Chester
Conflicting Priorities
As is true throughout much of the United States, military recruiters lie to and mislead high school students.
They show up uninvited. They call students at home. They ask personal questions about students’ future plans and then assure them that the best way these can be realized is by first joining the military. Want to go to college? Join the military. Want to be whatever? Join the military.
Not surprisingly, recruiters frequent schools serving working-class and low-income communities, usually not wealthy districts.
Anne C. Lewis, national education policy writer, wrote in Phi Delta Kappan (March 2006), “The Orwellian Pentagon has a database that contains the names and personal details of 30 million young people—ages 16–23. Parents can write the Pentagon to request that their children’s name be removed, but if they do so, the information is moved to a ‘suppression’ file in the Pentagon’s Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies database and is still given to recruiters.
“Several senators and more than 100 privacy groups have requested that the database be eliminated, but the Pentagon officials seem convinced that it is necessary if we are to maintain a volunteer Army. Oh, brother.”
Let us recall malingerer Dick Cheney when he said, “I had other priorities than the military.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
American Public Schools Dehumanize, Inhibit Kids
To the editor:
Educator John Holt, author of How Children Learn and How Children Fail, was not an aficionado of either Ritalin or our mass-production school system. Holt told Congress that we give kids this drug so that we can run our schools as we do—like maximum security prisons for the comfort and convenience of the teachers and administrators who work in them.
Holt also inferred that America’s public schools are not particularly shining examples of how to bring out the best in young people. Although thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers, aides, counselors, and administrators, a good number of the schools end up teaching little more than obedience and conformity. Research by the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development concluded, “Many large public schools function as mills that contain and process endless streams of students. Within them are masses of anonymous youth. Such settings virtually guarantee that the intellectual and emotional needs of youth will go unmet.”
One of the most penetrating critics of contemporary schooling is New York State 1991 Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, who states, “The school bell rings, and the students in the middle of writing a poem must close her/his notebook and move to a different cell, … it is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class … it is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a loud gong for every day of your youth, in an institution that allows you no privacy.”
For the entire school day, students are under surveillance. They hardly have any private time or private space. Many teachers do their best to be humane, but students are typically expected to sit still for hour upon hour and do whatever they are told. This is not only totally unnatural and profoundly frustrating for students, but it also inhibits learning. Human beings are programmed by evolution to develop by moving, touching, and being involved in life’s tasks.
Neil Postman said it best: “School and prison are the only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Hancock is a science teacher at Cleveland Heights High School.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
SUPERINTENDENT EXCELS
I need to respond to West Geauga Board of Education member Michael Kilroy giving Superintendent Anthony Podojil a grade of C.
I have personally and professionally known Dr. Podojil since 1991 when he became our assistant principal of curriculum and instruction at Cleveland Heights High School. I retired after thirty-five years of teaching experience, all in the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District, in 2003. I have had experience with scores of school administrators, including ten superintendents.
I would like to distinguish among grades, evaluation, and assessment. An assessment and evaluation is more valid and reliable than a grade. In my opinion, Dr. Podojil has earned an A-plus in assessment and evaluation. I base my judgment on the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, a professional organization involved with educational leadership.
A research study involved twenty-one responsibilities of effective school administrators and a correlation with student academic achievement. The most important are the following:
—Situational awareness. Takes note of details and undercurrents in the running of the school system.
—Flexibility. Adapts leadership behavior to the needs of the current situation and is comfortable with dissent.
—Discipline. Protects teachers from issues and influences that would detract from their teaching time or focus.
—Monitors the effectiveness of school practices and their impact on student learning.
—Fosters shared beliefs and a sense of community and cooperation.
—Establishes a set of standard operating procedures and routines, resources, financial stability, knowledge of curriculum and instruction, communication, ideals, and beliefs.
—Visibility.
—Has quality contact and interactions with teachers, students, and parents.
—Inspires and leads new and challenging innovations.
—Recognizes and celebrates accomplishments published in local newspapers.
Again, an A-plus is my professional grade to Anthony Podojil.
And the answer is no to the question, are you (am I) a sycophant-milquetoast?
David A. Hancock
Chester
Hancock is currently an adjunct professor of education at Notre Dame College in South Euclid.
Teachers Teach Kids—Administrators Don’t
Mayor Michael R. White has given Barbara Byrd-Bennett a 5 percent raise and a 15 percent bonus for her hard work, dedication, performance, and inspirational leadership. I do not recall White expressing this kind of thinking toward teachers, who get a raise of less than 5 percent and no bonus.
