| Book Excerpts 2
CONTINUED FROM BOOK EXCERPTS 1
NIGHTMARE SEVEN:
RETICENCE • PERMISSIVENESS • MEDIOCRITY •
SECULAR PROGRESSIVISM
EUPHEMISM: THE CULTURE OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS
" . . . reticence is an all-encompassing part of the culture of public schools . . . " In large measure, what really happens on the campuses of middle schools, junior high schools, and high schools is kept quiet except for what the education bureaucracy wants the public to know. The community in which these schools are located almost never knows about the serious situations that occur often at their local schools: fistfights, drug use, cheating, fraternization, vandalism, stealing, truancy, obscene language, suspensions, expulsions, gang-related threats, threats to teachers, and much more. Most schools are eminently proficient at keeping most of these negative happenings hushed and out of the public’s view. (P. 145)
"Isn’t it curious that most parents confidently believe that the school their children attend is a great school with good teachers and a really fine principal? Many parents believe this, and in the ABC 20/20 documentary "Stupid in America," their feelings were reported in these words:
Now, you may be thinking these things don’t happen at my kid’s school. Fifty-seven percent of American parents give an A or B grade to their kids’ public school. People in the suburbs say our schools are great. But they’re not. That’s the thing, and the test scores show that.
It’s that school across town, or those schools in a neighboring school district, which have problems with unruly students, drugs, low test scores, and incompetent teachers. If you honestly believe all is well at your local middle school, junior high school, or high school, you have been successfully hoodwinked by the effective implementation of reticence practiced by students, teachers, and administrators." (P. 146)
"Permissiveness is rampant in other ways, too. Inside classrooms, pupils are allowed to exhibit behaviors that would shock most parents. During the course of my career as a teacher, principal, and substitute teacher, I’ve personally witnessed the following behaviors:
1. Conversations between and among students while a teacher was conducting a lesson
2. Pupils mimicking their teacher’s voice and mannerisms
3. The screaming and yelling of expressions such as "shut up," "cool it," and "stop it," in an attempt to quiet down fellow students who were loud and boisterous in a classroom
4. Pupils shoving, pushing, and hitting each other before class started and during class while moving around the classroom
5. Pupils getting out of their desks during class to do basically whatever they wanted to do without permission: sharpen a pencil, get a book or piece of paper, adjust a window covering, move a desk, talk to a friend, write on a whiteboard, and so forth
6. The throwing of almost everything imaginable, such as erasers, pens, pencils, paper wads, spitballs, paper airplanes, books, backpacks, clothing, food, and drinks
7. The refusal to complete assignments by doing nothing the whole class, falling asleep with their heads in their arms on the desktop, reading a book, or engaging in other diversions
8. The irritating noise associated with tapping pencils and pens, the drumming of fingers and hands on desktops, and the thumping of feet against furniture and on the classroom floor during a lesson
9. Pupils listening to iPods, MP3s, and using other electronic devices such as cell phones, Blackberries, or PDAs
10. Pupils sending emails to friends while working on a computer
11. Pupils eating food and drinking sodas during class
12. Pupils sitting on desktops and classroom floors, sprawling spread-eagled on a floor or in chairs, and sitting on the backrests of chairs, with their feet on the seats
13. Pupils loudly interrupting teachers with objections to the
work they were assigned to do
14. Girls applying make-up, primping hair and clothing, and
using mirrors, combs, and brushes
I stopped at fourteen examples to give you an idea of what those behaviors are, but I could have easily included another fourteen. Pupils are generally allowed to do whatever they want as long as they don’t hurt themselves or each other, and don’t do anything illegal.
What’s absolutely amazing, and should be unacceptable, is the fact that many teachers allow these kinds of behaviors to take place every day in all their classes and do little or nothing to dissuade, correct, punish, or stop them. The permissiveness is so utterly uncontrolled that, in many middle and high school classrooms, these and other behaviors are normal and routine." (pp.149-150)
"In the classrooms of the fourteen thousand, five hundred school districts throughout the United States, teachers are not motivated to excel. The desire to be excellent is lacking, the aspiration to teach superbly is missing, and the dream to make a significant difference in the learning experience of students is severely deficient. Some people, certainly teachers, might ask how in the world I could use such strong, condemning language to describe the motivation of teachers. Let me explain before I go on to describe the reasons for this blatant mediocrity.
Notice the words I used, please; they were chosen with extreme care and purpose. The words desire,aspiration, and dream all connote a meaning indicative of a person’s interior, subjective motivation to achieve something. Today, most teachers don’t consciously desire to be excellent; they don’t strive for excellence as a conscious goal for themselves personally. Throughout our public schools, most teachers don’t aspire to teach superbly; they don’t make every possible, personal effort to be the best teacher their potential will allow. And, lamentably, most teachers don’t dream about making a difference in the academic lives of their students; they don’t personally crave and envision academic success, fulfillment, and achievement for their students." (p. 152)
NIGHTMARE EIGHT:
IN-SERVICE • COLLEGIALITY/PROFESSIONALISM •
TEACHER EVALUATION
EUPHEMISM: WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW WON'T HURT YOU
"Most of these teacher learning days are nearly a total waste of everyone’s time. Many teachers look forward to them for one reason only: to have a day off from teaching kids. They anticipate these days with a sense of relief because they know they won’t have to teach a full five days that week. At the extreme, I’ve heard a couple of teachers say, with disdain and glee, that they could not wait for in-service days because they would not have to be cooped up in their classrooms with spoiled, disruptive, ill-mannered brats. Parents, these are your children they put down. Even more sadly, they demonstrated their deep-seated lack of professionalism and devotion to teaching young people, the very qualities they want you to believe they possess with passion and commitment.
