“This whole school triflin’.”
One of my sophomores back in Baltimore said that while taking his seat in my English class. I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant. “Triflin’’” can mean a lot of things. He could have been complaining about any number of issues with the school: the roaches and mice that regularly scurried across the floor; or the fact that there was no AC or air flow—and that our water fountains “might” be contaminated with lead and therefore could not be used; or maybe he was talking about the violence in and around the schools that meant that kids had to be alert, maintain a low profile, walk in groups, or join a gang for safety; or maybe he was talking about the unsatisfying school lunches; or maybe he was talking about the way our principal would sign off her twice-daily announcements saying, “HSA is on its way”—referring to the High School Assessment and implying that if they failed, the school would be closed down. Or maybe he just didn’t like the “Warm Up” assignment.
At that particular moment, it wasn’t a conversation that I could get into.
I don’t remember exactly what I said. It was probably one of my typical responses. Something like: “Ah, come on. Do your Warm Up. I’ll come back with stickers.” Maybe I’d say it in a goofy voice to try to make him laugh at the sticker thing. Or I could go extra dorky, put on a bad British accent, and say, “Well, I’m not one to be trifled with, so do your Warm Up.” Or, if it was a bad day, I might have just said, “I know.”
And then I would have had to move on to the next student. Because thirty more people were coming in the classroom, all with their own needs. Some who were dealing with health problems or with parents with health problems; some who were homeless; some who were pregnant; some who were bullied; some who were trying to learn English as a second language; some who were trying to do everything right but just not making a lot of progress; a few who were making progress but were bored or frustrated; and some who were just going through the motions to get by.
That’s one classroom in one public school in one city.
The high school I attended had a different set of circumstances but lots of similar problems. I attended a public high school in Missouri that most people in our country would describe as rural. (I didn’t think of it that way because, even with a population of less than 10,000, our town was one of the bigger towns in the area. Rural, to me, meant Dadeville, a town of around 200, where my cousins attended school.) But my school was the only high school in our town. Everyone went there. The town was not at all ethnically or culturally diverse, but it was socio-economically diverse.
Kids at my school didn’t worry about violence in the same way that my students in Baltimore did (though domestic violence was certainly an issue). But they did come to school hungry. Like my students in Baltimore, a lot of kids at my school weren’t raised in households that had books on hand or in families that used a wide vocabulary, and they quickly fell behind those of us who were. Like many of my Baltimore students, many of my peers had to work. Granted, they were getting up early to milk the cows instead of closing down a restaurant late at night. Meth was a big issue in my area—a different drug than the ones most abused in Baltimore, but the same basic problem. And I, personally, remember being bored. And frustrated. I remember wishing that we could just move faster and not fully comprehending why we couldn’t.
I went to college at Yale. And I was behind from day one. The other students were way quicker with answers. They literally spoke faster than I did. They were used to “seminar” classes and to debating with teachers. About half of the kids at Yale go to private schools; the other half attend public schools. But the public schools that many (not all) of my Yale friends went to were not socio-economically diverse. Many of them never sat next to a person who lived in a trailer or came to school hungry or tired from milking the cows. The public schools they went to had things like lacrosse and AP Calculus. The students discussed Homer and knew who Herodotus was.
I now teach two days a week at a public elementary school in a nice neighborhood in Brooklyn. It draws kids with autism as well as gifted and talented kids. It’s ethnically diverse if not socio-economically diverse. They have multiple teachers in most classrooms and parent volunteers. (In Baltimore, I never had more than three parents come to a parent-teacher night, much less have parent volunteers in the classroom.) There is a Smart Board in every room, and they have access to laptops. The administrator and parents go to great lengths to provide the students with outside opportunities. That’s why I’m there to begin with. I’m a teaching artist, so I get to go in and help kids write, compose, and stage their own original operas. It’s a great gig. I think it’s a great school.
It’s definitely the type of school I would have chosen for myself as a student. That one—or maybe one of the fancy public schools that my Yale friends attended. I think lacrosse would have been my sport. Although I think many of its teachers were excellent, I certainly would not have chosen to attend the school in Baltimore where I taught. Most of the teachers at the school would not have sent their own kids there. And, although I loved many of my high school teachers (including my mom, who was a teacher at Bolivar High), I would have loved to have been more challenged than I was as a student there.
