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Looking Up at Mediocrity: The Push to Make Failure the Standard
By Wiley | May 28, 2007
I wouldn’t necessarily call it glee that he spoke with, perhaps pride, definitely with the blind passion of a man guided by those good intentions that in the end result in wide-spread social disarray.
Several days ago, my partner and I made an appointment with our son’s vice principle to discuss the wide-range of disappointments surrounding his first year of middle school. We live in Northern California, which has some of the worst schools in the nation, so it’s anyone’s guess as to why this even surprised us. California’s education system is currently ranked 46th against other states.
We understood that middle school would be a stressful and frustrating time, but what we didn’t expect was for it all to start on the first day of sixth grade.
Middle school is filled with all sorts of surprises. As parents you learn to roll with them, cope as best as you can, and, when required, make up vague answers to unexpected questions.
Coming home that first day, we found out the first 20 minutes of P.E. would be spent reading(!), that the focus of another class would be alternative lifestyles, and that he would be placed in the G.A.T.E program.
On a side note, it wasn’t until later in the school year that his male P.E. teacher wore a blue dress with white polka dots. Hell, while I’m knee deep in it, let’s mention the history teacher who had to resort to raffling off an iPod in order to get the class to hand in their work. Though apparently that’s wide-spread. Students now get prizes from some teachers, raffle tickets to accumulate for even better prizes from others, prizes like leaving class five minutes early for lunch. Why? All for that grand gesture of doing what they’re supposed to be doing, things like turning in homework, not talking in class, or not burying a shank in the homeroom teacher’s kidney.
I need to back up a step, take a deep breath, and get back to the vice principle.
What you’ll be surprised to learn is that the focus of our discussion with him centered primarily around the G.A.T.E program. We haven’t really asked for much, just that our son learn to read, be able to string coherent sentences together, and develop an understanding of math and science. All the alternative lifestyle propaganda to sixth graders is icing. All this time we thought such discussions were a parent’s responsibility.
We know we’ve been lucky. Aside from an uncontrollable urge to vocalize every thought that shoots through his head, he has excelled in school, is well-adjusted socially, and even won the school-wide spelling bee after entering it the day before because he thought he might get to miss one of his classes.
But back to the G.A.T.E. program. All of this started a month after the school year began and our son had yet to bring home any paperwork related to G.A.T.E. We questioned him about the schoolwork he was getting and he told us it was the same work everyone else did.
We know from experience that the best way to get information from an 11 year old is to call his teachers and ask them instead. But several unreturned phone calls later, plus notes begging for an acknowledgement of these calls, we changed tactics and set our sights on the school’s G.A.T.E. coordinator. Surely a school that has passed out such a title would have a program to suit it. That led to an uncomfortable conversation in which we were told, in all seriousness, that teachers don’t like having G.A.T.E. students in their classes, because each one of those students comes with a parent that wants to be involved.
They hadn’t seen involved yet. We next tracked down the G.A.T.E. coordinator for the district, because the school district is required to hold three open meetings a year, and, by God, we were going to attend and make a difference. First, we needed more information about the program. Our biggest mistake was to expect a differentiated curriculum. No, scratch that. Our biggest mistake was to expect to find the information readily accessible. The differentiated curriculum was our second mistake. That’s not how it works. The latest trend in administering a G.A.T.E. program is called “clustering.” Boiling it down, all they’re doing is grouping said G.A.T.E. students into working environments with underperforming students so that, and this is the best part, the underperforming kids can benefit from the G.A.T.E. students. To which we understood it to mean, those underperforming kids – meaning ESL, non-English speaking, and those unfortunate kids who get no support or encouragement in the home – can copy the answers to various bits of schoolwork from the G.A.T.E. kids. Everyone’s score is raised and the school is saved for another year from being held accountable under the No Child Left Behind Act.
The first district meeting we attended was also our last, pushing us from being involved parents, wanting to make a difference, to being escape artists looking to get out of the district and, eventually, out of the state.
Fact. The San Leandro Unified School District has a G.A.T.E program but as of this writing doesn’t have a mission statement or any information available, online or otherwise. Then again, the term “program” implies the implementation of a set curriculum, and at its core, that’s not happening.
That was the gist of our argument to the vice principle. Things went downhill from there when he responded.
“Our district policy is designed to meet the needs of the majority. The majority of the kids in this school, and in this district, are low-income and underperforming.” He held his arms up like a scale for this next bit. “The district must weigh the needs of those kids against the needs of those students who excel, the G.A.T.E. students. We hope to raise the level of achievement for special needs kids to put them on the same academic level as the rest. All of the available resources go to meet their needs.”
