The educational world is filled with plans and programs for improving our public schools. Many good programs have been implemented and are currently thriving and generating impressive success rates. And yet, for most of the schools where these programs are being carried out, the overall statistics are still abysmal: roughly 30% of 9th graders will not graduate and, though in some cases test scores seem to be rising, they are in general far from satisfactory.
Experts agree that the best cure for a failing school is superior leadership and superior teachers. Undoubtedly this is true. There have been many well-documented success stories of cities where incompetent principals and incompetent teachers have been ousted and replaced with the best of the best -- and the school, by every measure, has turned around. But the unfortunate reality is that there are not enough exceptional principals and highly competent teachers to staff all the mediocre schools. (Years ago, a superintendent of the Bannister district of St. Louis was talking about excellent teachers in his district. Someone asked him if his goal was to provide every child with excellent teachers in every grade. He acknowledged that that would indeed be wonderful but, he said, "Right now I would be happy if I could be sure that every child had an exceptional teacher at least once during his twelve years of schooling.")
I have read a number of plans, goals, and mission statements, for individual schools, for school systems, and for the state of North Carolina. They talk about improving the quality of teaching -- a good thing, certainly. They talk about better training, particularly in-service training, for teachers, about better cooperation and coordination among teachers -- all good. One talks about more truant officers (though I think this document used a more modern term).
And that reference to the need for dragging kids into school and forcing them to stay there gave away the problem with so many of the improvement plans. Without intending to, it acknowledged that many kids don't want to be in school. And here too is the shortcoming with many proposals for improving teaching. As I read through a number of proposals, I saw little that translated into making the teaching interesting for uninterested kids.
Granted, outstanding teachers have a gift for engaging the interest of any students that come into their classrooms. To some extent this is an art that can be taught. But I suspect the sharing of teaching expertise has its limits. Truly gifted teachers can perhaps arouse and inspire any child. Average teachers can perhaps learn the skills to motivate those that are not totally unwilling. Average and mediocre teachers have little effect on the unwilling. But the unwilling can be reached!
And who are these unwilling students, and why are they resistant to learning? Basic psychology: We do the things that bring us a reward, and we try to avoid situations that bring us pain or humiliation or other negative feelings. Now look at your resistant pupils and how they look at school: School is where they are forced to work hard, where they are bored, where what they are asked to learn seems to have nothing to do with their daily lives, where they find themselves frequently humiliated or in trouble. On the other hand, there is a group of their peers (maybe even a gang) that makes them feel accepted, where they do fun things, where the rules (spoken or not) are things they can handle -- and perhaps one of those rules requires not taking school seriously, not attending regularly, not doing homework, and not achieving what the school requires. When we state the situation that way, is it any wonder why so many kids choose the latter?
And given that stark contrast, as seen by the resistant student, what are the schools and their improvement plans doing to make school more attractive? But there are things the schools can do -- to improve teaching and to encourage supplementary programs.
Let me offer a blanket criticism of most of the extracurricular supplementary programs that I have read about. First, praise where it is due: Most of these programs -- AVID and several mentoring programs among others -- succeed well with the students they enroll. Most have excellent graduation rates, and most of their graduates enter college (and presumably do well there). And now the criticism: The overall graduation rates, like other measures of success, of the schools where these programs are active remain abysmal, even when these programs have been functioning for three, five, or more years. (You can check this out for yourself: Pick AVID or any other extra-curricular supportive program you know, look at its success numbers on its website, and then look at the overall success numbers for the school(s) in which the program operates.)
Granted, most of these programs do not have any explicit intention of influencing the rest of the student body beyond their own participants. So let us encourage such programs for what they can and do accomplish, but let us recognize that without significant changes in the way they operate, they can not and will not reach the typical resistant student or change the culture of failure.
So here is our dilemma: 1) There are not enough truly exceptional principals or teachers to turn failing schools around from the inside. (When exceptional principals and exceptional teachers can be identified, they should of course be brought into failing schools where they can make a huge difference.) 2) Teacher-improvement programs can help reasonably good teachers to reach students with at least average motivation. 3) Most existing supplementary programs richly benefit their participants, but have little spill-over effect on the school as a whole. And since they tend to be selective, they generally do not reach the most difficult -- and most at-risk -- students.
As a (not the) solution, I would like to suggest, as a model and a starting point, a program I was associated with many years ago in Charlotte. In a disadvantaged school, we selected the most promising 7th graders, encouraged them to take the most challenging (college-prep) courses offered, met with parents (in home visits) to ensure that they understood the program and knew what they needed to do to support it, conducted a wide variety of enrichment activities to broaden the participants' understanding of the world and their potential place in it -- field trips of all sorts, book discusssion groups, summer school on a college campus. We can safely say that all participants achieved some measure of success, some of them beyond our (and their) wildest dreams (how about post-doctoral work in clinical psychology, followed by a career as a clinical psychologist?).
As I look back on my experience, I now see some features I was not aware of then: 1) Though all the acticities had an educational purpose, the kids (at least at first) participated because they were FUN. 2) The program had a semi-open door policy: Kids not enrolled at first came to me to ask, "How can I get in the program and get to have all that fun?" I always told them to do well in school and they might get in next year. And many did. Suddenly there were rewards for doing well in school, and the entire school became different -- not instantly and not hugely, but significantly.
A cultural-enrichment program -- provided its activities are perceived as fun and provided that any kid has the reasonable expectation that good work can get him into the program -- thus has the potential to change a school's culture, even if the administration and its teaching are only average.
