3quarksdaily: Criminal Behavior American-Style

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February 28, 2011

Criminal Behavior American-Style

The first in the TEACHED short film series. To learn more, go to www.teached.org.

Posted by Kelly Amis at 12:28 AM | Permalink

Comments

For every crappy teacher, I can show you 20 good ones. Among those 20 I can show you 10 great ones.

This video is of a piece with the teacher-bashers and union-busters.

I guarantee his school had meager resources, and clearly America cares more about consumption of goods than funding schools properly.

The inner city suffers from the effects of generational poverty, and those with money and power want you to believe teachers caused it.

Posted by: TFT | Feb 28, 2011 7:59:28 PM

This video is of a piece with the teacher-bashers and union-busters.

Excuse me. Did you even bother to investigate the link. You're way off base. It appears to be part of a promotion for a feature-link documentary.

Posted by: John Ballard | Feb 28, 2011 8:31:44 PM

I investigated the link, which is how I know. It's old news to those of us in the eduwars.

TFA feels they can close the achievement gap because so many public school teachers are burned out and just treading water, but TFAers are young Ivy League educated saviors who can do what old, burned-out yet experienced teachers can't.

Except that's a bunch of nonsense, and a large part of the education reform movement is full of this nonsense.

The video, like I said, is unmistakably of a piece with the reform movement as envisioned by Rhee, Gates, Winfrey, Duncan, Obama, Guggneheim and the rest who want to blame teachers instead of poverty for society's ills.

I am disappointed to see 3QD succumb to the nonsense and post this bit of propaganda.

Posted by: TFT | Feb 28, 2011 9:32:40 PM

I agree with TFT. This situation is tragic, but doesn't start and end with drunk and abusive teachers.
There is actually a lot of sophisticated dialogue on the issue of education reform out there, but this isn't it. I expected more of 3QD.

Posted by: Cedar Riener | Feb 28, 2011 10:03:04 PM

Right on TFT! This is a craven propaganda war and is of a piece with recent ads by Comcast that feature a subliminal flash of a door legended "Teacher Lounge"; and upon entry Shaq is surrounded by a video arcade of games, walls bearing fullscreen TV's and the center of the room features an air hockey table on which Shaq and a "teacher" are playing. I have volunteered in a program that has put me in teacher lounges in urban and suburban schools. Standard fare is an obsolete microwave, a barely serviceable coffee pot and usually a frig full of bag lunches. The furnishings are the cast offs of the classrooms. Those are the realities of our opulently funded public schools.

Posted by: Erich | Feb 28, 2011 10:06:07 PM

While I am not very familiar with the issues and debates surrounding good and bad teaching in America, the strident and near-hysterical comments here do not dent the faith I have in my old friend Kelly Amis, who is not only an idealist and activist, but has done the difficult work of teaching in inner-city schools.

I am not sure what purpose this sort of disrespectful screeching serves, other than to show that those doing the screeching are incapable of reasoned and calm discussion of the issues. Instead of breathless hyperbole ("nonsense", "craven propaganda", etc.) it would have been much more useful if Kelly's interlocutors here had bothered to present some evidence to support what they are saying.

As for the professions of disappointment in 3QD, I am sure you can find other sites you like better, and I urge you to do that instead of needlessly insulting our contributors.

Posted by: Abbas Raza | Mar 1, 2011 4:08:16 AM

I heard mainly the cause of this man, who struggled in school. There are many like him, and not just in the inner cities. If I say that the routine of prison, regular meals, and a place to sleep, some enforced time to think may have helped him learn to read, will I be attacked as in favor of just incarcerating the poor, which is what we do in this country?

I don't favor this, I think he should have had those things, and every child should. And I don't blame teachers. God, being couped up with 30 kids of any kind would drive most of us nuts, and I'm betting that those who blame teachers are the farthest from being able to teach!

I'm glad to hear from teachers and others who oppose the further commoditisation of education, I just didn't get the same feeling from the video.

I've encountered bad teachers, but there are so many factors that make school difficult for children, and teachers. Like many middle class homes where there are no books, just the TV, no art, no real discussion with the family together - just the constant bombardment of commercialism, our most destructive artifact.

By the way, I hear teacher's aides (the TAA)were the firstest with the mostest in Wisconsin!

Posted by: Alice de Tocqueville | Mar 1, 2011 4:57:12 AM

My comment just disappeared. Trying again.

Many people believe the public school system is broken beyond repair, that it can't be reformed.

