This essay was written in response to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s plan to take control of the L.A. Unified School District away from the school board. The issue of mayoral control has since subsided in L.A., but the topic of improving our schools is perennial and often misdirected.
I am new to California, but I have been an educator in various capacities for many years in Minnesota, one of the nation’s highest rated states in education. However, it doesn’t really matter what state you’re in, the discussion is always the same: There is always talk of more accountability, the need for hiring more competent teachers and principals, complaints about the teachers’ unions, and the need for increased standardized testing. To be honest, I find these discussions nauseating in their intellectual laziness and their desire for quick, easy, and superficial fixes. I find it interesting that non-teachers always assume they could do better. I find it equally interesting that they mistakenly believe that a paradigm useful in measuring success in the business world, is the same paradigm that would be useful in measuring success in other fields.
It is not accountability that needs to be improved. It is not the principals or the teachers who are at fault. It is not more and better standardized testing that needs to be implemented or the ousting of the union. The problem is deeper than any these easy fixes can remedy. The problem lies at the core of society itself and is illustrated by an incident that occurred in my office while I was tutoring a student several years ago.
At the time I was working in a community college in Minnesota as a professional English writing tutor in a program based on the knowledge that first generation (parents who haven’t attended college), low income, and students with special needs are at a statistical disadvantage for staying in college. The student I was tutoring was an adult black man who was back in school, trying to earn a degree after being permanently laid off from his job. He was in his late 30’s, grew up in a low-income area in Minneapolis. He had been having trouble writing essays for his English class and had been coming for weeks to work with me. This session, he had brought a literary analysis paper he was working on, and I wasn’t quite sure of the direction his professor had wanted him to take in this assignment. It was the professor’s day off, but this particular instructor always left her home phone number for me to call if there were any questions. It was 9:00 am when we called. I put the professor on the speakerphone. In the background was her three-year old daughter. “Excuse me a minute,” she said, and my student, Ramon, and I could hear her talking to her daughter: “Honey, we’ll have the tea party in a few minutes. Go play. Mommy has to help a student for just a little bit.”
She returned to the phone and said, “I’m sorry, I just read a Beatrix Potter story to Emily and we were going to have a little tea party like the one we just read about.”
I looked at Ramon’s face, and he was dumbfounded. We finished discussing his essay with the instructor, and hung up the phone. I turned to Ramon, and, knowing full well what his response would be, I asked, “Did you ever read with your mother when you were little?”
He laughed out loud and replied. “Yeah, right, Billie, in between her two jobs and trying to feed us, “Oh sure,” he said mockingly, “I think she read us Shakespeare right before she tucked us into our comfy beds.”
You can counter this story all you want with examples of heroic mothers who work 60 hours a week and still are able read to their children and take them to museums, etc., but I can tell you, that those are the few mothers who are blessed with the stamina and fortitude to do so.
If you want to solve the problem in the schools, solve the problems of society. Solve the disparity of wealth in this nation. Every parent wants his or her child to succeed. When you’re worried about how to pay the electric bill, however, or wondering where next month’s rent is coming from, there isn’t much time to read Beatrix Potter or have an experience afterwards to reinforce the language and concepts that build a foundation for education.
It is not difficult to predict the future of the professor’s daughter. The handwriting is on the wall. Emily will go into kindergarten ahead of her peers. She will get A’s and B’s all through school. She’ll go on to college. She probably will surpass her mother in the number of degrees and most likely will have a lovely home with flowers planted in the front yard just like the ones in that story her mother read to her.
We need to forget about accountability; forget about the unions; forget about more multiple choice standardized tests that can’t even begin to assess the higher level thinking skills needed in society. We need to stop saying bilingual children aren’t learning English and start worrying about how our monolingual, English only children will ever be able to function in a global economy.
The proverbial bottom line is this: If you want better schools in this state, create a better life for the parents. Create the climate for affordable homes. Develop programs that give hope to young men and provide positive male role models for them. Lessen the disparity between wealth and poverty. Create communities that are clean and pleasant to live in and elevate people rather than discourage them. Continue the discussion of corporate greed and and excess profit-taking in the context of morality versus immorality. That is the road that is the harder, braver, and politically less popular path to travel, but that’s the only path that will lead to excellence in education.
Tags: Class, Community, Corporation, Minneapolis, News, Politics, Students