School Reformers Cry “Wolf!”

What’s wrong with America’s educators these days? Why don’t they believe school reformers when they say they have plans to “fix the schools?”

Maybe it’s because real educators want nothing more than to work, unimpeded, with actual children.

Maybe it’s because the reformers have cried, “Wolf!” once too often. Or twenty times too often.

Doubtless, millions of educators across the country could add examples to this kind of story. But I’ll start with Rod Paige, Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush. You may recall that while serving as superintendent of the Houston City Public Schools, Mr. Paige won acclaim for the “Houston Miracle.” On the strength of his walk-on-water powers, he followed Mr. Bush to Washington in 2001, where the Texas duo promised to duplicate miracles on a fifty-state stage.

Simply stated, Mr. Paige claimed to have reduced dropouts in many inner city high schools to zero.

Yep: zero!

It turned out later that the “Houston Miracle” was less miracle and more a matter cooking the books. One Houston high school, for example, managed to classify all 462 dropouts as “transfers.” Unfortunately, by the time everyone realized Mr. Paige couldn’t turn water into wine he was ensconced at the U. S. Department of Education.

On January 8, 2002, President Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law. Now it was the turn of Congress and the president to shout “Lupus!” Once this blockbuster legislation was implemented, they promised we could erase all racial gaps in academic performance. Follow the rules and regulations and every child in America would be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

So, what really happened? Rules and regulations spread like kudzu. Standardized testing and test prep overwhelmed everything. Time for art, music and physical education were slashed from the curriculum. Data-collection dominated the lives of frontline educators and took time away from doing what they truly needed to do. Days and weeks and in some cases months that should have been devoted to meaningful instruction were wasted. The National Assessment for Educational Progress would report in 2009 that racial gaps in reading and math were not closing. Despite all the time, effort and money poured into testing, scores in reading and math at the fourth and eighth grade levels rose no faster than they had before No Child Left Behind passed, when educators were still free to work with students in their own creative fashion.

Millions of educators on the frontlines of learning knew testing wasn’t working. What they knew didn’t matter. More and more reformers, most of whom had never bothered to teach, added to the cacophony.

“Wolf,” blundering billionaires like Bill Gates shouted, insisting everyone should listen to them because they had so much money. They knew what was “best” for the children and demanded all kinds of new “standards” for public school students. They said teachers had to be “held accountable” for test scores and prodded like dumb cattle to advance in the direction the reformers had charted. But they had no idea what was good for those teachers, and more importantly, no idea what was good for all those public school children. Frankly, they preferred to send their offspring to private school where educators were treated like adults and professionals.

“Wolf,” snarled Michelle Rhee, for a time the nation’s most famous school reformer. Rhee actually taught for three whole years but spent the rest of her time in education clambering to the top of the bureaucratic ladder. In 2008 she took over the Washington, D. C. schools. Appearing on the cover of Time magazine that fall, she promised to raise test scores or raise hell for teachers and administrators. Over the next three years several hundred educators who failed to raise scores were fired.

Others, who did raise scores, received fat bonuses. Then Rhee skipped town just in time to avoid responsibility for a massive cheating scandal. It turned out raising scores was easy if you knew how to ply an eraser.

Across this great nation, bold reformers like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel I. Klein continued to put forward their new plans. Yes, they promised. They could “fix schools”—in this case, in New York City. So Bloomberg and Klein “graded” schools. And they closed “failing” schools. And they opened up lots of charters.

Sure enough! Graduation rates rose! The racial gaps in performance narrowed! Test scores went up!

At first, there was celebrating in the ranks of the reformers. But it turned out schools under intense pressure to raise graduation rates simply made graduation easier. It didn’t matter that 1-in-5 New York City kids was chronically absent and that this wasn’t actually the fault of educators. Dennis Bunyan, a senior at Wadleigh Secondary School in Harlem, was typical, admitting he was absent so often from his senior English class that he “basically didn’t attend.” Yet, through a special program of “credit recovery,” he was allowed to do three essays in ten hours and gain a full Language Arts credit. “I’m grateful for it,” he told a reporter, “but it also just seems kind of, you know, outrageous. There’s no way three essays can cover a semester of work.”

Next, it turned out that the racial gaps in performance hadn’t narrowed at all in New York City.

