Liberty Maven

As a teacher for 25 yeas in the nation’s second largest school district, Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD), I find myself increasingly isolated in defending public education to my conservative and even liberal friends.  Unlike many of them, I continue to appreciate the fact that public schools in the U.S. are already in place, at a huge investment, and that they help millions of children, many more than they hurt; I must say, however, that as the years have passed, government, with the help of teachers unions, has made it increasingly difficult for me to face my critical friends, because what’s good about American education in recent years has been in spite of  government, not because of it.  From the U.S. Department of Education to state boards and even to many local boards and districts, teachers face dictums from imaginative dilettantes who are never asked to be responsible for their actions.  A brief history of my career will make the problem clear.

My first assignment as a new teacher was in South Los Angeles, in what was then a predominantly black neighborhood.  The school population was entirely low income and thus eligible for substantial Title I money, designated for schools with at least 40% low income population under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.  So much Title I money flowed into the school that we had a designated office just to manage it.  The school was filled with hundreds of brand new computers in fully staffed labs.  Music and art programs abounded.  All classrooms were air-conditioned years before any schools in the much hotter but largely affluent San Fernando Valley.  It would be mean spirited indeed for me to begrudge the children at my school any of these benefits, and I did not.  What I did notice, however, was that test scores at the school had not risen at all over the years of federal largess.   It appeared that money, by itself, was not sufficient to help these children.  It took me a few more years to learn what was missing.

My next assignment was at a school in East Hollywood, where I remained for 12 years.  This school was comprised of 40% Armenian children and 60% Hispanic, and it was here that I encountered bilingual education and other disastrous policies actively enforced by government at all levels, and where I learned to identify the evils of the government’s benign neglect, which is just as evil as its interventions.

Bilingual education was conceived in good faith by Congressman Herman Badillo, principal author of the Bilingual Education Act of 1974.  Badillo had in mind using non-English speaking children’s native languages as support for acquisition of English, a reasonable concept as he envisioned it, but the feds soon put an end to the reasonable part.  The type of “bilingual” education that appeared in the early 1980’s in California and much of the country, promoted by the U.S. Department of Education (to Badillo’s dismay) ordained that immigrant children could not study English at all until they had thoroughly mastered their native languages.  Here is how the policy played out at my school and in thousands of others: a Spanish speaking child (Armenian families, like Korean, would have nothing to do with the program) would enter the system in kindergarten and be designated LEP, Limited English Proficient. The child then began a regimen of all Spanish instruction until such time as he or she passed a quite rigorous test in the native language.  The result: students typically studied math, social studies- all academic subjects- in Spanish with Spanish language textbooks until the 5th grade or beyond, during which time instruction in the English language was strictly forbidden as a harmful distraction.  Parents were even advised not to speak English with their children at home, but to stick to their native language. It was clear to most teachers and parents that the inaptly named “bilingual education” approach wasted the students’ youngest years, when language acquisition skills are strongest.  California’s reading scores started to rival those of the Deep South, but this was not a concern to the vast district and state bureaucracies who supported the system, or who, I should say, were supported by it, with thousands of salaries and publishing deals dependent on it.

A great hue and cry ensued from parents and many teachers, but no one at the district, state or federal level listened.  It took Proposition 227 in 1997 to knock out “bilingual” education in California.  I worked closely with Ron Unz, the author of Prop. 227, to represent teacher opposition to bilingual education.  One of my approaches was to organize a referendum on Prop. 227 through the L.A. teachers union, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) for which I was a local chapter chair.  The experience taught me that teachers unions are as benighted as government when it comes education.   The entire UTLA leadership came out against me and Prop. 227, with nasty editorials in the union paper calling me a racist.  When the ballots for the referendum were distributed, they were accompanied by flyers urging a “No” vote.  Two UTLA members were assigned to picket my school with signs attacking me personally.  The result of the referendum: 49% of teachers voting were in favor of Prop. 227 and my referendum, an encouraging result considering the relentless union campaigning against it.  It should be noted that the California Teachers Association and the National Educators Association were dominated by proponents of bilingual education.  Will anyone ever hold them to account for the tens of thousands of Hispanic children who were denied English instruction because of them?  Don’t hold your breath.

The overwhelming passage of Prop. 227 ended bilingual education in California, but much of the nation still suffers from it.

One day, a few years after my arrival at my school, we assembled to hear the latest breakthrough in reading theory: “whole language.”  We were told to stop teaching grammar, phonics, and spelling.  What we needed were “interesting” books (with lots of illustrations) so students could teach themselves to read.  Many hundreds of thousands of state and federal dollars were spent on new books with beautiful illustrations.  Los Angeles Unified, the California Department of Education and many in the U.S. Department of Education were 100% behind whole language, until reading scores (of native English speakers) dropped so dramatically that, due to the efforts of activist parents and teachers, the system was finally scrapped in the early 90’s.

