A new, national study of what students don't know always spawns a new bunch of newspaper and magazines commentaries (often including my own) on why our kids are so ignorant and how we should reform our schools to take care of this. Teachers aren't usually invited to participate in these postmortems -- perhaps because they're supposed to be a big part of the problem. That's too bad because people in the trenches usually have a good idea about why the latest weapon isn't working. Take these comments on surveys, school reform and student learning that a friend who teaches in a New York City high school recently sent me:
"People who talk about survey results and propose reforms based on these results often know as little about what goes on in the classroom as the kids know about history, literature, and geography. Here's a case in point. After a recent survey revealed college seniors' woeful ignorance of who wrote Moby Dick and what Reconstruction was all about, two opinion-setters in education engaged in a dispute over whether we should beef up the college curriculum with courses that would give students 'a core of learning' or whether college was too late and that sort of stuff should be dealt with in junior and senior high schools. In other words, despite the disagreement about timing, both were making the revolutionary suggestion that we try our mightiest to teach the kids what they don't know. Why didn't I think of that?
"As a matter of fact, I did -- and it didn't help at all.
"One of the questions that the college seniors in the survey had a tough time with was where 'the shot heard 'round the world' was fired. Now, just by chance, kids in my first period junior English class this term were primed to get the right answer to that one. We spent two periods reading and discussing Emerson's 'Concord Hymn.' I tacked a map to our bulletin board and showed the kids where Lexington and Concord were. I told them about Apollos Rivoire's kid Paul and about how he rode out into the night waking everybody up yelling, 'The British are coming!' As we talked, each kid in the class had a slick, forty-dollar, four-color Am Lit text open to a photo of the Minuteman statue and the poem with the crucial words. We read the poem twice; I must have mentioned Concord a hundred times.
"Here's the sad part: Three weeks later, when I gave a short-answer test on some of the pieces we had read, I asked them where 'the shot heard 'round the world' was fired. Not one kid got the answer right.
"Maybe I should promise to re-work my lesson plans, get new maps -- even try to speak like a Boston Brahmin -- but I have no confidence that any of this would make a difference. My point here is that reformers would never suggest 'beefing up the curriculum' if they knew some basic facts about my students because these facts do more to explain my failure than any debate about what should and shouldn't be taught.
"Putting aside the question of why my students, preoccupied with sex, rock videos and part-time jobs, would give a second thought to Moby Dick's motives for opposing Reconstruction at Concord in 1492, here's something no one can argue about. When the term ended, I came up with the following tally:
My first-period students were absent an average of 27. 5 days and late 11. 7 times out of about 80 days of instruction. And when I did my duty and failed 16 of 28 of them for the next-to-last report, how many parents stormed the gates of the school to investigate their kid's problem? Only one. And no parents called to investigate the reasons why I had failed students in my other courses though I failed a total of 111 in five classes.
"And I'm not the only one who excites this kind of apathy. At the end of the term, like most other high schools in New York State, we administered the Regents Competency Tests, basic skills test in several subjects that many students are required to pass for graduation. A total of 233 students simply didn't bother to show up for the English test, 44 of them seniors who are supposed to graduate this June. This means, of course, that large numbers of kids are simply saying, 'Ho, hum' to our allegedly tougher standards.
"The teacher's eye view of school reform is that most of the high-profile spokespersons are asking the wrong questions. It's not a matter of 'Where's the beef in our curriculum?' but 'Where are the students? Where are the parents?"'
I wish I could say my friend's comments are atypical, but they're not -- I've gotten more letters from teachers than I can count voicing this kind of pain and frustration. Of course their students achieve badly on all kinds of tests. School is not important to these students (or, apparently, to many of their parents). The kids are disengaged and unmotivated because they see no connection between school and their lives, now or in the future. We can put that fact down to social change but whatever the reason, it's obvious that changing our schools is not just a matter of fiddling with the curriculum. Teachers tell us they are doing their best in a system that is no longer working. We need to listen to them and restructure our schools to make them workplaces -- for students, that is -- instead of holding tanks.