Here are some different perspectives on the issues. I like the choices in education found at AERO (educationrevolution.org), but thus far, they are available only to people with the money to pay for them. Single working parents, for example, may have no other choice except public schools.

If the goal is to bring inner city and poor schools up to the level of schools in more affluent neighborhoods, Cevin Soling's the War on Kids would make reformers think twice about it. Since zero tolerance policies have been introduced to the country's schools, many schools resemble prisons, drug-sniffing dogs and all.

I'm also including a video on corporal punishment in public schools. Twenty states in the United States permit hitting students with paddles - large wooden boards. New York Rep. Carolyn McCarthy introduced a bill to put a stop to it, but it has not gained any traction in Congress.

Posted by: Louise Gordon | Mar 1, 2011 11:04:00 AM

Abbas, you are a gentleman. Thank you.

I understand the current fury that is aimed at what is felt to be an "anti-teacher," somehow organized conspiracy, though, as I've said before, I wish that same level of fury erupted from thinking people when confronted with the reality that a young man like Jerone had to educate himself in prison.

Jerone spent ten years locked up, with no women or family in his life, or real education, or learning a skill (other than forced to help build an expansion to the prison), and the very real possibility of being violently attacked at any moment (and being attacked). These days it is very difficult for him to get a good job (the car wash is PT, and a relative owns it) because he is a felon. His dream, needless to say, is not to work at a car wash.

Yet HE (not I) believes that "prison made him successful" because he used his time there to educate himself. In making the film, I was letting Jerone tell his own, true story. It is a heart-breaking story, with a happier ending than most because he is alive.

Back to the teacher issue. What happens in this arena (which I have worked in for twenty years) is that somehow we as a society end up using the poverty and so-called "dysfunction" of inner-city families/communities as the ultimate excuse to not change how our schools operate, especially in the area of teacher quality. As if, since these kids might be "harder" to teach, we might as well just let anyone who signs up be their teachers. As if it won't matter if they have bad/abusive teachers, because they wouldn't succeed anyway.

But this is one area where we DO have the power to intervene and demand that every teacher on the payroll is capable and doing their best. Again, the problem I'm talking about stems from the minority of teachers who are abusive, incapable of teaching, violent, etc. I'm talking about the teachers who have even been removed from the classroom for abusing children but still cannot be fired (yet are paid full salary for years). This insane situation--created by union contract/work rules--negatively impacts both the students AND the other teachers who are there working their tails off.

This situation is why I left teaching full-time: to focus my energy into changing policy. Because while I could control my own classroom, it was incredibly frustrating to watch hundreds of students trapped in other classrooms where no teaching was happening day after day and where the principal could do nothing about it. My school had some AMAZING teachers that I hoped and tried to emulate (mostly, but not only, African-American women in their 30s to 50s), but about half of the teachers -- well, you would never let your own children stay in their classroom, let's put it that way.

When I interviewed the union representative at Jerone's school, I asked him what percentage of the teachers there were able to "manage a classroom," ie have discipline, maintain control. He said, with a straight face, "I'd say it's around 40%, I'd say it's as high as that." I then asked, and of that how many were good/great teachers? "About 20%" he said.

I asked him why the other 60% should keep their jobs and he answered, "You have to have tenure or your principal might fire you just because he/she doesn't like you."

Interestingly, when I asked Jerone how many teachers at his school were good, capable teachers, he also responded "40%."

@TFT Let's say for sake of argument that there is just one bad teacher for every 20 good ones -- that might not be so far off the mark actually. Why do you believe that that one "crappy" teacher should remain in the profession? Is it possible that person could find real success in another job, especially one in which children's lives aren't being impacted?

And finally, @Alice, being "cooped" up with 30 kids is a joy for good teachers, and it was a joy for me. What tries my patience infinitely more is trying to make more adults understand that our education system is almost perfectly designed so certain populations of students fail.

Posted by: Kelly Amis | Mar 1, 2011 1:21:15 PM

Crappy teachers should not remain in the classroom and administrators are responsible for reviewing teachers and booting them if they are lazy, drunk, violent, or whatever. To act like there is some huge number of abusive or otherwise unfit teachers makes a mockery of all the administrators out there whose job is to make sure students in their schools have what they need to learn.

Any principal can give any teacher a 90-day notice of any contractual violation and demand adherence. They can then easily document non-adherence and the teacher is gone.

This 'terrible teachers are ruining our kids' is just not true in the main. It's like any other industry with a curve. And teachers tend to weed themselves out, too. The bad teacher meme is just not very powerful when facts are considered.