The thing that he failed to articulate is that in order for the academic playing field to be leveled, not only does the standard of the special needs kids have to be raised, but the level of achievement from G.A.T.E. students, and others that excel, ultimately gets lowered.
We know, as parents of a middle school kid, that when the standardized state tests are administered each year, students will have spent the bulk of the previous few weeks studying nothing but the answers to the test questions. In fact, between 2004 and 2006, over 150 California schools were cited with supplying students with answers during the test, engaging the students in discussions during the test that might help them come up with answers to questions, or more blatantly, erasing and changing the answers themselves once the tests were turned in (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/05/13/MNGMSPPIU91.DTL).
As of this writing, it’s the end of the school year and there is a for sale sign in front of our home. Over the course of a single school year, we’ve met with teachers, school officials, district employees, and sent off one sternly worded letter to the district superintendent. I was raised to believe that one person can make a difference, but that was until we went up against a school district bureaucracy. Our schools can’t fight for change because they’re fighting just to stay at their current, underperforming levels.
The highest standard we can now hope for in our public schools is one of mediocrity. Ultimately, No Child Left Behind means no child shall finish above the rest.
Topics: education |
8 Responses to “Looking Up at Mediocrity: The Push to Make Failure the Standard”
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May 29th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
California really needs to shape up its schools. Unforutnately, the state educational policy-making elite and administrators follow whatever liberal doctrine is the flavor of the month–instead of realizing people are moving to towns with the best schools; and if they can’t afford that–ultimately moving out of state.
And we’ve already seen how well whole language and fuzzy math has hurt a whole generation of kids.
May 30th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
[…] in particular, a parent of an academically gifted child at Bancroft Middle School wrote this very personal blog about how the school’s handling of the G.A.T.E. program has inspired him to move out of […]
June 8th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
I would have to agree with Wiley. My wife and I had similar experiences with teachers at our son’s high school in Santa Rosa.
One of the few ways to hold our kid accountable in junior high was to stay in close contact with the teachers, however, once he got into high school it was impossible to open up lines of communication with the teachers. Here we are just north of the might Silicon Valley and probably 95% of his teachers didn’t even have an email. The phone numbers schools provided in order to leave voicemails for teachers were never set up either.
As it ends up, we were really never able to access what was most important: the nightly or weekly homework. I’ve talked to a high school teacher that taught in Colorado Springs and the school he was at provided each teacher with their own webpage containing contact info as well as homework and there was a way for parents to access their kids’ grades as well … on daily homework and tests.
And the head office treated both students and parents like they were a bother. I stood there one day waiting for something for about 15-20 min. while school admins talked about their weekend and didn’t even acknowledge me. Another time a teacher who was walking in and noticed me helped me out while the secretary just talked on the phone. And it would be one thing if they were all busy on school business but both times it was just personal crap they were busy with.
I’m really not sure what the solution is. Accountability would be nice. I’m not really bothered by sex education, alternative lifestyles or even men in dresses. What bothers me is the same wall that Wiley (the writer of the orig. blog) ran into … he’s calling it mediocrity. But really it’s more about getting funding and maintaining a status quo.
Although, I am really ambivalent about school vouchers being used for religious schools … I am more and more a supporter of school vouchers. Get your kids out while you can is my only advice. If I had it to do all over again, I would have pushed harder to get my step-son into any type of private school … just for the simple fact that he wouldn’t have been able to fall through the cracks because I could’ve maintained communication with teachers who were willing to work as a team.
Don’t get me wrong my step-son had a few great teachers who really went out of their way to do the best they could … but overall, I believe the system is broken.
And the admins at Montgomery High School in Santa Rosa need some serious customer service training … they set an extremely bad example for the kids. Big Time.
We really need to work to somehow re-assess the educational system. There needs to be more one on one … more mentorship, more reaching out to those parents who actually care, less kids per teacher. Maybe even breaking larger schools down into smaller schools. There definitely needs to be some type of focus on setting up our young students to achieve something great and work hard … not just learn how to slip by without working.
July 25th, 2007 at 8:49 am
I went through the San Leandro school system: Roosevelt, Bancroft, San Leandro High. I graduated in 2003 from the high school. I complained about the lack of G.A.T.E. programing in both the middle school and the high school. At Roosevelt we had an amazing G.A.T.E. program. We had all sorts of activities or special events.
I don’t know who was running the program for the first few years I was in it, but my mother actually took over their job for at least two years, while she also started and ran the ACE classes afterschool. I specifically remember coding programs on the old computers we had at school (which with certain commands, various alpha-and-numberical characters would visually spiral on the screen. We had rocket-building classes, taken elsewhere, but offered as G.A.T.E. programing, and when my mother took over, I know one of the classes in the ACE program was for G.A.T.E. students and we created a stop-animation film of Mr. Happy travelling around the world in 80 days.
