Garbanzo Toons

Another Reason (as if we needed more) for the Sad State of Public Schools

When he said it, I couldn't believe it. I wanted to contradict him, but what he said was wrong in so many ways, I didn't know where to begin, and I didn't want to go off into a political discussion. After all, this was a meeting of the 4th and 5th grade math teachers. We were analyzing this year's state-mandated standardized test scores in math. Our assistant superintendent stopped in to give his views on what kind of curriculum changes he was going to make.

But then he said something that I'd heard others say before, others who run unsuccessful public schools. We are classified as an "urban" district. Urban, in this case is a code word for Black, or African-American if you wish, or you can say "minority" if that's your brand of political correctness. Almost all of our students are black. A huge percentage qualify for free or reduced lunch, and breakfast. There are many single parent families. Some of our students come from really awful situations. Many of them have difficulties in school. They show up unprepared, hungry, etc. Not all of them, but some of them. Others have wonderful families. They work hard. They do well. They will go to college and succeed in whatever they decide to do.

Remember though, they are almost all black. So, our assistant superintendent, who is in charge of our curriculum, tells us that minority students learn differently from white students. They need to be taught using different strategies. My mind began to rebel. That's an old excuse for failure. Rather than address the fact that we don't teach phonetically as we should, educational experts for the last 40, or 60, or God only knows how many years, have come up with various cockamammie theories to explain why some students don't learn, and even more cockamammie programs to fix the problems. Obviously they haven't worked. Phonetics, remember? They continue to ignore or demean the necessary phonetic component. So of course their theories are useless, and their annual *NEW* and *IMPROVED* programs are doomed to failure. They do get lots of money and prestige, but that's another topic.

Our assistant superintendent goes on: Minority students, he imforms us, come from collective cultures while the culture of the United States is based on individuality. This is true, he says, not only for Black students but also for Hispanic/Latino students. Therefore, he states, we must not teach them individually, we must teach them collectively, using "cooperative learning" techniques to insure that they continue to fail. Oh wait, he didn't say they would fail, I did. For some reason, he thinks, and he is not the first to think this, that if we expect them only to succeed in groups in school (groupthink?), this will help them succeed as individuals in an individualistic society. Of maybe they will get together and form their own failing societies within the larger American society, you know, like a college town.

For some reason, he, and other educational "experts", who run our schools and profess this nonsense have never read about Marva Collins, or any of the other teachers who successfully taught minority students to achieve. They've never read anything by Nancy Ichinaga. They've never researched the KIPP schools. They've never visited the NO EXCUSES website (now sadly defunct) or read their book (even more sadly, out of print).

I couldn't argue with him because I didn't know where to start. Now I do know. It will be useless because I will never convince him that he's wrong, but I can't let this pass. Besides, over the past six years I've become pretty adept at beating my head against the educational wall. It took a pretty good pounding during the former regime, but I've been working on the new regime beginning with our new principal. He's a reasonable guy, but so was our last principal. Me? I'm not reasonable, so I will argue with the assistant superintendent the next time he tries to hand us this collectivist crap. I will point to the failures of the past and present, and I will suggest that we actually visit some of the "urban" schools that do succeed. There are some in our area. I won't go beyond that into the worldwide failure of collectivist societies though. As I encourage my students to do, I have to stay on topic, because if I go off, he will too, and who knows where we will end up.

Unfortunately, this debate still has a long way to go before it's resolved.

Labels: education, KIPP schools, Marva Collins, Nancy Ichinaga, teaching minority students

posted by Harry @ 10:07 PM 0 comments

Students Who Make it and Students Who Don't

I teach elementary school in a small "urban" district. You may read about these kids but I work with them. I meet their families, such as they are, and deal with their pathologies. Some of these kids raise themselves out of their circumstances. Some don't. Some come from solid families. Some come from situations that make you wonder how a child made it to elementary school age.

This is on my mind because I recently heard that the brother of a former student was murdered by his girlfriend. He was in high school. Some of his friends had t-shirts made in his memory. His best friend was a tutoring student of mine, a big tough football player who looks like nothing can hurt him. This hurt him.

A few months ago I ran into a student who went to my school but wasn't in my class. She was working at a local Quizno's. She was in the class across the hall and was sent to my room when she was bad, which as she tells it, was regularly. She told me about a former student of mine, still in high school, who died when he wrapped the car he had stolen around a tree in his attempted getaway. I remember this kid. He was a member of my "class from Hell." He wasn't one of the troublesome kids. At worst, he was a goof. He was friends with some of the rough kids. He may have fallen in with that "bad crowd" we hear so much about. There's another kid from that class, that I do see every once in a while. He was one of the troublesome kids. He's come around since then and is doing well in high school.

A few years ago, I was having a parent-teacher conference with the mother of a student who was doing very well. Then I asked about the older brother, also a former student. This mother's eyes teared up and she managed to choke out a few words. He'd be out of jail soon. He had plans to straigten out his life. He did. The last I heard, he was managing a MacDonald's.

Another mom at another parent-teacher conference broke into tears as she recounted the story of her absent father. She was desperately trying to avoid having her son grow up without a father or grandfather. She wasn't succeeding.

Other former students who "fell in with a bad crowd" have been in and out of jail. Some surprised me, but others didn't.