Frontline educators knew that most “racial” gaps had far more to do with poverty than race or any other factor. Yet, when they tried to point this out reformers shouted, “Wolf!” all the louder.

In any case, when the State of New York phased out tests tied to No Child Left Behind and new tests tied to Common Core were implemented, New York City’s “progress” turned out to be evanescent.

Scores in the city (and across the state) plummeted.

With the election of President Obama and the appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education new voices joined in all the shouting. Mr. Duncan promised to lead a “Race to the Top” and tame the sharp-toothed beast. The wolf, he assured everyone, wouldn’t stand a chance once he took office.

Something was still wrong, however, and frontline educators knew it. Like Secretary Paige, Secretary Duncan first won acclaim for fixing big city schools, in Mr. Duncan’s case, the Chicago Public Schools. Oddly enough, after he left the Windy City, the schools he “fixed” didn’t stay fixed. Gang violence, to cite just one terrible example, continued to plague the city. School-age kids were cut down by the hundreds  and a focus on testing did nothing to staunch the blood.

After Mr. Duncan moved to Washington, a fresh reformer joined the fray. Mayor Rahm Emanuel claimed—what else!—to have a plan to tame the wolf. He turned many schools over to private corporations to run as for-profit charters. He hand-picked a new superintendent. Meanwhile, one Chicago charter chain made headlines by charging misbehaving students $386,000 for discipline packets. The new superintendent decided to hand over $23 million in no-bid Chicago Public School contracts to a former employer. In return, company officials promised a huge signing bonus whenever she left her CPS post and rejoined their operations.

It turned out there were huge profits to be made by those who shouted “wolf” in the most vociferous fashion. In New York City, in 2013, sixteen top executives for sixteen charter chains “earned” more than the chancellor of the New York City Public Schools. Deborah Kenny of Village Academy led the big cash parade with $499,146. In Columbus, Ohio, seventeen charters went out of business in a single year, but not before founders walked away with large stacks of taxpayer dollars. Across the country, 2,500 charter schools closed their doors and went bust, founders often taking everything, including the last rolls of toilet paper with them. K-12 Inc., an online charter operation, to cite one especially egregious example, paid five top executives $34 million in just two years, 2013 and 2014, and devoted $26.5 million, most of it taxpayer cash, to advertising in 2010 alone.

And what about that “Race to the Top,” touted so loudly and so often by Mr. Arne Duncan?

It turned out that real educators and real students were forced to wade through an ever deeper quagmire of rules and regulations and devote days and weeks to test prep and test-taking, for no real purpose.

After listening to reformers shout, “wolf, wolf, wolf,” reading scores for high school seniors were lower in 2013 than twenty years earlier.

Billions had been wasted on tests and test preparation. Math scores for seniors—after a decade of misguided reforms—rose no faster than before all the “school reforming.”

After all the focus on testing the racial gaps—actually, the poverty gaps—still refused to close.

And, even though more students now graduated, ACT scores remained flat from 1990 until now.

And SAT scores in reading, math and writing (that third test added only in 2006) all declined.

It never mattered. The reformers kept up the shouting. The people who actually worked with America’s youth kept doing the best they could. Here in Ohio, lawmakers said we had to prepare students for tests in reading, math, science and social studies. “Wolf,” they cried in 2002. Educators were fooled into believing. But the tests in science and social studies proved expensive to grade. They were poorly designed, too. So the people who cried “wolf” said, “never mind.”

Those two tests were killed in 2009.

In 2010, Ohio lawmakers decided all the tests tied to No Child Left Behind were useless. Educators would have to be on the lookout for a wolf of a different color. Suddenly, legislators in Columbus and more than forty other states cried out in favor of Common Core! This time the tests politicians were demanding and paying fresh billions to have created would fix everything!

Only this wolf, too, was a figment of the imagination. In 2014 lawmakers in Ohio and in many of those same states that voted to implement Common Core rubbed their eyes—and the wolf they feared was no longer there—and they decided Common Core was a terrible idea.

But wait! Was that another fanged monster approaching? The tests used in Ohio in 2014, and tied to Common Core, would be tossed. New tests would be created—at new cost to taxpayers. Teachers and students would again be required to prepare for a battery of tests they had never seen, even though a decade of testing had resulted mainly in damaging the process of learning.

