The Bottom Five Percent

It’s good to hear that the Obama administration has taken notice of the failures of No Child Left Behind—beginning with the cruel irony of its name, because it has been leaving so very many children behind. (The ones I know best are the teenaged immigrants of Oakland who were abandoned in a weird triage program that funnels a strapped urban school system’s limited resources into the intensive coaching of the kids haven’t passed the test yet, but might. Fifteen-year-olds who turn up not speaking English aren’t going to pass the test any time before the age of 18, so just provide some kind of nominally supervised space for them to hang out in for a year until they can drop out. Then, if they or their families still have any aspirations for them, they will turn up in a community college where we do, in fact, have classes and teachers for them.)

But to return to Obama’s proposed renovations. Now, I wanted Obama with all my heart, but when it comes to education, which is what I do, I’m starting to feel like what Tom Lehrer described, in another context long ago, as a Christian Scientist with appendicitis. First we heard about competitive grants and a “race for the top.” A race is by definition something that most people lose. It is not a good paradigm for public education. To get a competitive grant, you need a good grant writer. Good grant writers cost money. I’ve worked in inner city schools where nobody had the time or energy to fill out the forms for the most obvious non-competitive funds, let along any hard-to-get grants.

Here in California we lost this race, being too broke or too disorganized or too union-ridden or something. (California schools have a very high proportion of English language learners, and we who teach them have an unreasonable tendency to resent evaluations made of them, and us, based on tests administered only in a language they don't yet know very well.) But I think in fact that failling to qualify for this new game plan may be a blessing in disguise. Now the idea is to target the lowest five percent of the low-performing schools, and be very, very tough with them. Fire teachers and principals, who are obviously the culprits who are responsible. Give their jobs to creative and enthusiastic people who are waiting in the wings, just dying to take over. You snooze, you lose.

For several years, I worked as the coordinator of a family literacy program, funded by a competitive grant won by Catholic Charities, which can pay grant writers, which operated out of the lowest-performing elementary school in California. For a year or two it was second to the bottom, edged up by another one down in the LA area. But then we slipped down to the place of honor once again. It is probably a lot like the lowest-performing elementary school in most other states.

There is a lot about this kind of school that Obama does not seem to know. For one thing, before you go firing the staff, many of whom who are either recent college graduates rapidly recovering from their idealism or genuine saints hanging in there from dogged dedication, be very sure that you really have figured out who else wants to work there. It's not like casting a Broadway show, or anything like that. The jobs were very hard to fill, as I recollect. Perhaps in the present job market people are more available, but they won’t be any more creative or enthusiastic.

And please, before you blame the school for those low test scores, have a look at the community it's sitting in. The school where I worked serves two communities, living side by side in more or less equal numbers, with no love lost between them. It is an inner-city African-American neighborhood devastated by the drug epidemic. Kids damaged by drugs before they were born, kids surfing sofas, kids raised by impoverished and exhausted elderly relatives who do their best while the parents are off somewhere burning up the welfare checks in their crack pipes. The neighborhood also serves as a landing pad for recently arrived immigrants, mostly undocumented Mexicans, a more hopeful community, partly because their involvement in the drug scene is more peripatetic and more profitable, and partly because they tend to go find somewhere cleaner and safer to live around the same time that they start learning English, so that if the kids do eventually pass the Star test, it will be somewhere else.

Don’t blame the principal and the teachers in this place for the low test scores. Pin medals on them for their efforts to head off violence, scrounge up food and clothes for everybody, and remain calm at the sound of nearby gunfire.


In unrelated news, it's St. Patrick's Day.

"St. Patrick drove the serpents out, and brought the churches in,
'Twas a bloody poor bargain, I would say, be Pagan once again!"

(Lyrics by Isaac Bonewitz, to be sung to the tune of "A Nation Once Again.")