Our kids are harder working than we ever were…and dumber. This paradoxical observation courtesy of Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post:
Without question, Americans, whether wealthy or just upwardly mobile, are nowadays obsessed with preparing their children for a super-competitive, globalized job market. They will therefore go a long way — switching neighborhoods, borrowing money, creating color-coded spreadsheets — to get their children into high schools that force them to study and that test them regularly.
Those who play the game most intensively are often rewarded: The child who takes 15 Advance Placement courses, plays the clarinet in three orchestras, runs a Cambodian refugee camp in the summer and eschews lunch all winter really does have a better chance of getting into college than the child who plays kickball after school in the empty lot next door.
Yet, at the same time, Applebaum notes, many parents retain “a kind of nostalgia for a pre-industrial America, one in which childhood involved breaking horses and building rafts….Today’s children always seem to be working harder than yesterday’s children, having less fun and taking more tests, at least according to everyone I know.”
More strangely, our nostalgia also clashes with the other important American education narrative, the one that focuses on the 46 percent of high school seniors who test below the “basic” level in science (only 2 percent qualify as ” advanced“), the ” Dumbest Generation” of semiliterates glued to their cellphones, and the number of teenagers, a stunning one-third of the total, who drop out of high school. Since 38 percent of these teenagers recently told one survey that they dropped out because “I had too much freedom and not enough rules in my life,” it’s no surprise that solutions to the dropout crisis often involve imposing stricter school regimens, with more organized hours of teaching, more pressure and, yes, more testing.
Thus, Applebaum concludes, our kids are both stupider than we were and harder working.
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Last week, I posted a memo to Wendy Kopp, suggesting a new way to deploy Teach for America corps members—and get top veteran teachers in front of our highest need classrooms. The Teach for America founder emailed a thoughtful reply over the weekend:
Many thanks for all the generous sentiments in your blog entry, which I appreciate. As for your recommendation, as you might guess, I don’t think this would be a good thing for urban and rural kids. It is a rare person who has what it takes to excel as a teacher in a low-income community, and it’s not at all a given that teachers who do well in more privileged communities will do well in urban and rural areas. The most important thing for kids in low-income communities is that we recruit as many people as possible — whether new or experienced — who have the personal characteristics that differentiate successful teachers in high-poverty communities, and that we train and support them to be effective in meeting the extra needs of their students. The individuals who come to Teach For America are coming because they want to work with the nation’s most disadvantaged children (and it is unlikely that most of them would decide to channel their energy toward teaching in more privileged contexts), and in fact their motivation to level the playing field for them is one reason for their success. The recent Urban Institute study that looked at the impact of high school teachers in the state of North Carolina over a six-year period provides evidence that our strategy has a positive impact for kids; the study showed that the incremental impact of hiring a Teach For America corps member was three times the impact of having a teacher with three or more years of experience. Moreover, in addition to providing a critical source of excellent teachers for disadvantaged kids, our strategy of channelling the energy of the nation’s future leaders into urban and rural schools is important for the long-term effort to ensure educational excellence and equity. Teach For America is building a pipeline of leaders who are deeply committed to educational equity and deeply understand what it will take to ensure that children in low-income communities have the educational opportunities they deserve. Their initial teaching experience in under-resourced communities is foundational to their lifelong commitment to effecting the systemic changes necessary to ensure educational opportunity for all.
Wendy Kopp
CEO & Founder
Teach For America
Daniel Santillan is a residency enforcer for the Calexico school district. His job is to make sure that students in the California school district actually live in the US, not Mexico. “When he’s not tracking students on weekday mornings at the border crossing, he visits local homes to make sure children live where their parents say they do,” reports the Christian Science Monitor.
“Santillan isn’t thrilled about busting youngsters for living south of the border, but he accepts his job. ‘The bottom line is that these kids are taking up room,’ he says. “Some schools are now doing more to enforce residency requirements under pressure from politicians and activists concerned about wasted taxpayer money, reports the paper, which notes it’s impossible to know how many Mexican students cross the border daily to attend school in the US, sent by parents who think they’ll get a better education. Still, border communities have fretted over their presence for more than a decade. Calexico’s schools, however, have gone further than others by sending Santillan to photograph students at the border and requiring parents to provide proof of residency twice a year.
A Port St. Lucie, Florida parent is threatening to sue after her son’s kindergarten teacher led his classmates to “vote him out of class.”
After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn’t like about Barton’s 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo said they were going to take a vote, Melissa Barton. By a 14 to 2 margin, the students voted Alex — who is in the process of being diagnosed with autism — out of the class.
Barton filed a complaint with the school resource officer, who investigated the matter, according to Port St. Lucie Department spokeswoman Michelle Steele, who said the teacher confirmed the incident took place. The state attorney’s office concluded the matter did not meet the criteria for emotional child abuse, so no criminal charges will be filed, Steele said. The district is investigating, not surprisingly.
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