On a more somber note…

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I’m going to throw in a News Tribune article about a young woman who committed suicide by stepping out in front of a semi truck here because it deserves to be shared in its entirety:

Teacher’s suicide stuns school, spurs colleagues to speak out

School board surprised by allegations of workplace bullying and fear

January 01, 2012|By Becky Schlikerman, Chicago Tribune reporter

On Thanksgiving, a grade-school gym teacher parked on the shoulder of Interstate 80/94 in northwest Indiana, got out of her Mercury SUV and walked in front of a moving semi truck.

The 32-year-old’s suicide shocked the tiny Ford Heights school district where she worked. In the days afterward, tension grew amid conversations by co-workers about what had happened and questions from the Army veteran’s parents. The turmoil peaked during a crowded meeting in December, when some teachers and school board members clashed.

The suicide note that Mary Thorson left centered on frustrations at the school, and her death spurred some of her co-workers to speak out at the public meeting.

Teachers described an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in the two-school district, where little things snowballed over time.

“We don’t feel like we can speak out because we have been intimidated,” teacher Rose Jimerson said at the meeting. “We have signs all over the building about anti-bullying. … Our staff gets bullied.”

Co-workers and friends said in interviews that Thorson was deeply upset by her job and was worried she was on the verge of being fired. She had been suspended in April after allegedly striking a student and again a week before her death, records show. The second suspension was for allegedly cursing at a student, a co-worker said.

Even some of those close to Thorson acknowledged that it’s difficult to pinpoint why anyone commits suicide, but her death opened wounds in the district. School district officials have vowed to work on healing with new channels of communication.

School board members and the administration expressed sorrow over Thorson’s death but also surprise at the way some teachers described the work atmosphere.

At the meeting, board members denied the allegations and asked why no one had come forward with such concerns.

“If you guys would have come and brought allegations and we didn’t address it, then you would have every right to say what you need to say,” Board President Joe Sherman said.

Thorson, known as Coach T, left behind a handwritten, six-page note in her SUV. Other than one paragraph in which she apologized to her parents for the hurt her death would cause, the rest of the note was exclusively about Ford Heights School District 169.

Thorson’s parents agreed to share the note with the Tribune. In it, Thorson wrote, sometimes rambling, about the plight of children in the poor school district and the lack of resources and discipline. She also wrote about the school’s leadership and said teachers were not taken seriously.

“We must speak up about what’s going on!” The note concludes: “This life has been unbelievable.”

Thorson had started her teaching career after an eight-year stint in the Army Reserve, where she attained the rank of specialist and served honorably, said Army spokesman Mark Edwards. She joined in 1998, just out of high school, to help pay for college, said her father, John Thorson.

Thorson was the first in her family to graduate from college, getting a diploma from Western Illinois University in 2005. She worked at schools in Chicago and Bellwood before taking a job in Ford Heights at Cottage Grove Upper Grade Center in 2008.

A lot of sympathetic teachers in my district discussed this incident when it occurred. Teachers in underperforming schools frequently face that kind of stress, as outsiders demand fixes for troubles that no teacher can control. Children can’t learn unless they are in school, for example, but when parents don’t send those children, a teacher’s options are limited. That teacher may still get slapped in a review for the chronically absent students’ test scores.

 

Eduhonesty:  That teacher had been suspended after allegedly striking a student and suspended again shortly before her death for allegedly cursing at a student. I can’t speak to the truth of those allegations. I can tell readers that certain students try to provoke these responses. They may spend an entire class period trying to get the teacher as angry as possible in hopes of making that teacher do something stupid. Sometimes kids do this for sport, especially in our underperforming and urban schools. A kid who is failing his classes and plans to drop out has little incentive to behave. If the teacher sends him to the Dean, he gets out of class. That’s a win for a student who did not want to be in class in the first place. If the teacher doesn’t send that student out, but just looks steadily more harried and upset, that’s a win, too. Administration may provide little help. I have a referral form here for a student I sent out for talking. It says, “this is a classroom management issue.” The first time that student talked, that was a classroom management issue. The tenth or fifteenth time might have been. But by the time I wrote that referral, I was looking for some help. I wasn’t surprised not to get it, though.

