(This is not a post about the politics of education, although politics plays a part. It’s not about how people’s poor habits hamper their educational aspirations, but that’s a part of it, too. This post is about the catch-22 many educators find themselves in as they try to serve the portion of the population that needs help most. While I understand how this intersects with most people’s political ideologies, I’m more interested in hearing about how the commenters (assuming there are any) would approach this from the perspective of the educator, not somebody pontificating from the sidelines.)
It’s a tough position to be in. The students who need the most help often lack the basic skills to be at the level where you’re supposed to be helping them. This is true at all educational levels, but one case in point is at the collegiate level. A former Norfolk State University professor was denied tenure because he failed too many students. According to the professor, many of the students could have failed on attendance alone.
Teaching is a weird profession because your performance is evaluated based on other people’s performances. The idea is that you’re supposed to be imparting knowledge, but the question is, how do you impart knowledge when the skills underlying the acquisition of that knowledge are not present? For instance, somebody could come up to me talkin about string theory all they want to, but unless I have the mathematical background to understand the theories undergirding ST, it’s all edutainment. So if I had a String Theory teacher and I couldn’t display proficiency in it, would that be because he can’t teach it or because I’m not prepared to learn it? How can you differentiate? In the case of high school and college students, particularly the younger ones, the some of the skills are academic, but even more important are the habits that help to engender success.
There are some folks who can regularly skip class then come in and write the papers and do well on the tests. Those folks are rare. They’re even more rare when you start scouring the ranks of the under-prepared and barely-prepared students who graduate high school. As the Journal of Blacks In Higher Education pointed out a couple years ago, a significant element in the attrition rate of Black students can be attributed to the fact that they’re forced to use their financial aid on remedial courses, which don’t matriculate.
High dropout rates appear to be primarily caused by inferior K-12 preparation and an absence of a family college tradition, conditions that apply to a very large percentage of today’s college-bound African Americans. But equally important considerations are family wealth and the availability of financial aid. According to a study by Nellie Mae, the largest nonprofit provider of federal and private education loan funds in this country, 69 percent of African Americans who enrolled in college but did not finish said that they left college because of high student loan debt as opposed to 43 percent of white students who cited the same reason.
[...]
This journal has always placed emphasis on financial pressures as a major agent in producing low black graduation rates. But, undoubtedly, cultural and family issues bear a huge responsibility. Invariably, the critical problem is that a very high number of young blacks are entering college with wholly inadequate academic credentials, ambition, and study habits.
Knowing, then, that we can’t necessarily go back and make sure every student has the financial backing to make sure they can stay in school until they get the college thing figured out, the question is what to do in the meantime.
I don’t think any educator gets into the field with the intent of maintaining the status quo. Teaching at any level is done because of the belief on the part of the educator that they can make a difference. The method of making a difference can vary. For some people, making a difference means giving a little more leeway here and there; it means letting some things slide for the sake of the bigger picture: “I’m going to help you succeed, even if we hafta bend a few rules to do it.” For some other educators, it means the exact opposite: it means toeing the line on every last detail. It means checking for every jot and tittle, because everybody else (read: white people) hafta have their I’s dotted and T’s crossed, so We have to too.
While I appreciate both perspectives, it’s something every person has to work out for themselves. And that’s before we include the external evaluations of administrators and politicians. You let somebody who’s not in the classroom all the time look at a roster with a high percentage of failures, and the attention is almost automatically going to go to the teacher. The politicians and laypeople are gonna look at the administration. But if the students aren’t passing because they don’t come to class, is it the teacher’s fault? Where’s the line between teacher responsibility and student responsibility?
Again, my thing here is not to point fingers and say so-and-so needs to do such-and-such. For those who don’t really hafta think about it, it’s very easy with a quick, neat answer. For the people who actually work in there, the field can be a lot muddier.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Good one. There is no doubt about it, the situation is muddy and the only thing to do is really spread the
blameresponsibility around to everyone.If kids are wrecking shop in the class, the teacher can’t teach and the kids can’t learn. Who cares if the curriculum is great or stinks? I can go out from there in all directions.
January 29th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I’m on the side of the strict constructionists, primarily because there is no guarantee whatsoever that success in the classroom relates directly to success outside of it. So fudging in school devalues school for the sake of school, which is where I think academics should be, even in secondary ed. I use the example of jail.
We already know that getting first offenders into the general population of prison wrecks them and contributes to the culture of crime. I can’t imagine that there are any illusions that trustees bend the rules of life on the inside so much to benefit those who don’t understand them. Maybe you could argue that there is some ‘tracking’, but prison life is prison life. Sink or swim. You don’t go in and come out the same, not because somebody is helping you along to learn, but because it is what it is.
I happen to believe that education systems do a rotten job of the Potteresque Sorting Hat, and that some legacy of the Cold War and GI Bill has everybody thinking that everybody has a right to a white collar college prep secondary education. I think we should be properly concerned about our pace of education, but then we should leave very strict rules in place.
