What I Learned by Writing a Book about Teaching

Six years ago, I sat down to write a book about teaching. I already knew a great deal about teaching.

I spent most of my adult life in a classroom.

I admit here, as well as in my book, that I knew nothing about heart surgery and almost nothing about plumbing. I served with the Marines during the Vietnam War. I’m no hero though. I was a clerk in a Camp Pendleton, California supply unit. I don’t know diddly about combat. So I don’t pretend I do.

I only know teaching.

Writing a book about the art of educating young people proved interesting and I learned a great deal in the process. For starters, I learned that people who know nothing about teaching seem compelled to write books about teaching.

Most of these books add nothing to a reader’s understanding and the worst (and there are many) may do actual harm.

It would be no difficult task to provide a long list of examples, but let me limit myself to but one. If you’ve never heard of Wendy Kopp, she’s the young college graduate who founded Teach for America back in 1989. Kopp quickly became the darling of school reform circles, quoted widely in magazines and newspapers, showing up with alarming frequency on cable news TV. Kopp was always happy to offer insights about teaching. Most of those insights centered on the idea that we needed to get more smart people—people like Kopp, who attended an Ivy League institution—into teaching. To paraphrase her message, the teachers we had were just dumb.

Kopp has three books to her credit, including Teaching as Leadership, which I find amazing. Not the book. No. I mean the fact Kopp has written three books about teaching without teaching.

(Call me Dr. Viall! I hereby claim to be a renowned heart surgeon!)

I don’t know if my particular book will sell. I do know I know more about teaching than Ms. Kopp and probably the top fifty “school reformers” combined. (Millions of frontline educators could say the same.) And I’m proud of the message I’m trying to relay. Two Legs Suffice: Lessons Learned by Teaching is intended as a defense of all good teachers, one classroom combat veteran’s attempt to explain what good teachers can do—which is much—and what they cannot do without help.

I already knew, the day I began writing, that there was potential in every child. I already knew that my job as an educator had been to tap that potential in every way possible. What I learned while writing was that reformers like Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee held frontline educators to an impossible standard. “Good” was not good enough. Even “very good” was akin to failure.

Oh no. They were prone to making bold statements like: “Every child deserves an excellent teacher.”

(More on that in a moment.)

Even a gifted writer like Amanda Ripley could offer up simplistic lines like the following, in a Time magazine article about education in 2010: “We now know that it is possible to teach every kid, even poor kids with wretched lives, to read, write and do math and science at respectable levels.”

I knew, of course—because I actually taught—that it was possible to teach every child. I had always felt that in my bones. I had lived by that philosophy in my own classroom for thirty-three years. But I knew what millions of dedicated teachers know, what Ripley did not, because Ripley never taught. “Yes, you are right,” we might have told Ms. Ripley, “but we have been in combat, so to speak, and you have not. It is possible to teach every child. It certainly isn’t easy and trying with all your heart and soul can wear you out.”

I remember a young man in my class back in 1981. He was absent 140 days in seventh grade alone. In the end, we had little choice but to fail him, because citing parents to court on four separate occasions didn’t help.

The next year he missed another 108 days.

Was it possible to teach him? In theory, it was. In reality, however, it was a daunting, depressing challenge. It’s easy to say, as a magazine writer, that it is possible to teach every child. It can be hard if you’re a teacher in this situation—unless, maybe, you possess some telepathic power.

What did I learn while writing to add to what I already knew from experience? I learned that these kinds of attendance problems were a national problem. I learned that researchers at Johns Hopkins University were reporting 10-15% of all U. S. students piled up a month or more of unexcused absences annually.

I kept hearing school reformers insist that every child deserved an excellent child. I kept wondering. Why isn’t anyone saying, “Every child deserve an excellent pediatrician?” Or: “Every child deserves excellent parents.”

At the same time, I learned our representatives in Congress had no idea what they were doing when it came to writing education policy.  These were the boneheads who gave us No Child Left Behind in 2002, who promised every child would be proficient in reading and math by 2014, who could not fix that flawed law even after it had clearly and catastrophically failed. And I learned that our lawmakers have spent eight years trying to recraft NCLB and still can’t agree on details.

What else did I learn?

I learned that pundits agree. Teachers are the problem in U. S. education. Kopp and many others think we’re stupid. Some say we’re too protected by unions. Some enjoy insulting teachers for the fun of it. Brent Staples, for example, put a finger on the “problem” in our schools when he claimed in a 2010 editorial that, “Public schools generally do a horrendous job of screening and evaluating teachers, which means that they typically end up hiring and granting tenure to any warm body that comes along.”