It's terrible poverty creating a culture that cannot overcome it's issues without huge, intense, expensive intervention.

The disease is poverty. Symptoms include poor school performance, cavities, absent parents, violence, fear, hunger and ignorance. We owe them more.

Why not work to ameliorate the root causes of these symptoms that show up in school?

Posted by: TFT | Mar 1, 2011 2:15:23 PM

Just curious, Kelly, did you only put in 2 years as a TFAer?

Posted by: TFT | Mar 1, 2011 2:18:21 PM

I am not here, so please don't pretend that I am.

TED - Sugata

TED - Ken Robinson

Posted by: Louise Gordon | Mar 1, 2011 3:42:52 PM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-d-slekar/post_1639_b_816041.html

For Abbas, who requested some validated pushback instead just plain pushback.

You admit you aren't really up on the eduwars, yet you call some of us strident and hysterical. The issue is very important, and even life changing for many in the trenches. That produces strong feelings. You understand strong feelings, right?

Posted by: TFT | Mar 1, 2011 3:55:51 PM

"Stop elevating and glorying . . . school choice."

So you and Slekar are saying that educational choice should be available only to those who can afford Greenwich Country Day or Sidwell? Everyone else gets a standardized curriculum, K-12, regardless of their interests, intellectual strengths, learning style, need for individualized curricula?

The unschoolers, or open source learners, inspired by John Holt in the sixties, would disagree with you.

Eli Gerzon

So would graduates of Sudbury Valley:

Sudbury Valley

I guess if everyone works really, really hard, kids in poor neighborhoods can go to schools that are as lousy as everyone else's public school.

Posted by: Louise Gordon | Mar 1, 2011 4:48:09 PM

No, Louise. I am saying that blaming poverty on teachers is not very smart because teachers didn't cause it, nor can they fix it.

If we did education right in America our kids would have more interesting curricula, more freedom to learn by doing, and less testing and memorizing.

To dislike teacher bashing, and to call it what it is, is not the same as saying everything is peachy.

School choice leaves some in the dust. We need to make our public schools responsive, not the vessel where we dump those who can't survive the charters, or who don't even know there is a charter in town (which isn't much of a choice, is it, considering charters are no better than traditional public schools on average?)

Vouchers, charters, NCLB and RTTT have created a tiered educational system--those with motivation and those without it. The motivated families populate certain schools, and the rest end up in my classroom, and I get yelled at because they don't score well.

Generational poverty has created this mess. Teachers and schools won't fix it. And the eduprenuers are circling what appears to be a new market for them. One where our least advantaged kids are used as guinea pigs in billionaires' experiments.

It's short sighted, to say the least.

Posted by: TFT | Mar 1, 2011 5:46:41 PM

"If we did education right in America our kids would have more interesting curricula, more freedom to learn by doing, and less testing and memorizing."

Is it possible to do this in public schools with NCLB and other testing driving the whole thing and zero tolerance creating prison-like conditions in schools? Can children be compelled to learn or can they only memorize and regurgitate memorized stuff, facts and figures in public school that demands high test scores? Who designs the curricula in public schools? Who decides what kids need to know?

Just an aside, but here is Ravitch on Bracey:

Ravitch-Bracey

"The real issue between us is the condition and progress of American education. I have long argued that we are in need of genuine standards and a solid liberal education for all students. I do not argue that everyone will be a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist or a poet, but that all children need and deserve the best education that we know how to provide. At the point when I first became aware of Gerald Bracey, he wrote in an education journal called "Phi Delta Kappan" (October 1991) that as a society 'we must continue to produce an uneducated social class' that 'will sweep the streets, unclog sewers, scrub toilets, pick up trash, bus tables or mop floors -- no matter what the wages.'"

WTF? If that's the goal, maybe what we have now is what the society wants, minus prison time - or with it, since prison industries rely on prison labor.

Posted by: Louise Gordon | Mar 1, 2011 6:10:31 PM

You sound as dubious as me about NCLB. No, zero tolerance and rote memorization are not the way to go, which is what I am saying.

I read the HuffPo article when it was written.

Posted by: TFT | Mar 1, 2011 6:25:14 PM

I'm not dubious about it. I think it's a bad idea, since it means teaching to the test and excluding learning that won't be on a test.

"No, zero tolerance and rote memorization are not the way to go, which is what I am saying."

And I'm asking, how do you get that in public schools?

