 | |||
 | |||
 | | | |
| | |
GWS 32 continued from previous page. This is page 5 of 13.
Go back a page — Go forward a page
The absence of "professional distance" makes homes effective environments not only for children's learning but also for the training of the parent/teachers themselves. All teachers who learn to teach well learn to do so mostly from their students, who show by their responses when teaching has been helpful and when it has not. But even the most attentive, perceptive, and thoughtful classroom teachers could never elicit from their students the amount and intensity of feedback that homeschooling parents typically get from their children, because parents know and understand their children so much better.
... So far, the home-schooling movement may not have generated statistically impressive numbers of success stories, but, if it is not legally prevented from growing, it is sure to do so. Meanwhile, as it grows, it gives more and more encouragement and support to those people within the schools who are trying to make fundamental changes.
But the home-schooling movement provides more than just encouragement to chose who seek change in schools; it also provides much useful information. There is a great deal of internal communication within the homeschooling movement. As people who teach their own children discover new ways to help their children learn (sometimes finding that the children don't need help at all), they tell this to others. When home schoolers have problems, they ask other home schoolers for help: when they solve their own problems, they share their solutions. If they live near enough to each other, they usually meet informally, sometimes as often as once a month. At these gatherings, home schoolers and their children get acquainted, share ideas and experiences, and often plan and carry out group projects. Since the bond between them is a strong one, many home schoolers become close friends; indeed, many people in the homeschooling movement liken it to being a member of a very large but close family.
Much of this communication between friends and colleagues is printed in the magazine GROWING WITHOUT SCHOOLING. Admittedly, some of this information is of interest mainly to parents, but much of it could be of immediate use to classroom teachers and others working in schools ...
As far as I know, there is nothing in public education that is comparable to this network. Certainly a great number of educational magazines exist, but none that I have seen are open forums in which teachers can talk freely to one another, especially about their problems and failures. Nothing would do more to improve the morale of teachers and raise the quality of their teaching than the creation of many such forums. Everything I learned about teaching I learned from my students, from my own experiences as a learner, and from talking, without fear of censure, to other teachers who were as puzzled and frustrated as I was. It is ironic that hardly anyone in the still small home-schooling movement feels as isolated as do many of the teachers and others working in our giant system of public education. Whatever educators may think of the content of the home-schooling publications, they do offer a rough model of a kind of network of communication and mutual support that, once established, could prove very useful to the public system. One can easily imagine a school district newsletter in which administrators, teachers, students, parents, and the general public share their ideas about the schools... _____
[JH:] I think it might be useful for local home schooling groups to send copies of this article, perhaps along with copies of our proposed legislation (GWS #30), to as many as possible school officials, state and national legislators, governors, other politically influential people, and the media. We must make it as clear as we can that we are trying to live in cooperation and harmony with the schools, and that if there is conflict it is of their making, not ours.
[JH:] The cover story of US News and World Report, 3/14/83, is entitled "What's Wrong With Our Teachers?" Since now in some states and perhaps soon in many more, home schoolers are combating attempts to make it difficult or impossible for them to teach their own children, we are going to have to make a point of collecting all we can find of stories like these, about the incompetence of schools and the very poor qualifications of many of their teachers. Here are some significant quotes from the four-page article (the numbers in parentheses refer to my comments later in this story):
... On the one hand, too many classrooms are burdened with teachers improperly prepared for their work. On the other, thousands of competent instructors are being lured from their jobs by more rewarding work elsewhere. (1)
... Increasingly, leading scholars insist that reform of the nation's schools - crucial to maintaining America's technological leadership - must start with teachers. In a major study of the American teacher to be released in mid-March by a panel of top educators, project director Emily Feistritzer concludes: "The real crisis in teaching today is in who is entering the profession." (2)
Fewer than 5% of the freshmen entering college last fall said they planned to become teachers - down from nearly 22% in 1966. Their low numbers were matched only by their low academic performances. The 1982 SAT scores for students entering education were 80 points below the national average in math and verbal skills - a combined score of 813 out of a possible 1,600. Future teachers ranked 26th in 29 academic fields surveyed. (3)
Educators say many of the problems are traceable to a surge in public-school enrollment in the early '60's that put pressure on colleges of education to train thousands of teachers quickly. The boom also caused many states to certify new instructors who were not adequately prepared.
"They were just trying to get warm bodies into the classroom," recalls Samuel Sava, executive director of the National Association of Elementary School Principals.
... Many young women have decided that the teaching profession, for decades one of the best jobs available to them, did not have enough prestige and chose other careers.
The result has been an alarming decline in the quality of teachers entering many classrooms...