(I had to put down the paper for a moment and check my temperature to see if I could still be a teacher. Okay: 98.6°. I still could.)

I knew the day I retired in 2008, that I had always loved teaching. I knew, because students told me, that I was good in the classroom. I knew, by observing peers, and talking to students and parents, that most of them were good too. Excellent? Yes, some were excellent too.

Generally, I think excellence is rare in any field.

I do know I never once looked down a hallway at school and thought to myself, “Teachers. Yeah. We’re the problem.”

Here’s what I knew before I wrote single word for my book. I knew the boy who spent months living in a rusted out station wagon was going to struggle in school no matter what members of the staff at my wife’s school might do.

I learned by writing that 2.5 million American children were homeless for at least part of every year.

I learned that reformers insist “poverty” is an excuse teachers trot out so they can evade responsibility for failing to educate every child. That’s what Joel I. Klein, chancellor of New York City Schools, said in 2009. And, again, it almost goes without saying Klein never taught at all.

Klein’s big idea was to grade schools. I thought we might need to talk about “grading parents” or “grading society,” too.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a former Marine. I believe in the power of motivation. I knew that my motivation as a teacher meant much. I also knew I did not teach in a vacuum. I knew education was a stool with three legs. I knew educators were one. Students were a second. Parents were a third.

Unlike all the arrogant school reformers, who offer up bold plans, but never bother or even dare to lend a hand, I knew we couldn’t improve education if all we planned to do was “hold teachers accountable.”

I knew that could never work.

I knew, because I met thousands of parents in the Ohio community where I worked, that most moms and dads were good, just as most educators were good. I knew some parents were excellent, too. I also knew parents were like a shadow, their influence and the values they inculcated in their offspring following them to school.

I knew, because I had tried teaching, that the boy whose schizophrenic mother came to my wife’s school and tried to kill the principal with a large butcher knife must face terrible problems in the home.

I knew the girl in my class who had been sexually abused by her father and older brother had problems that I might not be able to solve.

I would often wonder what we were going to do—as a society—to help children who suffered terribly, not in school, but at home. What were we going to do for the infant whose father beat her and stuck her in a freezer to stop her from crying? For the toddler whose mother filmed her smoking marijuana?

(Go to YouTube and search: “Pot Smoking Toddler” if you want to watch. I find it too depressing to even provide a link.)

You couple multiply these cases out into the millions. Why, then, weren’t all the bold school reformers focusing on parents responsible for three million cases of child abuse and neglect every year?

Yes, every child did deserve excellent teachers. But excellent parents would trump that every time. What about that third leg of the stool?

I already knew (because I had studied my colleagues for years), that principals and school counselors and psychologists were often overwhelmed by complex competing demands. I knew the situation had worsened as the focus on standardized testing grew.

I knew lawmakers at the state and national levels had failed to provide adequate funds, at least for the poorest schools.

I didn’t know—but learned while writing—that the United States had one of the highest poverty rates for children of all the advanced countries on the face of this green and blue earth.

I knew that as a society we did not do enough to help children growing up under trying conditions. I learned while writing that life was hard for all kinds of kids—that 2.7 million children had at least one parent behind bars.

I learned that 23 million Americans over the age of 12, nearly one in ten, were addicted to alcohol or drugs. (This included 1 in every 15 high school seniors who admitted smoking marijuana daily.)

I learned that a plague of prescription drug misuse was sweeping the nation, that in Scioto County, Ohio, 10% of babies were born addicted to drugs. I knew teachers weren’t the only leg to the stool.

I listened to the school reformers talk and talk and talk about how we needed more and more standardized tests. We had to “hold teachers accountable.” I tried to understand how standardized testing was going to fix all this societal mess.

I did learn we spent at least $1.7 billion on standardized testing every year. I wished we could have taken that money and used it to beef up children’s protective services in every city and state in the land.

I knew from seeing the damage in my classroom, and the damage done to my two oldest kids, that even good parents were having increasing trouble—with the American family (including my own) battered by divorce and other negative forces. In 1950, for example, 6% of children in this country grew up in single-parent homes. By 2012 that figure had soared to 35%.

I learned that poverty does matter, not just in schools, but in hospitals, too. When it comes to life expectancy, the richest 10% of American men could expect to live eleven years longer than the poorest 10%.

