An earlier version of this essay appears in educational Horizons

Gary K. Clabaugh, Emeritus Professor, La Salle University

RETURN
edited 9/2/16 

Imagine you walk into a dark room, flip on the lights, and nothing happens. You try the switch again. Still nothing. What’s wrong? Maybe the bulb is burnt out. But the switch could be faulty. Or possibly a circuit breaker tripped. Maybe electrical power is down in the neighborhood. In short, there are many possibilities.

Similarly, when students aren’t evidencing the desired learning, the problem may or may not be school based. Yet for decades both state and national officials have complained that U.S. school kids aren’t learning as much as they should and the schools are at fault.

These politicos not only presuppose that the problem is school based. They don’t even acknowledge the other possibilities. They are, in a sense, fixated on one element of a complex system—say, the light bulb—while ignoring the fact that the problem might be with the switch, or the circuit breaker, the wiring, power failure, and so forth.

Denny’s Story

Experienced teachers know that non-school problems often cause poor school performance. I recall one student—we’ll call him Denny—who regularly fell sound asleep in my seventh-grade class. I worried that my lessons were the sedative; but no one else in class was dozing.

In time I discovered the source of the problem. Denny’s father was a mean drunk who often came home smashed and proceeded to abuse Denny’s mother. When Denny tried to defend her, he took a licking himself.

Enraged and frightened, Denny took refuge in a nearby pool hall. In return for cleaning up after closing, the owner permitted him to sleep, as best he could, on one of the pool tables. Denny’s classroom failures had nothing to do with my lessons or with school. But he still learned very little.

Frontline teachers know from bitter experience that what goes on outside school either limits or enhances school success. But they often are loath to say so for fear they will be accused by public officials, or their school administrator lapdogs, of making excuses. Perhaps you remember when former President Reagan’s secretary of education, William F. Bennett, contemptuously referred to any externally based explanations of school failure as “sociological flim-flammery.”(1) Bennett, by the way, had no, as in “zero,” classroom experience in basic education. In fact, he had no training in education whatsoever. He was, however, a master of bombast.

Meet the Parents

Regardless of what Bennett and his ilk say, non-school factors greatly influence schooling. And a child’s home life is a particularly important element in school success or failure. In fact, it is fair to say that parents are often the switch that controls the educational lights. Have you ever gone to the equivalent of Meet the Parents Night, only to find your worst student’s parents absent and the best student’s parents always present? I know I have — every year. If you think this is a coincidence, you are engaging in wishful thinking.

It takes a special breed of parent to intelligently aid and encourage the schooling process, and not all parents are up to that. In fact, not all parents are even interested. And it is terribly difficult, if not impossible, for educators to overcome parental incompetence and/or dereliction of duty.

Asian-Americans

The disproportionate school success of most Asian-American students offers dramatic evidence of the importance of the parental role. Asian-American parents typically emphasize their child’s role as student; often also take on the role of after-school educator, make sure homework is done and done right and evidence great respect for educators and schooling.(2)

Such parenting pays off. Although Asians make up only 4 percent of the U.S. population, Asian-American students constitute an amazingly high percentage of the student body in top universities: 25 percent at both Columbia and Cornell, 24 percent at Stanford, and 18 percent at Harvard, for example. In fact more Asian Americans over the age of twenty-five have bachelor’s and advanced degrees than any other race or ethnic group in the nation.(3) This is not caused primarily by what goes on in school but by what goes on at home.

Ranked with Mexico

Of course, many other non-school factors turn the educational lights off or on. For example, living comfortably helps schooling take hold, but living in poverty does not. That is why it is significant that children in the United States are disproportionately poor compared to other developed nations. While they make up just 25 percent of the total U.S. population, they constitute 35 percent of the nation’s poor. In fact, eighteen of every hundred U.S. youngsters live in poverty.(4) That has a profoundly negative effect on their educational success.

Scandalously, twenty-two other nations rank better than the United States in terms of the relative poverty of their children.(5(The term “relative poverty” defines persons as poor if, on financial grounds, they lack the goods and services a vast majority of people in their culture have.) Finland, for instance, which has attracted international attention for its outstanding school achievement, ranks third best in the world with just 4.3 percent of its children living in relative poverty. Japan, often held up to U.S. educators as an example of a nation with top-notch schooling, ranks twelfth best with 12.2 percent of its children living in relative poverty. So how does the United States rate? A shameful 22.4 percent of our children fit that category live in relative poverty. That’s more than five times the rate in Finland and nearly double that of Japan. By the way, the nation ranked immediately below us is Mexico.

