Schools as Prisons

One of my academic responsibilities is supervising student teachers.  Student teachers are just what the name implies – university students learning to become teachers.  Typically, student teachers work with a veteran teacher at an area school over the course of a semester, ultimately assuming all facets of a full-time professional teacher.  Part of my job involves observing student teachers teaching a lesson in the classroom.  Lately, however, fulfilling this obligation has become increasingly onerous.  It has nothing to do with the students I supervise or the lessons they teach, but rather how schools are run.

As I arrived for a school visit recently I explained to the security personnel that greeted me who I was and the reason for my visit.  He asked to see a photo identification so I presented my university faculty id.  He asked instead for my driver’s licenses, explaining that he needed to enter my home address, telephone number, and birth date into a computer and then snap a digital photograph of me, all of which would be kept in a central database.  I explained that I was hesitant to disclose so much personal information and offered my work address and telephone.  The security person at first insisted on having my personal information but eventually accepted and entered my work information, but not before he and a nearby custodian who observed the exchange stated that all of these procedures were “for the safety of the kids.”  The implication that I was at the school to do some harm and the assumption that I do not care about student safety rankled to say the least.  I explained to both men that as a tenure-track professor at a public university, a former public high school teacher, and someone with over 20 years of experience in education, I would not be at their school if I was in anyway a threat to children.  I stated further that I am all for ensuring school safety but do not think I need to waive my privacy rights or other civil liberties to do so.  This ultimately ended the exchange and I was allowed to proceed to complete my visit and observation.

I thought about this experience again last week when I read about San Antonio’s Northside Independent School District (NISD) initiating a program requiring all students to wear identification badges embedded with radio frequency identification (RFID), enabling school personal to track students' movements.  Some students and parents complained of the new program as an invasion of privacy.  Students not complying with the program allegedly were subjected to harassment from teachers while administrators reportedly threatened to ban these students from extracurricular and other social activities.  School personnel meanwhile explained that the program was aimed at reducing truancy and promoting school safety.

I am skeptical of the district’s claim.  This program may indeed be about reducing truancy and promoting safety, but I wonder who’s safety the district has in mind that truant or absent students threaten.  The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) reports that the NISD student population is nearly 64 percent Hispanic, nearly 25 percent white, and approximately eight percent black or African American, with just over 47 percent of students eligible for federal reduced or free lunch programs.  This LoJack-type system and other technological deployments seem more about corralling poor and minority students than about anything with any pedagogical value.  It seems to be part of a troubling trend.  In her book, Lockdown High, journalist Annette Fuentes argues that legislative and policy responses to the 1999 Columbine High School shootings and similar tragic events have created police-state like conditions in many American schools.  Often school personnel implement these responses with little regard to their consequences - not the least of which is how being presumed guilty before being innocent affects the social and psychological development of children.

Using Big Brother tactics provides an easy solution to the complex problems of student truancy, absenteeism, and dropping out.  Schools would be better served by creating warm, welcoming environments staffed by caring teachers who develop interesting curricula taught with engaging learning activities and authentic assessments.  Perhaps that is too much to ask.

A Personal Post-Mortem on the CPS Teachers Strike & Latinos and Urban Schools

This is a long and personal one…

I am not your typical Chicago Public School student parent. I have a doctorate, an education from an Ivy League school and am fairly well informed about the nuances of urban schools; I have studied them and worked with their students, teachers, and parents for nearly a decade in several of the largest urban school districts in the country.

One might think that my graduate educated wife and I are crazy to even be sending our precious kindergarten-age daughter to what many view as a dysfunctional system. For many reasons we decided to send her to our neighborhood school; not that we did not make the attempt to navigate the CPS bureaucracy to get her into a selective enrollment school or a gifted program, but we were aware that the odds were slim, even for our upper-middle class family; we knew that the neighborhood school might be our only public school choice. Indeed, our local school ended up being the only CPS school option for us. We knew that we still had the choice of sending her to a private school or relocating to the suburbs, but ideologically and politically we believe in integration across class and race and ethnicity and we also believe in public education that is universally provided and supported. Also, our neighborhood school is among the top 20% of elementary schools (in terms of test scores) as our neighborhood reflects our income, education, while still holding to our values of diversity along race and class. Also, as a researcher, I know that much of what affects kids’ success in school has nothing to do with schools at all; success in school has to do with poverty, physical health, parents’ income and education level, the exposure to oral and printed language in the home, immigration status, violence in the neighborhood, and having two adults in the home to care for children. Enrollment in pre-school, where our daughter spent three years, also provides a significant and lasting effect on academic success all the way through college. So, our child holds advantages in just about all of the above categories.