I learned that in Chicago, Arne Duncan, who went on to be U. S. Secretary of Education, had been credited with “fixing the schools.” Sadly, after he left for Washington those schools didn’t stay fixed at all. Hundreds of school-age kids were shot and wounded every year in the Windy City. Gangs were the main cause.

In 2013, according to NBC News, Chicago had 100,000 gang members. Most were between the ages of 16 and 19.

I thought that seemed like a problem educators alone might not be able to solve, certainly not by “grading schools.”

I learned that critics seemed to have sweet kindergartners in mind when they talked about “saving every child.” I knew none of them had ever had to face down an agitated teen with a gun in a hallway at school. I knew they were not considering children with severe emotional problems. I knew, because I taught, what that could be like. In 1984 I had a young man bring a gun to school to shoot me.

I was lucky in that case; but I suppose we all learned—by watching the bloody news—that violence in America’s schools was rising steadily. I learned that since January 1, 2010, there have been more than a hundred shootings in and around our nation’s schools, with more than 250 teachers, students and bystanders killed or wounded.

I could never figure out how creating more charter schools was a priority, when the halls of the schools we already had were running crimson with blood.

I did learn while writing that school reformers, including the corporate types out to make a few million quick bucks, knew nothing about the problems frontline educators faced. And frankly, I learned that they didn’t really care. (Well, about anything besides money, I mean.) I learned that they blamed tens of thousands of real educators for creating “dropout factories.” These were schools, reformers howled, where teachers were rap-tap-tapping along some diabolical assembly line. We were purposely creating dropouts. The corporate types would stop us. They would create a business model for education that truly worked! (Translation: worked for them.) Secretary Duncan, perhaps the most clueless individual ever to hold his cabinet position, warned that there were 5,000 “dropout factories” spread across the United States.

I kept writing. I kept learning. I learned that pregnant teens were far more likely to drop out of school.

I learned in Ohio, that the law made it illegal for kids to drop out before age 18, without parental permission. Yet, 23,000 Ohio teens walked away from schools every year and never returned.

I learned a great deal more while writing about teaching. But I already knew a lot. I knew that the growing fetish for standardized tests had been crippling education and stifling learning in multiple ways.

I learned by writing, and by talking with hundreds of educators in the seven years since I retired, that the negative effects related to testing were growing worse with every passing season, like a metastasizing brain tumor.

I already knew, because I served with the United States Marines, because I pedaled a bicycle across the United States twice (with my role model Bruce Jennings, a young man who did it in 1976 with only one leg), because I worked with 5,000 teens, that there was one clear path if we wanted to improve what happened in schools.

I already knew everyone involved in education or interested in helping would have to be willing to pedal to reach their goals. I knew that two legs (and sometimes one, and even none) would always suffice.

So I wrote my book.

Now available Amazon.com.

A Very Late Review of The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got that Way

If I was still teaching I’d have to give myself an F for late work. (Very late work!) In the fall of 2013 the publisher of The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got that Way sent me a copy and asked for comment.

Eighteen months later, I’ll start with the good news. The author, Amanda Ripley, is an excellent writer. This allows her to take what might have been a slog through data and turn it into a lively, interesting story. She also demonstrates a sincere interest in unlocking the secrets of educational success.

For that reason, in 2010-2011, Ms. Ripley set out on a trip around the world to study schools in foreign lands. She spoke with leaders in education in several countries, compared notes with American educators, and followed the stories of three American teens who headed off to high school in foreign lands. Kim grew up in Oklahoma and went to Finland. Eric grew up in Minnesota and headed for South Korea. Tom left Pennsylvania to study in Poland. The author interviewed all three at length and surveyed two hundred foreign exchange students about their experiences—both those coming to this country, and ours, going the opposite way.

Although I found much of interest in the pages of The Smartest Kids and Ripley’s tale made me think, I had doubts from the start when she claimed that in a small number of countries “something incredible was happening. Virtually all kids were learning critical thinking skills in math, science, and reading. They weren’t just memorizing facts; they were learning to solve problems and adapt. That is to say, they were training to survive in the modern economy.”

What about this country? Were we preparing kids to survive in a modern economy? 

According to the CEO of BAMA, an Oklahoma company that makes apple pies for McDonalds, we were not. The CEO told Ripley it was getting harder and harder to find “people who could read, solve problems, and communicate what happened on their shift, and there weren’t enough of them coming out of Oklahoma high schools and community colleges.”