When Learning Fails

It is not difficult to imagine why public officials ignore non-school factors when learning fails . It is, after all, on their watch that we end up with millions of U.S. children living well below the standards that children in many other nations enjoy.  Far too many of US children also are homeless; lack moral, physiological and/or family security; are exposed to violence and aggression; don’t get enough to eat; are lonely, anxious, or depressed; get little or no encouragement to learn, explore, discover, and create; or have little opportunity to become engrossed by beauty or appreciate the wonders of the world.(6) Yet instead of trying to ameliorate these deficits, our public officials voted for a discretionary invasion of Iraq that cost an estimated 3 trillion, yes TRILLION, dollars and counting.

External factors, such as those just listed, are the prime reason inner-city school problems are so intractable. But it is educators who are blamed. No wonder the best and the brightest are often reluctant to choose a teaching career.

No Magic Wand

By what magic are educators to overcome destructive non-school forces? In most cases there is no magic to be found. Despite relentless bullying by federal and state officials, damaged children will inevitably be “left behind” and “fail” both now and into the indefinite future,

It is true that charismatic educational leadership, uncommon self-sacrifice, and inspired pedagogy can sometimes produce short-lived educational turnarounds. But too often such successes usually are flashes in the pan because they are so often excessively dependent on charismatic personalities and extraordinary effort.

That is not to say that we live in the best of all possible schooling worlds. More could be done to improve U.S. education. We could, for example, quit relying on academically marginal, undergraduate-trained teachers carrying out the orders of school board amateurs and substitute research-based methods implemented by well-paid, graduate-school-trained professionals. But even if this wildly improbable, though perfectly logical, vision were realized, the lights will remain out for far too many youngsters until their non-school issues are resolved.

What Is to Be Done?

Improved schooling results actually requires major non-school initiatives. Considering that poverty breeds school failure as surely as carrion breeds flies, for instance, the first necessary step is to establish a much fairer distribution of the nation’s wealth. Equal funding of all U.S. public schools is also almost certainly required. How can we expect to achieve across-the-board school improvements so long as the nation routinely under-funds the very schools that teach the most needy?

Truly ambitious parent-education programs might also prove necessary. And an unconditional guarantee of free and readily available child health care, including free eyeglasses, is also required. And we might also consider eliminating lay school boards at both the local and state levels. (After all, what do these amateur dabblers really know about children, instruction, or school management?) And we certainly don’t need any more inexpert, demagogic political hacks as secretaries of education at either the state or the national level. Indeed, if we wanted to get really radical we could appoint experts who, unlike Betsy DeVos actually know what they are talking about.

Another necessity might be deadly serious efforts to foster greater respect for education and the educators who provide it. Not the usual teacher-of-the-year backslapping and the like, mind you, but serious long-range efforts to nurture a sea change in national attitude. We could begin by requiring all candidates for public office to post their high school and college transcripts for all of us to see. Why not? We’re considering hiring them aren’t we?

Conclusion

The core point here is that non-school issues will have to be addressed if we want to achieve significantly more learning. As we’ve said, public schooling does not operate in a vacuum. It is deeply and ineluctably influenced both by who goes to school and by what they bring along as baggage.

The fact that our political leadership regularly ignores this consideration, often for dishonorable reasons, represents a power failure of major consequence. If we want the educational lights to burn brightly, we most assuredly must attend to all aspects of the system.

Notes

                            1. William F. Bennett, “Lessons from Great Schools,” speech delivered at Notre Dame University and reprinted in Reader’s Digest (November 1988): 122–125.

                            2. Soo Kim Abboud and Jane Kimm, “How Do Asian Students Get to the Top of the Class?” available at <http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/showarticle/ca/933/>.

                            3. Ibid.

                            4. National Poverty Center, “Poverty Facts,” University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford Poverty Center, available at <http://www.npc.umich.edu/poverty/>.

                            5. Relative poverty is defined by the United Nation’s Children’s Fund as households below 50 percent of the national median.

                            6. This list is derived from what Abraham Maslow presciently called “deficiency needs.” See Toward a Psychology of Being, 3rd ed. (John Wiley and Sons, 1999).

                            7. Susan Snyder, “An Inside Call to Fire 6 School Managers,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, May 20, 2007: B1.

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