Also, Byrd-Bennett is going to Jerusalem to learn more about educational leadership, funded by the Mandel Foundation. In the meantime, teachers are in classrooms (which administrators are happy they are not) doing their best to manage students and encourage them to learn—even the resistant students who are stressed, frustrated, and have physical and mental health problems.
Classroom teachers really resent administrators—especially superintendents. They have zero impact and influence on me personally in terms of inspirational leadership.
All the demagoguery, diatribes, harangues, incantations, and gibberish about US education are nonsense. So-called leaders, especially politicians, cannot make teachers change or improve. No one can make anyone else change or improve. Only each student can make himself improve or change. We can only support, direct, guide, and encourage. Let us get one thing straight: national standards, threats, coercion, administrators, rules, proficiency tests, state and federal regulations, and politicians do not teach kids. Teachers teach kids.
Our job is to teach the kids we have, not the kids we would like to have. Neil Postman, author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity [sic] and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, said it best:
“Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
This was written in 1998.
Byrd-Bennett to Plead Guilty
Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who ran the Chicago Public Schools until she stepped down this past spring amid allegations of corruption, will plead guilty to federal charges that she gave a no-bid $20.5 million contract to a former employer in exchange for future employment and a $250,000 kickback for two relatives. Byrd-Bennett, 66, was charged Thursday with 15 counts of mail fraud and five counts of wire fraud. Also facing federal charges are Gary Solomon, 47, and Thomas Vranas, 34, co-owners of SUPES Academy, a for-profit company that trains principals and administrators. Byrd-Bennett, who headed the Cleveland schools from 1998 to 2006, took over the Chicago schools in October 2012. (The Cleveland Plain Dealer)
Schools Become Prisons, but Learning Not Priority
To the editor:
Pedro Noguera, of Rethinking Schools in Milwaukee, makes several valid and thought-provoking points in regard to school violence.
Combating violence is difficult because it is promoted and legitimized by the mass media and by political leaders. While it is difficult to determine to what extent the glorification of violence in movies and on TV affects young people, psychological studies suggest that such exposure has a numbing effect on viewers.
Given the regularity with which violence is used for legitimate purposes, it is not surprising that children are confused about the appropriateness of responding violently to conflicts with others.
Most of the recent violence in public schools has been in upper-socioeconomic suburban communities—not in urban communities. Currently, the most fashionable response to school violence is the tendency toward making schools more like prisons. It is ironic that we are using prisons as our models for safety and security even though prisons are generally not safe places.
Further, these measures are undertaken without sufficient thought to the social and psychological consequences that may result from changing the school environment in this way. For too many students, going to school is a demeaning experience. The anonymity of large schools and the irrelevance of much of the curriculum to the experience and aspirations of children cultivates apathy, indifference, and disrespect toward school and the adults who work there. Feelings of hostility and resentment are exacerbated when some adults are just plain mean-spirited when they deal with children, exercising their authority over children in a pernicious and vindictive manner.
Laurence Steinberg, in his book Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed, said it best: “No curricular overhaul, no instructional innovation, no change in school organization, no toughening of standards, no rethinking of teacher training, or compensation will succeed if students do not come to school interested in and committed to learning.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Hancock teaches science at Heights High School.
Teachers Shun Public Schools
To the editor:
What’s wrong with this picture? Public school administrators and teachers who homeschool or send their children to a private or parochial school.
If these educators value private / parochial schools so much, why don’t they work there? I’ll tell you why—money and fringe benefits. Salaries are two to three times higher in public schools. This would be similar to a doctor practicing in Hospital X but choosing Hospital Y for medical treatment.
Charles A. Byrne, who represents the Eleventh District on the state board of education, wrote in another publication that State Superintendent Susan Tave Zelman’s 20 percent salary increase to $150,000—and a bonus to $180,000 – was well worth it. I wonder if he feels the same way about public school teachers. I have my doubts.
I never could understand why those who are indirectly involved with students are paid more than classroom teachers, who are. Don’t athletes earn more than coaches?
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Hancock is a science teacher at Heights High School.