Part of the problem is an idea sweeping through administrative academia: Administrators now are told that students need to be kept in the classroom if at all possible, since they cannot learn if they are not in the classroom. Professors who have never taught in a public school point out that removing kids from the classroom necessarily deprives those kids of opportunities to learn. But little attention is given to the impact of chronically-misbehaving students on the classroom, as they steal learning minutes from other students. Five minutes here, five minutes there, and pretty soon these students have taken hours from their peers, a fact that some of these miscreants find funny.

Why are there bully posters in all our schools? Because there are bullies in all our schools. The sad fact is that sometimes teachers are bullied, too. I hope the kids who kept pushing Mary Thorson’s buttons on that day have learned something from what happened. I’m selfish enough to hope they have a few nightmares, too.

Arming teachers is a bad idea

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The first paragraph of an article from http://news.yahoo.com/ark-ag-schools-cant-arm-teachers-staff-204340761.html:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas school districts can’t use a little-known state law to employ teachers and staff as guards who can carry guns on campus, the state’s attorney general said Thursday in an opinion that likely ends a district’s plan to arm more than 20 employees when school starts later this year.

Sanity prevailed here. Even in these scary times, arming teachers is a foolish plan. Remember that first-year, New York teacher who threw herself down the stairs, trying to avoid a second, bad classroom review? Remember the man who shot himself to death in his own classroom, planning for students to find his dead body? And while a Google search on “teacher attacks students” mostly returns articles about students attacking teachers, there are a few sobering stories of students being kicked, punched and even shoved into walls and lab tables by instructors. I remember one frustrated little woman, a first-year teacher who took a student’s electronic device, hurled it to the floor and stomped it into pieces, breaking the thing into tiny shards of plastic and metallic innards. I had no clue what the device had once been. That teacher left after her first year and I doubt she’s still teaching. Many equally fragile teachers remain in the classroom, though.

To be blunt, I want to say that if you arm teachers, one of them –somewhere, someday — is going to shoot up a school for sure. Teaching is far more stressful than postal work. Add to that the fact that we are not vetting our teachers for mental health. Employment applications don’t check to see if an applicant is half a bubble off plumb — or just plain bananas.

I recently filled out a number of those applications. They want to know if I am behind on student loans, if I have been convicted of crimes other than traffic tickets, if I am delinquent in child-support payments, if I have ever been accused of child abuse, if I am in the Sex Offender database, etc. But no one has ever asked  about my sanity. My mental and physical health history are mostly off-limits by law, as they are for job applicants all across the country. The district isn’t even supposed to ask me if I am married or have children.

If a district feels the need to put a policeman on site, that makes sense, but guns should otherwise be kept out the school. Period.

Too much fun

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Too many adult children are living in the basement of their parents’ houses, unready to launch.

Educators may have to shoulder at least part of the blame. We are taught to entice our students to learn through the use of computer programs and Smart Boards. We are taught to keep the pace active and entertaining, to engage our students. American education is designed to entertain children and adolescents, even in school.

Unfortunately, much of that fun originates outside of America’s children, from videogames, televisions, IPads, and smartphones, among other devices. Our children text each other nonstop as they wait for us to provide them with their next set of marching orders. The devices are almost never off. Texting is about as quiet as it gets and it’s not uncommon for adolescents to text through the night.

Our children are not learning to entertain themselves. From the outside, that fact is not always apparent. That girl who sits playing with her IPad at the adjacent restaurant table may appear to be keeping herself occupied. But who is entertaining whom? I would say some savvy software developers are amusing that girl. The gadget is active. The girl is reactive — and she may be essentially reacting through almost all of her day.

What’s the problem? I see a number of problems, but one that glares out at me lately has to do with teaching. We put the responsibility for engagement on the teachers, as if teachers are walking, breathing  programs on an IPad. We put almost no (or no!) responsibility on students to engage themselves. 

 

Too much fun

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Adults constantly find distractions for their kids. Parents provide as many of the latest electronics as they can afford. Teachers work endlessly to make sure students are occupied with interesting lessons. It’s become a kidcentric world.

I think some of these kids end up living at home after graduation because real jobs — especially first jobs — frequently are not fun. Suddenly, our young adults are plunged into day-to-day reality and nobody cares if they are entertained. In fact, relaxing with the usual devices can get you fired when you’re supposed to be working instead. These adult children don’t grab the bottom rung of the ladder because the bottom rung is boring, a word I hear students using far too often.

