By Steve Peha
“Academic genocide.†That’s how Judge Howard Manning characterized the performance of the Halifax County school district last month. Harsh language to say the least, and I’m sure the judge didn’t toss it around lightly. But as strong as this turn of phrase may be, the situation it describes is all too common in our country: entire school districts, many in rural areas, with abysmal academic performances.
Currently there are over 3,500 schools in the U.S. that have failed to meet the No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) Annual Yearly Progress requirement for seven years in a row. If you add to that the even larger numbers of schools who’ve failed just six or five or four years in a row, you can imagine possibly tens of thousands of situations where the term “academic genocide†might apply.
The real tragedy here is not the number of schools doing so poorly but how easy it might be to help them. I say “might†because helping schools like these requires those who work in them to trade in their traditional notions of teaching and learning for contemporary practices that are foreign to them.
The good news, if there is any, is that virtually all troubled schools have the same problem: poor literacy instruction.
Literacy is the foundation of school success. But kids in troubled schools rarely start out with a strong foundation. The culprit here, in many cases, is publisher-supplied programmed instruction. Rather than using the latest information about how to teach reading and writing effectively, teachers blindly follow a textbook-based program, and even sometimes lesson-by-lesson scripts.
This kind of traditional teaching has two main drawbacks: teachers pay more attention to their programs than they do to their pupils, and everyone ends up having to do the same thing, the same way, at the same time, on the same day. Differentiation, which research tells us is key to success, is almost impossible, and therefore rarely attempted.
Another problem with publisher-supplied curricula is that writing gets short shrift. Writing is essential to a child’s language development and must be given just as much time as reading. But many teachers don’t like to teach writing because they aren’t good writers themselves, and they have never learned to teach writing well because they’ve always relied on publisher-supplied resources that push writing to the side. That’s if they attempt to tackle it all.
Virtually everything at school depends on a student’s ability to read and write. And literacy is even more crucial as kids hit middle and high school. At many troubled schools, more than half of the entering high schoolers are already more than two years below grade level. How can they tackle the demands of social studies, science and math if they can’t read the content?
In my career as an education consultant, I’ll bet I’ve visited more than 100 schools where literacy instruction is so poor, and resulting student literacy rates are so low, that a term like “academic genocide†might be applicable. What has always fascinated me about these schools is that everyone in them is aware of the problem; that’s usually why they hire me. But when I provide training, materials and classroom demonstrations in more effective contemporary practices, teachers and administrators act surprised. Does my practice differ from theirs? Yes, it does; often dramatically. Is there work involved in learning a new way of teaching? Yes, there is; often a lot.
This is where we get to the heart of education reform. The practices we need to implement are well known and well documented. But the majority of teachers in our country don’t want to use them. And the majority of principals don’t want to require them. On a certain level, this is understandable. Change is hard. And dramatic change is even harder. But when we as a nation bought into standards and testing and NCLB, we bought into the idea of dramatic change. Given the way our laws work, it was inevitable that many schools would be unsuccessful.
For schools that reach the lower rungs of NCLB, an uncertain fate awaits. Technically, these schools can be turned over to the state and reorganized. But in these reorganizations, one set of ineffective practices is often replaced with another. Results may improve slightly in the short run but they don’t make the grade in the long run.
The part we’re missing in all of this is that changing the way a school works means changing the way teachers teach. This is especially true with literacy. Without a sound approach to literacy, students have no more chance of success in a reorganized school than they had before.
Steve Peha is president of Teaching That Makes Sense, Inc., a K-12 education consultancy based in Carrboro.
“But the majority of teachers in our country don’t want to use them. And the majority of principals don’t want to require them.”
Call a spade a spade: It’s because they don’t want to do the work. And that mindset gets passed down to students who don’t want to do their work.
I know the demands of teaching take up a huge amount of time. There’s no such thing as a 40-hour week for teachers. But when the results produced (as Steve cites) are this abysmal, then all that work is Sisyphean, not Herculean. It’s time for teachers to stop working dumb, because all that produces is dumb students.
Teaching must return to its roots, and become a vocation, not simply a career. Candidates should want to become teachers because they believe in education, and they want to be on the front line of ensuring that following generations will be prepared to lead and innovate.
To that end, teaching degree programs should more closely resemble boot camp, rather than laconic discussion groups musing over education theories and behavior modification. This is especially crucial for would-be elementary and middle-school teachers; they need to be drilled in all subjects in order to ensure that they KNOW what they’re teaching, rather than just regurgitating curricula. They are the ones building the educational foundations which will prepare these kids for more specialized study in high school and beyond.
I work in Halifax County Schools as a teacher assistant. I agree with you Steve 100%. I often tell my co-workers that the children are so tired of the “repetious teaching.” I know because I get so tired of it myself. Nobody wants to listen to a teacher assistant’s opinion. Some of our teachers are failing to give our children a sound education. Some teachers do not teach grammar, writing, and proper english, because they are so hung up on trying to teach the EOG. According to our test scores they have not succeeded in doing that.In my opinion I think it is time for a change in our system.
To Russ Carr: Middle school teachers in California who teach 7 and 8 grades are required to have single subject credentials, not multiple subject, and most of us know our subject pretty well…regurgitating curricula isn’t always the problem.
I think one of the major problems is that 7-12 grade teachers don’t expect to teach literacy and don’t want to teach literacy–they want to teach content. The credential program for a single subject may not include literacy instruction. The program I went through did, and it was definitely seen as unnecessary by many of my classmates, especially those in 9-12. Knowing a subject forwards, backwards, upside down and sideways doesn’t mean you know how to teach literacy or writing, which is a shame, because you need reading and writing in all subjects at all levels.
What does teaching boot camp look like? You say it shouldn’t be discussion of theory and management, but what should it be? Killing and drilling the teachers on subject matter doesn’t mean these teachers know how to teach reading and writing.
And if principals won’t insist on teachers using a certain method/approach, then why would a teacher do it, unless he/she felt it would work? It’s not so much about working dumb, as leadership is top down. Teachers go to many workshops, some by choice, some by requirement. When there is no follow up from site admin and/or district people, it starts to seem futile, and yes, Sisyphean.
Compelling points have been made by all, but I wonder when the conversation will shift from accountability for teaching efficacy to accountability for student learning? What about a degree in learning? There is so much knowledge about how students learn and resources for supporting teachers in practice to make that shift from teaching expertise to expertise in learning, that perhaps that is the change process that should be navigated.