My problem with “FAILING” schools

 

There is so much talk in the education world about “failing” schools. Reformers and politicians alike want to turn-around or take over failing schools, they want to punish or close failing schools, in Pennsylvania our own governor wants to offer students vouchers to get out of failing schools; however, much like the oft-scapegoated “bad” teachers, there are many problems with this obsession with FAILING schools. 

According to No Child Left Behind (2001), any school that does not meet its Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals for a given year can be designated as FAILING. Further, a school can be labeled as FAILING if any of its subpopulations (low-SES, Special ed, ELL, African-American, Asian, Hispanic, White, etc) don’t meet AYP in a given year.   There are a host of problems with this provision of the legislature (and to get deeper into them I highly recommend Diane Ravich’s The Life and Death of the Great American School System), but what it boils down to is that at any given time, a school or district that does not have 100% of students reaching proficiency is in danger of being labeled FAILING. 

(Interestingly, if all public schools in the United States don’t reach proficiency by next school year, by its own criteria, NCLB itself ought to be labeled FAILING… though we don’t have to wait that long to know that it is an utter failure when it comes to supporting the education of our nation’s neediest students.) 

Politicians and reformers alike are obsessed with this idea of FAILING schools and it makes me cringe every time I hear the term. 

Educational scholars Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell (the current vice-president of NCTE) explain in their work The Art of Critical Pedagogy:

Given the overwhelming body of evidence that reveals decades of funding and structural inequalities between schools in high- and low-income communities it is illogical to compare schools across these communities and then decry urban schools as failures. When one set of schools is given the resources necessary to succeed and another group of schools is not, we have predetermined winners and loser. In this scenario, failure is not actually the result of failing.  This is the paradox facing urban school reformers.  On the one hand, urban schools are producing academic failure at alarming rates; at the same time, they are doing this inside a systemic structural design that essentially predetermines their failure. (p. 2) 

How is it fair to label a school as FAILING when it is perpetually under-resourced, has a teaching staff that consists of under-trained TFA members,  and serves a population that is highly mobile and struggling with poverty and even homelessness.

Later, they cut directly to the point:

Urban schools are not broken; they are doing exactly what they are designed to do.   (p. 2)

Many politicians and school reformers are playing with a stacked deck.  When you under-resource schools so severely (as has been done all over the country, but especially in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh), what other outcome can you expect but failure. 

**It is important to note that Duncan-Andrade and Morrell do not use this argument as an excuse, but rather as a counterpoint to the constant “failure” of urban schools.  They don’t suggest that we should accept schools as they are, but rather offer the resources that urban schools need to improve, rather than punish or close schools.

So there are major structural problems with labeling schools FAILING, but what about the effect that this label has on the school, the community, the teachers, and… lest we forget… the students. 

An article published recently in Mother Jones outlines (among other things) what students, teachers, and administrators feel when they find out they’ve been labeled FAILING.  The author, Kristina Rizga, describes the principal at Mission School in San Francisco as he deals with the aftermath of making the state’s low-performing school list.  The school’s graduation and college acceptance rates have been improving, as have their test scores, but it doesn’t matter if they didn’t reach AYP.  Now principal finds out that because of their low-performing status, they are eligible for additional funding (which is a GREAT thing for a school on a bare bones budget), but they must undergo “major restructuring” to remain open. 

Thus is the fundamental problem with the labeling of FAILING schools.  The system does not account for individuality within the school system. If you don’t meet certain standards, make way for the corporate reformers.  This is not to mention what effect that labeling a neighborhood school as “FAILING” has on the surrounding community or students who attended the school.  

 

Imagine you see someone fall off a boat.  Do you wait for them to drown before throwing them a life preserver?  Of course not…

NCLB and the current educational climate have created a system in which schools must “drown” before they receive any supports (funding, resources… anything).  In this climate, of course students are flocking to charter schools (both reputable and otherwise).  Students and their families are being bombarded with information about how their schools are FAILURES.  Would you want to stick around to help revive a FAILING school?  Neither would many members of urban communities...  and that’s exactly what corporate reformers are counting on. 

TFA and assumptions about poverty

 

I read a well written piece on Reuters today that I feel outlines many of my fundamental concerns with TFA.

*Before I begin on what might come off as “TFA Bashing” (but in my opinion is not), I should say that I take issue with what the organization has become and the agenda that I feel they are pushing, not with individual corps members who are  following their training and supervisors.  I have a number of friends who have done TFA (with mixed reviews) and I’ve worked with a handful of corps members and alums.  

That said, in the interest of full disclosure, here is my personal background with TFA:

I went to a small, “highly selective” liberal arts school where TFA recruited heavily. They employed students, typically NOT education minors (in the teacher ed program you majored in your subject and minored in ed.) to speak to classes and recruit students to apply to the program.  Knowing I had been involved with a number of mentoring and teaching programs, I got calls from the recruiters, but after I told them I was committed to student teaching and the “traditional route” they left me alone. 

From my graduating class of about 700 students (I know, small), 6 students joined TFA.  Of those six, 1 quit during institute, 2 left after their first year, and 3 completed their 2 year commitment.  Also, according to the most recent college alumni magazine one of those 3 is now “one of the youngest principals in the country” (which is a whole separate concern for me). 

While these six students were completing their summer institutes in urban districts around the country, I was applying to and interviewing at schools all over Philly.  At almost every school, they asked disappointed, “So you aren’t TFA?” As though doing my student teaching and being fully certified was some sort of black mark on my application. In spite of my frustration, I ultimately found a job working at an alternative school, so no harm done.  I offer this personal account to show that even for traditionally trained novice teachers there is an “us vs. them” dichotomy set up with TFA. 

Though I have a host of other concerns with the present iteration of TFA, one particular quote from Stephanie Simon’s piece on Reuters jumped out at me.  A 22-year-old recruit who will be teaching in LA said, “I’m here to tell these kids that they have potential. They’ve never been told that before”.  The second sentence really rubbed me the wrong way.  Though I don’t think this well meaning recruit intended to insult the population of students that they’ll be teaching in the fall, it certainly struck me that way.

 If I’ve learned anything from teaching so-called “dropouts” for the last three years, it’s that you can’t make any assumptions about the students, their families, or their experiences.  Saying that students have never been told that they have potential is an assumption that people make about kids in poverty (and their families) and these assumptions are dangerous.  See the criticism of Ruby Payne’s “A Framework for Understanding Poverty”.  Teachers and districts love people like Payne who offer a step by step outline for how to teach poor kids.  The reality, however, is that there are no step-by-step directions.  In her book, which served as a great counter example in my urban ed classes, Payne makes generalizations and assumptions about children in poverty that I found shocking and absurd.  Further, even if her assumptions held true, I didn’t find them to be particularly helpful to my teaching. 

I feel that in its rush to “prepare” recruits for the classroom, TFA has drawn on the work of people like Payne who offer quick fixes to working with children in poverty.  This approach leads recruits to make assumptions that could ultimately make their work in the classroom even more difficult and be potentially damaging to their students.