It was a recent conversation with a mom from Pennsylvania (let’s
call her Laura) that brought me to a better understanding of America’s
“one-size-fits-all” schools and the stratifying effect they have been having on
our society. This lady lives in a very
affluent, suburban neighborhood outside of Philadelphia and has 15-year old
twin boys. She described her children’s
schools as “very good”, (and I thought, “Wow how lucky!”) – and then she began
the litany of complaints.
She started with how her sons were taught Math. When they were little, the boys would come
home with these bizarre homework assignments that neither she nor her husband
could figure out how to help them with.
These are both college-educated professionals. Have I seen the lattice method? Sure have. Laura and her husband bought supplementary
Math work books that had practice sheets.
Then the parents took turns almost every school night plus many hours
during weekends and summer vacations at the kitchen table teaching them the
correct way to solve Math problems.
Laura described these correct methods as the way they themselves had
been taught which were, of course, the Standard Algorithms.
I nodded my head – it’s the same down here. As a tutor I have spoken to many, many
parents about this same thing. The kids
would be trying to solve a division problem, for instance, and the first thing
they did was start drawing all these bubbles all over the paper. Laura saw that in her sons’ school as
well.
Or they would try to solve fraction problems, but had
forgotten their multiplication facts. About
two years can separate the schools’ work on the tables (3rd grade –
and we’re talking about an all too brief attempt at rote memorization) and the
introduction of fractions (5th grade). During this time, the material covered is so
fast-paced, over-loaded with disconnected skills, and poorly sequenced that the
gradual building of complexity in using multiplication appears to have been
lost in the crowd. Almost never do I meet
a student of any age who has had enough (or any) practice in using two and
three digit multipliers, while the neglect of the Standard Algorithm in
division can apply to simple one digit divisors, let alone two and three digit
divisor problems. (The absence of
division instruction was one of the most criticized points in the NCTM-written
standards of the OBE days. They’ve
effectively done away with this function anyway, despite all our protesting.) Once the connection between multiplication,
division and fractions is demonstrated to my tutoring students, they are
astonished!
It’s the logical, building-block sequencing in the practice
of increasingly complex operations that helps a child internalize the basics,
such as the multiplication tables or the step-by-step procedures used to solve
elementary arithmetic problems. Many parents know this and believe strongly in
the importance of plenty of paper and pencil work despite - or maybe because of
- their not having Education degrees. Too
often, however, when these parents try to show their kids how to solve Math
problems, the kids will protest that that’s not how they do it in school. But the kids can’t do it the way the teacher
showed them either, nor can they explain this new way to their parents. The books,
when they come home at all, are poorly written and will have only one or two
examples showing procedures which will not even cover all the different quirks
and ramifications of the exercise problems the kids have been assigned to
figure out. (This is experience speaking
here.) It is lose/lose. The end result is usually a build-up of
frustration on both sides, and the child’s loss of respect for the hapless
parents.
The Pa. schools don’t teach cursive anymore either. Laura believes that cursive is very important
– how can anyone sign their name if they haven’t learned cursive? I
nodded - it’s the same in Fl. They pretend
to teach cursive for like two weeks or so, then it comes to a screeching
halt, and the kids go right back to printing.
The printing is illegible because many schools don’t teach how to hold a
pencil and, if the kids start at the wrong place and head in the wrong
direction, they are not corrected. (Dyslexia
is such a lucrative little diagnosis.) The
kids end up trying to invent how to write the letters themselves which is
usually backwards, upside down and in the wrong positions.
Laura said they had the same situation up north. Plus there is no keyboarding
instruction. She was very indignant
about this. The reason the schools give
for not bothering with cursive anymore is because everyone will be typing
everything. But then they do not provide
any kind of formal training in keyboarding.
In their earliest days of school, this mom took on the task of teaching
her sons how to print and write cursive correctly, plus made sure they knew how
to keyboard better than the default, two-finger hunt & peck. It’s a good thing she started this so soon,
because once a child has a few years practice forming their letters wrong, it’s
a horribly difficult habit to break.
Spelling? Spelling
tests are gone in the schools she knows of in Pennsylvania, while in Florida,
they are sometimes still seen in the earlier grades. They are pretty hit or miss though – I’ll ask
my students how they’re doing on all their subjects, and they’ll tell me they
haven’t had a spelling test for a while. I told Laura that back in the late 90’s, when
my kids were still in a public middle school, the tests had devolved into a
multiple choice format. When I complained
to the principal, he told me that that’s how he did it when he was a
teacher. Plus there are a lot of times
where spelling is seen as unimportant, like in the kids’ daily journals. Laura hadn’t seen any multiple choice spelling
tests, but she remembers being appalled by her sons’ daily, error-filled
journals and also complained about all the “rough drafts” the kids are always
writing even now when they are in high school.
No one ever used to turn in rough drafts. We turned in the best work possible, and if
there were errors, the teacher marked them – in red – and we would take the
papers home, fix them and turn in the corrected paper the next day. This is how kids learn – and this has not
been happening in America’s public schools for quite some time now.