So I understand why school choice seems appealing. And voucher programs. It makes it so that students like myself—privileged as I was—can go to fantastic schools for free. It sounds great. And school choice is part of what makes a school like the one where I teach right now possible. It’s a pretty easy sell for most middle-class people, and it’s been a central component of education policy makers on both sides of the aisle for a while.
But the thing is, it’s not that simple. Because school choice is also what made the school where I taught in Baltimore so bad.
School choice makes it very easy for us to segregate ourselves. I don’t just mean racially (though there is undoubtedly a racial component.) In Baltimore, the top students could get into a top charter school. Other students, whose parents were involved and aware of the ever-changing school situation, could register for mid-tier charter schools that held random drawings. If they didn’t get in, many would opt to pay for private or Catholic schools. What this means is that the old-fashioned “neighborhood schools” ended up with concentrated groups of historically lower-performing students with low parental involvement. Now, that wasn’t 100% the case at my school, as we also had a great ESOL program and some other solid programs that drew students. We had some exceptional students. But it is the general trend in Baltimore.
Other cities have had similar patterns emerge. Detroit also has some elite charters, some charters with applications or requirements, and then a bunch of lottery charters. Detroit students have enough choices that they could get a seat at one of these lottery charters instead of a neighborhood school. The idea is to create competition and give charter schools money based on the number of students they enroll. But these charters are not serving the students any better than the neighborhood schools. This is because they are not addressing the real problems that face the students they have tried so hard to recruit. It’s not regulation that is hurting the poorest kids in our country. And you can’t just give a kid an iPad and a non-unionized teacher and expect miracles. Every kid brings her own set of challenges that must be addressed with a much deeper, more meaningful investment. Every teacher and school needs a lot of support to be successful. This is true across all schools, and especially true for lower-performing schools.
That’s where the problem gets worse. Because when we tie funding to school performance, these schools start to lose the few resources they had to begin with. When we link teacher pay to performance, the best teachers (who would be desired anywhere) are incentivized to leave the toughest situations. They can just go to schools where kids already pass the tests.
And no one has figured out what to do with schools that simply fail to meet annual yearly progress requirements every year. The school where I taught was under “alternative governance” while I taught there. This meant that consultants came in and tried to help. As well-meaning as some of them were, it amounted to no help—at least in terms of raising test scores. At the end of my third year, they “re-structured” my school—meaning, they made all of us who were teaching a tested subject reapply. I, like many teachers, decided not to. Not because I wouldn’t have been rehired. I probably would have. I taught an advanced class, so my test scores looked better than some teachers. I didn’t reapply, though, because I was completely exhausted. I admire my colleagues who stay in these incredibly difficult environments for their careers. I couldn’t do it.
Beyond the problems that it creates in urban communities, school choice isn’t a real option for rural schools like the one that I attended as a student. Some students were already riding a school bus for 45 minutes to get to school. The next school would probably be another 30 minutes away. It’s not feasible to rely on “school choice” as a solution in rural areas that can’t support more than one school. Sure, in Bolivar, small charter and religious schools might pop up as alternatives, but not for everyone. What happens to kids in Dadeville? How does school choice benefit them if their parents don’t have time to drive them to the next town? And is it really fair to give religious institutions government money? To me, it seems a clear breach of separation of church and state and a dangerous road to go down. (What happens when atheist and Muslim schools start appearing? How is that going to serve our communities? All it does is segregate us—and give us fewer chances to challenge our own cultural beliefs and biases?)
So as much as I understand the appeal of having a “free-market” approach to schools, I think it’s incredibly important to think about our social responsibility to rural kids and to city kids who might already be starting at a disadvantage. They are the ones who depend on schools the most, and they are the ones school choice lets down. Charter schools and vouchers ultimately reshuffle and stack the deck in favor of middle-class, usually white city kids—or in favor of the fundamentally religious, who would prefer to be segregated from whomever they consider to be heathens.
I will also add that at this point in my life, I’m very glad that I did attend the “neighborhood” public school that I attended. Yes, it meant that I started off a little bit behind my peers at Yale. I didn’t really speak in class for my first three years there. But I caught up in academics. Luckily, at my school–and in my home–I had learned to read and write well. I didn’t have all the AP terms on hand or the SAT words in my back pocket, but I could communicate. And I was way ahead in some other areas. I was much better able to empathize with a wide variety of people. I didn’t make the false assumptions that some made about the Midwest or people with disabilities or Christians or farmers. I played on the same teams and sang in the same choir as people from very different backgrounds than I had, and I formed real relationships with them. Just being able to form relationships with a diverse group of people is a useful skill to learn. It helped me adapt quickly at Yale and in Baltimore—and in Brooklyn. It has opened up the world to me.
