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Why haven’t a myriad of school reforms had a discernible impact on our public schools? Much like the six blind men who tried to identify an elephant based on touch, subjective experience is inherently limited when we don’t account for the totality of the beast.
As I point out in my book, The Elephant in the Classroom, today’s reformers have looked in all the wrong places. Rather than taking a realistic view of today’s elephant, they’ve tried to reform neighborhood public schools based on a 1980s’ or older model.
They see the neighborhood public school as a neat and tidy box where all of our students are taught the 3Rs plus lots of content material. But believe me, that’s not the way it is. What has changed? In many districts, almost half of our public school students are no longer in the regular neighborhood school.
Parents who are motivated and knowledgeable have enrolled their kids in a variety of programs outside of the regular neighborhood school structure. These programs include private, religious, and secular schools, voucher-supported schools, charter schools, gifted schools, International Baccalaureate schools, magnet schools within the public system itself, along with a few outstanding public schools in wealthy neighborhoods.
So who remains in the average neighborhood school? We’re left with a large number of students who have limited scholastic ability. Many also lack motivation, concentration, and self-control. All four of these qualities are necessary for college, and most are necessary to succeed academically at the high school level. These are the non-selected, non-“creamed” kids who reside in what I call the killing fields. A place where it’s not unusual to find that 20% of students are sent home for at least one day for fighting and 30% of students are absent 21+ days during the school year.
And the reason we continue this destructive process is because we have accepted two great American myths: that all children have the same academic potential and that everyone should go to college. We think all kids can succeed at the college level if we provide outstanding teachers and a challenging curriculum. But the population of students themselves has more to do with a school’s rankings than anything our teachers can accomplish.
Since we have not acknowledged what’s really happening within the “killing fields,” perhaps all we've done is to leave these students behind and hope for the best. Perhaps we're the dropouts, not them! Perhaps what we're doing today, as a society, is dropping out. Dropping out to find a better place for our kids and leaving students with less potential behind to face failure, underachievement, and unemployment.
This residual group is the one reformers believe represents our entire school population, and test scores from this group are, of course, included in the data we use to compare our student achievement with other countries. A population of students that we force to endure non-relevant, watered-down college prep courses and high-stakes testing.
We pretend to teach college prep academic skills, and these students in turn pretend to learn these skills. This reminds me of the dysfunctional situation under East Berlin communist rule where the citizens said about the authorities, “They pretend to pay us what we need, and we pretend to work.”
The following formula helps us to better comprehend the causes underlying the crisis in American schools today:
If SC ≥ 50%
Then NSC = (BC+ HT+ MA) – (AC + AA) = CCAS
Where:
SC = selective creaming of 50% of students
NSC = neighborhood school captives
BC = blended classrooms
HT = high stakes testing
MA = midlevel academics
AC = advanced career studies
AA = advanced academic studies
CCAS = causes of the crisis in American schools
Solutions? We must start to look in all the right places and overcome our fear of the truth. The vast majority of students left in these neighborhood schools will benefit most from advanced career studies that build self-esteem, help them land jobs and keep them out of the criminal system. A small percentage of these kids need advanced collegiate studies so they can complete college in 3 ½ years instead of 5+ years.
Are we willing to take off our blinders and see the elephant in the classroom, or, much like the six blind men, will we continue to look in all the wrong places?
