Having spent the two school years from August 2002 through June 2004 in “Education”; we felt compelled to reflect—maybe not exactly on “American Education”, since we were teaching in Venezuela—but we were teaching from American textbooks, with an international faculty composed of numerous expatriate Americans among other nationalities, teaching in English, and teaching to students intent on entering American universities. We think the Education system (capital “E” for the system, small “e” for the normal meaning) is underperforming for some basic reasons mentioned below and they are reasons not easy to see from outside. Oh sure, once upon a time we all went through this system, but we were just kids then so we took it for granted how things worked and the system itself was just one more thing we learned.
We did not give Education much consideration for many years. However, in January 2002, we met a couple who were teaching and administering a school in Honduras, and a few months later they contacted us with a job offer to come to Escuela Bella Vista (EBV) in Maracaibo, Venezuela. At the risk of over-generalizing, here is what we noticed about Education during our time there. We begin with students, because they are primary challenge for Education—at least on the surface. But the underlying challenge is really one of how we should approach education.
Latin American culture is renowned as the greatest party culture of the world, and the students at EBV – comfortable in the school they have attended for many years and surrounded by their friends – are on the verge of a party all day, every day. They are inclusive, and glad to bring a grouchy old teacher into the fun if there is a way.
The hubbub – nay, the roar – of a successful party necessitates that the music be played louder, and this in turn necessitates that a party-goer speak loudly. Furthermore, even without music or a large crowd, even a small group of latinos may find themselves shouting to eachother as they struggle individually to drown out the voices of the others in their group, equally determined to make their own point in a multifaceted “conversation”. They do not attend to quiet voices.
A favorite refrain of students was “I hate to read”. We almost never saw a student sitting alone and reading in two years at EBV – even in the school library(!). On this point, we are told, the distinction between the Latin American students and other students around the world these days is minimal.
They wouldn’t be kids if they did not misbehave some. We observed a variety of endearing and ingenious misbehaviors. Unfortunately, we also encountered a number of students who were simply “spoiled brats” with no sense of self discipline or respect for others – maybe that goes with teaching at an expensive private school. As a specific example, take cheating. The comic strip “Doonesbury” has commented on students’ willingness to cheat in colleges in America, and we found that a number of the students at EBV were also ready and willing. We suppose the hallmarks of education are more valuable to many than the education itself, making cheating a reasonable approach. How does such a value gain currency? (more on this below—it is a value endemic to the profession of teaching!) We found it necessary to produce multiple test versions, customize assignments, use a plagiarism filter (www.turnitin.com), and generally watch like a hawk to prevent flagrant cheating.
The school in Maracaibo had adopted a “block schedule” in which classes last 90 minutes. At the same time, teachers received training to the effect that today’s students cannot sit still more than 15 or 20 minutes and so a variety of activities must be planned. Does this sound stupid? Planning longer periods for students with shorter attention? Who comes up with these ideas?
We were told that short attention span is an effect of TV watching and internet use – activities that provide a high level of stimulus. When students find themselves in a lower-stimulus environment such as a classroom, they quickly lose interest. Maybe we are wrong, but it seems lack of attention span may become a liability later in these students’ life.
For a private school, in some respects the students are surrogate customers. An unruly student is still a paying student and their continued presence is required. It is hard for a student to get themselves expelled, so a few bad apples can sour the whole barrel year after year. Students who would otherwise be well behaved can feel freer to push the bounds of good behavior when they are in class with someone who is frequently behaving much worse.
Preventing bad behavior is the teacher’s responsibility. We found that a heavy hand of threatened discipline and exceptional efforts of creativity were required to keep students entertained and “on task”, as the educators say.
We met a limited set -- those with students having difficulties:
Some parents had a hands-off attitude to their students. It seemed that they were paying the school to educate the kids and they did not want to be bothered further about it. Twice a year, we had parent-teacher conferences for all interested parents (around 50% attendance), and other special conferences scattered through the year under circumstances of egregious student problems. In general, parents in these conferences expressed dismay or helplessness to affect their students’ behavior or performance. We always found such attitudes amazing, as we have always found the presence of undisciplined children to be amazing—how can parents be so irresponsible as to let children grow wild? Well, procreation is not a brain-critical function we suppose.
The nightmare parents from our perspective, were the few with the attitude that their student was perfect. Failures of their student to perform well on tests were evidence of teacher shortcomings. We found it tempting at times, and know other teachers felt the same, to avoid unpleasant parent confrontations by grading certain students’ work generously; but we did not succumb. We found these parents’ attitude to be at once challenging and naïve: we didn’t play favorites with students, and we thought our evaluations were fair and accurate. A poor mark indicated that a student had done significantly worse than the best students in the class. And yet, it is logical that student failure represents—for whatever reason—a failure to teach. We were not educated as teachers: maybe there was some teaching technique of which we were ignorant, that would have been suitable for a particular child. This idea nagged us, but we did not find teachers at EBV who agreed. Rather, the teachers’ refrain was “you can’t reach them all”!
