Glenn Reynolds posts a letter from a reader:
A school in which I used to teach was failing. Is failing. Has always failed. Our staff was more than 50% non-traditional teachers. We had a strong core of Teach For America and Teaching Fellows – neither of which pull in your regular “he who can’t? Teaches†anecdotes. Most of us were “wanting to help where we can†folks.
We couldn’t make a dent in that school.
The only reason that the 60% of the kids who bothered to show up daily even came to school was for the 2 free meals and the climate control. We needed a force of 15 security people to keep the kids IN CLASS. They had no desire to learn. They did not CARE if they failed. I never, ever had kids who started at my school as 9th graders and had enough credits to be juniors by their third year. Most didn’t even have enough credits to be sophomores. And this was when summer school was free!
Read the whole thing. And weep. Of the three largest cities in the country—New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—the city with the highest high school graduation rate is Chicago. Just over half of Chicago’s high school students graduate. This is not a new phenomenon. We are roughly where we’ve been for the last half century.
If your plan for curing what ails us is higher education, either you think that higher education can succeed where secondary education failed, you’re writing off a substantial fraction of today’s kids, or you have some new plan for keeping unwilling kids in school. I’m all ears.
Napoleon said that the only great motivators were the fear of loss and the hope of gain. As a society we’re rather obviously not willing to instill enough fear to motivate nor should we be. That means we must instill hope. I’m open to suggestions.
I write this as a former educator: the biggest problem with instruction is not teachers or unions or lack of funding but parents who don’t value learning and teach their children not to value it, or create an abusive/unstable home life which we know has an enormous impact. These pernicious environments cut across racial lines and seem to be a particularly American problem. There’s no amount of funding or teacher accountability which can overcome that and a college isn’t going to get it done either.
What it comes down to is that not geting things right in the first six or so years of a childs life effectively fucks them up for the next seventy. It is exceedingly rare a child can grow up and correct their own dysfunctions.
How enormous? Well, for one thing there’s some science that suggests that an abusive or unstable home life induces the release of an excessive of amount of stress hormones whose effects, through the magic of epigenetics, can persist for generations.
Same old, same old. If you want better schools, get better students. As a country we’re hell bent on the opposite approach, however.
And as youth unemployment rates persist at high levels, there isn’t going to be much hope to offer the little bastards, either. No hope, no fear, no talent, no progress.
Why don’t we try paying them?
My daughter is typically an indifferent student. But she’s been irritatingly determined to go to Mathnasium (a private math tutoring company.) Why? Because we paid her with an extra piercing that we had previously denied and a hundred bucks.
I can either wheedle and bully my son into putting together presentations for me and get nowhere, or I can pay him. I pay him. He does great work, but only when I pay him.
We take the people least likely to comprehend deferred rewards – kids – and we demand they work for nothing but deferred rewards. And as Ice points out, some damned shaky deferred rewards at that.
“Don’t you understand that middle school will eventually pay off in the form of still more school, to be followed by yet more education, and eventually a job in 10 years?” Ten years to a 14 year-old translates to 40 years for thee or me. It’s forever.
Why pay 15 security guards to bully kids into staying in class when we could pay the kids themselves? For that matter, what would it do to the entire economic environment of schools if we paid kids? We pay the teachers to be there. I don’t roll out of bed to work for nothing. None of us work for free. Why should kids?
If we paid the kids, say, two bucks an hour for attendance, that’s $60 a week, rough figures, would that perhaps pay for itself in less need for teachers – much of whose time is taken up with discipline. Would it reduce needs for security? Would it cut truancy which in turn cuts federal support? Would it cut drop-out rates and the resulting cost of policing? Damned if I know, but given that not one of us here does much of anything without being paid, why are we asking kids to act like communists? Are we not capitalists? Don’t we want to raise rational kids? Who the hell does algebra for free?
I hear the counterpoint: But middle-class kids and rich kids aren’t getting paid to attend. Riiiiight. Drive through my son’s high school parking lot. See all those slightly aged BMW 3 series? They don’t belong to the teachers. The fact is the middle class and rich kids are paid. They’re paid in cars, vacations, clothing, movies, iPads, phones. . . It’s just the poor kids making nothing and surprise! They don’t work that well for zero pay.
I’m an agnostic on whether your scheme would work. In Chicago, at least, if such a plan were to be undertaken it would need to be done by the federal government. The city is just about at the limit of its ability to extract revenues from its citizens in taxes. It already has the highest sales tax in the country, the city is at the limit of its authority to raise the property tax under state law, and it does not have the power to levy an income tax. The state isn’t in any better shape and for decades has shown an unwillingness to pay for local schools (the state is 50th among the 50 states in its contribution to education). Neither the city nor the state is raising enough revenue to cover the spending commitments they’ve already undertaken.
Well, me for one. I used to read math books the same way other kids read, er, young adult fiction. 😉
The allowance I received in high school (the period we’re talking about) was exactly enough to cover the bus fare to and from school (my high school was about eight miles from home). I purchased my first car after I’d been working full-time for a year which was after I’d graduated from college and finished two years of graduate school, all of which I’d paid for myself through what I earned from working.
In the summers during high school I mowed about five acres of lawn a week for spending money. Mostly, I bought books.
My folks did pay for a lot but it was by no means a reward for staying in school. Staying in school was mostly a social thing. In my family it was what one did.
Another factor: there are demonstrated differences among people in the ability to delay gratification. Violence and insecure family circumstances can produce physiological changes that result in a reduced ability to delay gratification.
The thing is there’s just about nothing we can do to alter the basic chemistry of a family. We have no power to make fathers be good fathers, or mothers be good mothers.
In any event, a lot has changed since you and I were kids. Even middle class and wealthy kids do not feel themselves to be part of some vertical hierarchy God-President-Parent-Teacher-Kid. Their world is much more horizontal, and in that world authority cannot merely be asserted, it has to negotiated. We could talk about why this has happened, but for this discussion it’s important to know that it has happened.
Fathers are not really in the picture for this demographic.
In Chicago, the illegitimacy rate for te overall population is in the low to mid 40 th percent. Of CPS students, a high 80th percent who are low income/ high poverty, the percentage of female headed households with no father present is higher.
The level of social dysfunction is so severe it won’t be remediated by waiting unil kids from this environment are 5 or 6 before they come into contact with a competent adult who is not a policeman or a social worker from DCFS – If it can be remediated at all.