No child left behind

The catchy title of the Bush administration’s legislation on education, “No Child Left Behind,” runs into a reality check as schools come to the end of a term and begin to assess the state of public school learning. The touted education reform legislation, ambitious in scope and couched in absolute imperatives, is being measured for efficiency and efficacy.

The recent headline of Hopwood seventh-grade students reading at 3rd grade level did not come as a surprise. This situation is not unique to the NMI. Nationally, the lower grades and pre-college schools are registering low ratings in reading levels.

There are many reasons that brought us to this situation, not the least of which is the fact that our mode of communication has changed drastically in the last 50 years. Until the end of World War II, we still depended on text and the printed word as our basic mode of communication. Messages were transmitted by radio, telegram, and plain printed pages. With the onset of television and the democratization of the visual image, our young have since become consumers of tactile, audio, olfactory and graphic stimulation. Students grow impatient with highly abstracted words and symbols.

Our consumer lifestyle has also introduced us to gratification on demand. We’ve mastered the art of fast food service. We are at a loss in providing fast track learning. When sixth graders come to class with text messaging cellular devices, the teacher is driven to wits end. How does one cope? On the one hand, we have just newly emancipated imaginations from the shackles of traditional island-bound, extensive extended-family network of authoritarian bondage and, on the other, highly excitable liberated nuclear souls who have bought into our promise of education as leading to a better life, and are eager to get on with it at a speed, preferably faster than light.

My sixth-grade class has 23 mainstream students whose reading levels extends from second grade to 12.9++. Trying to design a single lesson plan to implement a curriculum that fits all requires a genius and half, and a commando general briefed on guerrilla warfare to implement it successfully. The same teacher is also under pressure to meet standards to meet administrators’ requirements to meet accreditation benchmarks and statistics. Further, the increasing diversity and complexity of evident but undiagnosed learning disabilities add to the great challenge abiding in society’s microcosm residing daily in many of our public school classrooms.

The sole special education student in my class reads and writes at a first grade level. Though I belatedly discovered that she picks up on verbal rhymes, and can remember numbered sequences, most of my time has been spent on behavior issues rather than instructional ones. Classroom management has become the bane of every teacher’s pedagogical existence.

Attempting to mainstream a Special Ed student highlights the need to move into classroom situations where everyone comes with an independent educational plan (IEP). Mainstream students are no longer homogenous, if they ever were. Teachers grow cynical and are driven to despair when reduced to playing the role of truancy officers, in general, and surrogate parents, in particular.

Consider some of the characters in my class:

There’s a peripatetic young lady who fleets and flutters from one table to another like a reigning beauty queen or an aspiring politician. Enters daily a loud-mouthed hyperactive budding jock who announces every other minute that he is “the Man” and will beat you up if one does not acknowledge the same. Quietly perusing a thick bestseller, a chubby bookworm tells the teacher to her face that he, the student, did not learn anything new this year that he did not already know before the school term began. Then there is the free-spirited outer island boy who is advanced in age but has been detained a grade level to “meet standards,” and deftly plays a hide-and-seek game of now-you-see me, now-you-don’t! Need I mention Barbie doll and her low threshold for tears if the teacher’s voice is raised a couple of decibel higher in her direction? How about the Mama’s boys whose resilient umbilical cords remains uncut, and Papa’s girls who think everyone should eat off their hands? My favorite is an obesity-challenged young rebel whose curiosity will not allow him to leave anything that does not belong to him untouched. Queried last week, during a reflective class conversation on what exciting anticipation he had as classes wind down to summer, he answered with the arrogance and aplomb of a Winston Churchill: “I will not ever have to see Mr. Vergara again.” I think I might have pushed a raw button on this last one!

Early on during the year, I decided that pedagogy in my class will have to be an authentic encounter. Students had to learn how to GROW UP AGAINST the teacher! Learning was dialogical. Direct instructions were both buck shot and laser beamed. There were two people on both ends of the communication line, and they had to touch at a less than superficial level in order to connect, no child left behind. That happens when teachers and students meet as persons—unencumbered by half-hearted hugs and saccharine lollipops. Then, learning happens.