RUTHFULLY YOURS

The threat of more school closings in New York brought an unruly mob atmosphere to the large public hearing held by the Department of Education this week. The throngs of teenagers screaming “We Don’t Care” is emblematic of more fundamental issues than their not wanting to hear any speechifying by Cathy Black, Bloomberg’s unpopular new appointment as Chancellor. While it may be true that some schools are failing their students, it’s more germane that “students” are failing at school.  When you have an escalating non-graduation rate, an under-reported functional  illiteracy rate and growing problems of drugs and violence within the school boundaries, you know that high school is not the place to start making changes. A slew of social problems has created a population of young people, many of whom are incapable of academic work. Their fundamental math and reading skills are so blunted that they have little chance of success at advanced subjects yet we go through the pretense of forcing them through a high school curriculum they have little chance of mastering.

Instead of reverting to more drill work for honing these skills, our educators have gone in the opposite direction of more creative projects, deluding students who haven’t learned grammar or sentence structure into the pretense that they have something interesting to say and sufficient tools for that expression. Changing the names of high schools to lofty-sounding titles such as   “High School of World Cultures,” “The New Explorers High School for Films and Humanities,” “High School for International Business and Finance” is an insulting scam as these institutions have equally egregious graduation rates and aren’t leveling with students about their own severe academic shortcomings. Catholic schools have traditionally done better with low-performing students by emphasizing structure, discipline, authority and uniforms – all of which create an atmosphere of respect for the classroom and its teachers. What students in public school have learned is the opposite – that teachers can be challenged and even physically attacked, that students are entitled to their rights and their opinions, that an atmosphere of bedlam is often tolerated though it precludes any hope of actual learning.

For those students who manage to graduate and get into community colleges, there is intensive remedial work that must be done. This realization must be very disheartening to students who had been pushed along in a system that just wants to get them out because it can’t handle the enormity of the problem. Earlier this week, an article reported on the statistical impossibility of something that has been observed in many schools – the absence of numerical grades of 62, 63 and 64. Schools don’t want to fail kids even when they deserve to fail because they are in the business of self-preservation and don’t want to be closed for poor performance. So the cycle of students who can’t do the work and schools which pretend that they can continues until a culture clash erupts with the students and their parents facing off against an administrative reality from which they’ve been unhelpfully shielded.

There are no easy answers to the problems facing New York City schools or those of other large urban areas. More underclass students are entering school with such glaring vocabulary gaps that by five years old, they are already way behind and unlikely to catch up. Dumbing down the existing curriculum is not a good answer, nor is sugar coating failing work and pretending that it passes. Compounding all of this is our politically correct atmosphere that stifles the honesty necessary to make changes. We are forced to act as if all kids have the same equal opportunity to succeed. They don’t because life is not a level playing field and many kids start out getting an unfair roll of the dice genetically and environmentally. They’d have a better chance of compensating for that bad fortune if we rethought our pedagogical philosophy in grade school and made sure that children who can’t read or write or count are not promoted to grades where those skills are pre-requisites. We have made some progress in tackling the nutritional aspects of diet in school cafeterias and lunchrooms. What we demand that our younger students learn at school must be as nutritious as the milk that builds bones. Without that foundation, nothing else will work.