A new way of deriving grades, a sort of adjunct to whole language, was devised, based on student maintained “portfolios.”   These massive folders, stuffed with crayon drawings and uncorrected “journals,” were supposed to show “effort” (as opposed to knowledge), and vastly inflated grades were based on them.  Thus, a bulky portfolio with incomprehensible writing samples might give a high grade based on volume alone.

Shortly after whole language appeared, a movement to reform math was promoted which decried knowledge of the multiplication tables and the standard algorithms as useless distractions.  We endured several years of this state supported idiocy.

A new approach to science instruction came along and decreed that physical processes should not be explicitly taught.  Children should “discover” them on their own.  I tried one of these lessons, using an elaborate kit paid for with Title I funds.  The children, after wrapping string all over the room and cutting eye holes in paper for a week were supposed to discover, all by themselves, the principles of parallax.  At no time was the teacher permitted to use the term or define it.  The results were rather disappointing, not surprising since the premise of the activity implied that human wisdom is not cumulative.  Oops.

What was missing from the thinking of the government mavens who devised these airy theories and loony policies is simply that they were not close to the classroom, but were sequestered in government.  It doesn’t matter what level: downtown, state board, or Washington.  They were not working with children and they could not see what was happening, or what should happen.  They were easy pickings when accosted by ambitious academics from colleges of education who were looking to become distinguished, or entrepreneurs hoping to make millions in publishing.

Consider, for instance, that educrats cannot see that the two greatest impediments to increasing test scores are not addressed by any state or federal program, are not even discussed, not even on the radar.  These are discipline and social promotion.

It doesn’t matter how well conceived a teacher’s lessons might be, if there is a child, or several children, or a class full of them, who disrupt the class, and there’s nothing the teacher can do about it, then instruction will cease.  In public schools today there is virtually nothing that a classroom teacher can do about habitually disruptive children, even though almost every class has them.  You’d think there would be some discussion of this at the upper levels.  There is none.

Social promotion is the practice of promoting students to the next level whether they learn what they’re supposed to learn or not.  When I taught 5th grade, I could legitimately have held back up to 40% or each class that I dutifully sent on to middle school.  Why didn’t I?  For the same reason that no other teacher does: no American school district could even begin to handle the strain of holding back all students who don’t learn.  The result is that every class from 1st grade on is populated with increasing numbers of children who can’t understand any of the basic lessons.

Why doesn’t our meddling government dabble in discipline or social promotion?  Clearly it’s because these are extremely tough problems, not amendable to gimmicks or slogans, and thus useless as career enhancers, where quick fixes, whether they really fix anything or not, are keys to promotion.

In 2001 I reinvented myself as a high school English teacher.  Many of the abuses of government from previous decades had stopped (due to pubic pressure, not government enlightenment) only to be replaced by new bad ideas, like the CELDT, the California English Language Development Test, an offshoot of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, which mandates states to respond to new accountability requirements for EL’s, “English Learners” (the previous LEP’s).  It turns out that although California got rid of native language instruction at the expense of English, there continues to thrive, in California and nationwide, a vast and obscenely expensive bureaucracy whose mission is to obsess about the language skills of students.  Why? Because the classroom teacher, who actually works full-time with the students, is not expected to know anything on the subject.

I was recently enlisted to help administer the CELDT at my school, and the experience was an eye opener.  The questions were remarkably easy.  A typical task: the student sees a picture of a ball on a table.  The teacher then reads to the student the question: “Where is the ball?”  Student after student asked me, in quite presentable English, why he or she was taking such a simple test.  When I considered that students designated EL must score “proficient” on the California Standards Test (CST)- also mandated by NCLB-, the cause of the problem became clear.  Every time I tested a student whose abilities seemed far beyond the CELDT, I would ask, “Did you guess on the CST?”  The answer was invariably, “Yes.”

The CST scores are used to generate reports on schools, and negative reports can result in loss of federal funds, per NCLB, so school administrators and to a lesser extent teachers await with trepidation the public scores.  Most students, however, have no reason to worry, as CST scores do not affect report card grades and are not shown on college transcripts.  Every spring thousands of students in California guess on the CST.  For several years I flew regularly to Sacramento to participate in the State Department of Education’s Content Review Panel, which reviews CST test items.  Occasionally we were visited by state psychometricians, the brains behind the test.  During one such visit I asked if account was taken, in assessing test results, of the thousands of students who guess on all the questions.  The psychometricians stared at me as if I were telling an off-color joke.  They actually seemed unable to speak.  I had clearly passed the bounds of good taste, just as if I had asked about discipline or social promotion.