Neither the rich Pa. nor mixed-income Fl. schools of our
acquaintance spend significant time teaching grammatical rules, parts of speech
or variety of sentence structure. I’ll
have a student recite that a noun is a person, place or thing, but be unable to
identify the nouns in a sentence. They
won’t know what a verb is until reminded – but helping verbs, adjectives,
adverbs – nada. Prepositions? Please. Verb conjugations? Subjects and predicates? Compound sentences? Comma placement? Not that either of us have seen. There wasn’t anything she could do about her
kids’ journals since they stayed in school, and she only got to glance at them
during parents’ nights. But as often as
she could get her hands on her sons’ written work, Laura has been doing the
correcting herself, from elementary school and right up into their high school
years. Lucky you, I said. The Florida parents I know of almost never
get to see their children’s work. When
they do, it’s the same story. If you ask
the teacher why none of the mistakes are marked, it’s to save the child’s
self-esteem. Right – like illiteracy is good for
self-esteem. And whatever happened to
diagramming sentences? Gosh – who isn’t asking that question?
We must have compared our respective school experiences for
an hour. Skimpy phonics instruction –
check. Called “coincidental” by the
pro-Phonics millions, this is known as “eclectic” in Florida. Having higher achieving children tutor lower
achieving children without first instructing the little tutors in how to teach? You bet.
Group seating and group projects – check. They call it cooperating and collaborating in
school and cheating everywhere else.
The homework brought home veered from none at all to
infantile nonsense to pointless, time-consuming “projects”. Laura said she would prefer no homework at
all to the stuff her sons spend so much time trying to get done. I told Laura about one high school Senior I
knew who spent hours designing a color chart – for her Honors English
class. This was a very intelligent young
woman, but her English SAT scores were awful.
Go figure. Sadly, she wanted to
be an English major.
Laura told me she worried about how well many of her
children’s friends would do in college – the kids who did not have their
parents spending so much time with them or even getting them tutoring. Together we wondered how the kids could be
learning much about History or Science when no books ever come home, and
homework projects don’t seem to be teaching them anything either. She actually has no idea what her boys have
been studying in those subjects. It is
certainly hard for me to believe that schools that do such a poor job teaching
the most basic of skills and knowledge would suddenly become terrific at imparting
thorough, accurate, engagingly presented and politically neutral content in
these areas. According to college and
university professors, as well as the American population at large, these
bodies of knowledge are also being neglected in our public schools. Generally, parents who do much of the
teaching at home are hard pressed to keep up with the dearth of grade-level basic
skills, and will not think to read History and Science text books with their
children.
Finally, I pointed out that while we were both describing
almost identical schools, I described them as “really crappy.” What was it that made her think of them as
“very good”? Laura answered that the
schools where she lives are considered excellent because all the kids get high
SAT & ACT scores, and every single kid gets into a prestigious college or
university. There is no lower income
cohort that does more poorly? No
flunking? No dropping out? No.
Every single child gets into a good college. Wow.
I hearkened back to a couple experiences I had when my kids
were still in the public schools during the beginning of OBE. At an open house at my son’s middle school,
one of his teachers and I started talking about all the changes going on, and
she kept repeating the phrase, “Everything depends on the parents.” She was staring at me intently, so I stared intently
back at her and said, “If it takes a village to raise a child, when are the
schools going to be kicking in with their part?” (Hillary’s village was HUGE back then.) “Everything depends on the parents.” She was a good teacher and retired shortly
after.
There was also the time I spoke with a representative of the
Federal Department of Education. He was
down in Sarasota investigating claims of discrimination, and I was positive
that the withholding of skills and knowledge from young school children was
definitely discrimination. He kept
asking me if I knew of any instance of different treatment and, of course, I
didn’t. No one was being taught phonics or grammar or anything else, at
least not in the public schools. Then
there was nothing he could do because, according to the law, as long as all
students were receiving the same treatment, there was no discrimination. So discrimination for all is OK? He shrugged his shoulders – there was nothing
he could do. I yelled, "You’re getting blamed for
this, you know!" And, indeed, he did know.
This, then, has been - and continues to be - the true essence
of Outcome-Based Education. With the input of this nation’s cookie-cutter schools
held constant - as identical and as inferior as possible - the basis of the
schools’ reputations has become the outcomes, and those outcomes will depend on
how well the students’ families overcome the deficiencies of their children’s
schools. In fact, the modern school’s
biggest accomplishment has devolved into an assessment of the parents’
performance. This explains why poorly
performing schools so often whine that their students’ parents are just refusing
to do their jobs. It’s why one of the biggest arguments against objective teacher
evaluations is that the schools can’t be held responsible for their students’
test results. They say stuff like this
with conviction! Of course, the way
things are now, the schools are all too sadly correct.
This Darwinistic, family
as destiny, survival-of-the-fittest structure has been assuring the perpetuation
of an ever more rigid class system. To a
certain extent, this outcome dichotomy will break along income lines simply
because higher earning parents have more of the skills and knowledge necessary
to help their kids through the morass.
The illiterate, the innumerate, those whose schools have treated them
shabbily in their own turn are not only unable to do the teaching themselves,
but are also less likely to be earning enough to hire tutors let alone afford
private school. Our illustrious Educrats
do want us to believe that everything hinges on money – because they want tons
more of it. But this is the Information Age, so it’s the families with the necessary “information” who will have the children
who at least appear to be thriving in America’s cookie-cutter schools.
Why the American school system has become one where teaching is
so degraded rather than one where all children receive equally effective books
and teaching methods is the topic for another to handle. For now, I can state - with conviction! -
that Common Core is more of the same shabby treatment. We need Parents’ Choice.
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