As if this offensive behavior were not hypocritical enough, many teachers exhibit other deplorable behaviors while attending sessions during in-service days. Every time I experienced one of these days, I witnessed at least one of these unprofessional and disrespectful actions in nearly every session I attended. Many times I saw three or four of them used with total disregard for educational propriety and politeness. Teachers slept, unabashed, their heads tilted back or down on their arms, similar to the way some students sleep in class. Teachers knitted and crocheted. Others did crossword puzzles or read paperbacks. At times, I observed my colleagues holding whispered conversations during an entire presentation. Many daydreamed or looked around the room inattentively. The most popular activities, which I witnessed numerous times, were teachers grading papers or entering grades into their grade books." (p. 162)
"Apart from working together with another teacher or group of teachers, the words collegiality and professionalism also mean that teachers are assumed to have the integrity, honesty, and intelligence to regulate and monitor themselves while they carry out their responsibilities. Principals rarely oversee the day-to-day activities of teachers to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to do. Few questions, if any, are raised regarding their decisions about what and how they teach. They rarely see an administrator in their classrooms because they are professionals and are assumed to be doing a professional job. The latitude teachers enjoy in this regard is immense. Unfortunately, not all teachers are worthy of this freedom, and some of them take advantage of the situation to do the minimum amount of work possible.
I knew a teacher who taught a unit on sexual harassment in her English classes for years, even though it had absolutely nothing to do with the curriculum and had never been approved by the school district administration. She taught the unit because she believed personally that students should have the information. Even if the unit was a valuable learning experience for the students, she had no authority to take two to three weeks each school year from the English curriculum to teach it. She acted unilaterally and without regard for her responsibility to teach English. To my knowledge, no one in authority ever questioned her about this." (p. 168-169)
"When you hear these words [teacher evaluation] spoken by a school administrator, they are intended to connote the positive idea that teachers undergo a performance review intended to help them grow to be better teachers. An assessment of a person’s work is made in all professions and occupations, and the results usually determine whether or not a person will receive an increase in salary. That’s not the case in education. The evaluation of teachers has nothing to do with salary but everything to do with what can only be called a pattern of routine nonsense. The teacher evaluation process used by most school districts follows a design that is regularly used over and over again and usually results in balderdash. Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
The whole evaluation process is tolerated by both teachers and the administrators who conduct it. I intend no offense toward dentists; but, at best, the evaluation process is endured the way many people endure a visit to their dentists. I personally don’t know of anyone who looks forward, with anticipation and glee, to a dental appointment. It’s something most of us tolerate because we want to maintain good dental health, but we certainly don’t look forward to it. Likewise, teachers have to endure the evaluation process, but they certainly don’t look forward to it. More importantly, whereas there is, most often, a beneficial outcome to our visit to the dentist, there is practically nothing accomplished that’s worth reporting as a result of the teacher evaluation process." (p. 170)
PLEASANT DREAMS
"Competition results in people making decisions in their best interests. It’s so simple an idea to understand that it’s almost ludicrous to have to explain it. But explain it I will, not because I think you or the general public need to have it clarified, but because I want all of you to know the people and groups who oppose it for our public schools. Then, you can make up your own mind about their thinking and what it’s based upon. I’ve already made up my mind, and I can tell you that, in my opinion, they are biased, self-centered, insecure, ignorant, afraid of change, foolish, and putting their own self-interests ahead of the welfare of children.
Who are they? First and foremost, they are teachers’ unions who will do everything they can to preserve their own existence and power: The National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and The United Federation of Teachers. Then they are far-left organizations that attempt to influence your independent thinking with scare tactics and specious information: the American Civil Liberties Union, National Public Radio, and Air-America Radio. Next, they are powerful individuals whose far-left agenda is deceivingly couched in positive-sounding bromides like progressivism, multiculturalism, equal treatment, individual rights: politicians, school superintendents, school district board of education members, and union leaders. Finally, they are teachers who just don’t know any better because they have been hoodwinked, deceived, and manipulated or because they, too, mistakenly believe that competition is bad for education." (p. 183)
"Many of the educational nightmares I’ve written about will never be converted magically into pleasant dreams. Some are so ingrained in the structure of public schools that they are impossible to rectify. Others are so entrenched in the culture of schools that they don’t even appear to need modification because they have become so commonplace. Still others are so intertwined with such powerful groups as unions, state departments of education, textbook publishers, and political organizations that change seems a hopeless dream." (p. 187)
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