PICKING UP THE PIECES FROM THE SCHOOLS LEFT BEHIND

Now that public schools have been virtually destroyed by corporatism and banal policies which only served to line the pockets of an education corporate complex, who is going to pick up the pieces?  There is no doubt that the emphasis on test scores, data, and a remedial approach to intervention have backfired and contributed to a wider achievement gap and a poorly educated citizenry. If you think that charter and magnet schools are the answer you have fallen into the trap of corporate spin. It is the same trap which exudes from the Whitehouse in daily tweets from a consummate gas bag.  Unfortunately, the spin of privatization has effectively destroyed public schools.

Once a thriving institution thought to be the great equalizer, public schools have been pushed over the brink into a pool of mediocrity. Frustrated by the emphasis on testing and intervention, many parents, especially those of gifted children or out-of-the-box thinkers, have chosen private school or home schooling. If we have learned nothing else, we now know that almost everyone, except the uber wealthy has been left behind. And yet, we have an education secretary who continues to drive public schools into the ground with an emphasis on privatization. Her own pockets have been lined by the corporate model which has contributed to the downfall of public schools. Our once thriving schools have become zombie nightmares devoid of engaged learners and motivated teachers. But that’s what you get for letting the fox in the hen house who steals your golden egg.

          As schools come out of the anesthetic induced stupor of big data, they will need to rebuild the confidence of teachers and students, and the trust of parents and the community. It is not enough to admit our mistakes and move forward. Administrators and reformists can learn a lot by looking into the not-so-distant past when elementary schools cultivated a love for learning. Enrichment, environmental education, field studies and differentiated paths to knowledge through an integrated curriculum benefitted all students across the learning spectrum.  Rather than constantly applying triage to students who are bleeding out (from boredom, I might add), we need to reexamine what was working before public education was so brutally attacked.

          One of the great travesties of the data-driven model is that we gave up on our gifted and talented population. We forfeited talent development for remediation and an emphasis on deficits rather than strengths. While we were busy trying to raise the test scores of struggling students, we lost a whole population of students to charter or private schools because their needs were not being met in public school. We traded talent for test scores, and a generation or more of our future thinkers, leaders, and problem solvers became disengaged from the learning process. This is especially true in small rural districts, urban and economically disadvantaged schools which have suffered greatly from the punitive measures of not performing well on standardized tests.

          One of the greatest casualties from high-stakes and punitive testing has been the loss of talented and gifted programs and school-wide enrichment. It is naïve to assume that only the “best and brightest” suffered, and that they would “be fine”. Students who came from more affluent families probably landed on their feet in a private school during the dark days of “No Child Left Behind” and other such disruptive policies. However, poor and underserved kids who relied on their school enrichment program to help them develop their talents and cultivate their gifts    were cast aside. But they were not the only ones. The expense of testing and the mass exodus of students to charter schools have depleted school budgets. With more demands for interventionists, statisticians, data crunchers and teaching coaches, enrichment teachers were plucked from the talent pool and placed in the cesspool of intervention. Although there was no money for field studies, assemblies, and after school enrichment programs, there was always room for yet one more interventionist. The word intervention itself implies that students are innately broken, rather than whole. And yet, the very methods of intervening contributed to the current mess of broken schools, broken children, broken teachers and broken communities.

          There may be no turning back at this point, although I had to laugh recently when I caught a public television show waxing over an environmental education program which is selling hands-on learning in the outdoor classroom, as if it were a new idea. Having started my teaching career in Environmental Education, in the 1980’s, the idea of engaging kids in connecting to the earth and seeing first-hand the effects of pollution and climate change is nothing new.  But Environmental Ed, like talented and gifted programs were effectively derailed by a corporate model which robbed us of teaching science and social studies in elementary schools for at least twenty years. The rise of history and STEM charter schools is no coincidence. Due to the emphasis on reading and math in standardized tests, elementary schools virtually banned science and social studies from the curriculum. True to the market economy of which they were born, charter schools are filling the void for all of us who were left behind.

          If you think that gifted education and enrichment are frivolous and elitist, consider what some of my former talent pool students had to say          when I asked them to evaluate the program. I opened a can of worms when I asked my talent pools to engage in a conversation about school. I wanted them to share their thinking about what they loved about school and what they would like to change. They had a lot to say!  For the most part, they loved the Elementary School. They loved their teachers, the building, the staff, administration and the playground. They loved the fact that it felt like a family. But they didn’t always like being “the smart kids” in a classroom. They felt ripped off in a way.