“Wolf!” the reformers cried yet again.

Only now, educators no longer believed them. The educators grumbled and cried and cursed at all they had been put through, at all the time lost when they could have been helping children.

Parents, too, began to understand. The people who kept shouting “wolf” had fooled them far too often.

John J. Viall is the author of Two Legs Suffice: Lessons Learned by Teaching, a book about what good teachers can be expected to do, as well as a look at what others must do if students are to achieve a well-rounded education.

The story is based on his 33 years of experience in junior high and middle school classrooms.

Now available Amazon.com.

Teachers: Are You Part of the Lunatic Fringe?

Teachers: are you part of “the lunatic fringe?” Considering the results of a recent poll you probably are. Only 1 in 4 Americans said they believed standardized testing had made schools better.

To answer this question yourself a little background information first. If you missed the story early this month, the National Education Association approved a resolution calling for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to resign. Why? The resolution faulted Mr. Duncan for a “failed education agenda,” particularly a “toxic testing push.”

Naturally, this attack riled up Duncan’s defenders. Typically, these defenders never bothered to teach. Joe Williams, the no-teaching-ever-director of Democrats for Education Reform, was quick to condemn. The vote made those (at least to him) calling for Mr. Duncan’s head seem like part of “the lunatic fringe.”

Call me one of the lunatics, then.

But I believe teachers have legitimate reasons to despise standardized tests. In fact, I wonder what Williams would say if he tried teaching for a year or two, or twenty-five years. Here’s what I saw during my career in the classroom. In the late 80s I was there when states created their own standardized tests. Ohio implemented what was known as the Ninth Grade Proficiency Test. If students failed they had multiple chances to retake it and try to pass.

Unfortunately, state tests didn’t do much to improve education. The first problem was that the standards these tests set weren’t all that high to begin. Here’s one of my favorite geography questions from the old Ohio exam:

Not exactly a daunting challenge, right? (Wait: is the answer Z?)

At the same time, Ohio lawmakers in their infinite wisdom decreed that third graders would not advance to the fourth grade unless they could pass a reading proficiency test. This was labeled the Third Grade Reading Guarantee.

Elementary teachers warned that children mired in poverty might be dramatically impacted. Lawmakers didn’t care. Teachers warned that students new to this country and unfamiliar with English might not fare well. Lawmakers didn’t care.

Educators in middle and upper grades added their own warning. If you held a children back in third grade—and any other year during their academic careers—they were almost guaranteed to drop out of school. That was not the guarantee lawmakers had in mind.

Lawmakers didn’t care.

And yet the Third Grade Reading Guarantee died an early death. When actual children failed the test and parents made it clear they would not vote again for knuckle-headed lawmakers responsible for the mess, suddenly lawmakers cared. 

The guarantee was wiped from the books.

Eventually, leaders in education (people who give advice but never teach) realized that state-level testing was doing no good. So: Congress enacted No Child Left Behind (2002). Now the feds promised by 2014 every child in America would be proficient in reading and math.

Bureaucrats in various state departments of education realized how hard achieving academic perfection might be. And since failure to achieve “adequate yearly progress” involved penalties of all kinds, most states decided the path to success was clear. They lowered standards on their tests for the next few years. Then they raised them gradually to “prove” that great strides were being made—kind of a one step forward, two steps back approach to learning, you might say. This turned out to be a lame approach and teachers who had to scuffle to conform to all the rules understood it was a charade.

No one asked them what they thought.

Meanwhile, real teachers wanted to know what would happen if a young man missed 106 days of class in a single year. (I had one student who did.) Would they be “held accountable” if these kinds of students failed their tests?

Yes, the non-teaching education experts insisted, yes, they would.

School reformers—who never taught a single, solitary soul—insisted that real teachers were making excuses if they couldn’t reach every kid. Real teachers inquired anew: Will we be faulted if homeless boys and girls can’t pass the tests? After all, we find that acute hunger has have a detrimental effect on an eight-year-old’s performance in school?

“Stop making so many excuses,” the non-teaching types said.

What else was NCLB supposed to do? Politicians promised that the law would eliminate racial achievement gaps across this great land. But a decade later gaping racial gaps remained. When children were tested in 2012, 54% of white fourth graders scored “proficient or above” in math. For Asian Americans the figure was 64%.

