eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466886957 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/09/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 430 KB |
About the Author
Joe Williams writes about education and the New York City schools for The New York Daily News. Previously, he covered education for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel where he won numerous local and national awards for his coverage of that city's private school voucher program. His children attend public schools in Manhattan, where he lives.
Joe Williams writes about education and the New York City schools for The New York Daily News. He is the author of Cheating Our Kids. Previously, he covered education for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel where he won numerous local and national awards for his coverage of that city's private school voucher program. His children attend public schools in Manhattan, where he lives.
Read an Excerpt
Cheating Our Kids
How Politics and Greed Ruin Education
By Joe Williams
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2005 Joe WilliamsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8695-7
CHAPTER 1
CHILDREN LAST
Tiffany Schley wasn't in a mood to be overly nostalgic about her four years of high school. A feisty 17-year-old from Brooklyn's rough-and-tumble Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the largest predominantly African American neighborhood in New York City, Tiffany was the newly crowned valedictorian for the Class of 2004 at the High School of Legal Studies when we first met. Like most young people who achieve that level of academic success, she already had an impressive resume: She had served as editor of the school newspaper, had chaired the yearbook committee, had been elected to student government, and had been accepted to attend the prestigious Smith College on a full scholarship. On paper, her four years looked wonderful. Her reality was quite different.
The high school Tiffany attended was a small "school within a school" located inside the old Eastern District High School in Bushwick, Brooklyn, an economically depressed neighborhood adjacent to her own. As was starting to happen at many large dysfunctional high schools around the country at the time, Eastern District in 1999 was converted to several smaller, theme-based schools in an attempt to remedy longstanding struggles with violence and academic failure. But the experiment had seen less than stellar results. By the 2002–03 school year, only 63 percent of the students who started school there four years earlier had managed to graduate. Even worse, nearly 90 percent of the students who did graduate did so without earning a New York State Regents Diploma—meaning they didn't pass the mandatory tests in such basic subject areas as math and reading and were forced to settle for a virtually worthless "local" diploma. With eight out of ten of her classmates poor enough to qualify for a free lunch, these were clearly students for whom a good education might have been a ticket to a better life, if only such an education had been offered to them.
Tiffany, voted most likely to succeed by her classmates, originally intended to focus her graduation speech on what it took for her to overcome a lisp earlier in her life. When she sat down at her computer to write it out, however, she changed her mind. Thinking of how many of her classmates from four years earlier wouldn't be graduating with her, she decided instead to focus on what it was like to attend a public school that had sent every possible message to its students over the previous four years that their education didn't matter.
The way Tiffany saw it, she had put up with 12 years of substandard education, provided by what was supposed to be the greatest city in the world. The least the school administrators could do, she thought, was allow her, as the valedictorian, to shine a spotlight on her school experience. Her written speech was rejected beforehand by an assistant principal, who took the liberty of writing a new speech for her, one that glorified the school and its staff for their hard work and dedication.
When graduation day came, Tiffany decided the assistant principal's speech would be both dishonest and inappropriate. She knew she deserved a better education than the city's public school system had given her, and she decided to use the bully pulpit that is afforded to class valedictorians to let the world know about it. When it was her turn to speak, she swallowed hard, bravely threw caution to the wind and delivered her original, unedited version of the commencement address to shocked classmates and guests.
Among the complaints she highlighted: Classes were overcrowded and textbooks and other basic materials were hard to come by. The school, its staff, and its students were victims of extremely unstable leadership, with four different principals running the school over the course of her four years there. She said students were taught by incompetent teachers, some of whom had trouble with the English language. Fewer than one in four teachers at the school in 2003 had worked there for more than two years and the overall atmosphere was unpleasant. To add insult to injury, Tiffany said in her speech, uncaring school administrators refused even to meet with students to discuss these kinds of problems despite repeated attempts on the part of students to do so during the school year. "They always want to keep the problems hush-hush, but what goes on in this school is real," Tiffany told me at the time.
Many students and teachers cheered in approval at the speech, but some school staff members bristled, viewing Tiffany's public airing of her complaints as being completely out of bounds. When Tiffany and her mother showed up at the school the following day to pick up her diploma, they were told she wouldn't get it unless she formally apologized to school officials for what she said. The mother and daughter then were promptly booted out of the building by school security guards. "We've been living with this for four years," a frustrated Tiffany explained to me on the telephone, moments after the class valedictorian and her mother were escorted out of the school building.