I had a very bright student once who spent his days wandering around the class. He sometimes caused trouble, but he wrote well, and did well on tests. Things got worse as the year went on though. One day the adoptive father came in to talk to me. His family had also adopted the boy's sister. They were going to keep her but they were sending him back. Both children had been taken from their natural family. The boy was taught by his natural parents to beg on the street and to steal. He was causing trouble at the adoptive home and exposing himself to other children. I last saw the sister before she went off to college. She stopped by to give me her graduation picture. She said her brother was doing well. I don't know if she was telling the truth. I want to believe that she was.

Another adopted student I recently had also was troubled with light fingers. He was bright (as so many of these kids are) but spaced out regularly into his Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh world. I couldn't send him to the bathroom by himself because he would wander the school looking for things to steal. Sometimes he found them. The adoptive family was trying to give him back. I would like to know what happened to him to make him into what he was.

One little girl had been adopted by her foster family. She wasn't an easy student. The adoptive mom filled me in on the details of the sexual abuse the child had suffered from an earlier family prior to fourth grade. Mom went into more detail than I wanted to hear, and did it in front of her own young children. The girl was in counseling, but began shoplifting in middle school. The last I saw of her she had just been caught and almost injured trying to escape a heist.

I ran into one former student who was happy because he had just been hired as a hospital custodian. I remembered him as a nice kid, but he struggled mightily in class. He had a tough time reading. This was before I knew how to teach reading phonetically. Now, I could teach him to read. He wouldn't have to struggle. Around that same time I found out from someone else that the mother that I'd been encouraging to help her children by reading to them and with them every day, and don't waste money for books on tape, was illiterate herself. She was too embarrassed to admit it to me.

On the other hand-

I was invited to the graduation of a former student. She now has her master's degree in architecture. Other students have gotten their business degrees and are working. Sometimes I see them in their spiffy business-wear.

One former student enlisted in the army so he could get medical training on his way to being a doctor.

One day I was in the office when a substitute teacher was filling our her paperwork for the day. She looked familiar. She was a former student. She's married and working on her teaching certificate.

On the day of our last presidential election, there was a huge line of voters at our school. I recognized the mom and dad of a brother and sister whom I had taught. The woman in front of them said hi to me. She looked familiar, probably the mother of a student I thought. Of course when I asked the parents how their daughter was, the laugh was on me. Their daughter had just said hi to me. She was in law school. I don't remember what her brother was doing, but it was something good.

My first year teaching, there was a fourth grader across the hall. He was a trouble maker. He was also the biggest, toughest kid in the grade. He cried like a baby when his father cancelled a promise weekend visit. He excited all of the teachers when he showed up years later after deciding to get his act together.

The football player I mentioned earlier had a very rough time in elementary school. He's now an all-city and all-state football player and going to college. He still might need help, but he's determined to get an education.

What does all of this mean? I don't know. I do know that all children can get the education they need if teachers are trained correctly (but they're not) and if parents send their students to school ready to learn (which they don't). I also know that proper teacher training can overcome parental attitude. This is made clear in the book, Marva Collin's Way by Marva Collins and Civia Tamarkin. Children want to learn, and if we can cultivate that willingness, and lead them to success, we've got them.

Labels: education, Marva Collins

posted by Harry @ 9:36 PM 0 comments

How to Teach Children to Read, Part 2

According to the educational establishment, you teach children to read by exposing them to a variety of great literature, have them do a lot of writing, and even let them make up their own spelling. It's called, Whole Language. Over the years, they've come up with lots of different programs that show teachers different Whole language ways to teach. Actually, there are only a few ways and they've been repackaged and recycled over the years. The Whole Language proponents claim that these methods, properly taught, will get children to read and to love reading.
So one has to ask, after many generations of Whole Language teaching methods, why is American society becoming continuously less literate? Ah, claim the Whole Language proponents, students watch too much TV, play too many video games, they are victims of poor parenting, not enough money is going to the schools, they have ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, and other learning disabilities.
Don't you believe it!
After 16 years of elementary classroom experience, I can tell you that students aren't reading because they aren't being taught correctly. Students have to begin at the beginning with a strong phonetic foundation. English is a sound/symbol language. The letters are symbols for different sounds. These sound/symbol relationships have to be taught. Some students can figure them out on their own, but many can't and don't.
By beginning with phonics, I don't mean worksheets where students have to guess that the first letter in cup and cat is "c". I'm talking about intensive study and lots of, you will excuse the expression, drill and practice until students know what sounds the letters and letter combinations make. This can actually be done for most students in only a few weeks in first grade. Drill and practice is not the only teaching method, but it should be part of a teacher's bag of tricks.
The best phonetic method I've found, and I've done a lot of research on this is, The Writing and Spelling Road to Reading and Thinking, published by the Riggs Institute, www.riggsinst.org. It begins with students learning the sounds discussed above, then using those sounds to begin spelling. Anything a student can spell, they can read. Once a certain number of words are learned through dictation, not copying, through multi-sensory study and practice, students begin using these words in their own individually decodable sentences. This leads to reading, and finally in lesson 46 to the reading of "real books".
There is a lot more though. This is an entire language arts method covering two years of grammar and writing, and four years of spelling, that when taught properly (take the training, it's worth it) advances students way beyond what is traditionally taught in a public school classroom.
That was the short version. In addition to parents and teachers studying the Riggs website, I also recommend www.coreknowledge.com, and the book, The Schools We Need, and Why We Don't Have Them, by E. D. Hirsch. When he described teacher education, it read like he was there with me in teacher's school. Also, Marva Collins' Way, by Marva Collins and Civia Tamarkin is highly recommended.

Labels: E. D. Hirsch, education, Marva Collins, phonics, Riggs Institute

posted by Harry @ 6:17 PM 1 comments