This is a great career – it is not too demanding physically or intellectually, the pay is good , it features travel all over the world on two year assignments embedded in local cultures, there is a two month vacation every year, a long Christmas break and numerous other holidays, and good health coverage and benefits.
International teachers, like world cruisers, have experienced a variety of cultures and learned how to take pleasure from the good points of a place or society.
o Solitary
Teachers work alone.
Few endeavors are less dependent on teamwork; writing? Being a night
watchmen? As a teacher involved in teaching we spent only a few hours a
year interacting with other teachers or administrators on the matter of
teaching our students. There was plenty of social interaction and a
fair amount of dealing with bureaucratic matters, but the real issues
of how and what to teach were pretty completely left up to us – did we
mention that we had not been trained as teachers?
o Never see
their “product”
On the immediate level, a
teacher is supposed to inculcate knowledge. The success or failure of
this immediate objective can be evaluated by a well designed test.
However, it was made clear to us that the real purposes of secondary
education are more ephemeral: to develop in students an abiding thirst
for knowledge, to teach learning skills, and to help the student mature
into a successful adult. These “real purposes” cannot be tested except
by time, and the result of individual teachers’ efforts cannot be
quantified. Thus, there is no feedback to teachers about whether they
are being successful in their real purpose. Thus, their teaching
behaviors – good and bad – go unmodified by consequences.
Of course the students are growing up and the teacher spends a significant amount of time with them while they do this. It is gratifying to see students mature and become smarter over time. It is one of the chief benefits of being a teacher to participate in this process. Unfortunately, there is no way to really know how one is affecting the growth of students—they will mature whether the teacher influences them positively or negatively.
o Don’t “know”
how to do their work
Above, we mentioned the nagging doubt that we were doing a “good” job
as teachers. The
measures of a good job performing the “real purpose” of teaching being
nonexistent, teachers are evaluated in terms of more immediate
goals: how well the students are kept entertained, how satisfied
the parents are with their child’s education, how well organized the
classroom appears. All of these things would seem to support the
development of a child, but as far as we can tell, this seeming is only
conjecture. Human development is a complex phenomenon. Although
teachers have a big role in the process, their role seems uninformed in
many respects. We taught as we’d been taught, without benefit of any
specific guidelines of how to motivate students or help them develop.
We found the profession of teaching to be awash with sometimes
conflicting aphorisms about how to manage situations, what strategy to
follow in presenting lessons, and how to evaluate students. Since
“every child is unique”, there are no rules of how to perform: the
teacher is directed to exercise their own judgement and do the best
they can.
o Educated by
Educators
Professional teachers do unto the student as was done unto them. They
are taught
teaching techniques that sometimes may have a basis in psychological
studies which lead to appropriate long-term development, but more often
seem to be techniques for achieving the immediate goals of classroom
control and student entertainment. Within the context of confinement to
a classroom and a fixed schedule of a school day, the teacher must
juggle immediate control and long term developmental objectives. It
should be no surprise that the immediate objectives (the only ones on
which the teacher is actually evaluated) come first. Teachers share and
perpetuate the best short term control techniques but there is no
parallel body of Educational lore about how to achieve the “real
purposes” of education.
Maybe advanced developmental knowledge or managerial skills are to be found in the realm of advanced Education training? Framingham State University offers a Masters Degree in Education that working teachers can obtain by taking a series of nine courses, each a week to two weeks in duration and taught after regular school hours in the evenings for three hours or so. Over a two year period, various itinerant professors visit schools like EBV and teach the courses – they probably have a beaten trail to follow. Amazing, isn’t it, that the entire contents of a Masters program can be condensed into less than one half of a regular school quarter of normal study? We were so amazed, we took one of those courses – actually thinking in a down-the-rabbit-hole kind of way, that we might have stumbled upon a quick and easy way to become master educators ourselves, like Neo in The Matrix could load a program into his mind to gain expertise! We found the course to be superficial, irrelevant, and based on concepts that were at best questionable. We think the educational and managerial techniques these courses put forth are at the root of educational malaise because they present nothing to address the real purpose of education, and are based entirely on achieving the short term goals of educators—goals that are shaped by the structure of the school day and the traditions of education.
School administrators are almost universally former teachers themselves. How did they become administrators? They may have been lured by the slightly greater pay, the allure of the “management” challenge, or maybe some have felt that they have particularly good insight into the mystery of what constitutes the correct developmental program for the youth under their charge. In each of these respects, they are essentially self-appointed. In education more than other fields of endeavor, there is not a clear basis for evaluating a manager’s success. The teachers operate autonomously in most respects, and the students ultimate success or failure as adults is too separate from the action of the administration to provide useful feedback. An administrator who has not had excessive numbers of student or faculty deaths in their prior administrative roles can probably demonstrate a good track record and look forward to continued employment.
In fact, we understood from other teachers that school administrators generally come and go against their will for political failures, not because they did something incorrect in their management of their school. While we were at EBV, a principal was dismissed for reasons not divulged even to the departing principal! Of course, differences of a sort that, if related to the business purpose, relate only in a tangential way – are not the sort of differences that are used to make hiring and firing decisions in other types of employment. It just goes to show what a strange business Education can be.