According to the CEO the only possible solution was to open a factory in Guangzhou, China. So, I am assuming as I read, that China must be chock full of high school graduates ready to solve problems and communicate what happens on their shifts.

Also: these high school graduates will accept one tenth of what American workers expect to be paid.

This thread in Ms.  Ripley’s story may be accepted wisdom in school reform circles—and certainly, the corporate types love to talk about it and deflect attention from the fact they like shipping jobs overseas to low wage countries. But was it true? Were America’s schools really failing to prepare students to survive in a global economy? I decided to pull on this loose end and see if Ripley’s argument unraveled. First, I checked the list from 2009 that Ripley used in writing her book. Which countries were graduating virtually everybody with the skills they needed in a rapidly changing world?

Okay. Good job, Portugal and Slovenia. They graduated 96%. Finland and Japan were next at 95%. 

And then we had the laggard United States, with a graduation rate of 76% (since raised).

Pulling on one thread loosened another. So I gave a tug. If BAMA was having trouble finding skilled apple pie makers and American companies were desperate to find enough educated workers—why weren’t they opening up factories in Portugal or Finland? Only 65% of Chinese students graduate from high school. And yet when I pick up a pack of light bulbs at Lowes, a package of underwear at Target or a copy of Pat the Bunny at Barnes and Noble, I see “Made in China” every time.

I don’t see “Made in Finland.”

Despite my skepticism, there’s much in The Smartest Kids for every educator, parent, student and school reformer to ponder. When it comes to school reformers (who never bother to teach) what Ripley says might temper their arrogance. Studying educational systems around the world, she discovers, “Policies mostly worked in the margins.” So changing policy would be a secondary or tertiary affair. She doesn’t believe in all the high stakes testing we’ve been doing either. She refers to such exercises as “bubble tests our kids had to zombie walk through each spring.”

If there was one area where I most agreed with Ms. Ripley it was in making the case that American education wasn’t as rigorous as it should be. Ripley cites a study which found that four of every ten U. S. fourth graders said math homework was too easy. She notes that seven out of ten eighth graders in this country attended schools that do “not offer algebra courses with the kind of content that was standard in most other countries.” 

A Finnish exchange student told the author she was surprised to get a study guide in U. S. history, with answers provided. She scored an A on the test but several peers had C’s. American kids, she said, didn’t study much because they didn’t need to. “Not much is demanded of U. S. students.”

Unfortunately, Ms. Ripley rarely asked teachers, either here or during her travels, to comment. So there are missing elements in her tapestry. She did interview William Taylor, who first taught in a Washington, D. C. school under a principle who did believe in rigor. Taylor explained how he himself set high standards for students and graded accordingly. When he switched schools and began to ask around, however, he was shocked (as Ripley is in her telling) to find “some of his colleagues were basing 60 percent of students’ grades on effort alone.”

Ripley agrees that there are individual teachers and schools in this country that believe in rigor. But she misses a number of salient points in trying to explain why they might be rare. First, Taylor is earning bonus pay for raising standardized test scores on the very sort of tests Ripley feels don’t matter, under a system designed my former D. C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee. (Rhee’s plan would soon fall apart when reports of widespread cheating surfaced in USAToday.) And Taylor tells her he started getting complaints from parents because he graded too hard and expected too much.

In fact, one reason I liked Ripley’s book was that her default position isn’t to blame teachers for everything. Teachers don’t get a pass, as we shall see; but she spreads the blame around.

Students in South Korea, she discovered, scored near the top in every international testing competition. How was it possible, she wondered? “Korean teenagers spent more time studying than our kids spent awake,” Ripley realized. And she rightly asked about the role played by parents. “No one talked about them. Didn’t parents matter even more than teachers?”

“Yes, often they do,” I found myself muttering. (I taught for thirty-three years, myself.)

Unfortunately, I had trouble accepting Ripley’s basic premise—that you could legitimately compare the education system of one country with that of another. I was dubious from the start when results from the Program for International Assessment (PISA) tests formed the warp of her tapestry. First, the PISA tests did not exist until fifteen years ago. The first round of tests was given in 2000, when “a third of a million teenagers in forty-three countries sat down for two hours and took a test unlike any they had ever seen.” 

Two hours later we supposedly knew which countries were doing the best job of educating roughly a billion kids annually.

Call me dense, but I couldn’t see where two hours of anything proved much about entire systems of K-12 education. But simple lists held allure for school reformers, politicians and bureaucrats, who latched onto PISA results and flipped. The Germans, for example, were shocked to find their students ranked #21 in math and science and #22 in reading. One German periodical carried the pointed headline: “Are German Students Stupid?”

