American High Schools

When you talk about "American High Schools," you've got to generalize. A city like New York has more high schools than many countries, and some are among the finest high schools you'll find anywhere. Regrettably, these schools don't define our high school system as a whole.

So what's wrong with our average high school. They don't teach much math (based on test scores) and they suffer from high drop out rates. Should you have the opportunity to make an unannounced visit, you'll often find the classroom environment non conducive to learning.

There's really not much to chuckle about other than the irony of NYC having a mayor who made improving the educational levels in the city as one of his prime objectives. This was to be the jewel in the crown of the legacy he had hoped to establish. Oh, well . . . . . . . .

It was a worthy goal. However, I suspect he came to office not really knowing all that much about education. Business was his background. And, there, no one can question his expertise. But the business paradigm doesn't quite work in education. And, perhaps the main reason for this is one that escaped the good mayor; namely, there's no way to quality control the kids coming into the school.

If you make a toaster (something GE knows something about), you give your sheet metal supplier the specs you expect him to meet on the stuff he ships to your factory. If the chromed metal comes in off spec you reject it. You can't do that with kids. Some minds work faster than others. Some minds have been preconditioned for learning, whereas others have been woefully deprived of positive conditioning. If the mayor understood this, he has given no indication of it to his subjects.

His first target seemed to be the UFT. And, there is indeed logic to that. It's the membership of the UFT that we find on the front lines. It's the teachers who work with the kids in the classroom. Few appreciate exactly how demanding a teacher's work can be; or, how rewarding. The question, of course, is how responsive the UFT is to the needs of its own members. (If this question shocks you, think: teamsters, or dock workers.) True, the UFT did raise teachers from what now, as we look back, appears to have been a condition of servitude. But, that's far behind us.

And, while pay and and retirement benefits now seem ample, working conditions are often arguably worse. Benefits too have declined. New hires, for example, get less in their retirement than the old timers.

But, it's not the economic benefits of teaching that I want to focus on, but rather on what they face in the class room. They generally have 30 students in a class and they're expected to teach five classes a day. That's 150 students they've got to work with. One hundred and fifty names they'd better get to know within perhaps five days. You need stamina and good kidneys.

People who aren't teachers don't generally realize that stuffing information into the heads of their pupils, also known as "transferring content," is just one thing the teacher is expected to be good at. There is also the very important ability to achieve good "classroom management," which can also be described as keeping order among the inmates. It's a bit like being in the circus and putting the tigers through their paces. That last simile might seem a bit over the top, but keep in mind that the students are studying the teacher for any possible weakness or shortcoming to be exploited on a suitable occasion.

A new teacher doesn't enter his or her classroom on their first day with a full command of all the skills needed to do a good job. The same could be said of a soldier not yet tested by battle, or a salesman on his first day in the field. (There used to be something called "student teaching," but that seems to have been chucked a long time ago.) And, yet, that's what schools expect of their "green" teachers; namely, skills that often take more than a year to really learn well.

Now, if you have any sort of understanding of what's called for in a teacher, you can begin to understand how much more is needed in a principal. And, yet, under the guidance of our mayor, people are made principals who haven't taught a day in their life. They tend to be young people who have gone through his Leadership Academy. With what they've picked up there, they are now put in a position of overseeing teachers doing difficult things that they themselves have never experienced. One can only pity the teachers working under such inexperienced managers.

Teachers colleges aren't much help either. The get grants for innovating "new techniques," such as heterogeneous grouping. (That may no longer be a new technique. But whether new, or slightly used, it's still nonsense.) In the first grade, putting slow students with fast learners will create no great problems. But try teaching algebra to 30 students, where 10 are over-achievers and 20 really don't want to be in school. Here you can only pity the poor teacher.

The failure of teaching colleges is a subject unto itself. Let's return to the main problem facing many high schools; namely, the student, or, more precisely, our attitude toward the student population. If we were to put our students into various categories and attempt to put them in schools where the curriculum and the teaching staff focused on the need of that category, we'd be doing more for the students than seems to be possible under our current system. But we can't do that. It's not possible. It's called "tracking" and it's politically incorrect.

Thank goodness that, in medicine, antibiotics haven't been declared politically incorrect. Were that to happen, we'd be back to bleeding patients.