Category Archives: community

… in the Wake of COVID-19

……. Education Elevated

In this Beauty for Ashes series, I’ve been offering views on how we might leverage the current quarantine of our old “normal” to renew the health of several critical elements of our society. So far, I’ve addressed the importance of restoring the stability of our society’s foundation … the faith found in our houses of worship. And, I’ve taken up the urgency for us to restore the health of our families, as the strength of our social fabric, resting on that firm foundation. The aim of this edition is our education system, the mechanism that serves as the transmission, delivering that strength to the major functional elements of our society.

If it’s not broken …

Far too often, our teachers are blamed for the decline of the education system in the U.S. Typical claims along these lines are that the current crop of teachers aren’t as capable as the teachers we had “back in the day” and that they are overpaid and under worked. Although my career was in business, I spent most of the last decade of my working life in public schools. My experience with teachers during that time was pretty much opposite of these typical claims. Certainly there are exceptions but no more so than you would have found “back in the day.”

A great example of this is Carrie Newton, Math Teacher at Marshall Elementary School in Vancouver, WA. For close to five years, I worked in a classroom next door to Carrie’s. During that time, I wrote an article about her entitled “Train up a child in the way he should go …” If reading that article doesn’t convince you that Carrie exemplifies the superior quality of our education system’s teachers, check out the Math Queen movie above. This is from the YouTube channel that she created in order to continue her students’ math education during her school’s current COVID-19 related shutdown. If you’re concerned about the quality and dedication of teachers in our present education system, one of the best things you can do is to recognize and encourage teachers like Carrie Newton.

If it doesn’t serve its community …

I retired from working in a public school, at the end of the 2018 calendar year. So, I no longer have a direct view of what those who are in charge of running our public schools are doing during their current downtime. From my limited view, it appears that they are facilitating online learning. They’re making sure that every student has online access by distributing iPads or Chromebooks, etc. And, they’re equipping their teachers with the resources they need to deliver their curriculum online. Additionally, it appears that they are working hard to assure that student-families who were relying on meals provided by the schools continue to get the help they need along those lines.

Of course, it’s great that the above-mentioned steps are being taken. But, this downtime offers an opportunity to make sorely needed changes that are much more far reaching. Chief among these is the need for our schools to meet the needs of their community. Generally speaking, the U.S. education system is one-size-fits-all. And, mostly, it reflects the inbred views of national/state/local/district boards of education, determining the heavily politically orientated curriculum to be delivered. The result is that, by and large, employers find the pool of their prospective employees to be ill equipped to meet their performance requirements.

So, if that’s the case, what is a better approach? My recommendation is, if a top-down one-size-fits-all approach is failing, consider a bottom-up custom-fit alternative. Here’s what that means:

Many school districts are structured so that a high school serves a specific geographic area in a community. That high school has several middle schools that feed it and those middle schools each have several elementary schools that feed them. My thought is to set up each of these geographic school entities as a private company. Instead of being part of a school district that makes the decisions for the administration they place in each of their member schools, each of these would be independent, with their administration being composed of representatives from that geographic area’s employers, student-families and educators. Furthermore, funding for each of these entities would come from within that geographic area. Of course, this would take some time to wean off of the current methods of funding. But, it would be an incentive for communities to strive for being assured of getting what they pay for. According to a 2018 article entitled Report: Public School Bloat, Depressing Teacher Pay, Wasted $805 Billion Since 1992, it looks like there’s plenty of money that could be made available for us to work with.

It’s a silver-lining, no ifs …

In the Firm Foundation edition of Beauty for Ashes, I noted how the lack of faith-based upbringing negatively impacts our schools. This, as a result of students showing up with little understanding of what they’re there to accomplish. Added to that is the fact that many of these young people lack the development of appropriate behavior habits for a learning environment. Presently, our public schools attempt to address the results of these lacking qualities under the heading of Student Discipline.

My observation from my decade of working in public schools is that this is one of the greatest contributors to the declined status of our current education system. Essentially, what our schools are attempting to do with this is to do the job that families are failing to do in the upbringing of their children. Sadly, the approach our schools are taking with this is failing too and as a result of having to wastefully expend their resources on this, they’re failing at what we’re counting on them to do in the first place … to educate our kids.

One step to resolving this dilemma is for families to return to their Firm Foundation, as outlined in the preceding edition of this series – i.e. to return to being dedicated to caring for each other, their children, their preceding generations and subsequent generations. But, for our schools to eliminate the challenges they currently face as a result of this dedication being greatly lacking in today’s families, they can’t simply assume that their student-families will adhere to this needed caring dedication. They must insist on it.

In order to do this, our schools must first define expectations for student-behaviors. These behaviors must be defined to maximize the efficiency of the resources that the school invests in their students’ education. Likewise they must minimize any distractions from their students’ education. Then, a requirement of student enrollment should be that their families sign off on their agreement to the school’s mandatory expectations for student behaviors. Non-compliance would result in the removal of the student from the school and for the families to take over full responsibility for that students education.

Although having our schools insist on student-families taking responsibility for their students’ behaviors at school is an appropriate step for resolving the dilemma that our schools currently face with Student Discipline, it is an idealistic notion. It begs the question, “What is a better way to manage the behaviors of the current crop of students being sent to our schools by today’s families? Most often, this question results in endless debates pitting today’s methods for Student Discipline against the related practices from “back in the day.” Since I was a public school student “back in the day”, early on in my days as a public school employee, I fell into the trap of this debate. Here’s how:

The school district where I worked did use an approach to Student Discipline that ultimately concluded with expulsions but they were never absolute. An expelled student would, simply be sent to another school for a time. This included being sent to special schools set up, specifically, for students who will not/can not behave appropriately. The steps leading up to expulsion included suspension, various forms of detention, being sent to a “buddy room” and various forms of in-class discipline, including the use of a “resolution room.” Actually, “resolution rooms” or “quiet rooms” have a legitimate function in classrooms for kids with special needs. Mostly, they are meant as a place to put a student to keep them from harming themselves and/or others. When I first heard the term “resolution room”, I thought it was just another step in dealing with Student Discipline that had no real consequences. My reaction was, “We, also, had resolution rooms back when I was in school. Ours looked like a hallway and it looked like the Principal was out there with a paddle. I only visited there once. That’s all it took for me to get the message.”

With that, you may assume that I’m recommending a return to corporal punishment. That was effective and it is Biblical but I don’t think it would be realistic for me to expect today’s society to accept it. However, it is true that the approach to Student Discipline by today’s schools is failing and it needs to be replaced by something that is effective.

Ironically, I believe that the COVID-19 crisis has handed us a great solution. None of our students are in classrooms right now. That includes the students who will not/can not behave appropriately … the very students whose behaviors waste the resources that schools invest in their students’ education and whose behaviors greatly distract from other students’ education, as well as their own. Right now, any education being provided through our public schools is being delivered online.

There is no way to fully know what our world’s “new normal” will look like when the COVID-19 crisis settles down. Perhaps online learning through our public schools will remain as a much more significant factor than it did before the crisis. Maybe public schools will return, as much as possible, to the in-classroom learning we’ve been accustomed to. Regardless, I see online learning as an effective way for our public schools to replace today’s general approach to Student Discipline. It can take the place of a “buddy room” or detentions or suspensions or expulsions, including permanent expulsions when necessary. In any case, it would greatly diminish the burden of this very detrimental issue from our schools and move that responsibility to where it belongs … on to the student-families and the students themselves.