Our resolve was tested though on the day of our orientation when we entered a 90-degree auditorium with no air conditioning and a hundred or so parents and their children. There the principal informed us that our children would be in two classes of 37 students each, and that likely even more would be enrolling before the school year began in less than a week. An astute parent asked if the teachers would have aides and the principal replied, “no.” Determined, she followed-up asking, “can parents volunteer.” The principal grinned and then rattled back, “yes, but you’d have to go through all the requisite background checks, which would take a few weeks.” A collective pause, laden with hope was present. Then the principal’s ironic grin grew large and with almost comedic timing he said, “but CPS in its wisdom does not allow parents to volunteer in their own child’s classroom.” And the parents, regardless of probably not being well versed in game theory, knew that the classrooms would have no volunteers. Then he introduced our daughter’s teacher, a young woman no more than 25 years old with only one year of teaching experience under her belt.

For four days we experienced the chaos of our “good” neighborhood school. I weighed in my head whether we could really conceive of selling the home we just bought last year as I dropped off my precious daughter to a room of students who ranged from having graduate educated parents to those who probably arrived as immigrants within the past few years and spoke little English, to those who were spending their very first days away from their parents, never having had any sort of formal pre-school instructional experience before.  

One day I saw the forty or so students line up in the morning to enter the portable unit which housed their classroom, and two children screamed and clawed to remain with their parents as the other students marched into the building. The young teacher peeled the more strident child off of her father and carried her into the class. Meanwhile my daughter and her classmates were already in the room, unaccompanied. I only imagined that my daughter, who is very well behaved in school and is already on the verge of reading, would be tacitly neglected by the teacher to deal with the most needy students for the first few months of school. As already wrote, she is advantaged, right? She would be fine anyway. There is only so much a teacher can do.

And then the strike came.

I followed the strike as closely as a parent, and as fairly well informed researcher of urban schooling. But all theory, research and principles fly out the window when things hit you directly. Despite knowing that the teachers deserve the protection and stability of tenure, that they need to be assessed on true measures of learning and success, that student learning is influenced in many ways by factors that occur outside of school, I still wanted to blame the teachers for neglecting my daughter that first week and for abandoning her to strike. But again, there is only so much a teacher can do-forty students, parents who I attempted to converse with but couldn’t because they didn’t speak English, a principal who proudly said he keeps test scores up by giving no less than 60 minutes of homework a day to kindergartners (to serve the mandates of the state and federal governments)-the odds against having a good experience were overwhelming. The teachers needed more; an assistant, a smaller class, a system that provides healthcare and integration services for immigrant parents, among so many other things. While these may not be “strikable,” especially when you make an average of $76,000 a year, the teachers seemed justified in taking a stand.

So, allowing rationality to prevail, my family supported the striking teachers. I took our daughter to “strike camp” each day, provided by a local non-profit that typically runs supplemental afterschool programs in the public schools. The camp was a relief. The seventy or so students who were enrolled in the camp were met by no less than ten young adults, a staff to child ratio 7 to 1, about one-sixth of what the public schools had to offer. Our daughter knew all of the staff members’ names by the second day and displayed an excitement about the program that she had not shown in the first week of actual school. She was learning Chinese, was doing theater, and completed worksheets that had writing exercises. By the third day I noted that all the staff greeted our daughter by name, with large smiles, and a genuine interest in having fun.

While driving her to the camp on the fourth day, our daughter seemed especially pensive. She noted that I had been honking and waving to the red-clad striking teachers at the five or so schools we passed on the way to the camp. She asked why and I explained that I wanted to show that I supported them, because they wanted to help get more things to help kids do better in school. She paused and then said, “I hope they get more toys for us.” I laughed and told her that they would probably get more books or even more teachers. She heaved a sigh and said, “Daddy, you know I really hate school. There is too much learning.” I was shocked. This was a statement coming from a little girl who had been anticipating going to elementary school for months; a girl who would come home from pre-school singing and happy on most days. After having the opportunity to visit the elementary school of some friends’ children in suburban Atlanta, she became enthralled with the idea of the cafeteria and how “big kids” got to pick their lunch (of course the CPS school we enrolled her in had no cafeteria). Now she was saying she hated school. “Why?” I asked. “I have to sit in one place all day, and we don’t get to play, and all we do is learn,” she lamented. My heart was breaking. “We are just kids,” she said.