How does a teacher make their way to the ranks of administration? Well, since the business IS Education, it is essential to obtain some advanced education if you want to administer a school. We learned at EBV that an advanced degree is important to get ahead, and we also saw first-hand that it is relatively easy to jump through that hoop if one is interested and can bear a few weeks of regurgitating the tripe one is fed by the itinerant instructors. Note – the advanced DEGREE is required – the content of the degree program and the skills the administrator bring to the job are secondary.
In our Master’s course on supervision, where we learned that proper educational supervision is based on colleagiality and consensus, the techniques of management and leadership we’d been familiar with in business—the ideas of measuring service quality and striving to improve it—were not only deemed inapplicable to education, but scorned. A veteran teacher explained to us that teaching is the last true guild, and seniority is cherished more than demonstrated ability, so modern management techniques and quality improvement will not diffuse quickly into Education. The administration of schools has been educated in courses such as “Supervision” but we hope there are some out there who can overcome it.
In Education, administrators are given a special quality control function. Unlike in a factory, if the product isn’t meeting quality control standards part way through the assembly process, one cannot simply scrap it—it must still be made into something. The product can be a factory second, but it has to function. Administrators, being considered the senior educators of an institution, get the bad apples. What a job—want to pick a basis for evaluating the performance of a school administrator? Just keep track of how well they improve the performance of students referred to them. Apparently this is not done on a systematic basis: unfortunate! Administrators have to try to figure out the holes in upbringing, accidental cultural damage, and pure and simple mental deviations. If school administrators were trained in this duty, they would be called psychologists or psychiatrists, but since they are not trained, they are called principals or superintendents instead. . .
What should school administrators be doing when they are not evaluating each other’s political savvy, overseeing autonomous teachers, and chastising juvenile delinquents? What does every organization need? Facilitators—key contacts in the organization with the authority and perception to see what others in the organization need to do their jobs, assure that they get it, see that they don’t waste it, and verify the jobs get done. But school administrators are educated to work by consensus—they know techniques for keeping status quo, but it seems they are ill equipped for organization management in times of change. This is no surprise, because the Education system is very risk-averse: the product is very important to the community and there is a high cost for failure.
Whatever changes that may come to education, these changes must be managed by strong and knowledgable leaders who have to direct teachers accustomed to working alone, and integrate methods into local family culture. It is a difficult job and will require individuals with a high degree of training—but maybe not necessarily an Education training. Consider what administrators have created in the basic area of curriculum at the school with which we are familiar:
We were surprised to arrive at EBV and find an almost complete absence of systematic curriculum. Although Cade had never been a high school teacher before, he was expected to plan his courses of Chemistry, Biology, and Physics from scratch—the only course contents on file from 50 prior years of operation of the school were paragraph-long course descriptions, and a few hand-written lesson plans from a few years earlier. There was a stockroom full of physics demonstration equipment (and much of it actually worked), eight shelves of chemical reagents in an undocumented and arcane arrangement that (hopefully!?) was devised to reduce the risk of mixing incompatible chemicals, and numerous bottles of unlabeled liquids that turned out to be concentrated nitric acid! There were TVs and computers, textbooks and supplies; just no system for converting it all into education. None of what professional managers are charged to provide! Not just once, but chronically, school administrators had been abdicating their responsibility!
During our second year at Escuela Bella Vista, the school board imposed the International Baccalaureate (IB) program onto the high school. Perhaps they had put this program into motion because they recognized that the school had lacked suitable management for a long time? The IB program is a challenging high level educational program that is designed for exceptional and highly motivated students. An apparently unperceptive prior administrator of EBV had selected this program despite the unmotivated and party-oriented student body that would be force-fit to the program beginning in our second year. Fortunately, the teaching staff was ready with the customary array of classroom-controls to adapt students to the curriculum. The program was implemented and the future is not yet written. But nobody in the school while we were there could understand why we were all in the situation of imposing that particular program on those particular students.
If the IB program is not the answer to the lack of a coordinated curriculum, perhaps in time it could become the answer. The IB program is a curriculum system that extends to the elementary level (should EBV have begun there?) and maybe this will be adopted at some point. But whatever curriculum program is adopted, it will only arise by consensus! School administrators will not lead the way. In fact, they generally assign the role of establishing curriculum to a committee of teachers even though the administrators are the senior educators. We are not advocating that this particular school should adopt a particular program, or even suggesting that the administration is capable of more wisely choosing a curriculum; we only want to point out that the school administration—and we think ANY school administration—is incapable, by virtue of their training, of acting decisively on matters pertaining to Education.
Again, although our comments are based on what we saw at only one school, Escuela Bella Vista, fellow teachers who had been to numerous other schools, said that although there are cultural differences from country to country, EBV was not unusual in most respects. We inferred that poor student discipline and lack of integrated curriculum are problems endemic to many international schools, and perhaps to US public schools as well.
We think Education needs to take a page from business:
o a basic store of knowledge
o an ability to learn
o appropriate patterns of behavior
. . . and that is all we have to say about Education.