A Last Word on Reform? Don’t Bet on It
What terms and phrases come to mind when we ponder education reform? In my thirty years of classroom teaching experience, here are some possibilities: stonewalling, filibustering, phony facades, incantations, pompous ostentations, consternations, debacles, nihilism, arcane jargon, harangues, diatribes, demagoguery, gibberish, and conjurations. It translates to, “When all is said and done—more was said than done!” We still have the assembly-line, factory-model organizational structure—rushed fifty-minute periods and five-minute breaks, seven times a day. No wonder a great majority of students don’t equate school with learning. They equate it with stress or purgatory. Some schools have changed to block scheduling, which seems to have helped this psychological dilemma. A colleague said that one of his education professors (you know the “ivory tower” docent academic theorists) said that education will always be a century behind the times. “If we continue to do the same things in the same way and expect different results, then we are indeed insane.”
This observation is a product of what Herbert Kohl calls “willed not-learning.” In his book I Won’t Learn From You, Kohl says, “Such not-learning is often and disastrously mistaken for failure to learn or the inability to learn.”
“Learning how to not learn is an intellectual and social challenge; sometimes you have to work very hard at it. It consists of an active, often ingenious, willful rejection of even the most compassionate and well-designed teaching. It subverts attempts at remediation as much as it rejects learning in the first place. Over the years, I’ve come to side with them in their refusal to be molded by a hostile society and have come to look upon not learning as positive and healthy in many situations.
“I came to understand that children in school act in ways that are shaped by the institution; therefore, it is essential never to a judge a child by his or her school behavior.”
One final piece of information, as reported in the American Teacher, confirms the relative disadvantage of US teachers. The number of teaching hours a year is 958 at the primary level, 964 at lower secondary, and 942 for upper secondary. The overall means for teachers in the Organization of Economic Countries and Development’s twenty-three member nations at the three levels are 791 hours, 700 hours, and 630 hours, respectively. This proves the ultimate paradox of more is less and less is more.
David A. Hancock
Cleveland Heights
Hancock teaches at Cleveland Heights High School.
Can’t Predict Success
The following is a letter regarding “Math Scores on the SAT Hit Highest Mark in 30 Years” (Aug. 30):
Don’t get too excited. An increase of three points means that students are answering two or three more questions correctly.
In my thirty-two years of classroom teaching experience, I still have many students who have taken algebra and geometry fail the ninth-grade math proficiency test. Most lack basic skills with fractions, decimals, percentages, and analytical problem-solving. Let us remember that the SAT is an aptitude test (readiness, ability, talent, knack, skill, proficiency), not an achievement test (success, attainment, triumph, accomplishment). Standardized tests ignore skills and abilities needed to function in a complex, pluralistic society—such as the ability to work collectively in various social and cultural contexts, to adjust to change, to understand the perspectives of others, to persevere, to motivate, to solve problems in a real-life context, to lead, and to value moral integrity and social commitment.
I have known many students who attended prestigious colleges yet have not been “successful” and many who have attended local community colleges and universities and succeeded very well.
As Marian Wright Edelman said, “You can get all As and still flunk life.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
LETTERS
HOMEWORK’S PROBLEM
I read with interest the article “Homework Overload—Are We Trying Too Hard?” (Feb. 14). As a public sch
ool educator for thirty years, I agree with William Glasser, MD, author of The Quality School, Schools without Failure, and several other books. As difficult as it may be for both educators and parents to accept, mandatory homework may be the main reason that so many students take schoolwork out of their quality worlds.
Leadership guru W. Edward Deming would say that if 80 percent of the workers will not do what they are asked to do, it is the fault of the system. This is a significant statistic proving that the “do what we tell you to do whether it is satisfying or not,” boss-managed system does not work, yet we continue to pay little attention to the system itself.
The way to solve the problem of students not doing homework is exactly the opposite of what we do now: reduce compulsory homework drastically and emphasize the importance of classwork.
David A. Hancock
Chester Township
Hancock teaches at Cleveland Heights High School.
The Book That Ignited the Great Homework Debate: The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning
Etta Kralovec and John Buell are educators who dared to challenge one of the most widely accepted practices in American schools. Their provocative argument—first published in their book and featured in Time and Newsweek, in numerous women’s magazines, and on national radio and network television broadcasts—was the first to openly challenge the gospel of “the more homework, the better.”
Consider the following:
□In 1901, homework was legally banned in parts of the US. There are no studies showing that assigning homework before junior high school improves academic achievement.
□Increasingly, students and their parents are told that homework must take precedence over music lessons, religious education, and family and community activities. As the homework load increases (and studies show it is increasing) these family priorities are neglected.
The Diary of a Mad Public School Teacher Page 3