Blacks (18%), American Indians (23%) and Hispanics (26%) still lagged behind.

Classroom teachers tried to point out to lawmakers that poverty really seemed to matter. In 2012, the biggest “gap” in math scores was seen when students eligible for free/reduced price lunches were compared with those not eligible.

Those eligible passed at a rate of 25%.

Those not eligible passed at a rate of 59%.

Scores on the eighth grade reading test showed the same poverty-related achievement gap.

The experts, who never taught anyone, rich child, or poor, told real teachers to quit with all the whining and save every child.

Here in Ohio, politicians decided that if testing in reading and math was good then testing in science and social studies would be better yet. So sub tests in science and social studies were added to the Eighth Grade Ohio Achievement Test. (This test replaced the Ninth Grade Proficiency Test after passage of NCLB.) The social studies sub test was phased in in 2003 and scores first counted in 2005. By 2009, however, the sub test was dead. Too late, frugal lawmakers (the same ones who came up with the idea in the first place) suddenly realized that it would cost large heaps of money to print, administer and grade the social studies sub test.

Besides, there were complaints from all corners of the state—not necessarily from members of the lunatic fringe—that made it clear the social studies sub test was stupid, almost from question one all the way to the bitter end.

On one occasion I headed for Columbus to testify in front of the education committee of the Ohio Senate about a proposal to tie merit pay to scores on high stakes tests. I asked members of the august panel if any of them could provide a definition of “mercantilism.” That was in fact a question asked of eighth graders on the previous year’s test.

Not one member on the Senate committee could.

I inquired next about Songhai trade. That was indeed another question on the social studies sub test of the OAT.

Once more, I was met with uncomprehending stares.

Worse yet, when all the testing was done and students walked across the stage to pick up their diplomas, how much had standardized testing done to improve U. S. education? In reading, according to the National Assessment for Educational Progress, there was zero long-term gain. 

All that money spent on testing and scores would not budge! 
(Well, not unless you count going down.)

And in math, gains were also thin.

Real teachers grumbled—but not because they hoped to evade accountability. They realized you could have had greater impact on reading scores if you had simply taken all the money wasted on testing ($1.7 billion annually) and used it to buy books—170 million per year, at $10 each. And you could have given two to every child in the U. S. public school system and done it every year.

Each spring the tests were given and taken. Teachers had no choice but to play the lousy hands they were dealt. If tests at the elementary level measured only what children learned in reading and math—well, thenit made sense to focus only on that. Technically, if a subject wasn’t tested in your grade it no longer mattered what you taught.

Art? Not tested. Forget art! Music? Who cares! Even time spent on science and social studies declined (ironically, students would be tested later in those very subjects). As for physical education, it was clear the testing companies weren’t going to ask kids to run a mile.

Who cared if kids got fat!

It took a decade—but gradually it dawned on politicians and bureaucrats and education leaders who never taught that NCLB was a terrible flop. Probably every classroom teacher from Juneau to Miami could have predicted this would be the end result.

Then Secretary Duncan stepped forward with a bold new plan. And his plan was sure to work. (That’s what the last guy said.) NCLB would be killed. All those expensive standardized tests tied to NCLB? Use them for scrap paper, kids.

Mr. Duncan would oversee creation of a brand new battery of standardized tests. His tests would be tied to Common Core and this time testing would work!

State after state fell in line. Everyone seemed to love Common Core. And it did not hurt that Mr. Duncan passed out $4.35 billion to states willing to implement his plan—which another reformer (who never taught) dubbed “Race to the Top.”

In Louisiana the legislature voted in favor of racing to the top. Racing to the top sounded good. Governor Jindal was all for the racing. Then Governor Jindal changed his mind and said he would work to defeat Common Core instead. Oklahoma lawmakers were all for Common Core until they were all against it and repealed their consent. Real teachers sadly shook their heads.

So the years passed and new plans came and went and came and went and came and went. Real teachers who had growing and even profound doubts about the mess school reformers were creating did not feel as if they were part of a lunatic fringe. They watched and wondered. Who were these fools pushing all these tests, changing the rules almost as quickly as those rules were written. Did these people have even the whiff of a clue?

Here in Ohio, the bureaucrats and politicians went back to work. They renamed their test. The OAT was no longer cool. The Ohio Achievement Assessments (OAA). That sounded better! And you know what we really needed, they said?