Yes, that bottom rung is frequently boring. My first job was as a file clerk. (That dates me!) I put endless files in drawers. I cleaned up files and paperwork once my bosses knew I could be trusted. After six months, I was promoted to secretary. I typed checks and other correspondence. Three weeks later, I became an insurance claims adjuster, an interesting job which provided me with a passable paycheck until I returned to school.

Those first two insurance jobs were repetitive and dull, much less interesting than high school or college classes. I took the jobs, did them well, and worked up to a place I wanted to be. But I did not expect my environment to be fun. I did not think the world owed me an enriching experience.

The entitlement generation

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More and more, I hear the phrase “entitlement generation.”

Here’s a definition from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/entitlement+generation:

Main Entry: Entitlement Generation

Noun: Definition: the group born between 1979 and 1994 who believe they are owed certain rights and benefits without further justification.

The entitlement generation expects higher salaries, flexible work hours, and ample time off.

We built these self-entitled, wretched young adults. They are frequently discontented, some of them bitterly unhappy, because that flexible job with the high salary, short hours and long vacations is nothing more than a pipe dream. Personally, I don’t know a single person in this country with that job, except a few college professors who are skating on past laurels. Virtually no one gets to start in that job, unless maybe they are born to Trump or other big money.

This is my message for students and former students who have not launched: Suck it up, guys. The world was not built for you. The world is not responsible for you. YOU are responsible for you.

But I apologize, too. Instead of giving you endless second chances, we should have failed you more often. When you deliberately broke the class fan, you should have been suspended. When you kept talking to your girlfriend in class, you should have been thrown out — or your parents should have been called in to sit with you for a few days in class. We treated you like you were incapable of being responsible for yourself and I’m very much afraid you may have come to believe you aren’t responsible for yourself.

If you think that, you’re wrong.

Eduhonesty: Second chances are not a right. Teachers and administrators may believe they are being kind when offering second, third, fourth, etc. chances to students who break the rules. They aren’t always being kind. Sometimes, that second chance may be deserved and a student may learn from the lecture that comes with the free pass. But too many second chances lead to an expectation that all will always be forgiven.

The world does not offer endless forgiveness. Sometimes it does not even offer second chances. The world offers opportunities and too often “opportunity only knocks once,” as the old saying goes. The world can go whizzing right by while entitled young adults wait for the right break. And wait. And wait. And wait.

More on scheduling

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How else can we attack the disparities between our richer and poorer districts?  We might start by looking further at traditional scheduling. The idea that all of America’s students should be on more or less the same schedule comes from an agrarian time when crops set the schedule. Very few districts in America today need to follow the harvest. Studies document substantial learning loss over summer vacation.

Districts with air-conditioning would benefit from spreading out the school year. Even if the school year cannot be changed, we can create shorter vacations. Four three-week vacations could be scheduled instead of the one, long summer break. For that matter, students in America’s most challenged districts would greatly benefit from a longer school year. The idea that all students should go for 180 days makes little sense. Why do ALL districts need to have approximately the same year? If the job is getting done in 180 days, fine. But if a school’s students lag behind most of their peers, then the job is not getting done.

We don’t set a time limit when mopping the kitchen. We don’t say, “Four minutes. Time to quit.” We stop when the mop has covered the floor and the dirt is gone. There is no reason our academically-challenged districts should not have a 250 day year or a 280 day year if that is the time needed to catch students up in English and mathematics. (I acknowledge the problem of financial constraints.)

Just as the school year and school day should be as long as a district can afford, even schools that cannot significantly extend the school day overall might consider mandatory after-school tutoring for students who are behind grade level. Some districts have already taken this approach, an extension of the concept of mandatory summer school for failing students. The idea that all students should have a school day of the same length is another legacy from the distant past. Why not provide needier, academically-disadvantaged students with a longer school day?

Our time constraints are highly artificial. In urban areas especially, the vast majority of our students have never visited a working farm. Many would have trouble telling a shorn sheep from a goat. It’s long past time to get off the agricultural calendar.

