Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Every year halfway through June I get an urgent phone call from Poor Elijah. That’s how long it takes him to figure out that all the honorary degrees and commencement invitations have already gone to the president and people like Oprah. Fortunately, very little exciting ever happens on my porch, so he always has a venue for his annual address.
There’s a wicker rocker in the corner. Pour yourself some iced coffee and settle in.
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I’m a teacher. I have a very important job. I know this because the president says that “education is everything to our children’s future.” His Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, agrees I’m doing “the most important work in the country.” Apparently, though, I’m not doing it very well. I know this because Mr. Duncan also says I’m part of a “school to prison pipeline.” He further claims that a “staggering” 40 percent of college freshmen require remediation, even in Massachusetts, which consistently ranks at or near the top in achievement nationwide.
Inconveniently, his staggering 40 percent was roughly double the actual number. The average percentage for all 50 states, which obviously don’t all rank at or near the top in achievement nationwide, is closer to 20 percent. This figure comes to us via the National Center for Education Statistics, the number crunchers in Mr. Duncan’s education department.
I mention this because Mr. Duncan, like almost every other policymaker, is adamant that data should drive education reform. It’s bad enough that most education data, while extraordinarily expensive, is also extraordinarily meaningless and unreliable. It’s even more unnerving when experts who expect my school to live and die by data, and who zealously judge and “transform” schools according to that data, can’t even get their faulty data right.
Of course, at the same time Mr. Duncan is complaining that too many students graduate unprepared for college, he also maintains that most students drop out of high school “not because it’s too hard, but because it’s too easy.”
In other words, students who complete high school don’t know enough, but students who don’t complete high school drop out because learning all the things they don’t know would have been too easy.
Mr. Duncan’s theory might make some sense if most dropouts were getting A’s. However, most dropouts were failing the “easy” classes that Mr. Duncan condemns. Making those classes more academically difficult might be a good idea, but it’s unlikely to result in fewer students dropping out.
Students who aren’t meeting allegedly low standards aren’t likely to succeed if you make the standards higher. If I can’t vault over a three-foot bar, setting the bar at six feet probably won’t help. Therein lies the flaw in most reform schemes, including reform’s current flavor, the Common Core.
Individuals who harm other students, threaten other students, or disrupt the education of other students should rightly be excluded from school.
If what I’m saying makes sense to you, and what Mr. Duncan says doesn’t, welcome to the looking glass world in which my “important work” takes place.
Mr. Duncan and the plague of experts like him who don’t know the first thing about teaching are problematic. Forty years of education reform, premised on pipedreams, have been counterproductive. Some teachers are incompetent and should be dismissed. But none of these is education’s most pernicious menace.
Over the years I’ve known a lot of students and their parents. Most, like me, have been far from idealized characters out of a Frank Capra movie. But most have been decent, hard-working people with the ordinary run of human blind spots and flaws, liable to intemperate moments, but by and large reasonable.
Some have not been so.
This is to be expected.
What’s unexpected and ill-advised is how we’ve dealt and continue to deal with these aberrant individuals.
Individuals who harm other students, threaten other students, or disrupt the education of other students should rightly be excluded from school. I don’t care what the Attorney General and Mr. Duncan say. They don’t live every day in a classroom. Their glib platitudes about safe schools and the “learning process” ring as hollow as Marie Antoinette’s suggestion that the peasants eat cake.
I’m sorry some students’ lives are hard. I don’t know that I could bear what some of my students do. I cut them some slack when I can. But in the end I’m more obliged to care about the rights of the students they terrorize and whose educations they steal. Education may be a right, but it’s a right that can and should be lost, like the right of drunks to drive and the right of criminals to roam freely in society.
If we don’t stand united against violence and disruption, don’t come to me about why my students don’t learn.
Students aren’t failing to learn because the material is too easy. If mouthing such nonsense doesn’t discredit the “experts” in education, I don’t know what will. It also doesn’t matter that some material is boring. Some of it has always been boring. That formerly didn’t stop Americans from learning it.
Learning isn’t always fun, and the harder it gets, the less fun it becomes. That’s why 3-year-olds don’t feel the burden of work as much as 30-year-olds do. Life isn’t an arcade. The fact that so many policymakers think that’s what school should be says something about why we as a nation are growing less productive and competitive.
Students don’t need to learn because it’s fun or even interesting, or because it gratifies their immediate appetites. They need to learn because if they don’t, no one will, and that will mean an end to American life as they know it. If that’s not enough motivation, I don’t have anything better.
If we can’t impress that imperative on our children, don’t come to me about why my students don’t learn.
Families increasingly expect schools to feed their children, exercise their children, treat their children’s illnesses, teach their children values, prevent their children’s pregnancies, and generally fill in as parents.
Parents increasingly come to school demanding, “What are you going to do to solve my child’s problem.” Irrational demands, obscenities and intimidation are daily fare for too many teachers and administrators.
If we don’t stand united against the basest, most irresponsible among us, don’t come to me about why my students don’t learn.
All is not lost yet. It’s important that you as this year’s graduates understand that.
More than my words can say rides on your understanding.
Godspeed.
