The claim that college has become the new high school is starting to gain some traction. The Florida College Reading Council reported recently that nearly 55 percent of students attending Florida colleges are enrolled in remedial classes. Judging by President Obama’s newest education initiatives, the problem reaches well beyond Florida. The President has called for an overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in order to tighten the screws on teacher preparation and student performance, adding to a growing chorus of politicians and educational bureaucrats who have hastily jumped on the accountability bandwagon.
Have public policy leaders considered the possibility that poor student performance is a matter that extends well beyond the classroom? Having been a teacher for a decade and a half, I can attest to a number of other factors that have much greater influence on student 
performance than anything I do or don’t do in the classroom, but I hear no one addressing these factors. Plans for improvement seem to exclusively target teachers and administrators, insinuating that either they are to blame or they are the solution. Neither is realistic. Rather than asking whether or not the problem lies in instruction, policy leaders default to mandates: a host of outcomes-based standards, so-called “innovative” teaching techniques, and teacher accountability measures that punish teachers if they don’t single-handedly save each and every student.
It is easy to preach higher standards and accountability from the soapbox, but in the classroom a few crucial factors in student performance show up for which policy recommendations fail to account.
Chronic Sleep Deprivation: High school students are notorious night owls. Some are chronically sleep deprived, trying to function each day on less then 5 hours of sleep. The saying, “You can’t fool Mother Nature,” comes to mind here. The human body simply doesn’t work right when it’s in a constant state of fatigue; it will suffer from decreased mental acuity, unstable emotions, attention deficit, and lower ambition. Everybody knows these deficits directly oppose learning, but few seem concerned enough to step in and prevent this bad habit.
Electronic over-stimulation: It seems more than ever teen students are hyper-stimulated. For some, not a moment goes by that they are not wired to something: big-screen TVs, surround-sound, iPods, cell phones, and computers. Lots of young children seem incapable of traveling 15 minutes in the minivan to school without staring at a DVD player. Many young people have been utterly immersed in a digital din since they were toddlers. Is it not foolish to think that a gadget addict could concentrate on a complex text, have the patience to see a nuanced argument through to its logical end, or sit still and concentrate when necessary?
Compounding the problem is that parents often exhibit the same kind of persistent attachment to electronic media. There are TVs in multiple rooms with access to hundreds of channels that seem to always be on. Mom and Dad are engrossed either in their home computer and on their portable mini computers just about everywhere else. Meanwhile multiple electronic babysitters keep the kids occupied for hours on end. Once everyone goes to bed, many teens are just hitting their social networking stride and will continue texting or Facebooking unsupervised for hours. This is not to say that electronic media is inherently evil. Used conservatively they can be useful–even necessary. However, their use in our day has crowded out some of the necessary virtues of a learner, like sustained focus, deep reading, and industriousness.
Drugs and alcohol: The Partnership for a Drug Free America reports that drug use in on the rise among teens–up 19% from their previous year’s study. 39 percent of those polled said they drink and 19 percent said they had smoked pot in the last month. This places serious limitations on school improvement measures. How likely is it that student performance will increase while teen drug and alcohol abuse is on the rise? Is it really fair to hold teachers responsible for the performance of their students when almost 1/5 of every class is getting high on drugs and 2 out of every 5 students are drinking?
The effects of substance abuse extend beyond the users themselves. Having to sit next to a pot head or a binge drinker in class doesn’t tend to support learning. Teachers find themselves in the impossible situation of trying to challenge students who actually want to learn without leaving the substance abusers behind. Any teacher can attest that the lowest performing 20 percent of a class ends up getting most of the teacher’s attention. When it comes time for grades to be given out, no one is going to account for users’ secret drug habits; it’s just going to look like the teacher let kids fall through the cracks.
In all the get-tough rhetoric flying around now, it is bound to be said that drug use goes with the territory–if you’re a high school teacher you just have to roll with the punches and find a way to get results anyway. Nonsense! Teachers are not drug counselors. They’re not running half-way houses or juvenile lock up. Junkies are poisonous to the entire school. They don’t just destroy their own lives, they invite others to join them. They create cliques of underachievers that almost always seem to spread their misery whether it’s recruiting new users or inviting into the school all the negative social factors that accompany drug use.
Talk of reform is just talk unless schools take seriously their responsibility to drug test students. If they are not willing to remove substance abusers immediately when they are caught, they will never get on top of the problem. If parents don’t take an active role in monitoring their kids’ social lives, they will continue to send a steady stream of burnouts into already faltering classrooms.
Doomed Strategies
Modern educational orthodoxy holds that the only way to improve education is engagement. In other words, students don’t learn because they’re not interested. If we can come up with innovative methods that engage students, they will fall in love with learning and become one giant National Honor Society. Sound a bit idealistic? It is–especially when teachers pursue teaching methods that have more gimmick than grit. The trend is to design fun-filled lessons that integrate multimedia technology and which require students to get up and move around–lessons that require interpersonal interaction, and open-ended creativity. These so-called “student-centered” activities look vibrant and increase the fun quotient, but do little to impart knowledge.