It is my understanding that the reason other countries do so well in secondary education is because the presumption is *against* college. So people in other countries with a 10th grade education do as well as our high school seniors. It’s because they know that most of the time high school is *it*, period. Consequently a 10th grade education is something real and bankable, whereas here it is not. So we get soft in our educational discipline because we are expected to assume that a 10th grade education is all relative – that if people don’t have the discipline to do 10th grade math, that’s OK because they can just become journalism majors in college. Consequently we have Katie Couric.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Also check out this…
http://books.google.com/books?id=q98DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA10&dq=B-29+gunner&lr=&as_brr=3&client=firefox-a#PPP5,M1
January 30th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Cobb, quit being a snob…you are better than that. If someone told you your kids won’t be able to go to college, you’d go Charlton Heston on them.
AT, I am actually contemplating earning a teaching credential to go into the classroom as a career finale. I’m thinking middle school or high school math.
I taught at the community college level for about 4 years. Generally, I taught an Intro to Computers and Intermediate Computer class. They were essentially classes that taught about the evolution of computing (which was interesting to about 10 percent of the class) and how to use the Microsoft Office Suite. It’s the sort of class that helped students be more efficient in all of their classes, because by the time they finished my class, they had several pratical tools they could use in Word, Powerpoint, Excel and Access to help them in any class.
However, some people had never used a computer, didn’t know how to type, had no finesse with the mouse. I had to give them more time and effort. Fortunately, I would minimize my lectures so that the students could work on their assignments, which gave me time to help the students who needed the most help.
I know you were primarily focussed on k-12, which is quite a distance from community college, so let me throw out an idea I have had for a while: Team teaching for Math. Two teachers for, say, 50 students in a single class. One does the lesson, the other works the room.
Just a thought…
January 30th, 2009 at 8:14 am
Actually, the college level is what I’m really interested in. I’m kinda regretting not getting a graduate degree in English, since that would’ve allowed me to teach at the community college level.
The kids you’re talking about sound like the ones in the article, only they’re perhaps more appropriately situated in a community college. I know that four-year universities are kinda overrated in terms of the fact that it’s usually expected that students go there straight from high school. For some students, community college would give them the opportunity to tighten up those study skills at much less expense So-and-so University, where they eventually flunk out or can’t continue because they used all their financial aid on remedial courses.
The team-teaching model is one that I actually used before. I was the general ed teacher and I had a special ed co-teacher. If I had it to do over, I probably would’ve switched off with who was at the front and who was working the room a little more frequently.
I kinda think Cobb’s on to something about the potential reaction to high school if it were still a terminal degree, of sorts. The thing is, I don’t know if we can get back to that point again. It’s almost like we’ve bought into the idea of 4-year college as a right to the extent that community colleges are viewed as a second-tier option, when for many people, that would probably be the ideal situation.
February 2nd, 2009 at 1:18 am
I wish society would stop wasting time asking whether the chicken or the egg comes first with regards to who bears responsibility at what point (and to what degree) in the education process. The entire culture bears responsibility for the process; parents/guardians have their respective role, taxpayers theirs, gov’t officials theirs, and school administrators and faculty theirs. They’re interconnected… co-dependent. So the real question to be asked is what do we want our K-12 educational system to do?
I suspect most parents and students look at a college education as a means to an end rather than an end. By this I mean that very few people attend college with the intention of becoming scholars. Instead, we tend to focus on getting basic skills in some, usually white-collar, service profession with an added measure of entry-level exposure to the humanities thrown in, thereby qualifying us to hold a half-decent, grammatically proper conversation with just about anyone for about 5 minutes without making a fool of ourselves. I raise this point because if a generic proficiency in acceptable social behavior is the standard required of a productive person in tomorrow’s economy, that skill set can and should be taught in K-12.
And all of us adults are responsible for making that education happen. This is not to suggest that within all kids lies a dormant brainiac, but that the point of an education system is to raise the greatest number of people to competency. That’s all. There are going to be failures. Otherwise healthy students that, with the best guidance available notwithstanding, will never get ‘it’. What we do know is the world of tomorrow will be more demanding for an ‘average’ person to navigate than today’s. IMO, they’ll need to understand computer languages. Civics should be again taught in K-12 schools; the curricula for health/physical education, social and life sciences, and the arts should be made much more rigorous than they are presently. I believe most kids can handle the upgrade.
I’d like to see the charter school movement evolve along the lines of vo-tech trade schools (e.g.; DeVry) and European sports/arts academies. Certainly there must be a way to integrate the commerce sector into public education better than it’s done currently. I also believe electronic and digital media can be used to much greater effect in K-12 education.
June 30th, 2010 at 5:19 am
K12 education is the best. Everyone should look out for it.*;-
July 25th, 2010 at 8:35 am
K12 education is always the best’,~