Misrepresenting Urban Education

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I am not one for bumper sticker politics, but I saw a t-shirt on a teacher recently that said, “Those who can, teach; those who can’t teach, pass legislation about teaching.” 

This made me think about the fact that the vast majority of our critics have never stepped into a classroom since they walked across their high school auditorium stage to take their diploma.  A couple examples slapped me in the face recently.

I shouldn’t give this guy the publicity that comes with a response, but the other day I read an editorial by Chris Powell, the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, that really got under my skin.  Powell routinely offends me because he hates teachers so profoundly and bashes them so regularly on the editorial pages of the JI.  I know this not because I subscribe to the JI but because someone at the Willimantic Chronicle loves to run Powell’s editorials on an all-too-regular basis.

One of Powell’s obsessions is with social promotion.  In a recent editorial, he misrepresented results of the most recent NAEP tests to suggest that half of all Connecticut high school seniors “had not mastered high school English,” when in fact Connecticut had the highest reading scores in the country, and had the most significant gains for African-American students.  Furthermore, if Connecticut were its own country, its scores on the commensurate PISA exam, which is international, would place it among the top performers in the world.

This is not to say we don’t have work to do, but honestly.  Powell gets himself in a lather because students who don’t score proficient on the NAEP test get a “diploma anyway.”  He writes that this is “because the unacknowledged policy of public education in Connecticut is never to hold students to standards but to promote them from grade to grade even if they fail to learn.”

Now, Powell is maligning all Connecticut teachers, but being that he is based in Manchester, I assume he has those teachers foremost in his mind.  But as someone who has spent the whole year working in three schools in Manchester, I can tell you I have never seen Powell cross the threshold of any building, and that I have certainly not witnessed the lack of standards or failure to teach or learn that he reports. 

The fact of the matter—in Manchester and everywhere else—is that we all do our best to progress our students, and then, yes, we generally pass them to the next grade.  Which is as it should be.  Research has routinely demonstrated that retention does not aid learning but hinders it.  In fact, keeping a student back in a transitional grade like 1, 5, or 8 is one of the best predictors of dropping out of school. 

Don’t believe me?  Read Russell Rumberger’s excellent compendium titled Dropping Out.  Rumberger demonstrates in great detail that when students repeat a grade their likelihood of future failure increases.  (One of the most frightening predictors of prison for African-American males is if they repeat first grade!).  We are much better off promoting students and then providing the necessary interventions and support to promote their continued learning.  There’s the rub, no doubt, but that is the best option.

Maybe I get frustrated with Powell because I hold journalists to a higher standard.  I expect them to promote opinions that are informed by fact, observation, and experience, and not merely based on something they read on the internet.  But truth be told, such uninformed opinions about education—and especially about urban education—are pervasive.  (I know I’m not telling most of my readers anything you don’t know). 

And here’s my other disturbing example.

The other day I was heading to East Hartford High to sit in on my friend Kim Shaker’s UConn Early College Experience class.  They were reading Hamlet.  I always love going to Kim’s classes because she’s a great teacher, she has a preponderance of energy, and her classes look like a model United Nations.

I observed and lightly participated in a great class that was doing this fun, dynamic close-reading activity with Claudius’ confessional monologue.  The students were brilliant.

But here’s my point.  As I was leaving to go to East Hartford, I bumped into an acquaintance, and when I told him where I was headed, he said, “Be careful!  Those places are dangerous!” 

Those places?  I didn’t even want to ask for clarification.  I just said, “Don’t believe the hype,” got in my car, and drove off.