A new third-grade reading guarantee.

This time, lawmakers promised, everything would turn out great.

Do Schools Fail or Do Homes Fail?

As a veteran teacher (now retired), I’ve long been interested in the role parents play in American education.

I spent 33 years in a classroom. 

So I understand that teachers matter.

What bothers me, particularly in recent years, is the laser-like focus in school reform on those who stand at the front of every class. Our “leaders” in education, various and sundry fools like Arne Duncan, insist that the key to improvement is holding teachers accountable for everything, even inclement weather. These leaders claim that we nust now measure everything teachers do, from respiration to defecation, to raise academic standards. They believe if we create enough charter schools and hand out enough vouchers then critical problems in education will magically fade away.

Call me a skeptic.

I was flipping through the pages of my personal diary last week when I came across a brief mention (in the fall of 1980) of a young New Jersey couple who offered to trade in their 14-month-old son for a used Corvette.

The dealer wanted $8,800 but…hey…these lousy parents had an extra child they didn’t want. How about a swamp: flesh for metal?

I don’t think in this young boy’s life that teachers were going to be the problem. 

In 1998, after spending an evening calling parents at home to inform them their sons or daughters were behind on their work in my class, I again jotted down a few thoughts in my diary (only the names have been changed below):

Spent 1 ½ hours on phone tonight with five parents. Bill Hawley’s mom has him in AA three nights a week and says he’s rated chemically dependent. (Carol [his sister] is also in the program on a limited basis.) Bill’s dad started him drinking at six—Bill got into his father’s cocaine.

Sure. Teachers matter. But parents play a fundamental role in education—shaping their children from the moment they’re born.

In my experience, most parents did a good job—just as did most teachers. But where children were badly warped by life in the home my colleagues and I could only mitigate the harm already inflicted.

My wife (also a retired educator) and I were watching an old CNN documentary about education recently, narrated by Morgan Spurlock. Spurlock, you might not remember, first became famous when he tried to live on McDonald’s food for a month. So his take on education was interesting. First, he visited a school in Finland—because Finland is now supposed to be a leader in education. (I think that’s a bit of a myth; but leave that issue aside.) Spurlock was trying to be fair and even did a little teaching, admitting later it was much harder than expected. Then he returned to visit Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School, a successful charter operation in Brooklyn.

I know there are good charter schools out there and based on Spurlock’s story, I think most of us would be happy to send our children to Williamsburg. I visited Discovery Academy in March, myself. This Toledo charter school is run by one of my former students, Mr. Noah Campbell. As expected his school was well-run and I came away impressed. I also talked to his faculty and again came away impressed. Most of his teachers we’re first-year educators but all were clearly serious about their crucial work with children. Good administrators and teachers always make schools better. But even dedicated individuals like those on staff at Discovery Academy can’t do everything.

Near the end of Spurlock’s documentary, he makes a bold and erroneous statement. He says every parent wants their child to succeed in school. 

That’s not true. 

Or: in too many cases, it’s only true to this degree sense. All of us who want to lose weight care about losing weight. We just don’t care enough to take real action.

The grim truth is that not all parents are equal—and truly bad parents cripple their children in ways educators find incredibly difficult and sometimes nearly impossible to overcome. All too often this crippling effect begins in the womb, with one in ten American mothers abusing drugs or alcohol during pregnancy. You can’t cure that kind of problem by grading schools as many of our school reform “leaders” insist.

You might as well grade hospitals.

To say all parents really care is absurd. Suppose your dad is Travis Henry, former NFL running back with the Denver Broncos. Dad has trouble finding time to help with your homework because…well…Dad has nine children by nine different women. Dad would like to pay child support, too, but Dad can’t do it, despite millions of dollars earned during his career, because he’s been busted several times for drug possession and finally for cocaine trafficking.

Bad parents come in all colors and can be seen at the top of the economic heap just as often as at the bottom. I taught in an affluent suburban district near Cincinnati and almost all my students were white and from well-to-do families. That didn’t stop one father from repeatedly molesting his seventh grade daughter—and stalling off teachers when we began to home in on root causes of the girl’s depression. I called that son-of-bitch several times and invited him in twice for meetings and he always assured us his daughter was happy at home. She just didn’t like school.

