smart kids, bad schools

Smart Kids, Bad Schools, authored by high school English teacher-turned-author Brian Crosby, has been taking up most of my reading time as of late. I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed the book, mainly because of my recent kick in rethinking the way I think about public education. The premise of the book is that while public schools are racked with problems, they are our best option in terms of educating young people that is available. From his perspective of working in Los Angeles area public school, Mr. Crosby provides 38 ways that he thinks our current system could be improved... from my perspective, I am going to provide my own take on 5 of his best ideas for reforming the system.

5. (1) What Building Is Drab-Looking, Has Gates All Around It, with Bells Ringing All the Time? (Hint: It's Not a Prison)

In his first chapter, Mr. Crosby makes the point that schools are designed horribly these days. Even newer schools are bland-looking and set a very negative tone for what goes on within the walls of the school. He also makes the point that the way that school is structured, with bells going off to indicate that students should move on to the next class and with Student Resource Officers (SROs - little more than glorified sheriff's deputies) marshaling over the goings-on of the school as if it were a prison. When you put kids into a prison-like place, and set the tone of expectation that they will screw up and break all sorts of rules, well... don't be surprised when they behave like prisoners and act a fool!

The point is well taken... in the school in which I work there is an SRO and several administrators whose sole job it seems is to monitor the halls and to track down troubled children. At least once a week there are "hall sweeps" which are used to flush out the tardy children who are just hanging out in the halls. They are collected by these administrators and placed into the auditorium, presumably to strike fear in their harts such that they will never be late again... right. Halls sweeps are ridiculous... if kids are late to class or just trying to spend their time hanging out in the hall... fuck them up. Give them suspensions or just kick them out of school. If they don't want to be in class and want to fuck around, they can do that on someone else's time. These administrators could be doing more useful things with their time rather than being the police of the school.

4. (29) Outlaw Teacher's Unions

Towards the end of his book, Mr. Crosby makes the point that a lot of the changes he proposes to public education, as well as any change in general, are rendered immediately fanciful because of the powerful teachers unions that are interested in maintaining the status quo. He also points out that all teachers have at least a bachelors' degree and most of them have masters' degrees, so having their work treated in the same way as autoworkers (an occupation that requires little to no college education) is demeaning and regressive. The assertion is rightly made that the unions for the most part are interested in the power of the union, not the betterment of the teaching profession or what is best for students.

Although I have little experience with teachers unions, I have gained some experience with how teachers view the status quo and its not good. I have some teacher-friends and they fall into two categories for the most part: those who are upset by much of what they see going on in the school and will soon change occupation if their situations don't improve and those who are satisfied enough with the way things are going/are apathetic to the real problems that face the school. Teachers unions are against many proven methods of improving the student experience: performance-based pay, eliminating the summer vacation, and more rigorous licensure measures. I think that any institution that stands against the kind of change that schools need is vile and needs to be done away with. Its obvious that many, many schools are underperforming and that education is becoming a black hole for billions of dollars of public funds, so lets do away with that which is holding back much needed reform.

3. (19) Put the A Back in Advanced Placement Classes

Mr. Crosby bemoans the fact that these days simply too many kids are taking the AP program of classes. The AP was initially designed as a rigorous curriculum for college preparation, and now it has taken the place of honors classes as a place for students to acquire weighted grades. Parents clamor for their students to be in these classes, and for the school districts to offer more of them, while the number of truly bright and dedicated kids up to the challenge of taking these classes isn't necessarily increasing. The result is a watered-down experience for those students who are in the classes for the right reasons of intellectual curiosity and aptitude.

This is one of the points of the book that really appealed to me. Being placed in a high school where the AP curriculum is somewhat suspect, I really took to noticing more about how there were some really trifling kids taking AP classes, some mediocre kids taking AP classes, and much fewer actually competent and prepared students taking the classes. Another problem about the AP situation, especially at my school, is that there aren't enough teachers qualified to teach the classes that are in demand and scheduled. For example, AP US History is taught virtually from the other high school in the county because of a shortage of teachers certified to teach the course. The result? Shitty classroom experience (students can't ask questions of a teacher who isn't there), a TERRIBLE passage rate on the AP test (a 3 is hailed as a great success at SHS), and a cheating scandal because the person watching over the class is super disinterested in watching the kids and grading tests that she didn't write (awesome!). The AP should be a great way for kids to get a jump on college - kids who are able to compete in the class and absorb the information required to pass the class.