Closer to home, Rod Paige, U. S. Secretary of Education when the first results were released in 2001(our kids finished #20, #15 and #16), went bug-eyed. “Average is not good enough for American kids,” he fumed to reporters. No Child Left Behind, then in the works, would fix everything.

Paige promised!

So Ripley set out to determine what factors explained the differences in PISA scores (and I kept wondering why scores on this particular test mattered). Why did kids in Finland, South Korea, and Poland score higher than our kids? Studying the evidence, she insisted increased spending did not equate to higher scores. “Beyond a certain baseline level,” she said, “money does not translate into quality in education anywhere.”

“Everything—everything—depended on what teachers, parents, and students did with those investments,” she added.

Her first stop was South Korea. There classrooms were “utilitarian and spare.” The Koreans didn’t go in for a lot of “high tech toys.” On the other hand, she was surprised to see that in a typical classroom a third of the students were asleep. “The teacher,” she noted, “lectured on, unfazed.”

What else did Eric from Minnesota and the author discover? School uniforms were required. Makeup was banned. Students were exhausted. They cleaned the school after classes ended. Kids who had demerits were assigned bathroom duty. At 4:30 they settled in to prep for the one college entrance exam that almost entirely determined their futures. They even ate dinner at school. At nine p.m. they left the building. Most weren’t done and headed for hagwons, or tutoring mills, for which parents paid extra. 

The school year was two months longer than in Minnesota.

Sadly, Ms. Ripley mentioned in passing that both President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan once said they envied the South Koreans their system. This gives the reader some idea how little our leaders understand about what goes on in our schools. But on close examination the author comes away convinced the Korean system could never work in this country. Even the Korean minister of education isn’t thrilled, telling her his nation had “created a monster.”

Nevertheless, Ripley saw what countries like Korea did to raise PISA scores and came away excited. “First countries could change. That was hopeful,” she explained. Second, “rigor mattered.” The Koreans “assumed that performance was mostly a product of hard work—not God-given talent. This attitude meant that all kids tried harder, and it was more valuable to a country than gold or oil.”

I’m a former Marine. So I believe in rigor. I still wasn’t convinced that the Korean system produced cloth of a better quality. The suicide rate for teens was more than double the rate in this country. And you had to wonder why 68,000 Korean high school graduates headed to the United States for college annually if our system was such a mess. As for all those high PISA scores, they seemed to have little benefit in the long term. The Korean economy has remained stagnant for twenty years.

At first glance, Ms. Ripley appeared to weave a stronger case when she turned to comparing high school graduation rates. A study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the very same organization which created the PISA tests, placed the United States #21 out of twenty-eight developed nations in terms of high school graduation.

So the author headed for Poland—where the rate was 85%—where rigor was a big deal. In Poland, Tom, the boy from Pennsylvania, found calculators were not allowed in class. At the end of a test the teacher announced scores. Five was the highest. No one ever got a “5.” In one class the teacher not only announced grades, 22 of 26 students failed.

Ms. Ripley set out to dig down and find the roots of Poland’s phenomenal “success,” in terms of graduation rates and increased PISA scores. From 2000 to 2006, she noted, reading scores for Polish kids taking PISA soared 29 points. 

(By 2012 they were up ten more points.)

Here in America, we were busy preparing students for those infernal “bubble tests.” We listened to people like Secretary Paige and Secretary Duncan, who assured everyone if we followed their lead, results would be great. PISA scores in reading for America’s kids dropped six points instead.

 “Poland’s poorest kids outscored the poorest kids in the United States,” Ripley continued. “That was a remarkable feat, given that they were worse off, socioeconomically, than the poorest American kids.” “The results,” she said, “suggested a radical possibility for the rest of the world: perhaps the poor kids could learn more than they were learning. Perhaps all was not lost.”

I taught for decades, myself, and don’t doubt for a moment that poor kids can learn. But I decided to check another OECD report on childhood poverty. Ripley’s statement was true, to a point. Poland did have a higher percentage of children living in poverty (21.5% to 20.6% in the U. S.). Still, we ranked #27 out of 30 OECD countries reporting and two of three countries with more children in poverty, Turkey and Mexico, graduated only 45% of their students.

So, poverty did seem to matter.