A study conducted for the National Institute of Education, which looked at college graduates who entered teaching in the late 70's, found that those with the highest academic ability were much more likely to leave their jobs than those who were lower achievers. Among high-achieving students, only 26% intended to teach at age 30, as compared with approximately 60% of those with the lowest academic ability. (4)
... One third of the nearly 7,000 prospective teachers who took California's first minimum competency test failed to meet the most basic skill requirements. (5)
Notes Dan Alexander, president of the Mobile County, Ala., school board: "If the current test-failure rate is, say, 20%, then you have to figure that 20% of the people who would have failed in the past are still teaching in the system." (6)
One of the worst effects of the crisis is the lowering of teachers' morale. A 1981 survey... found that 24% of the teachers polled "probably would not" choose teaching as a career again... What has happened over the past two decades to make teaching so unpopular? (7)
... Low pay is the top complaint. (8)
29% of the teachers surveyed in Texas last year had outside jobs, up from 22% in 1980. The experience can be humiliating. A Salt Lake City teacher finds his job at a gas station makes him the target of student ridicule: "Students that I had bring in their cars and ask for a dollar's worth of gas. They enjoy taunting me as their teacher who now has to wait on them." (9)
... Many areas ... have had to use teachers certified in other subject areas to teach math and science. in Pacific Coast states, 84% of the new math and science teachers were trained in other fields. (10)
Other reasons for leaving [the teaching profession] include problems of discipline in overcrowded classrooms that are filled with handicapped youngsters, children who speak little English, and the products of broken homes.
... Teachers in many urban school districts live with the fear of violence ... In Dade County, Fla., public schools reported 84 student assaults on school personnel during the first half of the past school year. (11)
... By 1985, half of the 50 states will require new teachers to take a basic-skills test before they can operate in a classroom. The tests screen out incompetent teachers and help pinpoint weak teacher-preparation programs. (12)
... Improvements also are underway in many of the 1,340 colleges offering teacher-education programs - only 534 of which are approved by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. Concern has generally focused on the teaching-methods courses that critics say are boring and are driving away many bright, ambitious students. (13)
...Secretary of Education Terrel Bell favors creating a position called "master teacher," which would command a salary several thousand dollars higher than a regular teacher's pay. Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander has proposed such a program that would pay master teachers an average salary of $26,873, which is 60% more than the salary of a regular teacher. (14)
While such a program would reward excellence, many administrators say any type of merit-pay system would be hard to administer and might prove divisive. (15) _____
[JH:l Some observations about the above quotes:
(1) This condition has been true through all the thirty years I have been involved in education.
(2) One of the first books about modern education (whose title I forget) was written by Joseph Wood Krutch in the early 1950's. In it he quoted an extensive study showing that of all college students entering graduate schools, the only ones whose grades were lower than those going into education were those going into physical education. In the years since then I have read a number of articles, reports, news stories, etc., on this question, and I do not remember one that did not in effect say the same thing.
(3) "...80 points below the national average..." But that average itself is the lowest we have had in many years. As a former secondary school teacher I can assure you that a student whose combined math and verbal scores are barely above 800 is a very poor student indeed. The chances are that of all the students taking the SAT tests, only a very small percentage had a total score of less chan 813, and of these, almost all went to schools of education. In other words the average score of future teachers was lower than the scores of almost any scores of people going into other fields. Important to note that the only fields ranked lower than Education were Home Economics, Ethnic Studies, and Trade and Vocational.
(4) What this tells us is that the average of the SAT scores of the people who stayed for a long time in the schools was lower and probably considerably lower than the math + verbal figure of 813 quoted above. It would be interesting, and people with access to the figures should find it not too difficult, to find out how much lower it was. Indeed, if we are ever forced to take a case into the high Federal courts, we ought to make a point of getting that figure. Beyond that, I have known a number of very bright people who, thinking that they wanted to teach, went to schools of education, but soon changed to other fields because the material they had to study in ed school was so boring and stupid. It seems very likely that schools of education lose a number of their best students for this reason, which would, of course, lower still further the average scores of those remaining.
(5) We are certainly entitled to assume that the people who went into teaching in California before this test was established did no better - and it's worth noting further that the California schools have long had the reputation of being one of our best state systems. Home schoolers in California who are fighting the requirement that they must be state certified in order to teach their own children should make use of this information.
(6) For the reason given in #4, that most of the best people quit early, we have to assume that many more than 20% of those now in the schools would have filed that test.
(7) See #1 and #2. Teaching was "unpopular" for a long time before that.
(8) This is a very common. and mostly mistaken argument. In the first place, it has been true for a long time and still is true that on the whole private schools, even in the inner city, achieve much better results than public schools in the same area, in spite of the fact that they pay their teachers less. Beyond that, I have by now heard, either face to face or by letter, from many hundreds of former teachers (many of whom now teach their own children at home), and very few have ever said that money was an important reason for their leaving, or a reason at all. Most left because they were denied any real control over their own work, and/or because they could not stand to work in places where so many of their colleagues so obviously and so strongly distrusted and disliked children. Worth noting, too, that in the Scandinavian schools, where pay is relatively higher and only the best students, instead of the worst, are admitted to teacher's colleges, the schools are also in serious crisis and getting worse, and teacher morale is also very low.