You will find similar silence if you delve into the usefulness of California’s so-called “Williams Decree,” which grew out of a lawsuit contending that schools in California often do not have adequate textbooks for their most needy students.  Every year guilt-ridden public schools in California have to verify that they are not shortchanging their hard working students by failing to provide textbooks.  What the public does not know is that the schools are verifying that they have many more texts than they need, since high school students habitually and blithely lose their books.  When I teach summer school I expect our textbook room to deny textbooks to up to a third of my students until they have paid off books they lost the previous year.  These are mostly students who failed the summer school class when they took it the previous year, so they are the very students that Williams is aiming to help.  What does Williams, or for that matter any level of the U.S. government’s educational hierarchy have to say about students losing books?  You guessed it: Nothing.

In a timely fashion for this article, fall ‘08 marked the promulgation of the new 11th grade curriculum in Los Angeles Unified, devised by the district and the school of education at California State University at Northridge (CSUN) and approved, we are told, by the California Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Education.  Juniors in LAUSD have for years studied American Literature.  Typically we start off in the fall with William Bradford’s account of the Mayflower, hit Twain in the winter, and end up with maybe John Updike in the spring.  It’s time now, we heard at the rollout of the new curriculum, to drop this dinosaur.   The keynote speaker, a professor of education at CSUN, announced the new discovery: literature must be de-emphasized, or dropped altogether from the 11th grade curriculum, and indeed from all of secondary school.  The only reason we’ve taught literature all these years, per the maven, is that elitists at Yale and then Harvard demanded it in the 1890’s.   What our fast-paced kids crave these days is non-fiction, expository texts such as “You-can-do-it” essays by celebrities, magazine articles of a youthful and hip variety that won’t unduly tax their minds.

To emphasize the point we spent an hour exploring a unit in the shiny new text, printed at great expense by the district with funds of unknown origin (apparently extensive funds, as the books are “consumable”- the kids write in them then throw them away) entitled “Virtual Selves,” by MIT “cyberanalyst” Sherry Terkel, about “avatars,”- not the Buddhist incarnations of godhead, but imaginary beings in video games with whom the game player identifies.  Terkel explains that young people today are not bounded by the real world (abbreviated RL).  In cyberspace you can do whatever you want.  Terkel’s emphasis is on sexual expression.  There are gleeful descriptions of the joys of “virtual sex.” A college senior is quoted as saying he can relieve his desire to rape by creating a “rapist avatar.”   Or you might try “virtual gender swapping,” in which a man becomes a woman to experience lesbian sex, or a women becomes a man to experience gay sex.  There are explorations of “virtual adultery,” “animal net-sex,” and “group sex.”  One of the suggestions for a teacher directed lesson is to have students gather in groups to discuss “…what your multiple personalities may be and/or who you’d like to be.”  Keep in mind that the target students are 16 years old.  The implications dawned on many of us at the workshop, and there were serious rumblings of dissent.  Teachers were shouting in fury and several walked out.  The presenters grudgingly  acknowledged that, yes, some “older” teachers might have trouble with the content, and perhaps some parents too.  Perhaps?  I don’t know too many parents of 16 year olds who want their public schools giving up Shakespeare in favor of virtual gender-swapping sex-ed.  It doesn’t seem to have dawned on the educrats and pundits that many students will object to the curriculum as well.  Nor do they seem to have the slightest inkling of the power and beauty of the literature they wish to throw out.  They are tone deaf to politics and common sense.  Left to their own devices, they will be the greatest argument for charters and vouchers.

To return to the national scene, which dwells on somewhat less fervid subjects, the recent presidential campaign found time to debate the re-funding of NCLB.  Notably Joe Biden in the VP debate claimed that NCLB’s failures stem from underfunding, a clearly ludicrous idea from a classroom point of view.  Take NCLB’s requirement that all students be “proficient” in reading by 2010.  There is no amount of money in the universe, not even $700 billion, that could begin to promote a result like that.  No society has ever achieved total proficiency of the population in any skill, let alone something as difficult as reading.  And to do it without discussing discipline or social promotion?  It’s a sad joke.  Let’s hope President Obama has something more useful to suggest for education than commanding success through government fiat of fantasy education.  The signs, sadly, are not in that direction.  As detailed by Lance Izumi (”Obama’s Ed Plan: Hold Your Wallet, But Don’t Hold Your Breath For Better Results,” Pacific Research Institute) one of Obama’s few forays into educational “reform” has been to advocate the use of portfolios.

The reader might wonder, since I’ve indicted as deficient in educational expertise not only the federal and state education establishments but many local districts as well, who is left to make decisions about educating our children.  I’m going to go out on a limb here, because we haven’t had a million dollar federal study to corroborate it, but I’d say that the people who work most closely with children, the parents and teachers, would be a good place to start.

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Doug Lasken teaches English and coaches debate for the Los Angeles Unified School District.  Write to him at dlasken514@aol.com