I wrote about Tiffany's situation for my newspaper, the New York Daily News, and the story took on a life of its own. Red-faced school officials eventually caved in after Mayor Michael Bloomberg called the decision to deny Tiffany's diploma "boneheaded" and referred to the offending educrat as a "bozo" at a press conference. Tiffany's proud mother, Felicia Schley, was shocked by the response of the grownups involved. The kids who managed to stay in school from freshman year through graduation, she told me, did so in spite of the obstacles the school created over the course of four years. "She busted her behind to get there (to the podium as valedictorian), she kept it clean, and she was honest," her mother said. "Sometimes the truth hurts."
The truth, as it is increasingly clear, is that our once-heralded system of education in America has lost its way. Almost everyone agrees that the education system should exist to serve children like Tiffany, but it has been captured by groups—teachers and other employees, politicians, philanthropists, higher education institutions, vendors, consultants, et cetera—whose interests and egos are protected and advanced through competent and powerful organizations, including unions, lobbying firms, and even the major political parties themselves. Children don't have such representation or political pull, let alone the right to vote. Their parents often are treated more like opponents of the system than the actual customers, especially when they have concerns or complaints.
It has become a dirty little secret within public education. Despite the fact that the system as it now exists does not meet the needs of many students like Tiffany, our society is often unwilling to talk in stark terms about the gravity of the situation. Everyone knows there is a problem, but we prefer to speak of public education as an institution in glowing terms. We prefer to see the glass as half full, even when the vast emptiness inside the glass translates into the dashed hopes and dreams of so many of our young citizens who most need the institution. We often say we are pro–public education, yet we allow the system we supposedly support to continue chugging along unobstructed, while by almost any measure, the job of educating children isn't happening the way it should.
Among the world's major industrialized nations, the United States had the poorest student outcomes per dollar spent on education, according to a 2004 comparison of math and reading scores conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Of the 40 countries whose scores were analyzed, the United States ranked twenty-eighth in math and eighteenth in reading.
Even our best and brightest are getting a substandard education. Many of our students who leave high school and head for college do so without having mastered basic skills necessary to complete college-level work. "Free and open to all, the public school system tricks students into believing they've been well-educated," wrote former Los Angeles Times education reporter Richard Lee Colvin in a 2005 opinion piece, noting that the California State University system in 2004 required 58 percent of its freshmen to take remedial classes in math, writing, or both. And remember, those are the students who do make it to graduation day, the kids we consider the lucky ones. The Children's Defense Fund estimates that every school day in America, 2,539 high school students become dropouts. Often, these students report that they have simply grown tired of school violence and pointless lessons that don't seem to be getting them any closer to a diploma.
The statistics in New York City alone are shocking: Only 18 percent of children who begin high school graduate with a Regents diploma four years later. For black and Hispanic students, the Regents graduation rate is less than 10 percent. Despite years of curriculum and other reforms, fully two-thirds of the city's eighth graders are not capable of passing the New York State math and reading exams.
Put bluntly, the nation's schools are in a crisis, a reality understood best by the same people who work in school systems every day. New York City school chancellor Joel Klein notes that most people who work for him within the bowels of the school system would never dream of allowing their kids to attend schools like the one from which Tiffany Schley graduated. "When I meet with people in the department, I ask them how many schools in the city they'd feel comfortable sending their children to, and no one has ever said more than 20 percent," Klein said. "That means that, at best, 80 percent of our schools aren't good enough for our own people to send their kids to." And yet the grownups keep cashing their paychecks, consultants and other experts keep getting fat contracts, and the public sticks its head in the sand, or at best, wrings its hands while the cycle continues. The kids always come last.
Public education has long been viewed romantically as a distinctly American way for the underprivileged to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. As Americans, we value individualism and stories about rising above the odds, so much so that we sometimes fall into the trap of unfairly blaming students for the lousy education they are getting from adults. We like to think that it is up to the students to rise to the occasion, often turning a blind eye when our American public education system neglects these same kids year after year by failing to provide the kinds of tools and incentives they need to beat the odds.
Take the example of comedian Bill Cosby, who in 1992 joined New York City mayor David Dinkins in visiting Public School 113 in Harlem to give the students a pep talk about the need to stay in school and get an education. The school, located in one of the toughest and economically depressed parts of New York City, perennially had the lowest reading and math scores in the five boroughs. But Cosby's message was delivered to the wrong people. When less than 5 percent of the school's students are reading at grade level, it's a safe bet that there is an entire cast of adult characters who should have been lectured on the "importance of education" before the students.