(9) This is a sad and indeed a disgusting story. But we have to ask ourselves, what kind of atmosphere did that teacher create in that class, what kind of values did he and his fellow teachers communicate to their students that would lead them to act in such a shameful way. Even more to the point, what can we say about the "social life" of a school that would turn out students with such values?
(10) This says a good deal about the supposed qualifications of certified teachers. Home schooling families in both California and Washington should make full use of this information. Many or most courts would agree that for the schools to impose upon parents requirements which they themselves do not even come close to meeting is to deny them equal treatment before the law.
(11) These conditions, which have made classrooms intolerable for more and more teachers, make up the very same "social life" which educators say is so good and indeed essential for children. When I was being interviewed by a Florida radio station, and a mother called in to say that she had taken her young child out of school because he was beaten up almost daily by other children, a male teacher phoned in to say that this mother was teaching her child "to run away from problems." In reply, I asked him when was the last time someone had punched him in the face. If violence in school is bad for teachers, as we all agree it is, then it is ten, a hundred times worse for children, and parents have every moral right to protect and withdraw their children from it, if they can.
(12) Well, but what good will this do if there are not enough teachers who can pass the tests to fill up all the necessary classrooms? Furthermore, the same week, Newsweek reported, "Like several other cities, Houston now requires public-school teachers to be tested to assess their competence. Last week more than 3,000 teachers took the test, and many of them openly cheated. Some freely exchanged answers. Some passed their test booklets around. Others sauntered in and out of the room with answer sheets ... It appears that the flagrant cribbing was at least in part a protest against the test. Many of them thought the basic-skills exam was beneath their professional dignity. Some were concerned about flunking, though school superintendent Billy Reagan assured everyone that the test would be used merely to gauge district 'needs,' not to fire teachers who did poorly ... No one has taken the names of the cheaters."
(13) But it is not going to be any easier to get rid of the many incompetent professors of education who teach these boring courses than it is to get rid of incompetent teachers. Most of these professors of education have tenure, and many of them are presidents, deans, and heads of departments in schools of education. How are we to get out from under them?
(14) This is not a new idea at all - many schools during the '60's had "master teachers," and most of these were in fact paid more. But this scheme did not improve the quality of teaching and did not get to the bottom of what was wrong with schools.
(15) There is no reason whatever to believe that it would reward excellence, since most of the people who would decide who was or was not "excellent" would be administrators who were themselves indifferent teachers if indeed they had ever been teachers at all. "Excellence" in most schools has mostly to do not with results but with keeping your students quiet and doing whatever the administration tells you. James Herndon's THE WAY IT SPOZED TO BE is a good and all-too-typical story of what really happens to excellent teachers, teachers who get results, in the average school.
SURVIVING ED. SCHOOL
Sue Radosti (1526 3rd St, Charleston IL 61920) wrote to John:
... I'm taking my second shot at college after a 3-year absence, struggling through the elementary ed. program here ... School has always been a breeze for me, but I've hated all the superficial teaching/learning games. It was a major disappointment to me to discover that college was only more of the same, which was why I quit after my first two years. But during my three years out, I decided I wanted to do something to make it possible for kids to learn without being stuffed into rigid schedules and lesson plans. As I read through your books, my goals shifted from working within the system, to getting involved in alternative schooling, to helping sustain the homeschooling/unschooling "movement." ...I feel that I'll be a lot freer to be of service to unschoolers in a variety of ways if my certification base is covered.
Teacher Ed. programs are certainly everything you've claimed, if not worse. I spend a lot of time with my mouth hanging open in amazement over the issues raised in class. I'm learning to be a little bolder with my objections, but it's an overwhelming task sometimes when an entire lecture presentation is permeated with learning myths and child stereotypes.
... I've discovered first-hand some of the problems involved in trying to change the thinking of the traditional educators, a major one being the nature of educational research. I'm in a general methods course this semester (primarily focused on - what else? - classroom management), and one of the course requirements is proficiency in the Zaner-Bloser manuscript handwriting system (undoubtedly the ugliest writing style I've ever seen!). We were given assignments to be written, in the Z-B style which were corrected by a grad assistant and returned to us with the more imperfect letters designated for extra practice. It took many of us 3 or 4 weeks to become proficient - and yet no one ever mentioned in class the obvious irony that this system was too difficult even for adults who have been writing with ease for years!
...Anyway, I spent a great deal of time in the library, poring over ERIC abstracts and searching Education Digest for some scrap of research to support my belief that a rigid system of handwriting isn't necessary for learning to write. What I found was that a lot of study has been devoted to comparing one system with another but no attempt has been made to compare a system with a lack of a system. Silly me - why should I expect educators to undermine their own purpose by disproving the necessity for systematized instruction? To quote one article I came across: "For a school to model its instructional program, after the kind of free learning pupils do on their own out of school is to abandon most of its special value as a school, most of its very reason for existence." Indeed.
This is page 5 of 13. Go back a page — Go forward a page | ||
| | |