 pencil.

The first writing implement handed to a child is generally the crayon -- that colorful extension of an unbridled imagination and that great waxy smell.  With the crayon the sky can be green, grass can be purple and smiles can be larger than the faces that hold them.  Maybe people would be a little happier if they colored at least once or twice a week.  It's fun.  And don't worry about staying within the lines.  Too many people get hung up on coloring within the lines.  A teacher once told my parents that I had trouble coloring in the lines, but my original artwork was brilliant.

The first pencil most kids use is that thick blue one that makes those wonderfully broad soft lines on green paper with the wide spaces between the lines for big capital letters and numbers.  Suddenly the child's work is grayed a little and the lines within which they colored have become rigid and taught and highly structured so the letter "E" will always and forever have only three lines sticking out of one and not four or five or eight.  This shift from creative openness to unbending lines will, to many, be associated with the pencil.

Without warning the thick blue pencil that felt like something of substance in your hand is ripped away.  The child is told that it is now pass to use big blue.  I have even teachers "actively ignore" kids ridiculing their peers for holding onto the big blue pencil.  Now it is the thin, mousy yellow number two that is introduced.  And like a virus, it grows into the consciousness of society that this by which you will be tried, assessed, judged, measured, quantified, discriminated, condemned.

Thanks to the “No Child Left Behind” act, by third grade the number two pencil is used for the standardized test that will assess little more than the ability of an eight or nine year old to take a test.  It begins the conditioning process that fools our society into believing that standardized tests actually reflect knowledge and predict future academic success.

If it wasn't for the number two pencil, our school curriculums wouldn't be destroyed by being "aligned" to state and national tests.  By changing curriculums to what is being tested sends the message that anything taught that is not covered on the state tests is irrelevant and unimportant. 

If it wasn't for the number two pencil, kids who have vision and drive, but were not lucky enough to live in an affluent area where schools could afford to give them enrichment classes on the tricks to taking standardized tests, could get into better colleges.

If it wasn't for the number two pencil, people could be judged on ability and authentic knowledge and aptitude and not word games and numbers play.

The day I see a standard child is the day I will agree that standardized tests are good for more than just keeping testing services in business, school administrators in excuses and the less fortunate in repression.

The more we rely on the number two, the less likely we will be to find number one.