These adults had for years failed the children who met with Cosby and Dinkins that day. The long-time principal, who blamed the problem on budget cuts, had been denied tenure in the 1970s because of poor performance but was ultimately allowed to keep her job after her union sued on her behalf and won. Parents and students complained that the principal would spend her days getting drunk in her office, while reports of teacher assaults on students at the school piled up. When confronted with accounts of her drinking, the principal denied the charges, saying, "I know nobody came here and smelled alcohol on me."
In the 20 years before Cosby visited the brick school building, a dozen school superintendents had come and gone with no success in turning things around. Chancellors at the central office came and went, too, while the principal kept her job and hundreds of students moved from grade to grade without getting an education. In 1987, only one third grader in the school was able to do math on grade level. In the 1987–88 school year, teachers at P.S. 113 racked up 328 absences, less than half of which were covered by substitutes. Students told a Newsday reporter at the time that they frequently were asked to sit in classrooms unsupervised because there was no teacher around to supervise them. A 6th-grade girl said she was frequently asked to teach children in younger grades when their teachers were absent. For her work, she received a certificate and was given a mailbox with the rest of the faculty in the school office.
Considering how badly public education had failed those young people, a pep talk about the importance of education from Bill Cosby amounted to kicking the victims while they were down. In addition to possibly tearing into the powers that be who had allowed the school to get to that point in the first place, Cosby might have also considered a pep talk to the parents who ever let their children step foot inside the school. Considering the lack of any real education that had been made available to these young people by the system, their parents clearly would have been better off keeping them home in front of a television all day, where they at least might have had a chance to learn something.
MONEY IS POLITICS, POLITICS IS MONEY
As long as we continue to spend tax money on public schools, education will inherently be a political operation. Politics at its core involves the conflicts that arise over the distribution of public resources. As political scientist Harold Lasswell defined it, politics is the everyday fight over who gets what, when, and how. We spend more on public education than any other industrialized nation, making education spending one of the most sought-after pools of cash in the public sector. In the 2003–04 school year alone, local, state, and federal taxpayers ponied up more than $500 billion for public schools—more than the entire military defense budget. On average, only 60 cents on the dollar go toward "instruction," including teacher salaries and benefits, and supplies such as textbooks. That the other 40 cents go toward something other than teaching children—on expenses like legal fees, lobbying, transportation, and administration—shows how far off track our system has gotten. Often, as education professor Martin Haberman notes, the 40 cents of noninstructional spending shows "the highest priority is always the protection and growth of the district system" rather than the education of young people. We don't get what we pay for in our schools, but we get what we deserve because we simply don't insist as a society that the resources be used in ways that benefit our children.
The list of people and institutions fighting over the billions of dollars in school funds nationwide on a daily basis is dizzying: local colleges and universities that earn millions a year to train (and then retrain) teachers and principals, book publishers and test makers, bus companies, food vendors, et cetera. All claim to have the interests of children in mind. Even if the system that keeps them in business fails to do its job of educating kids year after year, these grownup interests still get paid.
Sometimes we even crank up the intensity with which we write these checks, but because the system is built in a way that puts other needs ahead of children, our students don't benefit. In Kansas City, Missouri, where tumultuous conditions wore out 20 school superintendents in 30 years, a court ordered that an extra $2 billion be spent over a dozen years (between the mid-1980s and late 1990s) as a supplement to the district's $125 million per year operating budget to improve education for minority students. School officials used the unprecedented cash infusion to boost teacher salaries and build 15 new schools. They included pricey luxuries like an Olympic-size swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, and a model United Nations chamber with simultaneous translation capability. Unfortunately, after a dozen years very little had really changed and the district still failed to meet any of the state's performance standards. Structure matters in education, particularly when school systems are configured in ways that assure that the needs of adults are addressed first and foremost.
There is simply no shortage of adults, however well intentioned they may be, who are willing to stand in line looking for handouts while our children suffer. When a special court-appointed panel in New York City recommended in 2004 that the city's public schools should get an additional $5.6 billion per year on top of its $13 billion operating budget to remedy a funding adequacy lawsuit, Chancellor Klein said he was bombarded by offers of help on how to spend it. "I never had so many friends before," Klein joked. Many people benefit from the billions of dollars spent on education in America each year—our task is to make sure students are at the top of that list.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cheating Our Kids by Joe Williams. Copyright © 2005 Joe Williams. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction * Children Last * Public Education, American-Style * The Public Education Cartel * The Plight of Teachers * No Vendor Left Behind * The Elephant in the Room--The Teachers Unions * Democrats and Republicans (But Mostly Democrats) * Friends with Deep Pockets * The Corporate Role in Reform * Leadership and Voters * Kids Can Come First * Parent Power