A Kennewick Teacher on Reform

This article by Kurt Clemmens was first published in the Community Conversation feature of the Tri-City Herald on Sunday, November 21, 2010.

My point of view comes as a high school English teacher who has spent most of my 27 year career in the middle of this convulsion known as public school reform. Since “A Nation at Risk” came out denouncing public education in the 80’s, our educational system has been twisting and contorting in order to satisfy all the share holders. The problem is the paradox that has been created: While fixing what is bad about public education, we have been damaging what has been good. Low reading scores are “fixed” by reducing or eliminating time spent on other traditional areas of a child’s education. Geography, history, music, art, P.E., and until recently, even science have all been on the chopping block these last few years because they are not measured by the state test.

Some schools are even beginning to reduce failure rates by eliminating the F grade. The idea is that F grades and Zeros discourage our lowest students, and then they drop out. This in turn negatively impacts the school’ statistics on both dropouts and graduation rates, two of the criteria administrators are judged by according to the conditions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). As teachers with high standards, this puts many of us in a double-bind situation. We are told on one hand that the standards have been too low in American schools, and then we are encouraged or even ordered to drop our standard. So by playing around with the statistics a bit we can meet the Average Yearly Progress (AYP) required by NCLB. I guess that’s good, but the cost is one of integrity. Good teachers know this has nothing to do with giving kids a solid education.

And finally the reform paradox takes its toll on the average and above-average students. The movement to reform has increasingly gouged into normal class time and reduced teacher preparation time so staff and administration can discuss how to make our schools better. We have poured our resources into the lowest achieving students in order to meet AYP and stay out of the doghouse. But we do this at the expense of the kids who are meeting the standard because, ironically, if they are meeting the standard, then they are essentially “educated” and not much cause for concern.

As an English teacher, my late friend and mentor, Rob Haug, devoted his life to the business of making high school kids, including my own son, deeply literate. He perfectly understood the profound difference between a functional reader and a reader who is truly educated. One is trained to be an automaton that will satisfy employers, while the other is a dynamic force with a range of possibilities going far beyond employment. In a twenty-four hour day, we have eight hours to sleep, eight to work, and eight to live. Rob pointed out that school should help prepare us for two of these categories. However, in our chaotic rush to reform public education, we have lopped off the part teaching kids to be fully-functioning members of society who understand our cultural lexicon. The emphasis on testing in the core areas has eclipsed much of the traditional American curriculum like the arts, geography, history, physical education, ethics, and even designing and building a set of shelves in woodshop. Rob recently observed that even upper-level kids were now arriving at high school significantly below where the same kids were in the 1980’s when all this madness began.

The irony and paradox were crystal clear to the best teacher I have ever known: Our misguided efforts to improve schools are ruining them.