I wasn’t just picking and choosing statistics. I was using OECD charts and data, the same organization that provides PISA data every three years. Looking closely at OECD numbers, you started seeing more loose threads in the woof of Ms. Ripley’s  telling. In terms of poverty, we finished #25 out of 30 developed nations for number of low birth-weight children. We finished #27 out of 29 nations reporting on infant mortality. We had a far higher rate of births to adolescent mothers, coming in #29 out of 30 developed countries.

In fact, it appeared that you might be able to reduce the U. S. dropout rate by ensuring every teen had access to birth control and knew how to use it. Half of teen girls who get pregnant end up dropping out. And if we were going to compare PISA scores, we might need to compare fertility rates per 1,000 females, ages 15-19. The United States had 31 live births per 1,000 in 2012. Poland had 12. Finland had 9. South Korea had 2. Multiply those numbers by four, as in four years of high school, and you see were part of the problem may lie.

Ripley suggests—and here I believe her argument breaks down entirely—that one problem is American educators’ attitudes in regard to poverty. “What did it mean, then,” she asks at one point, “that respected U. S. education leaders and professors in teacher colleges were indoctrinating young teachers with the mindset that poverty trumped everything?”

First, I didn’t believe young teachers were being “indoctrinated” to believe that poverty trumped everything. 

Secondly, I knew from experience what it was like to try to reach a student who lived in squalor at home, with a dead dog in the family bathtub. Every frontline educator who ever walked through the door of a classroom knows teaching kids from impoverished backgrounds is much harder. 

Ripley misses the point badly, probably because she never tried to teach.

Sometimes she even missed points she herself had made. All around the world, she admits, it has been shown parents who read to their young children produce kids who do much better at reading at age fifteen. “Read to your kids. Could it be that simple?” she asks at one point. “Yes, it could.”

Yes. It could. But one problem (of many) for poor kids is that their families don’t always have extra money for books. So money might not matter, beyond a “certain baseline” in schools.

Money surely matters at home.

I picked at a few more loose ends and discovered that the United States wasn’t just bad when infant mortality rates were tabulated. Young people of all ages were more likely to die early than in all but two nations of 26 reporting. The pattern seemed clear and a UNICEF study of 29 developed nations in 2013 (below) confirmed it. In America we did a lousy job of protecting children.

Ripley’s final stop was in Finland—a nation whose education system sounded too good to be true—a Lake Woebegone, academically.

The question Ripley hoped to answer was simple. How did Finland finish near the top in PISA scores every three years? What did Finland do that we might emulate?

Before we look at how Ripley answers the question, however, allow me to note: Finland has a population equal to Minnesota. So comparing Finland to our entire country is like comparing apples and clam chowder.

In any case, when Kim left Oklahoma to study in Finland she noticed all kinds of differences. There were no “high-tech, interactive white boards in her classroom. There was no police officer in the hallway.”

I read that line and found myself thinking that the missing police officer tells us something very important about differences in “educational systems.” It speaks volumes about how unhealthy life in the United States has become for young people, particularly when we remember that an estimated 17,000 school resource officers currently patrol the hallways of America’s schools.

Ripley doesn’t see it. The key, she insists—and here the anvil finally gets dropped on American educators’ heads—is the way Finland selects and trains teachers. There are only eight prestigious training universities in the entire country and only 20% of applicants are accepted. Finnish teachers are smart.

Ours?

Well, they’re dumb. “At most U. S. colleges,” Ripley argues, “education was known as one of the easiest majors. Education departments usually welcomed almost anyone who claimed to love children. Once they got there, they were rewarded with high grades and relatively easy work.” “In other words, to educate our children, we invited anyone—no matter how poorly educated they were—to give it a try.”

(I feel, hear, lik i shud mispel som werds ar something.)

At this point, Ripley began to question the whole idea of using standardized tests and holding teachers accountable. She no longer believed it would work.

“I started to worry that the reforms sweeping across the United States had the equation backwards.” “What if the main problem was not motivation? Was it possible to hammer 3.6 million American teachers into becoming master educators if their SAT scores were below average?”

Nope. We were too dumb.

America needed smarter teachers—that’s why kids in Finland did well. They had smarter teachers. But I remained unconvinced. Korean students outscored Finnish kids on every PISA test given, even though they often slept through class. Ripley didn’t notice the dichotomy. Instead, she called on U. S. colleges to limit admittance to teacher training programs to those whose SAT scores placed them in the top third of their class. 

Kind of like Teach for America on steroids.

