What Goes Unsaid in Education Reform - Part 1

She was there after school again, just hanging out and talking. She visited a couple of other teachers, but my room was one that she invariably came into after school. She didn't stay every day, but she stayed after school frequently, just to talk or kill time. After several weeks I finally joked with her about how much she must like school, since she stayed there for so long after the school day was over. Then I asked, "why don't you go home?" It was an ignorant question and I had been teaching long enough to know better than to ask such a question so flippantly, but I did.

"Why would I want to go home?" she answered. "My grandma is probably drunk and my grandpa is probably in the garage getting high."

 She went on to tell me about frequent fights between her grandma and grandpa and how grandma would sometimes lock grandpa out in the garage. She said she never knew her father and her mother came and went, but was mostly gone. At the time she didn't even know where her mom was, she just knew she wasn't home, and she had no idea when her mom might show up again...

I told her she could hang out after school anytime she wanted for as long as I was there. Inside I cried.

After 26 years of teaching I can see the faces of hundreds of former students who have had similar stories and worse. I have had the students of illegal immigrants, constantly on the move. I have had third and fourth generation gang members in my class. I have had kids who are living out of a car, kids who have run away and are living with friends. I have had kids with ankle bracelets (not as jewelry) and more arrests than grades in the grade book. I have had kids suspended for having every kind of drug imaginable, for having guns and knives, and for countless fights. I have had to send homework assignments to tutors in mental health facilities where my students were recovering from being suicidal. I have had to go to court to testify in contentious custody proceedings over my students. I have listened to parents degrade their sons and daughters in conferences, and listened to story after story of dysfunctional homes and parents that have no idea how to simply love their own child in a meaningful ways.

Is it at all surprising that these students struggle in school?

But if I was just a better teacher...

That is the message I hear constantly, maybe not directly (although sometimes it is), but it is always implied. Education reform is primarily about getting teachers to do a better job - having higher expectations for students, 

You don't hear about these issues in the debates about education reform. Education reform doesn't deal with the trauma that many students live with every day. While it sounds good to talk about "higher standards," those standards don't insure a child has food for the day and they don't ensure the child's emotional and physical safety. Technology, assessments, and fancy curriculum, doesn't deal with the root cause for the struggles of many students. Reformers don't talk about how to address those issues.

For many students education reform is like a doctor telling a patient that they should eat nutritiously and exercise, but refusing to treat the patient's bleeding open wound. How can we possibly expect children to "step up" to more rigorous standards while we are unwilling to treat their open wounds? The millions upon millions of dollars being spent on "education reform" and lining the pockets of politicians and "experts" are doing nothing to treat the open wounds of our students.

This last year, just before the end of the school year, our school was presented with an opportunity to partner with an organization that helps teachers learn how to best deal with students who have dealt with or are currently dealing with trauma in their lives. Our staff was able to listen to a presentation from a representative and we were asked by our administration to consider whether this was a partnership that we would like to join. It was a rare time where we were actually asked to give an opinion and decide the merits of a program, rather than simply deal with another mandate from above. It was like a breath of fresh air, not just because we were being given a choice, but because this was a program that actually encouraged us to  treat students like human beings. Our staff was overwhelmingly in favor of participating in the program and our only complaint is that we couldn't start right away.

When we returned to school in the fall, we soon learned that the one program we most looked forward to, was the one program that we could not have. In the midst of purchasing computers, buying new curriculum, creating new staff positions, remodeling at the administration building, and a variety of other expenditures, it seems there was not sufficient funds to pay for our program learning to help our students dealing with trauma in their lives. State and national mandates, the need for increased technology, and the need to conform to Common Core Standards (all in the best interest of students, of course), left us with no additional resources to treat the open wounds of our students. 

Education reform is not concerned with open wounds. Education reform has no interest in dealing with trauma. Reformers are not walking alongside teachers in the classroom or sitting next to disadvantage students in the classroom. They are too busy writing papers, plotting data points and drooling over technology. 

In all the talk about education reform, you will see virtually no mention of how we will lift students to higher standards who are just struggling just to get through another day. You will not hear the millionaire corporate supporters of reform talk about caring for those students living in brokenness. Education reform is for the middle up, not for the struggling - the struggling are ignored or left behind.