Poor Frankie

           “I’m dumb, dumb! Everyone else in the class gets this math and I don’t.” The adorable and affable second grader tears.

            “First of all, Frankie, you are not dumb! Not at all! Secondly, there are at least 12 other students who do not understand this lesson.”

            “I didn’t get it last year and I don’t get it this year. I hate science, and I hate math, and I hate school!”

            “Frankie, do you do your homework?” I ask.

            “Uh, not so much. I usually play outside after school. Then, I watch TV.” Home alone?

Poor Frankie never completely understood adding one number to another. He probably blinked in kindergarten, missed a couple days of phonics and the abacus, and never gained ground. No rescue.  Knowledge sequencing was impossible.

It does not take much to loosen the fundamental glue of a lesson: daydreaming, bending over to pick up a pencil, fatigue, confusion, distress, teaching too fast, lean or toxic home support, a friend’s toy, an orthodontic appointment, any frivolity that supplants education.

Since pupils are unaware of having missed integral, vital specks of a day’s lesson, the pupil perceives him/herself as dumb. Just ask him, her.

The truth is that the teacher, the school, and the administrators all know what was missed, when, and why. The who is in the grade books, self-blaming, being ignored/cheated.

NEXT:  “Stupid in America.”  John Stossel

Kindergarteners, first days...

           “What if I oversleep?” Happens.

           “What if I forget where the bathroom is?” Happens.

           “What if I pee my pants?” Happens.

           “What if my mom doesn’t know where I am?” Happens.

           “What if the teacher doesn’t like me?” Happens.

            “What if I never see my friend Luke?” Happens.

           “What if I fall asleep in school?” Happens.

           “What if someone beats me up?” Happens.

           “What if kids make fun of me?” Happens.

           “What if no one likes me?” Happens.

           “Pssst. Don’t tell on me, okay.”

These little September mustangs differ immensely from the bridled crop of the following June.

Two kindergartens: same day, same school, same classroom.  A.M. kindergarten is taught by a quality teacher and 2 parent volunteers. Students are quietly engaged, and learning.  P.M. kindergarten is chaos as students play/wrestle under the desks. Their teacher is scheduling tutoring sessions with parents in the back of the room. No aides. No learning.

Primary grades craft all future sequential learning. Flunk kindergarten and pupil stumbles/struggles forever. Teachers need to get the education right at the get-go!  No excuses.

If your child is not at grade level knowledge, make noise, serious noise. Professionals posture but in the face of $$$ and votes, waffle.  Students have no vote, no lobby, no recourse ...only parents.

Fact!  Children of involved parents get much more positive classroom attention/assistance.  Fact!

Well-meaning parents have tutors on speed-dial. Assume their child is deficient, to blame for failing.  But the mainstreamed student is guaranteed the right to free, public education, is tested able to learn, and wants to learn. If some educators score success, all should!

Next:

“I’m dumb, dumb! Everyone else in the class gets this math and I don’t.” The adorable and affable second grader tears. “I didn’t get it last year and I don’t get it this year. I hate science, I hate math, and I hate school!” Frankie.

Elementary Years Build the Foundations

The kindergarten, elementary years build the foundations that all future, sequential learning is based. Every skipped rung, every broken rule in education fractures learning. Gaps become yawning caverns that take on power.  Imagine, failure power, where lack of attention and assistance  trump intelligence.  

“Your turn to read, George,” I say to the four-year-old kindergartener sucking a thumb and stroking his shirt with the other hand. The thumb is yanked and both hands grip his reader.

“The dog, Fenway, rounded the corner to see if Gordo was hiding behind the bush. A smile came to Fenway’s face as Gordo walked up to his friend and plunked the bone at his front paws. Where have you been, Gordo? I thought you’d gone off with Mister Martin to the hard...hard...ware store.”

           

“George, that was excellent!” He grins as his fingers crab toward the pretzels in the center of the table. I edge the bowl closer to him.

A few quality teachers in excelling schools, understand the criticalness of scholarship in these early years of teaching/learning. These teachers have kindergarten reading clubs, catch-up exercises; students excel across the subject spectrum with solid grade-specific knowledge.  Attention, assistance, accountability.  No child is left behind academically. Students succeed because teachers succeed.

Next: Kindergarten fears

Peek-a-boo education. Distractions guaranteed.