Every teacher comes to understand what Spurlock and all the reformers miss—that every imaginable type of human being can become a parent. You don’t even need to be sane to produce sperm or egg. Remember Ariel Castro, the sociopath who chained up three women in the basement of his home for more than a decade? He had a daughter by one of his victims.

Who in their right mind would argue that the biggest problems a child like that would face in life would be the quality of her elementary teachers?

How about Fred Phelps, who died this April? Phelps headed the Westboro Baptist Church, a hateful religious operation famous for picketing the funerals of American service people.. According to Time magazine one of his sons claimed dad kept all his offspring in line with fists and a club. Nate Phelps spoke of a life “filled with anger, fear and violence.” On one occasion his father used the handle of a mattock to beat his children into good behavior.

If all parents wanted their children to succeed in school or even lead a decent existence stories like that of Megan Huntsman wouldn’t make lurid headlines. The bodies of seven dead newborns, apparently born to Huntsman over the last decade, were found swaddled in rags in cardboard boxes in her garage. Where was her former husband, father of the couple’s three surviving daughters? Oh yes. In 2005 he was sentenced to nine years in prison on drug charges.

You can look at the problem on a case-by-case basis or consider it societally. It’s simple true. Not all parents are equal. Not even close. In 2013 it was reported that 2.7 million U. S. children had one or both parents locked up behind bars.

Most teachers I’ve ever met care deeply about helping every child—but when they can’t save them all, blaming them only makes their job, already hard, much harder. And it does nothing to help the children who most need help. I’m retired. Technically, I don’t have to worry. But if we really cared about every child we’d do far more to help every child. 

Think all parents care? Don’t be so naive. In 2009, for example, CBS reported that one fourth of all mothers and fathers who owed child support paid nothing. Zip. If we’re going to grade schools, as many of our reformers say we must, what do these deadbeat parents earn for a grade?

A ZERO in the gradebook seems appropriate.

In fact, even our greatest school reformers haven’t been able to fix broken families. Arne Duncan couldn’t fix the problem of youths in gangs in the Chicago Public Schools. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had three terms in office to improve schools in New York City? That didn’t help the rising tide of homeless children—22,000 of them. And remember Michelle Rhee? The Broom Queen was going to fix the Washington, D. C. public schools by sweeping out all the bad teachers. According to an article in the Washington Post last week it turns out teachers weren’t the biggest problem where thousands of D. C. students were concerned. Nout unless we’re going to fault teachers for lack of telepathic powers.

Even after all of Rhee’s sweeping, it turns out that one in five D. C. children piled up at least twenty days of unexcused absences last year; and that doesn’t factor in any excused absences. To put it simply: 20% of parents in D. C. allowed children to miss school 20% of the time. Even grading such moms and dads on a curve, they’d earn no better than a D- for ineffective parenting.

I have a good friend, a conservative fan of Fox News, and if you ask him he believes most public school teachers spend their days having sex with children and running to union representatives for protection. We know, of course, that scum bags do occasionally find employment in the classroom—and the faster we get rid of them the better. But one teacher having sex with a student garners more attention than 10,000 parents sexually abusing their children. There are, after all, an estimated three millions cases of child abuse and neglect in this country annually, involving six million children.

On average, four or five youngsters die every twenty-four hours.

Every good teacher and every good administrator I’ve ever known could have told you pretty much the same. These people devote their lives to trying to help the kinds of students who badly need help in school because they get no help (and often harm) at home. But our leaders continue to miss this dilemma. They talk about education as if only teachers factor into results. How would they help a homeless child and that homeless child’s teacher? Grade the school if the child can’t read at grade level. What about that seventh grader who was being molested by her father? How do our leaders help me, if I’m still teaching, help this poor young woman? 

Oh, hell, here’s their bold idea; Let’s have the girl take more and more and more standardized tests.

I’m retired. Maybe I’m just old and crotchety. But, if you ask me, I don’t believe our education “leaders” have any clue what they’re doing.



POSTSCRIPT:  Let me note very clearly that I am not bashing parents. Most of the parents I dealt with over the years were doing a fine job, just as I did with my children, just as most parents across the nation do every day.

In my experience, however, the kids who most needed saving usually came from homes where parents had failed badly. If we want to save ALL children we need to focus on that reality and do more to help teachers.