At this point, I started muttering darkly. Perhaps teachers in Finland simply had an easier time in class every day. Only 3% of students in Finland had immigrant parents. The figure here was 20%, and language barriers often created an extra layer of problems. Finland was a socialist country. So every child received quality health care. There were no Indian reservations, as in this country, where test scores are consistently low and unemployment rates and alcoholism consistently high. Finland had almost no racial minorities—no lingering effects related to a history of virulent prejudice.

Even Ms. Ripley has to admit that African American students in the United States score 84 points lower than white students on the reading section of the PISA test. Their graduation rates and SAT scores were lower—and she recognizes that “up to half the gap could be explained by economics.”

At that point, I wondered. Were teachers “indoctrinated” to believe poverty mattered—or were they realistic?

I suppose at this point I should sum up as best I can. So let me say, despite my doubts, I’m glad I read The Smartest Kids. It made me think about the keys to success in education, which I believe are the same in every country.

I think rigor matters. I think parents, students, educators and our nation’s leaders need to face that fact.

Are there ideas we might copy from other countries? Sure: we could copy Finland and pay college tuition for everyone. We could require student teachers to spend a year in the classroom as they do in Finland. We could fund schools equally the way Finland does, so every school gets the same money per pupil. We could eliminate almost all private schools, scrap vouchers, close down charter schools and eliminate interscholastic sports (Finland, like Poland, has none).

Is there reason to hope that we can improve American education? There always is and always will be. And I believe Ripley sees the clearest path to that goal. “The most important difference I’d seen so far,” she says of her travels, “was the drive of students and their families. It was viral, and it mattered more than I’d expected.”

With that, I believe, almost all educators would agree.

The dilemma for even the most dedicated teachers, and there are many more of these teachers than Ripley will ever know, is how to get students and parents to buy in to this idea.

*******

If you liked this post, you might like my book about teaching, Two Legs Suffice, now available on Amazon.

Or contact me at vilejjv@yahoo.com and I can probably send you a copy direct for a little bit cheaper. My book is meant to be a defense of all good teachers and a clear explanation of what good teachers can do, and what they cannot do.

Two Legs Suffice is also about what students, parents and others involved in education must do if we want to truly enhance learning.

Ripley is surely a better writer—but unlike her, I actually know what teaching is like. My book is based on working with 5,000 kids, not following a handful of foreign exchange students for a year.

Arne Duncan Discovers the Obvious!

Every so often, one of America’s “education leaders” gets a whiff of reality and comes briefly to his or her senses. 

This week, U S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan suddenly discovered that not all parents prefer higher standards. Duncan passed on this revelation to Thomas Friedman, editorialist for The New York Times.

Then Duncan and Friedman tipped their caps to Amanda Ripley, author of The Smartest Kids in the World:  And How They Got That Way.

The author of this blog voted for President Obama twice and he’s still glad he did.

Unfortunately, Arne Duncan is a terrible Secretary of Education.

According to Friedman, here’s what transpired. Duncan gave a “feel bad” speech to a group of parents a few days ago. Friedman thinks President Obama should claim the speech for his own and make it his State of the Union Address. What was the problem Duncan chose to discuss before parents? Get ready teachers. You will be fainting in droves!

Harken to the Gospel of Arne:

“Are we falling behind as a country in education,” he wondered, “not just because we fail to recruit the smartest college students to become teachers or reform-resistant teachers’ unions, but because of our culture today:  too many parents and too many kids just don’t take education seriously enough and don’t want to put in the work needed today to really excel?”

Okay. Ignore the gratuitous slam directed at every teacher in the nation. (Duncan thinks we’re morons.)

Oh, yes. Remember that unions have blocked reform. That’s why reforms have failed. It’s not because the reforms have been misguided.  

Well, what does Duncan know now that he failed to grasp five years ago when he became Secretary of Education? He and Friedman now know what Ripley discovered while researching her book. And Ripley now knows what all of us teachers/morons know by…um…well…by teaching. One of these days, I need to complete a review of The Smartest Kids. The publisher sent me a copy and I admit liking it.

But could we please stop “discovering” the obvious?

Friedman  fleshes out his position with a pair of letters from actual teachers. (That alone is failry rare: an education expert quoting a real educator.) One first appeared in the Washington Post. The writer was a seventh-grade language arts teacher in Frederick, Maryland. She explained that she no longer wanted to teach. One problem was a “superficial curriculum that encouraged mindless conformity.” And who demanded that teachers follow such curriculums? That plan was foisted upon us by politicians, bureaucrats and non-teaching experts.