“Students, please face me when I teach!”  “Sorry, no can do, Mrs. M, our regular teacher seats us facing away from the speaker.”  Current public education intentionally directs the focuses of 4-, 5-, 6-, 7-, et cetera-year-olds (50, even 100% of classroom) away from the speaker, the topic of study.  

Why? Adults choose (for themselves) to face the speaker, all speakers: auditoriums, symphony halls, ball games, television, horse-racing, swim meets, ocean views...always toward the action.

Are educators concerned about student socialization?  Order up another recess.

Why educators find themselves a productive path to learn while drawing a blank with children is another mystery. What’s good for the goose could be good for the gander, and the gosling.

In excelling classrooms, students face the action and have multiple aides prodding them along. Age-appropriate distractions are happenstance, not preordained.

“Oh, yeah, we always read with our head-phones on, our regular teacher doesn’t really care.” H.S. Shoddy, Regular Teach! How do even the best students survive these lackadaisical, obstructionist teachers?

“Hey, are you a Sub? Can you watch my class for 5 minutes so I can refill my coffee? Mrs. A and I do this all the time.” The across-the-walkway teacher was gone for a half-hour— during which I ran between 2 classrooms monitoring/teaching 60 + students. I declined his second request.

Children’s potential? They’re swinging from the tree-tops!

Parents, questioning your child’s potential, in the face of school/teacher’s complaints?

Watch extra-curricular play, observe control, confidence, and the seamless transference of skills. Children problem-solve, soar on to new heights, to greater challenges, to higher rungs on Jungle Jim. There’s a rhythm to children’s intrinsic drive—onward, upward. It’s at the classroom door mainstreamed children choke.

Conversing with Mom and Dad, in the comfort of home, is generally stressless. Communication within the school-house walls is a challenge.  A 6 year-old confessing to a teacher? “I don’t understand what we’re reading. You need to review.”  “You’re going too fast, Teacher.”  Rare.  Children are sensitive, unwilling to admit frailties, or invite peer ridicule.  Teachers are well aware of each student’s achievement level—evident in weekly tests. Assistance if needed?  Not in the failing classrooms.

Few adults tolerate an instructor “moving on” if the lesson were unclear—certainly not when tuition is involved.  Adults will raise hands and voices for clarification. The younger will self-blame.

To add to the students’ misery, the classroom teaching pace generally follows those who learn with ease, who have parents protecting them/their futures. Parents, standing outside the door with pitchforks!  Teachers understand this in-your-face accountability.

“Don’t worry, your child will catch up,” the teacher assures the parent.” Without serious intervention, this is a fantasy.  Your child’s teacher is being paid to keep all pupils at grade-level knowledge; the excelling teachers do.

Eventually, when enough degrading failure becomes enough, these marginalized students drop out. Why not?  

Next: Deliberate distractions.  “Students, please face me when I’m teaching.” Sorry, Mrs. M, no can do. Our regular teacher seats us looking away from the speaker.”

Con game 101

“Come on in, Young People, we’ll give you a ride for your lives!” Hawk public school educators, lounging at the entrance. Tiny, bright-eyed students eagerly cross the school-house door-step carrying mini-backpacks, #2 pencils, a snack. The result?

“Close to 40% drops out...” “...50% of America’s public school students fails proficiency in math and reading skills...” “...66% of public schools is drug infested...” “...50% of schools is gang infected...” “...ability to create the next generation of U.S. leaders in science and technology is seriously in danger.”A. Friedman.

The home-schooled students, kitchen-table scholars, test consistently higher and higher than the public school students— with significantly less resources, and untrained (mostly) personnel.

Come in, visit a classroom. Read the faces of failure—the students who understand they don’t understand what they should...no self-respect, no peer respect, certainly no enjoyment—eyes turned down, out the window, glaring back.  Students fail because teachers fail.

How this lack of achievement is, has been, allowed to persist (for decades) is a mystery, unconscionable.  Administrators know the standards, know the test scores, know the non-productive classrooms/schools. In no other field would these slackers be tolerated.

Parents are suing districts for the faulty education of their children, and they’re establishing alternatives to the public school education classroom. Why should parents keep opening their wallets wider and wider, over and over?  Why should communities pay over $200,000 annually to rehab one juvenile when the schools could have done the job for well under $10,000?

“Eventually, the only students in college will be from private schools or those who are home-schooled, certainly the ones who’ll be getting scholarships!”  prophesied a young mom.

