Where American Education Fails

August brings children of every age back to dusty classrooms and overcrowded hallways. It’s that time every year when skeletons are brought back out of storage and Harper Lee gets ready to sing her rather dull and antiquated Mockingbird song once again. Bus engines are checked and parents clamor to their local Walmarts and dollar stores for notebooks, pens and pencils, rulers, folders, and a variety of other now obsolete “essentials” that their kids will never use. It’s back to school time, and the state of education in America is at an all-time low.

Sure, high school graduation rates are at an all-time high, but college drop-out rates are also soaring. High school “success” isn’t translating into more college degrees. So what IS happening in our public education system? We’re graduating more kids, but they are less “college-ready” than ever. It’s easy (and lazy) to blame the modern college drop-out rate on preposterous tuition rates (they ARE stupidly high; most Americans are appalled when they find out the United States is one of the only places on the planet where you have to pay to go to college), but that’s not the REAL (or should I say PRIMARY) reason there are so many college drop-outs these days, that’s just a socially acceptable excuse to mask the fact that today’s graduating high school seniors are much “dumber” than generations past. And it’s not their fault. Let me explain…

I was a teacher in public education for close to seven years (from 2010-16), and some of the conversations and decisions regarding curriculum and learning targets behind closed doors was downright disgusting. When I was at Berthoud High School (2012-13), we had a department meeting where we looked at literacy rate data for graduating seniors in the district for the previous five years. Put plainly, in the Spring of 2012, high school seniors in that district were graduating with a proficiency in literacy (reading / writing) equal to 7^th graders from 2007. In other words, over the course of those five years, literacy rates within the district were drastically falling.

So we were the professionals – the teachers with the data. What do you expect we would do with this information? What questions should we be asking? Perhaps something along the lines of: How can we turn this trend around? Maybe you would expect teachers to develop lesson plans geared towards the development of a skill like critical thinking that doesn’t only apply to one classroom. Maybe you would expect teachers to create alternative assessments that allow (and encourage) students to think abstractly in their problem-solving. Sadly, such expectations are far from reality.

As my fellow educators and department members began discussing what this data meant, and what we could or should do about it, my department leader’s favorite slogan was: “It is what it is”, and she made it abundantly clear that the reality of the situation was that our jobs were to prepare kids for the big standardized test in the Spring. Period. It wasn’t about getting them “college-ready”, or even “life-ready”. We proceeded to take the past versions of the standardized test and pull out common concepts across the years (e.g. metaphor, personification, five-paragraph essay, etc.) to guide instruction. Because in the end – in the BIG picture – better standardized test scores meant more district funding from the government the following school year (which consequently means each individual school gets more money), whereas lower standardized test scores meant less district funding from the government (resulting in decreasing budgets in each individual school, which equals less staff, more students per teacher, less extracurricular programs, and all sorts of other compounding problems). It’s backwards, I know. But as my department leader at BHS would say: It is what it is.

Of course, teachers are the ones who get the axe first when school budgets are decreased, meaning it’s in their best interest that students score well on standardized tests. With this in plain sight, it becomes pretty clear what teachers need to do in order to not lose their jobs: TEACH TO THE TEST (as a side note, every teacher in BHS’ district has a ‘Performance Rating’ every year; 40% of this ‘Performance Rating’ is directly tied to the average standardized test score for students across the district. There are 4 categories an educator can fall into on their ‘Performance Rating’: Exemplary 90%+, Proficient 80-90%, Partially Proficient 50-79%, and Developing 0-49%. A ridiculous 40% of that 100% rating is determined by standardized test scores. If you are ‘Partially Proficient’ or lower two years in a row, you are put into professional development classes to “correct” what you are doing wrong, as well as those who have earned tenure, lose it). The problem with this model is pretty evident: the majority of students don’t care about how they perform on standardized tests. They realize it doesn’t affect them in any way, shape, or form, and schools can’t do anything to incentivize (positively or negatively) their student population.

I write all of this because the function of the teacher has changed, and it’s troublesome to the future of education in this country. The modern teacher’s job has become unfathomably prescriptive. Dropping standardized test scores obviously means teachers suck at doing their jobs, right? The solution by folks in positions of power who have never stepped foot into a public education classroom? Create a canned curriculum, with preset concepts (like metaphor, personification, five-paragraph essay, etc.) geared towards “success” on standardized tests, and cookie-cutter rules disseminated and enforced by administration in every classroom. Teachers are being neutered and creativity in lesson-planning and relationship building is being destroyed.

Famous author Jiddu Krishnamurti was a teacher for several years before becoming disenfranchised about the direction education was headed and chose to follow a path of writing philosophically instead. In one of his writings, he asks the question: “what is the true function of an educator? What is education? Why are we educated? Are we educated at all? Because you pass a few examinations, have a job, competing, struggling, brutalizing ambition, is that education? What is an educator? Is he one who prepares the student for a job, merely for a job, for technical achievement in order to earn a livelihood? That is all we know at present. There are vast schools, universities where you prepare the youth, boy or girl, to have a job, to have technical knowledge so that he or she can have a livelihood. Is that alone the function of a true educator? There must be something more than that, because it is too mechanical. So you say that the educator must be an example. You agree with that?”