Now, I admit, that’s a rosy, optimistic way to frame my experiences. I acknowledge that I don’t have kids, so it’s easier for me to make some of the arguments that I’m making. I understand that most people are primarily concerned with caring for their own families and don’t see it as their responsibility to worry about those who are left with only bad options in a school-choice system. And, while I would like to think that I wouldn’t necessarily take advantage of school choice in New York by doing my best to place my own kids in a selective or “good” charter school, I probably would. Or I would try to convince many other highly educated, middle-class people—people like me–to send their kids to the same school. And things could get tricky then. Because, however well-intentioned, that could be an invasive act as well. It could be seen as a type of gentrification. It could build resentment—and not without reason.
Integration is messy and difficult, and it will always cause problems.
But for us to build strong, diverse communities, it’s also necessary. We can’t give up. We have to learn to talk to one another. Our schools should be centers for the communities they serve. They should protect and support the vulnerable. Funding should not be tied to success on tests. And it shouldn’t be tied to property value. And we need to incentivize teachers to take on the challenges of “failing” schools, not incentivize them to leave.
And we really need to start re-thinking the goals of education in general. We cannot continue to be obsessed with terrible multiple-choice tests that take up way too much class time (particularly in “failing” schools) and promote the wrong learning goals. Before my third year of teaching, I attended a conference put on by the consulting group that was “alternatively governing” my school. The woman running my clinic told us not to bother with reading novels with our English students.
“Oh, of course, you and I read,” she said. “I just looked at my reading journal yesterday, and I read 101 books last year. But these kids aren’t going to be English majors, you know? They won’t read anything longer than a manual. Just give them excerpts.”
I argued with her. We became English teachers because we love to read and write and think. And because we believe that reading and writing benefit all people—regardless of what profession they end up in. With the testing movement, we had already been told to give students “boring” passages, so that they would be conditioned to read boring passages on the tests. We were told not to worry as much with writing essays, since writing was not on the test. Reading was a thing to be endured, not enjoyed. Writing was a secondary skill to reading comprehension and vocabulary. But my goal was never to make kids English majors. It was to help foster a lifelong love of reading. It was to help kids organize their thoughts and communicate them. It was to spark new ideas in them. We need to be emphasizing these goals as well as critical, analytical thinking. Back when I really bought into this accountability thing (a time that I don’t like to think about), I would tell my students, as part of test prep, “Don’t think too hard. You can probably justify several answers, so just go with the one that feels right.” Don’t think too hard? I can’t believe I said that.
It’s no surprise that people today have such a hard time sorting out legitimate sources and determining what sources are reliable. (I don’t mean this as a partisan dig, because people on the left spread as much “fake news” as people on the right.) I think, across the board, we are telling kids that they shouldn’t ask questions and that they should read everything as though it were a manual. We are killing the creativity and innovation in kids who are naturally creative and innovative. We are cutting the arts when we should be emphasizing them. We are setting them up to be exploited. And this particular facilitator was acting as though the kids who were not passing tests were somehow lesser humans—as though they couldn’t gain the same pleasures from reading that she and I could. Ultimately, I got so frustrated that I burst into tears and had to leave the room. How heroic, yes.
But this obsession with tests (which is tied to accountability and the notion of school competition) is killing a lot of schools. I know this isn’t true of all schools, but it’s true of far too many. Take for example, the school where I’m currently working. My residency with them will end in March—a length of time agreed to in advance, largely so they can prepare for and take tests. They start this testing process in March. Three months before school is out. I know some teachers buy into these tests—even act as though “test-taking” in and of itself is an important life skill. Please. I will probably never again take a multiple-choice test like the ones we obsess over. Most people don’t after the age of 18. But the kids who spent so much time on test prep struggle when they get to colleges. An enormous percentage of students from schools like mine simply aren’t prepared to write at a college level—and they may have to spend an extra year or two of tuition trying to catch up. (And that year or two often proves to be too much.)