There was another pregnant pause. She then said, “Daddy, you’re a teacher, right?” “Yes, I am.” “I think then that I don’t have to go to school again. I can just stay home with you and you can be my teacher.” I couldn’t believe her desperation to find a way not to return to school. “I would love to stay home with you, but I have to work to make money. I can’t stop teaching my own students.” Silence. “I know,” she said. “You can teach me at night after you work in the day. During the day I can just spend time with Mommy.” And then we arrived at camp. “I can see you have given a lot of thought to this idea.” “Let me think about it,” I said. And so I did.

After some hard conversations and frantic searching on the Internet for private schools, my wife and I found ourselves at a local Catholic school on the sixth day of the strike. We were visiting with the principal, who for the next two hours explained the curriculum, showed us the kindergarten classrooms that each had less than twenty students with teachers with over thirty years of experience between them. We saw the already beautiful, but soon-to-be renovated gymnasium, the library filled with books, the friendly and calm staff. And for our last stop we saw the spacious cafeteria, where the kids would be treated to hot meals each day. Then next day the strike was resolved, and while the teachers and students returned to public schools after that, our daughter began Catholic school.

So, what does this have to do with Mexicans or Latinos? Well, as we walked away from the Catholic school I told my wife that I wondered how in our pleasant middle-class neighborhood that the public school still felt very urban, crowded, and disproportionately minority. After visiting the parochial school it made sense because we had found the white middle-class people; they pay for school quality because they can. Poverty among Latino children is at 27%, and schools are so much more than just places of learning for them; they are medical centers, social service agencies,recreation spaces, babysitters, and spaces for acculturating new immigrants. The strike hit Latinos hard because they lost this resource. But how much of a resource can they be with such poor funding that is dependent upon test scores rather than the full array of socioemotional outcomes that schools are responsible for. How could schools overcome all of the challenges facing Latinos when there are as many as 50 students per teacher in some pre-school classrooms? Meanwhile, the middle-class and above remove themselves from this system by fleeing to the suburbs or private schools. Without ethnic, racial and class integration, how can schools get better? I wish I had the solution to this complex problem. It will probably take a really long time to address. Despite my ideals, I’ve learned that for our Latina daughter, we simply couldn’t wait for the answer to arise in the public schools. Unfortunately, so few other Latinos have this choice.

Latinos and the Politics of Cynicism

While the politicians, pundits, media personalities, and others continue to dissect Wednesday’s Presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, I continue to digest the news announced early this week of the record number Latinos eligible to vote in this year’s election.  As announced by the Pew Hispanic Center, upwards to 24 million Latino voters could go to the polls this November.  The lingering question remains, however, how many actually will vote?  Despite their growing numbers, the Pew report states, “the turnout rate of eligible Latino voters has historically lagged that of whites and blacks by substantial margins.  In 2008, for example, 50% of eligible Latino voters cast ballots, compared with 65% of blacks and 66% of whites.”  As such, getting more Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican-origin voters to the polls could tip the election for one candidate or the other, which is why the presidential candidates continue courting these ever-increasingly important populations.

As widely reported earlier this week, both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney made overtures to Latino and Hispanic voters in the run-up to their debate.  The President announced plans for a César Chávez memorial, while the former Massachusetts Governor visited a Chipotle restaurant and declared he would maintain the current administration’s halting of deporting younger undocumented immigrants.  (For the record, I have long admired César Chávez, and had the pleasure of meeting him twice when he visited my alma mater during the late 1980s and early 1990s.  A national monument to his memory is long overdue.)

While having Hispanics and Latinos playing a more prominent role in national politics is undoubtedly a good thing, the ploys both candidates used this week bother me on a couple of levels, and I am not sure what bothers me more.  For one, the candidates seemingly think that cynical moves like these will persuade Hispanic and Latino voters to vote for them.  Moreover, these kinds of cynical moves might actually work.  Politicians would not make such overtures unless there was some evidence that they did.  And if these cynical political moves do ultimately persuade those Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and other voting-eligible populations to cast their ballots for one candidate over the other, than can we legitimately ask to be taken seriously as a political constituency?  I fear the answer may be “no.”