Honestly, I missed G.A.T.E. programing when I hit Bancroft. All I remember being G.A.T.E.-related in middle school or high school was being called out of class maybe 1-3 times a year to attend some speech or special play in the auditorium. And even then, in high school it wasn’t even that often.
I complained about it plenty while doing my time in the middle school and high school. And currently, I’m working on a Recreation degree so I can fix the San Leandro Recreation department, which is seriously lacking. I work for the City of Oakland Recreation department (and have for over seven years), simply because the San Leandro Rec is so horrible. As part of that Recreation system, I would love to one day get the G.A.T.E. system back to how it was for me in elementary school and have that system be throughout the San Leandro School District for everyone.
I’m running out of time to finish this as I need to get to work, but if I left anything out, I’ll definitely come back and add it — and excuse any errors, I don’t have time to read over it just now.
I’m glad to see that someone else that is as peeved about the “programing” as I am and have been!
July 25th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Your story inspired in me rage and then sadness. Before I started teaching English on a college level, I worked as a substitute “teacher” in the Vallejo City Unified School District where I received vocal death-threats, was attacked physically by a middle school girl after I tried to break up a fight that she started during class, and was surprised by the fact that none of the students were even punished. The death threats were laughed at by my principle, who coached football and put all the school’s money into sports while the library had fewer books than my apartment, and the attack just meant that the girl continue serving detention as she already had been.
Let me, as you said, try to “back up a step, take a deep breath,” and get to my comment about the G.A.T.E. program. As a sub, I was sent to elementary schools, middle schools and high schools, and allotted “classes” in all subjects. I was also assigned, even though I don’t have any training in the field, “Special-Needs” “classes,” into which, like G.A.T.E. classrooms, students are herded in, and in which the student conditions raged from blindness to emotional issues, to learning disabilities, to, most commonly, behavior issues, to brightness and motivation. With such disparate student needs, as you can imagine, the teacher is trying to basically keep the majority of the rowdy kids from insulting or hurting the kids with real needs, protecting the most vulnerable, overlooking the polite and motivated students, teaching for ten minutes out of the our that are distributed in tiny bits throughout, and basically play coach with the students with behavior problems while students with serious needs are not tended to. After the first session, a “Special Needs” teacher who watched the class from the hallway said, “looking up at mediocrity,” “You’re doing really well. That’s just how it goes here.”
While an underperforming school used to more often than not receive grant money that was meant to fund programs to help the issue, as long as the school proved that it was making improvements, Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” fundamentally does the opposite, threatening schools to cut funds if test scores, the only thing he cares about, drop. This minor premise relies on the major premises, if schools are underperforming, it is the teachers’ faults and if we scare them with threats of even greater poverty, then they will have to listen. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” should be called “More Soldiers and Less Thinkers,” as it makes it mandatory for the administration to provide the military with lists of the names of students who they feel will make good soldiers, namely, the students not educated, while epidemics, like the 78% of the black male population in Baltimore City not graduating from high school, go unobserved. The fact that military recruitment is even part of an education plan says all you need to hear.
On the topic of fear-inspired educational plans, which evidently inspire some of our students, I’ll share a final anecdote about, let’s just say, a principle at one of the Vallejo high schools. I was subbing a math class and, during my free period, was told to “report to” the assembly room to work as a chaperone. As I arrived, I noticed that the principle was on stage in front of the gigantic freshman class, delivering with reddened mug a diabolical diatribe on their recent behavior, threatening “harsher” rules, and, whenever a student even giggled or sneezed, he would point to the student and the nearest chaperone would escort him or her out of the room. When I was assigned my first victim, I walked him of the room to find that the other chaperones were chewing out the “offenders,” threatening them, and then returning them to their seats. I looked at my “offender,” who had snickered a particular contradictory point of the outrageous rant, looked away, breathed for a few minutes, looked at him again shaking my head, and silently lead him back into his doomed chance at education. I continued to do this for the rest of my period, ensuring that I would be paid my ten dollars for the hour, and “reported” to my next class. Isn’t that similar to the “Shock and Awe” phase in the first Baghdad bombings? Hey, is that terrorism?
July 31st, 2007 at 10:31 am
[…] not sure how you can fix the state of San Leandro public schools, but catering to the lowest common denominator seems to be the mantra, and it seems to be a recipe for failure. I have a lot of respect for […]
August 24th, 2007 at 11:57 am
[…] leave San Leandro for many reasons - it’s usually because of a bad experience with the public schools, or leaving before their kids attend junior high, or to move their business because of San […]
February 23rd, 2008 at 2:26 pm
[…] is my response to an emotional blog entry written by Stephen Wiley, my friend and the editor of Olios Online, about the his gripes about the […]