Students acquire skills by practicing them. What are the skills in which modern high schoolers are deficient? Reading, writing, and math. Add to this an appalling lack of cultural literacy: world literature, history, government, languages, art, and music. Catchy lessons look stimulating, but if students aren’t reading more, writing more, and calculating more, no amount of amusement is going to make up for it. Educationalists have been preaching engagement for 30 years, and where has it gotten us? We graduate students who are consistently inferior to the graduates of other industrialized countries and it shows no signs of improving in the near future. Graduation rates are still scandalously low in most American cities. Colleges report that they spend more time than ever remediating new students.
What seems to have been left off the table in the nation’s discussion of educational reform is student accountability. I’m not referring to accountability on a giant impersonal standardized test. I’m referring to day-to-day accountability that emphasizes content, coaches and drills students, and quizzes them frequently. If they don’t try, they fail. No dumbing down, no childish gimmicks, no padding grades with cupcake assignments, no grade inflation. Students get help if they need it, but only the kind of help that requires them to work up to established standards. Trying to get students to seek and accept help is reasonable; enabling their helplessness by over-accommodating them is disastrous. Paradoxically, one of the greatest obstacles to this kind of student accountability is parents who don’t want the headache of reigning in a wayward student or the potential lower grades that might occur in the process. Teachers who want to implement common sense structure in their approach will often swim against the current of angry parents and the administrators who have to deal with them.
I’m not advocating that teachers bear no responsibility in the success or failure of their students. Teachers are responsible for infusing lessons with passion and truth. They should offer interesting lectures and discussions, and practice essential skills with appropriate repetition. Students should be engaged by excellent texts, the works of genius that are the great heritage of western civilization. Schools must move away from cookie-cutter texts that are heavy on gloss and graphics, but diluted and dull in prose. For the life of me, I’ll never understand how schools plan to engage students with enormous generic texts that are little more than annotated curriculum outlines. The course-in-a-book approach has no soul, no drama, no literary attraction. It tends to dictate to the teacher what ought to be taught rather than supporting the plans of a creative teacher who knows and is responsive to his or her students.
Politicians, most of whom have no teaching experience whatsoever, speak in platitudes about weeding out less-engaging teachers and then mass produce one-size-fits all assessments that reward the type of knowledge that is a mile wide and an inch deep. They come up with a cockamamie plan, give it a catchy name, spend billions of dollars to implement it, and then repackage the same worn-out bubble sheet tests that didn’t work the last time we resolved to change the way teachers teach and students learn. The only people that benefit from the latest greatest educational panacea are the politicians who want to position themselves as education candidates. The same politico-educational establishment that brought us the last in a long line of educational debacles comes to us yet again asking us to trust them.
The Big Picture
The reason current reform proposals will surely fail is that they purport to solve problems without addressing causes bigger than the school. They ignore the reality that schools are cultural indicators. When a culture is dying (as it is in America) the schools die with it. An ever-increasing proportion of students come from broken and detached homes in which there has been little intellectual and moral formation. A growing proportion of children are, in essence, raised by electronic devices. The temptation to overworked, overstressed parents is immense because it is much easier, in the short-term, to supervise children when their brains are anesthetized by constant digital stimuli. Preferring the passive electronic entertainment, kids forego more active occupations like reading, imagining, making up games, talking, drawing, exercising, or pursuing a creative hobby. Every time this trade-off occurs an opportunity to refine thinking, language, and creativity is missed. As if the cognitive effects aren’t bad enough, the media they consume is also defining the world for them. Too often, the shows they watch, the music they listen to, and the websites they frequent, glamorize moral depravity. Irreverence, casual premarital sex, dumb risk-taking, violence, dishonesty, drugs, and alcohol make for titillating entertainment, but they are the very vices that most threaten academic success.
Kids eventually find themselves in the position of being unable to relate to anything that lacks the virtual hyperactivity of the electronic world they’ve created for themselves. They seem increasingly less capable of digging beneath the surface to see the finer points of a story or an argument, much less construct one of their own. They read, think, and speak in the same bullet-point style that comprises the language of the internet. They lose focus when a spoken or written statement exceeds the 140 characters of Twitterese. Their minds seem wired to the staccoto rhythm of texting. Poeticism and literary flourish annoy most modern day teens, because they either exceed their attention span, their vocabulary, or the fragmented nature of the language they have acquired. Language as art may well be an appreciation today’s graduates never develop.
Families are the first educators of children. They set the pattern of learning throughout the schooling years, but they’ve taken their hands off the wheel. The new attitude toward education is really just a spoken version of an old unspoken expectation that teachers are to cure all that ails their students with no excuses. They are told to suck it up regardless of the learning habits (or unlearning habits) students bring to the classroom. This is the hand the teacher has been dealt, and he or she must simply “stand and deliver.” If students fail, no matter how opposed their attitudes and habits to learning, it is the teacher’s fault. Placing the burden of learning exclusively on the shoulders of teachers, will not work because it demands the impossible. The question is, will we ever learn this lesson?
