The Same Old, Same Old
By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I can’t remember exactly which educational reform was involved in the discussion I had with the principal in the public school in a suburb of New York City where I used to teach. I can’t even recall exactly when it took place. If I had to guess it would be somewhere in the mid-1980s.
But the authorities in Albany that year were proposing new standards to raise the level of achievement of the high school students in the state. The guidelines sent to the local schools stressed that students would no longer be promoted if they did not demonstrate competency in their classwork.
I can remember leaving a meeting where the new standards had been introduced to the teachers. I was walking down a hall with the principal and said privately to him, “You know, if we go ahead with these standards, a really large number of our students won’t graduate from high school.” He replied, “I know it. They’ll drop the new standards once they realize that. It is more of the same old, same old.”
Which the authorities did. The reform in question disappeared into the memory hole where all the great educational reforms seem to end up, everything from the open classroom to schools without walls to holistic grading to open book tests to team teaching to. . . . You get the point.
Well, it looks as if Common Core is next in line. On September 24, the website Education News (educationnews.org) announced, “New York Education Department officials have made draft changes to improve Common Core academic standards with the pledge of better lessons that will also remain rigorous. The streamlining of the Common Core criteria will be executed beginning in the 2017-2018 school year after the Board of Regents approves them in 2017. The changes will be far-reaching, said State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia, but the state’s robust take on the national academic standards will not be watered down.”
Still “rigorous”? Not “watered down”? Do you think the New York authorities doth protest too much? Lisa Colangelo, in an article on the proposed changes in New York’s Daily News, writes, “With English Language Arts, more than 60 percent of those standards have changed and with mathematics, more than 55 percent have changed. It isn’t just tinkering around the edges and doing small little things.”
Why the changes? “The difficulty of Common Core caused a huge drop in state test scores in 2013, which angered educators and parents. Even now, test scores have not fully revived, and Common Core is still just as controversial. The alterations, which include more fiction in reading lessons and the addition of glossaries to critical reading passages, have been supported by Common Core proponents including the NYC Education Department, teachers unions, and a variety of education advocacy organizations.”
To what end? David Bloomfield, professor of education leadership at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and a supporter of the changes, contends, “All students don’t learn at the same pace but teachers are encouraged to teach the standards rather than the child in front of them.” Education News reports, “Some of the benchmarks were moved up a grade level so they were developmentally appropriate for students.”
The same old, same old? I know the danger of jumping to conclusions, but you can put me down on the side of those who think that is what is going on.
On another topic: The ongoing discussion of whether the underperformance of students in inner-city schools is rooted in a “lack of funding.” Connecticut is currently involved in lawsuit that alleges the state is not allocating sufficient resources to these schools.
Chris Powell, the managing editor of a newspaper in the state, the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, analyzed in a column on September 21 the problem that continues to stump the authorities: the allocation “of any extra state money for failing school systems will have to be taken from successful school systems,” even though there is a track record of the additional spending doing little good in the underperforming schools.
Powell asks whether the day will come when taxpayers will “demand results and accountability from the cities and their residents” for the increases in state aid, when “education never improves in these cities no matter how much more is spent — because most city students lack the prerequisite of education, parents.”
Some may find Powell’s language too blunt. See what you think. He describes the current situation in Connecticut as follows:
“1) State government taxes people who took education seriously, gained work experience, achieved self-sufficiency, lived responsibly, and married before having children.
“2) State government transfers that money to people who disregarded education, learned little but were advanced from grade to grade and given high school diplomas anyway, and, though uneducated, unskilled, unmarried, and incapable of self-sufficiency, had children in the confidence that state government would give them EBT cards, food credits, housing vouchers, and medical insurance.”
Ouch. Powell closes by observing, “A century ago Theodore Roosevelt, while regarded as a flaming liberal, nevertheless argued that the first duty of a citizen is to pull his own weight. The collapse of schools, cities, and the state itself is what happens when public policy disagrees.”
One can see the cause of Powell’s frustration. There is no reason to criticize him for pointing out that more government spending is not the answer. I think even the judges and professors of education who call for increased state aid to inner-city schools know that. More money does not make up for the single-parent homes, high crime rates, and drug use in the inner cities.
But what do we do after that point is conceded? Tell hardworking parents with children in these inner-city schools, “Tough luck. Your kids have no option other than to make the best of a dangerous school with classes that are filled with disruptive students, taught by teachers who cannot cope with the situation they have been handed.” That is no answer, even after we agree that neither is more spending.
I have said it before, but, at the risk of irking you, I will say it again: The best disciplinarians among the Jesuit priests and Marist brothers who taught me in the 1950s and 1960s would not be able to bring order and a sense of purpose to a classroom filled with the dangerous gang members that the inner-city teachers of today face every day when they enter their classrooms. Picture a classroom full of the teenage boys we saw rioting in the streets of Charlotte. We can’t expel all these kids. Not if we are looking for a way to do something good and educationally sound for their neighborhoods. But what do we do then?
Fire away with your suggestions. If you come up with an answer, they might put you on Mt. Rushmore.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