          Their frustration revolved around feeling held back by the other kids. The teachers had to spend a lot of time helping kids who struggled to keep up while talent pool kids had the burden of pulling the weight of the class behind them. They were either ignored or asked to help other kids. When they did have trouble understanding something, they hated it when the teacher just gave them the answer. They wanted help figuring it out and thinking – not the answers. They hated the way everything was disconnected in an hour of this an hour of that. However, they loved the way the reading & writing workshop connected.  They loved coming to enrichment because they got to talk and think about things and make connections. They wanted to do more in math, reading and writing and they felt dragged down and bored by the whole-class instruction which was geared toward the other kids.

          Their perspectives got me re-thinking the heterogeneous classroom. Although I wanted to believe that the benefits of an academically diverse and inclusive classroom outweighed the down side, I’m not sure it’s good for the kids on either end of the spectrum and especially not so good for the ones we should be nurturing to become leaders in science, technology and innovation. My talent pool students loved their teachers and their friends. They didn’t want to be home-schooled because they liked their social life. But they really wanted to be in a class together all day like when they came to talent pool.

Shortly after my interview with talent pool students I heard about one of our faculty “walk-throughs”.  During the feed-back session, the principal was perplexed that several kids got up and went to their talent pool cluster for writing (Press Corps). After observing the lesson, he began to wonder out loud about the possible negative impact of the TAG program. He wondered what it did to the rest of the class when the brightest kids left, and if they would benefit more by keeping those kids in the classroom. He also wondered what the TAG kids missed out on and how it impacted them to miss a writing lesson. Thankfully, the teacher spoke up in favor of the TAG program. She pointed out that when the TAG kids left it gave the rest of the class a chance to participate and share their own thinking, whereas they usually sat back and let the TAG kids do all the work and answer all the questions. She couldn’t speak to what the TAG kids got out of being in press corps but did say that they didn’t suffer from missing a writing lesson once a week. In fact, I would add that they were becoming better writers given the opportunity to publish a newspaper. Their non-fiction writing skills and editing improved tremendously. I would also conjecture that the TAG kids enriched classroom discussions by sharing what they had learned in their clusters and by making connections to the lessons in class. After all, the enrichment courses were designed to connect with classroom curriculum.

          The TAG (talented and gifted) program which I directed and taught for seven years, benefited all the students in our small rural school. When I wasn’t working with the talent pools, I was providing classroom enrichment, after-school programs, schoolwide enrichment, science, social studies, invention convention and integrated arts and science (STEAM). Before the budget was depleted, we had schoolwide assemblies and family nights where storytellers, musicians, authors and scientists shared their talents and expertise. The school was abuzz with engagement and learning. We had gardens, a greenhouse, and numerous service projects linked to the community. Most important, the kids who were a little out of the box, the quirky creatives, and the divergent thinkers had a home-base in the school. They had true mentorship.

          I know I’m beating a dead horse here, but the demise of the TAG program, the removal of science and social studies from the curriculum, and the emphasis on a data-driven model was an apocalypse for my school and many others. I’m sure we were not alone. Although I don’t have available data to support it, I can anecdotally report that with without the TAG program, bullying increased along with a decline in student behavior. These negative trends also coincided with a much more punitive emphasis on test scores and student performance. The school climate took a plunge with parents venting their anger at teachers while administration chose to duck and cover. Test scores continued to plummet, and yet no one questioned the validity or the ethics of a test-driven model. Curriculum was reduced to reading and math while social studies and science were banned from the schedule. Those of us who continued to teach science had to sneak it in behind closed doors. The language arts program consumed most of our time with very poor results. Where the TAG program had cultivated a stimulating learning environment for students and their families, we were now cultivating anti-intellectualism and a dislike for reading and writing.

          It breaks my heart to think about the wonderful standards-based lessons and projects the TAG program provided for all the students and teachers in that school. The enrichment model was pedagogically sound and based on the curriculum for each grade. Rather than extraneous fluff, it became an integral part of the classroom teaching and learning. Like Environmental Education, the enrichment model was the tease which got students engaged in a desire to know more. It is unfortunate that public schools sold out to the corporate model, and ironic that corporations are now enticing students away from public schools by providing science, social studies, environmental studies and enrichment in the form of charter schools. If public schools continue to pander to the failing data-driven model, they will bleed-out as more families and teachers divest themselves from one of our most sacred ideals of democracy.

If Betsy DeVos and her corporate ilk have their way, public schools will no longer exist. Instead, private institutions specializing in various unregulated pedagogical philosophies will be providing a smorgasbord of choice on the spectrum between special education and gifted. Like third-world and developing countries, and not unlike the 18^th and 19^th centuries in this country, education will come at a price. Those who can afford it will send their children to private schools. Those who can’t will get a rudimentary education, continuing the cycle of poverty and racial inequity. Perhaps someone in that not-so distant dystopian future will wonder why no one stepped in to pick up the pieces of our dismantled public schools.