Next:  Children’s potential? They’re swinging from the tree-tops!

Failing scores are failing futures, and a pervasive, catastrophic public safety issue!

Besides the tanking of home-grown prosperity and intensified citizen inequality, the most lethal, corrosive consequence of the current failing system of public education is the pervasive, catastrophic public safety issue.

Younger failing students are confused. But the older failing students are angry and resentful! The former “unruly” students have morphed into today’s classroom at-risk, “power-kegs.” Drop-outs. Then, the rest of us meet these under-schooled, unskilled drifters on the streets of America, extracting their pound of toxic comeuppance. Tit-for-tat?

“Yeah, our teacher doesn’t make us read during Reading Period (compulsory in district). He lets us do whatever we want.” Sloppy, Regular Teach!
The private, business sector warns: “get the numbers, or clean out your desks!” Educators? Teacher accountability—linch-pin of Finland’s education system (1st in the world)—is absent in America. Respect for educators is earned, not gratis.

“I’m dumb, dumb, dumb! I didn’t get it last year and I don’t get it this year!” The second grader tears and slumps. Most failing students will self-blame, wondering why they just cannot get it. Then, the student is shoved into the next grade.


Next: “Come on in, Young People, we’ll give you a ride for your lives,” hawk the public school educators, standing at the entrance.

Imagine, the public education system academically dooming 4-5 year olds, deliberately!

Public school education begins in kindergarten. Students learn to read then, they read to learn. Some exiting kindergarteners can read, some cannot.  Why? Teacher: “It’s compulsory to present the material; it’s not compulsory that students learn it!”  First grade, sequential learning? Unlikely.  Non-readers learn little/nothing, in any subject. Ever.

CDC: “...if the 2^nd grader cannot read, he/she has as little as a 20% chance of being successful in life.” The happy kindergartener face becomes the shuttered 4^th grade face. Imagine, academically dooming 4-5 year olds.    

If some quality teachers/schools score success, all should. Excelling vs. failing classrooms?  1:9. 

Private industry routinely reviews workers and their outputs. “Perform productively and get the numbers, or clean out your desks!” Yet, America’s failing public education is an international laughingstock. Why are failing public educators getting a pass?

Public education reform starts in kindergarten, with the teacher, the only trained professional in the classroom.  Standards are not to be degraded in the face of educators’ incompetence.

How is it that an entire third class fails a routine spelling quiz, in June? Failure in September is understandable when rules of the road are hazy, but a school year later!! Students fail because teachers fail.  

Next:  Failing academic scores are failing futures, and a pervasive, catastrophic public safety issue!

America's prosperity hijacked...by public education!

America’s prosperity hijacked...by public education!

               

There are five plus, soundly flunking students in 99% of my classes—K-12^th grades...thousands of mainstreamed students, in hundreds of public school classrooms, multiple schools, different districts, most subjects...in upper-income communities! The rest? They cling to fractured knowledge, or excel with relentless parental support.  Scholarship requires back-up!

      

Do parents wonder if their public school children will get a fair shot learning the academic necessities of the day?  Future wunderkinds? College scholarships? 

Why not?  Schools school. Appropriate education is a moral birthright for all our children. 

   

This I believed. Then I bore children, entered classrooms, taught, tested, corrected, and collected work well-below grade-specific knowledge. Some children will be schooled; some will be under-schooled; some will be un-schooled. Sadly, parents (including this educator) have no clue.

“Yeah, we don’t get no tests, no quizzes, no papers, no nada! We don’t know where our teacher gets our grade from. It’s soooo boring!” Collective head nod. Under-schooled, not under-achieving.

Classroom teachers, the only trained professional in the room, control students’ success and failure, period: not students (5, 6, 7 year olds inclusive), not parents, not poverty, not language difficulties, not testing, not NCLB, not RTT, not vanishing $$$--red herrings all.  Blame shame. Students fail because teachers fail...and have been since the mid 70s.

Biography

MM Madison, Educator Mom, is a parent, a decade-long substitute teacher (K-12), a writer.  She is a retired Probation Counselor, Special Education Coordinator, and business owner. 

Please go to, www.educatingthechild.com for more detail, and for classroom notes on, CHEATING OUR CHILDREN—Public education’s WINNERS, CLINGERS, and FLUNKERS.

Next: Imagine, the public education system academically dooming 4-5 year olds, purposely