(People like Duncan.)

What most bothered this successful Maryland teacher was the reaction she met when she handed out low grades:

It was about this time that I was called down to the principal’s office…She handed me a list of 10 students, all of whom had D’s or F’s. At the time, I only had about 120 students, so I was relatively on par with a standard bell curve. As she brought up each one, I walked her through my grade sheets that showed not low scores but a failure to turn in work—a lack of responsibility. I showed her my tutoring logs, my letters to parents, only to be interrogated further.

Eventually, the meeting came down to two quotes that I will forever remember as the defining slogans for public education: “They are not allowed to fail.” “If they have D’s or F’s, there is something that you are not doing for them.” What am I not doing for them? I suppose I was not giving them the answers. I was not physically picking up their hands to write for them. I was not following them home each night to make sure they did their work on time. I was not excusing their lack of discipline…Teachers are held to impossible standards, and students are accountable for hardly any part of their own education and are incapable of failing.”

Friedman also cited a letter from an Oregon educator. This time the writer noted that he had gone back and looked at tests he gave in 1992. They were tough and today few of his students could pass them. He notes—and Friedman seems surprised—that today you might get only 8 or 10 homework assignments turned in by a class of 35.

Let me scratch my head for a moment. I know teachers are supposed to be dumb. (Only Teach for America can save us!) But I can’t recall ever being called on the carpet by any parent or administrator because my class was too easy.

By contrast, I once had 36 students in my seventh grade American history classes fail a map test. I told all of them they’d have to stay after school the next afternoon and study for an hour. If they couldn’t make it I gave out my home phone number and told them parents should call. All showed up as required and reviewed for the test.

At the end of that hour, when all my kids headed home, my principal called me down to the office to thank me…Ha, ha, no!

He grilled me. Had I given a day’s notice so everyone would have rides home? “Yes,” I said. I mentioned that I had also provided my home number. “Do you think students are benefitting from staying so late?” he continued unfazed. “Won’t they be too tired after a long day?” It turned out a mother had complained because her daughter hadn’t said where she was going to be after school. So, mom ended up sitting in the parking lot waiting for the girl to appear. And this was back in 1978.

What Friedman, by way of Duncan, by way of Ripley, discovered is not new. My principal in the late 70s was fond of intoning, “If a student fails, a teacher fails.”

I always wanted to respond:  “If a teacher fails, does the principal fail?” But I didn’t think he’d appreciate my sterling wit.

I stood my ground that afternoon—and the next day stayed again—to re-administer the test. This time, one girl was missing. But 35 ordinary kids retook the test. All I did was switch numbers on the map and the matching choices around. Otherwise, it was the same test.

I never forgot the results as long as I taught: 24 “failures” had A’s the second time. There were 8 B’s, 2 C’s and a single D.

Not one child flunked after studying.

Now, here was Friedman last week—quoting Duncan—quoting Ripley. In a recent policy speech Duncan told his audience:

Amanda points a finger at you and me, as parents—not because we aren’t involved in school, but because too often, we are involved in the wrong way. Parents, she says, are happy to show up at sports events, video camera in hand, and they’ll come to school to protest a bad grade. But she writes, and I quote: “Parents did not tend to show up at schools demanding that their kids be assigned more challenging reading or that their kindergarteners learn math while they still loved numbers.”…To really help our kids, we have to do so much more as parents. We have to change expectations about how hard kids should work. And we have to work with teachers and leaders to create schools that demand more from our kids.

Ripley is a fine writer. But Ripley never taught. So she was stunned when she put together her book. And Duncan was stunned when he read it. And Friedman was stunned because he only writes editorials about education. Neither he nor Duncan ever stood in front of a class of 35 and asked for homework to be passed forward.

They have no idea what it can be like to see only a handful of papers coming up the rows. 

Let’s imagine that they had. I loved teaching and loved working with teens. But if Duncan and Friedman had been manning rooms down the hall they might not be shocked to hear that sometimes students don’t turn in work when they should. Or: they don’t study when they could. Then they’d realize that’s not really the fault of the teacher. They would know what every real teacher I ever met knows.

They would know that parents and administrators often complain, and complain vociferously, if a teacher grades hard and upholds high standards.

You can go back farther back into history to understand what might be wrong in American education today. If you want your child to get an excellent education keep in mind what Thucydides once said:

“Not much is ever gained simply by wishing for it.”
(c. 411 B. C.)

Even the ancient Greeks probably had trouble getting children to turn in homework.