2. (10) What One-third of All Seventeen- and Eighteen-year-olds Are Not Doing This Year (and It Has Nothing to Do with Sex or Drugs)

This chapter covers the alarming dropout rate among high school students in this country. According to statistics that Mr. Crosby provides, about 1/3 of the aforementioned seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds each year are dropping out of high school, an alarming statistic. Further statistics provided by Crosby show that the US ranks 11th among developed nations in our high school graduation rate, and that we used to rank 1st.

On its face, this might not be of great concern to you... after all, the world needs people to staff the McDonalds, the WalMarts, and the convenience stores. But when you think about it more deeply, you realize that these people will be lacking even the most remedial skills in reading, writing, and mathematics, leading to an overall dumbing down of our culture and country. This dropout rate is telling us that public schools are failing to engage and make school worthwhile to a third of the children that come through its doors. If you were to think that maybe the standards for high school graduation are too lofty, that if maybe schools made it easier to graduate we wouldn't have such an alarming figure, let me assuage your fears: IF YOU HAVE A PULSE, YOU CAN GRADUATE HIGH SCHOOL these days. The last thing that schools are set up to do these days is allow for failure, such is the fear of administrators of having funding to their schools reduced or losing their jobs. Students are allowed to take, re-take, and take again standardized tests required by states to graduate from high school and teachers are actively discouraged from giving out F's that will prevent students from moving through high school. So trust me, these kids are not dropping out for lack of hope of attaining that elusive high school diploma. They are leaving because they find the classes disengaging, the material they are being forced to learn (or really not learn, as evidenced above) boring/inapplicable, or because they don't see the point in going to school if they want to be anything other than a college going student. Which brings me to my favorite point of the book...

1. (11) Vocational Education: Public Schools' Neglected Stepchild

Because Mr. Crosby makes his point best in his own words, I will quote from the opening paragraphs of his chapter to summarize:

"When students don't feel that school provides them with any thing, they act out in antisocial ways, from not doing work to creating a disturbance in class to vandalizing the school. A crucial area of connecting students to their schools is making sure there are enough choices to satisfy most students' interests. Currently in high school this is not the case.

Why are students brought up on the belief that they can accomplish any goal, yet when they get to high school their options are limited to "you will go to college"?

The question that needs to be asked of every high school student is "What are you interested in doing?" instead of "did you know that college graduates make X amount of money?" If a youngster can't stand spinach, the solution isn't to give him a heaping portion of it. You try to find alternative nutritious foods he will eat."

With the line of work that I am in, this chapter proved the most pertinent to me. I see the main thrust of this chapter playing out every day, amongst the guidance counselors I work with, the teachers in my school, and amongst my colleagues in college access. I can't blame students for seeing that all that high school is leading up to is more schooling, more classes that they are disinterested in, and ultimately ore wasting of their time. If a high school student has no appetite for college, currently their only options are to go through the motions at school and make a token effort, or to not. I can't blame those who choose to not go through the motions, to be honest. If you were to show up to a place every day, where you have no interest in what you are doing, where teachers treat you like crap because you don't want anything to do with what they are teaching you, where administrators are always on your case for not rushing to another useless class... would you show up? Probably not.

That’s why vocational education needs to be stressed more heavily. Instead of treating it as beneath our students, we need to be encouraging it as the best option for a lot of them. In the coming days I will write more about the ideas of chapter, as it fits into a general theory about the high school/college/vocational education paradigm. Suffice to say, though, that this point is one that more in my field need to consider more heavily. College isn't, or shouldn't be, for everyone.

The final verdict: the book is decent. Mr. Crosby makes some good points (like the ones above), but many of his chapters are weighed down by personal examples that stray from the main thrusts of the book and seem rather petty. He also shills for his American Educational Association (a professional association as an option for teachers against the powerful NEA), something that I wasn't crazy about in the context of a book that should have a more objective point of view. The writing isn't all that great and oftentimes ventures into the colloquial. Mr. Crosby is fond of providing statistics to back up his personal observations, but most all of these statistics lack proper footnotes or parenthetical references, so there is really no good way of backing up many of the points he attempts to bolster through the use of statistics. I would say its worth a read for the points mentioned above, but definitely peruse it on your next trip to Borders or take a look at it in the library, don't shell out precious dollars to buy it.