Frustration with “the system” was a central theme of my time teaching in Baltimore. But it was a theme in my mom’s career in teaching in Missouri as well. It’s been a problem for a long time. It was made worse with No Child Left Behind, but I do not think of it as a partisan issue. Obama was elected during my first year of teaching, and things did not get any better at my school. I think they got worse. And, with the policies this new administration is championing, we are on track to accelerate the destruction. It could be devastating.
Devastating. See, I always arrived at school early. During my last year of teaching, I had a student (a sophomore) who was illiterate who would come and sit in my class with me as I prepared for the day. I started reading to him regularly, from a children’s book. I tried to teach him to read by pointing at the words as I went along and letting him sound out a few. I had to be discrete. I didn’t want him to be made fun of. And sometimes I only had five minutes to spend with him. Sometimes, if the copier was broken or I was dealing with a crisis, I couldn’t read with him at all. He made a little bit of progress. More than that, he had a thing that got him to school every day. Of course, he would never pass a test. He would be held as proof of my incompetence as a teacher. But I don’t care about that.
What I do care about is that he probably came to my room an hour before school on the first day of the next school year, and I wasn’t there. I let him down.
Sure, I had tried to tell him that I was leaving at the end of the year, but I don’t think he fully understood. Most kids don’t understand why a school is being restructured or why their teachers are leaving. To him, I just disappeared. A lot of teachers disappeared that year.
I will never fully forgive myself for walking away from that student—or many others—at that triflin’ school. And it kills me to see so many people follow my footsteps. Teachers, parents, politicians, we are running away from our real, difficult problems and challenges. Those of us who can are jumping in lifeboats while others drown. We are individually and collectively failing our country’s most vulnerable kids.
Teachers—those of you who have managed to stay in these struggling schools, those of you who have been willing to acknowledge and take on some of our country’s biggest problems without credit or resources, those of you who believe that success is not defined by passing a multiple-choice test—it might be time for major action. We are the ones who have faces to go along with the failing numbers that the rest of the country hears about. We know that the reason one kid failed on that particular day was that his cousin died; we know that another one missed most of middle school because he was floating between unstable homes. We know that we cannot use these things as excuses for failure, but that they are all realities that we cannot wish away or ignore—realities that cutting regulation, incentivizing test scores, and shuffling kids around won’t fix.
Call for an end to standardized testing; demand equitable and sufficient funding for the resources that you need to serve your students. And demand that we find a way to transition away from this unfair school-choice model back to an integrated community-centered school–without disrupting the learning of kids already enrolled in these schools. That transition won’t be easy or clear-cut. I’m not arguing that we shut down all charters or that there’s never a reason to group certain kids together. Someone will certainly bring up the KIPP schools—or another successful charter–as a reason we should keep charters in general around. And it’s possible that KIPP schools, some of them, at least, serve their students well. But they are serving students with parents who commit to a certain level of involvement, and they have the option of getting rid of students who aren’t keeping up with that commitment. They attract people who already understand the value of education. We can’t make all schools KIPP schools because a lot of kids don’t have parents who can or will make that commitment. A lot of kids don’t have what they need to make it through. So even if we want to keep some schools that are more focused on college prep and others that are more focused on vocational training (without wholly neglecting critical thinking, literature, and communication skills!), we need to do it in a way that is conscious of the needs of a diverse population. And we need to spend less time shuffling kids around and preparing them for tests and more time teaching them.
Bottom line, schools can’t be treated like businesses because failure is not an option and students can’t be reduced to numbers—and certainly shouldn’t be thought of as currency. The health of our democracy depends on our ability to provide a good education to all of our citizens. I believe that–now more than ever. I understand the desire to say, “Hey, not my problem. They need to take responsibility for themselves.” And at a certain point, I agree. But that point is not while they are children. I certainly applaud the few exceptional students who survived this mess and ended up graduating from excellent colleges and pursuing fruitful lives. But I do not hold them up as proof that we are doing this right or truly providing everyone with the support they need. I know too many who didn’t make it—who could have. Instead of blaming the kids for this, I blame myself. And I blame you.
We have to do better than school choice. We can’t give up on the harder, slower, deeper solutions. They are not as glitzy, clear-cut, or easy to reduce to political sound bites as “school-choice,” but they could actually be effective.
If we don’t come together and take a stand for our kids, we all triflin’.
E.J. Roller is the author of The Alloway Files.
Originally published 2/9/17.
