Isn’t it about time to tell the standardistos to “sit down and shut up” (sounds like corpulent Governor Christie) shut up? It seems like everybody is supposed to learn everything. The sad part is that when students are taught everything, they don’t learn much of anything. But standardistos believe that teachers teach and students learn. However, students don’t necessarily learn what teachers teach.
Standardistos don’t talk about how boring school is for most students. Most adults probably could not sit quietly and go through the assembly-line, factory-model maze for one day without feeling like one of B. F. Skinner’s pigeons. They would probably need Ritalin.
Ohanian asked 108 California teachers, “What do you think of the nation’s education standards?” Not one has seen them. Their attitude is the attitude of teachers nationwide. This too will pass. One teacher said in despair, “Why don’t they just build jails next to the schools?” Interesting idea. Since 1980, California colleges and universities have downsized eight thousand jobs. The state’s prisons have upsized by 112,000 inmates and 26,000 guards; plus, it seems that public schools are becoming part-time orphanages.
Ohanian discusses Louis V. Gerstner. In 1993, he went from being CEO of RJR Nabisco to becoming CEO of IBM. He got a signing bonus of $4,924,596 plus a generous stock package (around $21 million). She states that in his 1994 book Reinventing Education, Gerstner blames teachers for not producing an increasing supply of “world-class workers,” which he claims IBM needs. But soon after receiving his signing bonus, Gerstner fired 90,000 of IBM’s 270,000 employees—the same kind of highly-trained workers he insists the schools aren’t producing. Yet his stockholders love him. IBM’s market capitalization is up $70 billion, Ohanian writes.
She also notes that while American corporations are sending jobs to foreign climes with low wages, they are demanding the schools save American business from the threat of foreign economies. “Corporate life is rather mindboggling [sic] in its greed,” she notes.
Nobody gets rich worrying about children. But the 1996 Congress gave the Pentagon $9 billion more than it requested while cutting $54 billion from child nutrition programs. Fortune 500 businesses and the Pentagon do not have to resort to bake sales or collecting cash register receipts to buy equipment they need.
Ohanian writes that it doesn’t matter that standards ignore the needs of children and sell teachers short. Standardistos move ahead with the education-reform plans dreamed up in corporate board rooms and conservative think tanks. The standards apply to all students, regardless of their experiences, capabilities, learning differences, interests, or ambitions.
She concludes, “These standardistos’ statements [sic] prove a major tenet of education: If you’re sure you know the solution, you are part of the problem.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Students Must Be Responsible
To the editor:
Before we criticize, let’s answer two questions:
Is the medical establishment responsible for your health if you misuse or abuse alcohol, tobacco, and drugs (acquiring emphysema, lung cancer, cirrhosis, etc)?
Is the educational establishment responsible for your learning if you avoid studying and participating in the educational process (i.e., failing proficiency tests)?
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
The writer is a teacher at Heights High School.
Poor Expectations Explain a Lot
To the editor:
Let’s settle some nonsense right now.
John Ogbu, a cultural anthropologist, has done a careful study of the origins of human competence in different countries. Each country had easily identified minority members regarded as outcasts. These outcasts were systematically denied full participation in society. After so many years of harsh repression, such outcast minorities learned their lesson. No matter how hard they worked in school, their future opportunity was extremely limited.
Ogbu’s point is that the apparent failure of minority students to complete their schooling (e.g., the high school dropout rate for American Indians is more than 90 percent) has been a functional adaption of reality.
As educators, we need to become particularly sensitive to the motivation issue. We can remind parents and teachers that their attitude can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and that no relationship exists among ability, effort, and ethnicity.
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Behavior Shows What Kids Learn at Home, Not School
To the editor:
Powell Caesar’s “Perspectives” column (The Sun Press, Oct. 28, “School District’s Best Public Relations Is Its Students”) was an exemplary example of a sardonic diatribe and first-degree demagoguery. Students’ rudeness, crudeness, profanity, and rowdiness, etc., reflects peer groups much more than school. Believe me, I can say without a doubt that students do not learn these behaviors in our classrooms.
Instead of education personnel telling (encouraging) the students to be on their best behavior (which we do), how about reminding parents to tell their children to be on their best behavior going to and from school (which I’m sure most do). I observe many adults who exhibit the behaviors that Caesar is writing about.
Here we go again, blaming the school for student misbehavior. The school’s primary mission and responsibility is education, instruction, and counseling. We all know what the primary responsibilities of the parents are.
I would like to know when the last time was that Caesar was physically in a Cleveland Heights-University Heights school building. Probably not too recently. I invite Caesar to visit Wiley and look around and see firsthand what is going on (Discover Your Schools’ Day).
Caesar is jumping to conclusions and being very judgmental in his perceptions about the correlation between school and behavior. It’s unfortunate, but studies show that 85 percent of what humans think about is negative.
The biggest problem we face with our students is apathy and indifference as well as the apathy of parents who are too busy making a living, parents who just can’t be reached, parents who support the school but the behavior never changes, and parents who refuse to accept the reality that their son or daughter has a problem and blames the school. There is no ABC approach to dealing with human behavior.
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Teachers Should