Posted by: Louise Gordon | Mar 1, 2011 7:49:54 PM

Kelly and others, thank you for this material, and related material of posts past.

My grandfather wrote a thesis on the educability of children dealing with the stresses of poverty, esp African-American children -- this in 1911 in Texas. Too few were listening when he suggested that poverty and many other disadvantages did not have to defeat education, if only teachers were skilled enough. My mother, his daughter, spent her working years teaching in the worst middle school
in our city. She was aware the kids she taught were going to have a harder time learning than children of affluence. What she was always surprised by was
how easily their teachers gave up on them. The mantra was "Whatever gets us through the day." The thinking seemed to be that theirs was such an impossible job, they might as well try to make it easy.

TFT, I hear you when you say the problem is poverty. While it is an outrage that so many children live in poverty, if that were the reason why education ill serves poor children, then there would be no children of poverty who ever succeeded in school, agaist all odds. Ever. I don't think you can posit poverty as the culprit, as long as children raised in poor homes do get educated. You might instead analyze what those admittedly atypical children did that worked. It could be they had at least one good teacher.

If poverty were the root cause of inadequate education, then we would never see bad education in affluent school districts. Yet we do see it. Not all those teachers are any good, either. I honestly do not understand why you resist the idea that many teachers are unfit for their jobs, and--most importantly--have been made unfit for them by doing them. I can think of many jobs I would find out the hard way I was unfit for. But if the risk of my unfitness was borne not by me, but by others? And I could work without getting fired? This is a system that puts the interests of the least fit teachers ahead of those of the most fit, and well ahead of those of the least-served students.

Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 1, 2011 8:43:56 PM

Whatever gets teachers through the day is often Ritalin or Concerta, drugging kids who don't want to sit still all day, as recess time is reduced and even bathroom breaks require the teacher's permission.

Also, even the best teachers are challenged when public schools demand standardized learning and texts (sometimes bowdlerized), and teaching to tests. Learning and students aren't standardized, which is one of the things that makes public school a losing battle for everyone involved.

Posted by: Louise Gordon | Mar 1, 2011 9:10:22 PM

Wish I had time to respond to all the issues raised here, but meanwhile, in response to @TFT's:

"Any principal can give any teacher a 90-day notice of any contractual violation and demand adherence. They can then easily document non-adherence and the teacher is gone."

I assume, by "gone," you mean "transferred to another school" (and another group of kids), because as a public school teacher yourself, you know that it is nearly impossible for principals/ districts to fire a teacher (lay-off new teachers yes, fire bad even abusive teachers, extremely costly, time-consuming and difficult). A couple of reminders of reality:

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-teachers3-2009may03,0,5930657.story?page=1

http://www.laweekly.com/2010-02-11/news/lausd-s-dance-of-the-lemons/

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/03/05/why-we-must-fire-bad-teachers.html#

"Rubber Rooms" were closed in name only last year: the teachers in them were moved home or to administrative offices: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/22/new-york-teachers-paid-to_n_219336.html

http://articles.cnn.com/2009-06-05/justice/alabama.teacher.sex.salary_1_employment-appeal-reading-teacher-school-board?_s=PM:CRIME

Posted by: kamis | Mar 2, 2011 12:50:59 PM

By "gone" I mean fired, never to return to that district, and reported to the credentialing agency for the state.

Posted by: TFT | Mar 2, 2011 3:33:32 PM

Here's a little footnote to a conversation that's apparently over.

Cevin Soling

Posted by: Louise Gordon | Mar 3, 2011 9:53:19 PM

I'm largely with TFT on this. As one who reads (you might say wastes time) numerous opinion sites + blogs, I see a huge effort to scapegoat public employees, especially teachers. I would be sensitive, too, if I were a teacher.

I also accept poverty as a powerful causative force for the problems discussed here, likely the largest single factor.

To minimize this with strikingly poor logic - such as creating a straw man argument stating that if the above premises were true, then there would be no children of poverty who ever succeeded in school - leaves me pondering the connection of good education to clear thinking.

Posted by: yakinsea | Mar 4, 2011 1:36:51 AM

@yakinsea. Agree with you that public employees are currently being scapegoated, and that teachers feel under attack. They are under attack, and it's not fair nor productive. I don't support this broad-brush attack and, in fact, am worried that it will undermine what progress has been made recently in this area of professionalizing teaching.

We need to transform the profession of teaching in America so that teachers who are working hard are rewarded and honored; and those that are not can be let go. This is not the same as calling for the balancing of budgets on all public employees' backs.

