Teecherz Rule

Just sitting here on a gray winter afternoon looking out at the frozen chunks of ice forming wondrous little jigsaw patterns on the lake. Out beyond in the deeper lake there is open water, perhaps a little slushy, though. Above, however, is gray, like my mood has been about work lately.

I work for the 3rd largest school district in the country. I work in a high school in a neighborhood widely known as a place where every week or two some teenager shoots another teenager. It is known as "Back of the Yards," for the former stockyards that occupied a huge section of this portion of the city.

The ethnic makeup of the student body is 2/3 Latino and 1/3 African American. About 98-99% of the students come from families that live below the poverty line. There are a great many free and reduced price lunches here. Many of our kids will be the first one in their family to graduate from high school, not college, high school. Many of our kids join gangs to keep from being assaulted by thugs in the neighborhood. Drugs are routine. 95% of our kids kids know someone who has been shot.

Some of our kids can't read because they suffer from learning disabilities. Some can't read because they just moved here from Mexico and Spanish is their first language. Some just aren't motivated and don't care. They have low expectations and don't think about anything beyond age 21 at best. Not really a breeding ground for scholarship. Still, many of our kids do well. Many suffer through it all and come out okay. As a teacher you have to try to minimize the craziness from the minority that tries to keep the rest from learning.

I'm not applying for sainthood. I'm just a guy who does his job and as it happens, cares about kids and the future of our country. Sometimes it seems like teacher bashing has become the national pastime. Arne Duncan is about to become the Secretary of Education for the nation. He is being rewarded for what he has done with the Chicago Public Schools.

Let's see what he has done. He has presided over the startup of such schools as Northside College Preparatory High School and Walter Payton College Preparatory High Schools which recently were included in a list of The Best 100 High Schools in the country. Pretty good. What happens, though, is the best and brightest are taken out of the neighborhood schools and shuttled off to magnet programs for students who are going to succeed and the students who do not qualify are left in the neighborhood schools. The best and the brightest in those schools are the ones who formerly were the merely average.

Then there is the program called Renaissance 2010. Research has shown that students are more successful in smaller environments where teachers and administrators know every student personally instead of in huge learning factories. The idea was to take the worst big schools, shut them down, and recreate each as several smaller schools with a renewed dedication to reaching every child. Nobody talks about the fact that Charter Schools and Contract Schools bring in private dollars and oversight into a formerly public domain and thus save taxpayers money in the process. Oh, and they aren't governed by the same rules and restraints that govern fully public schools. Teachers and administrators can be paid less money. They don't have to contribute to pension funds for the employees, on and on... The jury may be still out on these schools, but at this point it looks as if selective enrollment schools do great things for their students, but those that accept any student don't do a bit better job of educating kids than the old schools did. They're just cheaper. It's all smoke and mirrors.

The kids who come from the bad neighborhoods come to school with so many problems. It's a wonder they learn at all. The teachers in the schools in those neighborhoods are continually bashed and punished when all the best students have been sent elsewhere, yet they continue to show up and do their best with what they have. In return they are held up as "those failing schools with bad, unmotivated teachers." They don't need excoriating. They need resources. They need psychologists and social workers for the kids. They need smaller class sizes. They need security guards to stop gang violence, tagging, and drug sales in the bathrooms. They need adequate computer facilities for their students in the classroom. Instead, resources continue to dry up and these schools are threatened with being shut down.

A couple of days ago the students at my school, in a celebratory mood for the holidays, opted to have a food fight in the cafeteria. The food fight turned nasty when one student was hit up the side of the head with a tray. The food fight turned into real fight with African American and Mexican American students began to choose up sides and the fight turned into a racial incident. Huge numbers of kids who belonged in a classroom heard rumors and rushed to the scene of the incident to gawk and cheer like Roman peasants in the Colosseum cheering the lions and gladiators.

This is real education in a school in a bad neighborhood in any large city in the U.S. We who do the job go to work every day, secure in the knowledge that some of these kids will survive, go on to college, and one day come back to visit and thank us. We are secure in the knowledge that some of the kids will not go to college or at least will not finish college, but they will get a job and survive anyway. We are secure in the knowlege that a minority of these kids are lost. These are the kids who are looking forward to being shot or locked up in prison, or both. The pretty little girls who developed the attitude and hung out with the gangs will have children too early and too often and will live a life of poverty, extending the cycle for at least one more generation.

Yet the mantra coming from the schools of education in universities across the country and from Washington itself continues to be, "No child left behind," and "Every child can learn." This is from people who never spend a day in a classroom with real kids in the other America. Sorry. I just needed to vent. Merry Christmas.