People don’t like change. I know that. I experience it all the time when I have a conversation with parents about the grading policy at my school. Or when I explain that students have to meet standards in order to move on to the next grade. Parents really don’t like change because they don’t understand it. And when people don’t like change they always go back to the same phrase, “If it ain’t broke, then why fix it.” The thing is, public education in this country is broke. And it has been for a long time. Deep down inside people know this but they don’t want to acknowledge it because they don’t want to change. Or because they don’t know how to make things better. Or because they know something isn’t right with our educational system but they don’t know what it is. It can be very hard to make the changes necessary when you don’t know exactly what the problems are. So let me help you. Below you will find a list of all the things that are wrong with education.
1) Poverty.
Education is supposed to be the big equalizer. By providing a free public education to all we are ensuring that everyone in our country has the opportunity to get out of poverty. The problem is that it is extremely hard to get an education when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from or where you are going to sleep that night. Schools try to help mitigate this by providing free and reduced lunches to students. Some schools have even started food pantries. But there is a lot more that needs to be done to help our poorest students succeed. They need to have safe homes. They need a quiet place to complete their homework every night. They need to have time to balance school and their after school jobs. They need clothes that fit, warm jackets for the winter, running water for a shower, and deodorant. We can’t expect anyone to learn if their basic needs are not being met first and foremost.
2) We need laws that ensure students are in school.
There is no one to enforce truancy laws. Schools have no way of ensuring that kids come to school. It is a fact that when kids don’t go to school their grades suffer.
3) When this year’s middle school students are ready to enter the job market the jobs they will be applying for do not even exist now.
Technology has changed everything in our lives. It has especially changed the job market and the kinds of jobs that are available to people. Gone are many factory jobs. Who knows what other jobs might follow? But even as these jobs disappear new jobs, jobs no one has ever had before, are created. Companies everywhere are discovering they have a need to hire people to do tasks they have never needed done before. And they are finding that no one is trained to do these tasks. Why would they be? Five years ago these jobs didn’t even exist! Teachers can no longer simply teach content. Teachers must now teach students how to think, how to problem solve, and how to learn. We can’t be certain what content students will need for the jobs they will enter but we can be certain of the skills.
4) Money (or more education around why budgets go up every year).
Every few years teachers become more expensive. They earn a pay raise based on their classroom experience because research says the more experienced teachers are better at their jobs. This means that school budgets rise. So school districts need to either ask for more money from the town or they need to make cuts. Our economy was in the tank for a long time and many people still believe it is. So no one feels they can afford to have their taxes go up and so school boards make cuts. This needs to end. This has led to less funding for the arts which studies show help keep kids in school. This has led to teachers jobs being cut. This has led to classes of 30-40 instead of 15-20.
5) Larger class sizes.
The larger to class the less time a teacher has to spend with each students one-on-one assessing what that students needs to succeed. More students also leads to louder classrooms and more problems concentrating for kids who need a quiet environment to learn.
6) This image of teachers as either saints or villains.
We have all heard stories about teachers who yelled at and belittled a student for forgetting a pencil. And we have all heard stories about teachers who hid students in a closet and were gunned down themselves in a school shooting. Both of these are true. They might even be true of the same teacher. Teachers are neither villains or saints. They are human beings. They make mistakes and have bad days just like the rest of us. People need to remember this.
7) Parents who don’t stress the importance of education to their children.
Children sometimes get bad grades because they don’t understand the material being taught to them. More often than not students get bad grades because they chose to not ask for help or because they chose to not do the work or they chose to not take the teacher up on a retake. It might surprise you to know there are people out there who do not stress the importance of education to their children. There are parents who don’t even look at their child’s report card. Parents who show their child that it doesn’t matter how they do will have children who don’t try. Children who don’t try, don’t learn.
8) Bullying and cyber-bullying.
Yes, this is real. Yes, schools do everything they can to put a stop to it. Yet, in public schools it continues and it dramatically affects how a student does in school. It changes how safe they feel and when a student doesn’t feel safe in school it is incredibly difficult to learn.
9) Testing has taken all of the fun out of learning (or has tried to).
We know that students learn different things in different ways and at different rates. However, we still give them tests where we make them prove they are on grade level even if they might not be ready for the test. We then measure the worth of a teacher based on these tests without taking in any of the above circumstances which could be impeding the student’s success. No one can solve all of these problems on their own but somehow we expect teachers to work miracles and make all students successful without removing all the obstacles standing in the way. And on top of that the tests are long, hard, and boring! We make kindergarteners who are just learning to use a mouse try to type paragraphs on keyboards with their tiny fingers. The test takes hours to complete. We expect them to sit and take these tests for days on end. This ruins their love of school forever.
10) Students are supposed to be motivated to succeed by grades.
Our letter grading system is a joke. It requires students to memorize a bunch of content they are never going to remember and that in the future they will probably just google anyway. Or it asks them to learn processes and skills but it doesn’t check to make sure the student is proficient at the skill before moving on. Get a D, C, or B and you can move on. But the only person who really knows the skill or the process is the student who got an A. So why are we asking the rest to move on to the next, more difficult task before they are ready? Are we asking them to move on before they have completely mastered this skill? And none of these grades represent learning. You don’t get an A when you learn something. You get an A when you prove you know it. Why should a student who already knows the content of a class have to stay in that class all year and prove they know that content? Why shouldn’t they be moved on?
11) Students are not motivated to behave by detentions.
When a student misbehaves they get a detention. The thing is detention is not that bad. The student sits in a room, silently, and thinks about what they did. Once a student knows this, detention isn’t scary anymore. So what’s to stop them from getting more? Nothing. We need to stop thinking that punishment can always correct a student’s behavior. Students need to be engaged in the learning so much that they want to be involved in the class. That they want to behave so they can participate.
12) Everyone thinks they can fix schools simply by changing one thing.
NO! Before education can improve we need to accept that all of the above problems have to change. Our philosophy about what schools are needs to change. Our vision of what schools look like needs to change. We need to be brave and more forward purposefully. There is a lot of research out there about what is best for students but until these problems are addressed we can’t implement any of that research successfully.