What do you believe causes/continues poverty? How do people rise out of poverty when they do? When you watch this film, do you see a man who could not be educated or achieve? Do you not believe him when he describes his education?

We have a system that has evolved in such a way that it is nearly impossible to fire a teacher. And when they can't be fired, they end up shuffled to schools in poor neighborhoods where parents have little power to do anything about it. This isn't my opinion, this is reality. And then we say---POVERTY is the reason these kids aren't learning.

50% of black, male fourth-graders are not reading at a basic level. Do you really believe that that many kids can't be taught to READ after 4-5 years in school even if they live in poverty!?!

During and after slavery, it was illegal in southern American states to educate blacks. A white person could go to jail for teaching a black person how to read. Why? Because this would provide blacks with the power to organize and fight. What we have today is just a softer, better marketed version of that.

Posted by: kamis | Mar 4, 2011 2:20:41 AM

Bed is calling, but a short reply is in order.

I'm with you on getting bad teachers out; my son had a terrible one that nearly ruined him on math. He's entering grad school next year and has his pick of top schools.

Poverty, though, is not an insurmountable problem for all, and I believe that we can effectively end poverty in two generations if we had the will.

Poverty causes dysfunction from the individual level through international levels. Poverty causes family disruption with a subculture of male machismo that results in an active de-emphasis of education, violence - especially towards women, substance abuse, attraction towards gangs, crime, absent fathers with the further disruption families with poor role models, and on and on...

So no, I don't believe that kids can't be taught in spite of poverty. But if one looks at any deeply impoverished subculture anywhere in the world, one sees the same set of problems - including dramatically worse educational outcomes. In totality, the social environment with all the consequences that poverty entails is a root cause. There are others, too.

On one level poor education is a symptom of a larger problem. Cure the underlying disease while treating the symptoms. We are not limited to one action at a time are we?

Posted by: yakinsea | Mar 4, 2011 3:53:56 AM

Yakinsea, sorry you don't like my logic. Let me try it another way. In areas of the world where dysentery kills an enormous number of people -- these areas tend to be poor -- would you say ignorance and backwardness were responsible for those deaths, or would you say that not boiling water is what kills people? You don't fix poverty so that you can boil water, you boil water to drastically reduce unnecessary deaths. Paul Farmer has shown that some of the most wretchedly poor people on earth, who "live in dirt" as he puts it, can manage complex medication regimes and save their own lives if they are taught how and monitored. Farmer has not cured poverty, but he is successfully treating poor patients and successfully soliciting drugs for them by demonstrating they are competent to use the drugs correctly. The good teacher, in situations that are off-the-charts desperate, could be analogized to the boiled water, or to the medication management skills that no one but Paul Farmer thought could be taught to people whose portion was ignorance and poverty. Attributing horrible outcomes to sweeping conditions is perhaps never entirely wrong, but it is dedicated and highly competent individuals who fight for the children of poverty every day that they instruct them, not people who condemn poverty in the abstract, that will make a difference.

Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 4, 2011 11:27:34 AM

My father and I have an ongoing joke about needing to have "the last word" (so we both try to yell "word!" and quickly disappear at the end of an argument). I will try to refrain from doing that on 3QD, BUT I do have one thought to share re: the last few comments.

In most of the world, illiteracy is a rural problem. The problem is access to education. Only in America is illiteracy predominantly an urban problem. And, as you know, all American children aren't just allowed to attend school, by law they must.

http://www.newsweek.com/2002/09/29/letter-from-america-illiterate-america.html

Posted by: kamis | Mar 4, 2011 1:39:11 PM

I need to take off in a few minutes to ski patrol, so I'll keep it short.

Kamis, you give an excellent example that is thought provoking; I'll check out your link later.

Elatia, you, too, give an excellent of a similar situation. I live in a solid middle class community in Oregon with three bedroom ranch houses all around. No dysentery here or anywhere in Oregon that I know of.

It strikes me that another straw man type argument is being made by loosely implying that my point connects poverty with ignorance and backwardness. I would never call impoverished cultures this.

In this parallel situation I would say fix the poverty as much as possible (the problem would likely go away as is the case in Oregon) and boil the water in the mean time.

Posted by: yakinnsea | Mar 4, 2011 3:12:18 PM

AERO's Isaac Graves in the Huffington Post on Democratic Education:

Isaac Graves on Education

Posted by: Louise Gordon | Mar 8, 2011 6:34:58 PM

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February 28, 2011

Criminal Behavior American-Style

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