Magic wands and common sense

Every August, teachers get “welcome back” letters from their principals, brimming with cutting-edge jargon and positive thinking. Unfortunately, the bright ideas hatched in July rarely work in September. The in-service expert presentations teachers endure on opening day bear little resemblance to classroom reality.

There’s no end to the giddy rhetoric telling us in implausible detail what schools must do so all American students can succeed in the 21st century, compete in the global economy, lose weight, cut greenhouse gases, and someday win the World Cup. But every school could tomorrow take commonsense action that would improve school life and learning more than any program or initiative.

1. Focus on academics. There’s more to life than reading, writing and arithmetic, and more to learn than just what’s written in books. That’s why children don’t attend school 24 hours a day. That’s why we have homes, neighborhoods, communities, churches and Little League. When students are in school, though, that’s what they’re supposed to be — students. Classroom hours are for academic learning the same way hospitals are for healing sick people, dentists are for filling cavities, and my mechanic’s garage is for fixing cars. Decency, compassion and humor should be part of every endeavor, especially where children are involved. But no other enterprise is routinely expected to set aside its job to do everybody else’s. The more we require schools to raise the nation’s children, clean their teeth, and engineer their psyches and social development, the less those children will learn in our classrooms.

2. Maintain discipline and civility. Schools are big on anti-bullying programs, peer mediation and “trauma-informed” discipline plans. Unfortunately, too many aren’t big on actual discipline. We’re so busy counseling children about their behavior that we let their misbehavior destroy their classmates’ education. One published expert advised a math teacher that if he didn’t take class time to teach “social skills” to disruptive students, he wouldn’t have time to teach math to everyone else. That’s madness. If someone’s behavior is stealing math time, the solution isn’t to steal more math time exploring why he shouldn’t.

If a student interferes with other students’ learning, he needs to be removed from the classroom. His right to an education isn’t unconditional, and it doesn’t trump everybody else’s rights to an education. No workplace can be productive if it’s subject to chronic disruption and lawlessness. Teachers, principals, school boards, and communities need to demand decency and good order and stand behind those who enforce it.

3. Disregard the experts. Schools are plagued by experts with little or no firsthand experience with real students in real classrooms. That’s why public education habitually chases miracle cures that don’t fix anything. I’d be ashamed to pontificate about cardiac surgery because I’ve never done it. Education experts sadly don’t know how to blush, and the rest of us apparently don’t know how to ignore them. Anyone who hasn’t worked longterm in a real classroom shouldn’t be in a position to dictate how classroom teachers have to teach.

4. Put the “special” back in special education. Special education has a rightful place at school. But it’s not about filling out paperwork, avoiding lawsuits or guaranteeing happy grades. It’s not for students who just won’t do their work, and it’s not for perpetuating the illusion that children with significant learning and emotional disabilities are in the “mainstream.” Some students can be best educated in the regular classroom and some can’t. It’s wrong to place a child who can’t read in a seventh-grade reading class if he could better learn to read in a small group operating at his level somewhere else. It’s also wrong to pretend I can address his needs without diminishing the grade level education I owe the rest of the class. We need to cater less to our philosophical preference for “inclusion” and concern ourselves instead with what best serves special education students as well as their regular education classmates.

5. Don’t judge your school by its test results. Despite all the hoopla and hand-wringing when the data are released, contemporary standardized testing is chronically unreliable. Documented variations in students’ scores between computerized assessments and “paper and pencil” tests, scoring inconsistencies and errors, and discrepancies between national and state tests render the expensive data worthless. If you want to gauge how well your school is educating your child, talk to him. Check how well prepared students from your school are when they graduate. Then check how well prepared your own child is when it’s his turn to move on to the next level.

6. Keep academic expectations high but realistic. We hear nonstop about higher standards, but there’s more to academic rigor than touting the Common Core, imposing allegedly “standards-based” grading, or renaming a course with a more exalted title. When it comes to academic ability and diligence, all students aren’t created equal. That’s why sometimes they belong in different classes. Watering down algebra or an advanced placement course so we can say that more students took it doesn’t constitute higher standards. Focusing more on academic content knowledge and skills, beginning with fundamentals, will more likely yield the schools and students we need.

The schools most of us want are within our grasp. We don’t need “bold initiatives” or a magic wand.

We just need the will and a dose of common sense.