Why Johnny Can't Lead

Holy flip me pink! I thought I was losing it. I had gone a whole week without getting exorcised just reading the newspaper. Turns out, I am fine, but education in America is in deep trouble. Of course, this has been a matter of debate for some years. And it is something my husband has taken a keen interest in, editorially speaking. In addition to our own careers as students, both of us have had the experience of being in front of classrooms full of “learners” to use the current vernacular. And we are in the final throes of shepherding our child through her own educational career. I have even done a bit of school law from time to time. In short, this is a subject on which I am amply qualified to opine.

I suppose the English teacher contributor to the AZ Plugged In in yesterday’s Arizona Republic Viewpoints section feels the same way about his credentials and opine he does:


Farcical AIMS Fails To Pass Logic Test Another round of AIMS high-school testing ended last week. …The writing assignment? Contradictory directions, of course….And the reading test? How about 18 different passages for 64 questions? Passages that jump from poetry to non-fiction, to short stories, to manuals, to essays. Try keeping your concentration with that. …[Y]ou seniors out there who haven’t passed…math…no tutoring. The [state]ran out of money.



Contrast that with this statement from a student on a 2007 spring evening after having taken the AIMS test: “Are you guys always talking about how some people can’t pass the AIMS test? [We nod.] Well that means that those people cannot read at all!” Well, yes, Melanie, we kind of thought so, too, but other people don’t seem to think that is such a big deal, was our learned reply.

Let me digress for a moment. I am a total product of Arizona public schools. Back in my day we did not have kindergarten. I went from first grade through law school in the public education system with a ten year break in between high school and college. My sister married a guy who had the same education as he went through high school in the same district. He and I had one thing in common-a high school diploma. Only thing is, he was totally and completely illiterate. How can this be you may ask yourself?

As a parent of a child we tried the public school system but moved to the private sector in sixth grade, having given it our best shot. But the quality of the education was just not there. I did not want my child going through all those years of school and coming out like I did—feeling cheated and like I missed something so irreplaceable that I am forever scarred. What I mean is that I really never learned anything. By the time I got out of high school I was so bored out of my mind that the thought of going to college was tortuous. Then I got out into the world and found out about all the great things I had been missing! History was not about wars and border drawing-it was about relationships and personalities and greatness and evil. Reading was not boring when you could read something that was well written and had some relevance to your life. And math is really logic; it can be thought of as a game but that actually provides a means to an end. Wow! I had a lot of catching up to do. Unfortunately for my brother-in-law catching up was not an option--starting over would have been his order of business.

I once did a stint teaching at the University of Phoenix. After a couple of years I simply could not take it anymore. I was relegated to instructing most of these people how to write a simple sentence even though I was not teaching an English course! This was too big a distraction and I just could not keep doing it. One thing I felt was apparent--feedback had been lacking for this group during its time on the way up to this level. The other thing that drove me under was that this was a vociferous crowd. Give them anything less than a B and they went into full attack mode (because their employer was not about to pay for less than that). If only they had put as much effort into absorbing the red ink I had just spent hours spilling on their papers.
This experience and Mr. English Teacher’s comments above illustrate the basic problem: (it has been stated over and over so many times that it is almost becoming a cliché) it is not the poor darling students fault if they don’t learn-we simply have failed to provide them the proper resources and when we do provide the resources the validity is suspect because the little darlings have such a delicate attention span.

This teacher is apologizing for his student’s inability to concentrate because of having to hop from genre to genre. Hello! Do you watch your students EVER? Don’t they skip from cellphone to IPod to text message to lap top to TV to Youtube and back again 400 million times a minute? They seem to master all that crap with no detriment to learning every lyric to a thousand songs, memorizing all the lines from movies like Superbad and keeping track of a gazillion one-hit band names without taking a breath (my friend’s kid sent 7,000 text messages in one month without missing a meal) , all while flirting with the comely teachers! It is a lame statement to say that answering 64 questions after reading 18 passages of a few lines each should be terribly taxing for these kids.

This is not to say that I don’t think they have a tough time concentrating. Sure they do. We do everything in our power to keep them distracted from the things that have meaning and then make excuses for them. Poor educational performance, in my view, has everything to do with the structure of the system. Money is not the issue. What goes on at school is. And from I have seen what is going on has less and less to do with learning.

The best thing we got from private school was the policy of no nonsense. Discipline is alive and well there. It is the flooring for a proper learning environment. It does not tolerate misanthropes and therefore eliminates a major source of distraction. With discipline comes respect. I cannot tell you how many people come before me in court without a clue about how respect buys you validity. It is a sad commentary. With respect comes decency. We are more likely to be tolerant of legitimate differences in such an environment. And the folks that aren’t are out, plain and simple.

To be sure, there are a number of things in private schools that are lacking in the public sector, chief among them are parental involvement (another key that often translates into financial backing) and dedicated educators who are there to teach rather than serve as pawns in some political jockeying. All of this adds up to expectations. At all stages of life a key to sound thinking and success comes from managing expectations. If we expect people are losers, they will more than likely meet our expectations. If we expect to get rewarded for doing a good job, the chances are much better that our expectations will be met. This applies to teachers, students, carpenters, lawyers, parents, spouses, just about anyone.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not an advertisement for private school. Rather, this is to point out that this teacher, who represents himself and everyone in his profession by signing his column with his profession, is doing a great job of managing the public’s expectations and doing a severe disservice to his student’s expectations. Rather than focusing on how to make his students better performers on the test, at once making his job the priority and thereby the kid’s performance an intrinsic reward for his dedication, he is publically acknowledging that either he cannot perform or will not perform his chosen profession adequately. If he feels so strongly that the system is keeping him from performing, rather than damn the system, he should rise above it. Instead of admonishing the seniors who have not passed the math for not working hard enough he laments that they were not given enough crutches. This sends a totally retarded message.

This is the plight of public education in this country today. As with most public sector activities, it seems to be just about to have run its course. This is the system that gave us the people who are running the show and making the mess out of everything that is happening in greater America. People, people, people, no wonder we are no longer capable of winning wars, balancing budgets, responding to crises and controlling our own spending. We never learned how to read a few passages and answer a few questions! If only someone had taught us how.