Air-conditioning matters a lot

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State intervention has turned out to be a financial godsend to “Gotham City School District 100,” even if the school board members lost their jobs and state representatives were sitting in some school staff meetings. The district finally possesses a functional website and computers without floppy drives.  But two years ago, the State Superintendent of Education looked at the district’s schools and suggested knocking down the two middle schools and adding an addition onto the high school to house the middle school students. In the Superintendent’s view, fixing up the dilapidated middle-school buildings was a waste of money. A large portion of any extra money the district receives in the near future will probably have to be sunk into infrastructure, into the buildings and grounds that were built in the middle of the last century.

This year, one of the two middle schools will be closed and those students will be placed in the larger middle school, a school where classrooms sometimes are in the nineties. On other days, these classrooms fall into the midfifties.

This fact alone may clobber any attempts to raise scores. Students seldom function well in such extreme conditions. They also whine a lot.

A Few Changes that Could Provide Genuine Educational Benefit

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Many proposed solutions for America’s educational disparities require large sums of money – money that frequently does not exist, at least not in the districts that need that money. With state and federal governments lacking financial surpluses that might be used to fund new programs, I believe we need to stop discussing across-the-board plans for longer school years, more early enrichment programs, and smaller class sizes. America has many solvent, well-funded school districts that might be able to put some of these ideas into action but, overall, these are not the districts where students need extra help.

Districts burdened by academic underachievement and high drop-out rates hardly ever have extra resources available. The costs required to lengthen the school year, add extra years of schooling or seriously shrink classes are formidable. High costs generally render these strategies infeasible on a broad-scale basis, and focusing on such universal, costly strategies keeps us from exploring alternatives in scattered districts where we might make immediate improvements to American education.

We need to focus on what we can do to improve our schools right now.  That requires approaching school districts on an individual basis. All of America’s school districts are different, and some vary radically.  Whether a district is located in Illinois or Texas or Maine affects what may be done. A school without air-conditioning cannot run classes much past the start of June in states with hot summers. Within a given state, the financial strength of an individual district affects what may be done – or whether anything needs to be done at all. Past performance obviously has to be a major consideration in reform efforts: Part of the absurdity of NCLB has been the many “failing” districts that include schools regularly at the top of their state’s testing pool.

What can be done for those schools that are not yet succeeding? In those districts that have air-conditioning, if we cannot significantly lengthen the total number of days in the school year, due to the large costs involved, we can at least spread out that year, with probably manageable extra costs, such as increased utility bills and the expenses incurred by having staff on site for a longer period of time. More and more schools are starting earlier and ending later, a schedule that may prevent some of the learning loss documented from longer summer breaks. Schools are adding fall breaks and otherwise tweaking the schedule so that instead of one long summer break, for example, three shorter breaks are spread throughout the year.

The longer school day is another possible, admittedly somewhat expensive change that would benefit academic underachievers. As I write this, Chicago is coming close to establishing that longer school day, adding 144 teachers to create the new schedule. Coming up with more money to keep underachieving schools open longer has proved a difficult proposition, mostly due to increased staffing costs, but the longer school day will allow Chicago to attack critical problems such as lack of reading time and spotty homework performance.

The longer school day does not have to be enacted across the board — Please, no more sweeping laws! — but could reasonably be based on academic performance. The school district where I live does not need to add hours to the school day. Almost 100% of its students go on to higher education after high school, one of the main reasons why my local high school was chosen as one of the top 100 high schools in the country. The district where I worked two years ago, though, is creating a new charter school and one selling point for that school was the plan for a longer school day. The students where I taught had not been succeeding on the standard 8:00 to 2:45 school day. The new school was planned to start at 8:30 and run until 4:00. Those extra minutes could only be beneficial. Somehow the district had also budgeted a 200 day year for the charter school, adding 20 days to the school year.  

No Money is No Money is No Money

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The state government of Illinois is teetering on financial insolvency. California is almost equally crippled. Most American states have dug their way deep into financial holes. Some school districts have been in the red for years. Most lower-performing school districts are perpetually short of funds and have little prospect of receiving sudden, large infusions of cash. Some of our “solutions” need to be taken off the table. The mandatory, nation-wide, all-year school year requires all-year air-conditioning and all-year teachers at a time when school districts are aggressively laying off teachers and paraprofessionals, while juggling the remaining staff to cut costs. The extended year also requires more busses, more general staffing, and many more “free” breakfasts and lunches. Utility and supply costs go up as days are added. Longer school days, early enrichment programs, and smaller class sizes eat funds rapidly for the same reasons.