Under the NCLB influenced public school performance standards currently in place in most areas of the US Principals of underperforming schools can be fired or removed if their school’s test results to not improve to median standards within a few years. These struggling schools are almost always in underclass areas that have historically tested poorly compared to schools with more the middle class demographic student populations.
There seems to be the inherent assumption in all this that students from underclass families have the same innate intellectual capacity as the students of middle class demographic households. Failing to harness this capacity is thus a failure of leadership and management by the school administration where the underperforming students are being taught.
So far based on news stories about Principals being regularly shuffled around this hypothesis seems mainly to have resulted in struggling schools being meat grinders for destroying careers if you are a school administrator unlucky enough to get stuck with the responsibility for improving one of these underperforming schools. Occasionally you get a newspaper story about a superstar Principalmaking a difference in cleaning up a poorly run school, but even if violence is reduced etc. this doesn’t seem to translate into significant long term improvements in academic achievement.
There are even some social experiments where some super wealthy individuals gave massive amounts of resources to entire underclass school districts and it still did not get them to middle class performance standards.
At some point do you just have to accept that most (obviously not all) kids coming out of underclass households are not going to be median academic performers and just live with it?
Kids underperform in lower SES districts for a lot of reasons, for example:
They may not be getting decent nutrition at home, especially breakfast
They may be doing a lot more work at home than kids from wealthier families, whether it be caring for younger siblings, working at the family business, or actually bringing in income upon which the family is depending
English may not be the primary language at home; in fact, their parents may not speak it at all
Even if the parents do speak English, they may be undereducated and education may not be considered a priority
They may not have a computer, or the internet, at home, both of which are enormously helpful for schoolwork
…and that’s just off the top of my head, having had kids in public school in some pretty shitty districts. And those are all problems that don’t have anything to do with the kids being less intelligent, and also wouldn’t be solved by firing a principal.
Not to minimize these points, they are solid, but…
Jaime Escalante, of “Stand and Deliver” fame, had entire classes of dirt-poor Hispanic high-school students from terrible parts of Los Angeles ACING the AP Calculus exam. Check the wiki. It takes work, but you can really change lives, even in high school, even in bad neighborhoods, even with the kids of illiterate immigrants. It can be done, he proved it.
Sure. And you can walk away from a casino with a huge win too. But the odds are against it. Same goes for high academic achievement from low-achieving backgrounds. And I say this as a former National Merit Scholar who grew up in what can now only be called a ghetto.
But back to the original question: yes, firing the principal is magical thinking.
I’m not disagreeing with any of that nor am I taking a stance on the origin of academic performance differences being nature or nurture. The point is that short of taking the child out of it’s household and social context and placing it with an entirely different family you have what you have, and that whipping the horse of school leadership and management is not going to get you to middle class performance standards no matter how much you beat that horse and believe that all these kids need is more resources etc. That earnest belief does not seem to be playing out.
Not so much magical thinking as an aspect of the much broader, ongoing campaign to denigrate and destroy the American Public School system so that education can be run as a for-profit business.
I give academics a big fail when it comes to education. We have very little control over the parents. Teachers need to learn more about priming the brain to start accepting an education. You won’t find these skills being taught in college. Look at successful models and see what they are doing. Give a child the opportunity to stand out and be recognized. Motivation is what they are lacking in.
This. The entire point is to drive poor schools into the ground so that they can run their social experiment/profit machine. There are millions to be made from failed schools.
Jaime Escalante wasn’t magical. He was a Bolivian immigrant who had very little teaching experience. Michael Jordan’s natural athletic ability is not easily teachable, true. That doesn’t bear on this discussion in any real way. Teaching methods are far more transferable than athletic ability.
I agree, but Jaime Escalante was one in a million. Maybe literally. If we’re going to fix a whole system, it will necessarily be based on a strategy other than “let’s find thousands more teachers like Jaime Escalante.”
I agree with you. I don’t think public education will be fixed by firing underperforming principals or teachers (at least not solely). And obviously it isn’t realistic to take hundreds of thousands of children from their homes (and sounds loathsome even if it were possible). What we can do, what we should try to do, is take hundreds of thousands of households from the situations they’re currently in, to something better. A few highly gifted, highly motivated students and teachers aside, trying to really excel in a school environment with all these outside influences will be a losing battle. What we should really be hoping to achieve, in a country as wealthy as the USA, is an environment where the 6-16 year old gets home from school with no higher priority than to get his or her homework done, and study for the next test.
The best cartoon on education I ever saw was by Jules Feiffer. I can’t find it now, but it went something like “Take classic education: have the child memorize everything by rote. It worked for a while but it failed. Take progressive education: let the child discover on his own, and he will want to learn. It worked for a while but it failed. Take modern education: drill, test, and make education competitive. It worked for a while but it failed. Eventually, all education fails. Kids build antibodies.”
To address the OP, yes, it’s magical thinking, but it goes on everywhere, not just in schools.
Not only that, but he was a total workaholic. I mean, I have tremendous respect for someone who’s willing to dedicate his entire life to teaching, but that’s not really a scalable solution: we don’t have millions of folks willing to work his incredible hours for the low pay and high stress of teaching.
Firing principles is indeed magical thinking; even sven is absolutely correct that the problem is poverty, not our educational system. If you look at districts with very low poverty, academic scores rival the best nations on the planet.