The educator must be an example for young people. In modern times, the educator cannot do this without becoming a polarizing figure to their peers and their administration. In the 2014-15 school year, my principal called me into her office and reprimanded me because “students like you too much, and that’s not normal.” A former student thought of me when they received a buy one get one free Subway sandwich near my new school and didn’t want it to go to waste. We talked over lunch hour in my classroom and he left. The reprimand happened that afternoon. My principal continued to tell me: “if you don’t cease and desist in your efforts to build relationships with students, I will find reasons to remove you from the classroom.” She made life miserable for me over the course of the last few months, and when students found out (from a different staff member) that I was being non-renewed at the end of the school year, they took it upon themselves to email school board members and the superintendent to reverse her decision because of the positive effects I had on their lives. When I found out about it, I told students to stop, and that it would only go to hurt my cause. Of course, that same day, the principal had me in her office and told me to “shut up”, that she “doesn’t want to hear a word [I] have to say”, and that she knew “[I] was behind all of it”. She then told me in pointblank fashion: “I don’t care what it takes, or if I have to pay for it myself, I’m going to get you out of my school.” The following school day, she had the head of Human Resources in her office and I was summoned. She had a copy of one of my books in front of her that she had confiscated from a student. The student had bought the book via Barnes&Noble, but she believed I was running a “self-promoting scam” through the school (and yes, I do have all of this recorded). Human Resources told me there would be an investigation and that I wasn’t allowed on school grounds or school events until the conclusion of the investigation. Surely it wouldn’t take but a quick check into the student’s bank statement to show the purchase at B&N, right? The student was fully willing to prove that she bought it outside of school, but as one of the Chief Human Resource Officers later told me, “she wants to make sure the investigation lasts the rest of the school year.” Of course, a month later, Human Resources found that everything was legitimate and said I did nothing wrong, and that if it’s any consolation, she paid for the substitutes and my paid time off out of her own pocket. What broke my heart was that I knew students were getting no educational value out of the substitutes they had, and it was 100% time wasted at the cost of our country’s future.

One may ask why she didn’t like me in the first place, and sadly, I found out that it came back to other teachers. They were complaining behind my back that I was making them look bad. I had an alternative way of teaching students, of going beyond the canned content the district gave us and challenging each individual student to relate to concepts and ideas on a personal level – on a level beyond memorizing and “banking method” education (deposit and withdraw theory). I got to know students personally and I cared about them – genuinely. And they reciprocated that. They performed better in my classes, and they looked forward to my class every day. I had students who ditched every other class except mine, that only turned in work in my class and no other because they cared and they saw the relevancy in what they were learning. But the downside was that it made me stick out like a sore thumb, it ultimately cast administration’s gaze on my way of teaching, and they hated it. They want sit-down, shut up, and do your worksheets and take your notes teachers. This new wave of “Next Gen Learning” that is now catching fire in many states (Colorado must have it fully implemented across the board by Fall of 2017) is just that. Canned curriculum, worksheets, and a lot of worthless information that does the next generation of students no good in the BIG picture. They may graduate knowing what a metaphor is and what Pythagorean Theorem is, but they won’t be able to balance a bank account or use abstract thinking to solve problems. They are becoming less and less “college-ready” at the expense of public education’s desire to make more money via the standardized testing infrastructure which is employed.

As far as the soaring high school graduation rates go, even when students fail, administrators are desperate to “push them through” and pass them, because the higher your graduation rate is…you guessed it, the higher a stipend your school receives for the upcoming school year. I’ve had multiple occasions at multiple schools where the principal or assistant principal has told me that if I didn’t change a student’s ‘F’ to a ‘C’, that they would overwrite it themselves before grades were officially due. I told them to go ahead and do it because I wasn’t going to have that on my conscience. And it happened. A lot. And there are a good number of students who know this, and they take advantage of it. There’s also a population of entitled students who know they can do nothing and have Mommy or Daddy call in and have their ‘F’ changed at the end of each semester because an administrator will do ANYTHING to prevent a parent from complaining to the School Board. Just some insight into some of the PRIMARY reasons why high school graduation rates are soaring and not translating into higher education success.

Overall, the main problem is that public education is no longer about the student. It is about the student’s standardized test scores and the process deemed as best practice to get higher standardized test scores, and if a teacher can’t be a cog in the application of that process, that teacher is eliminated. I’ve found that students work wonders when you show them a shred of care. Ultimately, that’s what we are all seeking in life. We want to be cared about, and in public education, they aren’t cared about enough personally, and they feel it. Educators, administrators, and parents are quick to blame the student when they fail (e.g. “they just don’t care enough” / “they are choosing to fail” / “there’s only so much I can do to motivate them”), when in reality (more cases than not), they were failed by a horrific system the day they set foot in a public school. They’re not stupid (kids are actually quite bright), they’re sad, mad, and upset that they aren’t validated enough as their own unique human being.

The result as this next generation of students is coming out into the world and the workforce: apathy. An “I don’t care because nobody cares about me” attitude that has become easy to label and stereotype as millennial (and don’t get me wrong, I’m not attempting to defend millennials because they drive me crazy too, I’m just shedding some light on one of the reasons WHY they are the way they are). It’s become easy to make fun of millennials, but that’s because nobody in any position of power wants to acknowledge the messed up system that helped shape these millennials – the messed up system that IS public education.