A little bit of context before I jump up onto my soapbox...
One of my friends posted on a major social networking site, in frustration, about how her son came home with D's and F's on his most recent report card... after multiple emails, phone calls, conferences, and whatnot about how he's perfectly capable of getting As and Bs but just doesn't seem to care. I know this kid, and he's not a dumb kid in any sense of the word... granted, there are days when he'd forget his head if it wasn't attached, but hey, we all have days like that, right? Having been that kind of student at points in my own life, I tried to be encouraging: middle school's not all THAT big of a deal, and even if this kind of thing continues into high school, it's not the end of the world, etcetera etcetera.
Later that day, I ran into another friend at the grocery store, and we started talking about her first grader, who is in the middle of the IEP process at the elementary school he and my younger son both attend; because he struggles with behavioral issues and decoding skills, his teachers get frustrated with him because he has trouble completing his work in the same time frame as his classmates... even though he can talk circles around them and demonstrate his understanding of the concepts just fine. The usual first impression that teachers, specialists, and other kids seem to have is that my friend's son is a "slow learner"; once the IEP process is finished and he starts receiving special education services, this may serve to reinforce this misconception.
OK, so this is probably the point at which I start soapboxing... consider yourselves warned :-)
For those who don't already know, I'm an elementary education major, with one more year left until I graduate and apply for my Initial Teaching License. Before I transferred to my current school, I was working towards an Associate's Degree in Paraeducation, with an emphasis on Special Education; in my days of running a day care center, I worked with several students designated by the school system as having "special needs", ranging from ADHD to ODD (Oppositional-Defiant Disorder) to PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). The kids I know with these alphabet-soup labels are actually the reason I wanted to become a Special Ed teacher in the first place; these kids are people, not disorders.
Which is in part the whole reason for this post.
Where along the road of American Education did we get the idea that the "A student" is the standard, the ideal? Why do we beat ourselves up whenever our kids don't get straight As, or when they're diagnosed with learning disabilities, or when their test scores come back placing them in the 50th or 60th percentiles instead of the 90th or 98th? Why, when our kids start failing things at school, do we automatically assume that there's something wrong with them, something broken that needs to be fixed?
Maybe the problem isn't them at all... Maybe it's us.
Our schools and our educational system are designed for maximum instructional efficiency... How can we educate the largest number of kids in the most effective way possible so that as many kids as possible score at or above the minimum required benchmarks? We seek to streamline our educational practices so that we can fit more information into a shrinking amount of time (as more and more districts cut school days to keep their budgets in the black), and then we worry and fret about whether or not they will get enough of the answers right on our state's standardized tests for us to keep our jobs. We align our curriculum and our daily lessons with our state's Dept. of Ed. standards, and make sure to cover the items that we just know are going to be on the upcoming OAKS (or ITBS, or CTBS, or whatever they call them in your state) tests. We focus on getting as many of our students as possible to Benchmark, and then hope that someone later on will have the freedom to teach them how to postulate, how to ponder, how to seek, and how to discover.
And then we wonder why some of our students don't seem to be "getting it", and why others don't seem to care. We wonder why our middle schoolers agree via Facebook that school is boring, and that it's a waste of time that they can't wait to leave. We wonder why the drop-out rates don't seem to be dropping, even with all the Positive Behavioral Supports, effort incentives, extra privileges, and other bribery systems we've put into place for motivation. We wonder at the fact that the diagnosis rates for specific learning disabilities are skyrocketing, and why ADHD is diagnosed 3 times more often in boys than in girls. We wonder at the increasing violence in our middle and high schools, and we wonder why our anti-bullying programs don't seem to be making a difference. And we wonder at the rising numbers of teen and young adult suicides, especially among those diagnosed with learning or behavioral disabilities.
What if the problem is that, by aiming our instruction and our behavior management plans at the 68% of students in the middle of the bell curve, we have created an environment where the other 32% of our students are allowed to fall by the wayside? In a classroom of 30 students, that means we accept that at least 3 out of every 10 of our students-- at least 9 out of our whole class-- are going to fall short of the mark in some way... and we consider that to be an acceptable casualty rate.
Who are these 9 students that we're not aiming for? Maybe they're the kids who already know the material we're teaching, or who learn it quicker than most students, and they're the ones sitting at their desks bored and looking for trouble. Maybe they're the kids who, no matter how hard they try to focus and make sense of our teaching, just don't understand what we're talking about. Maybe they're the kids who have so much other stuff going on in their lives outside of the classroom that our exciting new lesson on phonics or slope-intercept form just really isn't all that important to them.
Does any of this make them stupid, or disabled, or defective, or broken?
We and our multi-billion dollar educational system seem to keep telling them that it does.
When kids start pulling in Ds and Fs, the first thing we do is try and encourage the kids with incentive systems such as Friday Fun Day or punish them by keeping them in from recess. When that doesn't work, we call in the parents for a conference, where we ask them to tell us what is wrong with their child that keeps him from doing his work (and where we surreptitiously watch to see if the problem is perhaps with the parents instead of the child). When that still doesn't work, we (and/or the child's parents) lecture the kid about how they're throwing their future away, and how when they get into "the real world" (as if their own world is somehow imaginary or something...), they'll find out how important slope-intercept form, the Pythagorean theorem, and the life cycle of a frog really are. When all our impassioned lectures, our wheedling, our nagging, and our screaming doesn't work, we sigh and shrug and either place them into a lower skill group (where maybe they won't mind doing the work as much because it will be easier), or else refer them for Special Ed evaluation in the hopes that someone, somewhere will be able to figure out what to do with them.
The key problem with this whole scenario? It focuses on the kid (and the parents, if we're feeling particularly generous that year) as the source of the problem. It never stops to consider that maybe we-- our classrooms, our schools, our districts, and our American public school system as a whole-- are contributing factors to our students' struggles.
What if our students aren't motivated to turn in their worksheets and comprehension questions because they don't see the point in jumping through hoops to prove to us what they already know? What if they don't see why they need to learn slope-intercept form when their graphing calculator and computer can do the work for them? What if the reason that their homework isn't done and their library books keep disappearing is because they were stuck riding around in the car all afternoon while their parents are turning in job applications or babysitting their younger siblings all evening so that their parents can work and pay the bills? What if they're tuning out because we're teaching on something they already know or because we've lost their interest 7 minutes into the 15 minute lesson?
I guess my point here is that maybe, when our students aren't performing (which may be the most accurate word for the process in this whole blog post) to our expectations, we should first look to see if the problem is something we can fix before relegating the student to our academic Island of Misfit Toys. Perhaps by telling students that their academic problems are something broken in them that they need to fix to earn our approval, we have created the monsters that we identify as the biggest problems in the public school system today.
But then again, there's the other side of the story... which, considering the length of this post already, I think I'll post another day. I'm sure there's enough here to tick enough people off for one day :-)
I like to include at least one song in each of my posts... a bit of a shout-out to those of us (not me, unfortunately) who are musically inclined, I guess. The only song I can think of at the moment that even remotely applies to the topic is this one, but hey, it's Switchfoot, so it works if for no other reason than that :-)
