Solutions for kids who don't care

At a staff meeting this week we discussed our data. Each week, sometimes more often, we meet and discuss the astronomical failure rate of our children, especially ninth grade. We talk about intervention strategies that we could use to encourage these children to succeed. We discuss tutoring and initiative and motivation. And at the end of the day when we don't know how to make our children succeed, we always turn it back around on them. Years ago, a lady said, a man paid for a church van out of his own money to take students home from tutoring because they had no way to get home. The van typically had one or two students on it. If the children don't want to succeed, the teachers eventually decide, we can't change that.

On the other side of the fence sit the administrators, urging us to use our thousand-page blue and yellow and red books full of "intervention strategies." Every possible problem we could face, they assure us, has its solution in these many pages. I wouldn't know. Mine serves to prop up a wobbly desk. But let us be clear about the types of intervention we are discussing. The single largest cause for failure at my school is not the children who cannot understand the material and thus perform poorly on tests. Nor is it the delinquents who have discovered long ago that they will inevitably perform poorly on tests and so refuse to put pen to paper when the time comes. Children don't come with supplies, the administration notes, but this is easily solved by teachers having a ready supply themselves. Expecting a child to bring a pen and paper to school, they inform us, is oftentimes too much to expect. The indignation at this statement is quickly translated by our verbal administrative moderator as a lack of sympathy on the part of the outraged teachers, a complete and utter lack of understanding of the circumstances out of which these students come. Even if, as a staff, we accept that these students are allowed to slip by outside the classroom without meeting minimal expectations, is it our responsibility, then, to allow them to do the same in our classrooms? But their homes, says the administration ... we can never really understand what it's like to grow up without the privileges that we all enjoyed. These children simply don't value education, can't be EXPECTED to value education, and so it is our responsibility as teachers to have texts that will be likely to engage the students, texts on many different reading levels, coloring books if necessary, and this on a school budget that cannot supply a grade-level text to every child. If only we had coloring books, certainly our students would perform better on the state exams. Someone should tell the governor.

A ninth-grade teacher pipes up, says that the argument doesn't hold because she was raised a home of the same type that supplies our students and SHE understood the value of education although it was not highly valued in her home. The administrator again uses her as a lucky example, saying that not everyone can be expected to have the internal drive and motivation that she has.

But oh yes, what was the point of our coming together? To discuss our failures, of course. And neglecting the over-30% of my students who simply failed to turn in a major assignment they knew counted as a test grade, glossing over the computer discovery students who fail at unit modules because they are unable to read the manual that tells them how to operate their computers, let us come together as a staff and consider how to address the fundamental problem that we see: The kids just aren't coming to school.

It is the students who DON'T SHOW UP, then, who are to be our primary concern. As a ninth grade TEACHER ... not counselor, not state agent assigned to address and seek out the truants in this district ... it becomes my primary responsibility, not to teach the students I see before me every day, not merely to follow lesson plans and guidelines and give four assessments a term and grade three drafts of a writing prompt I don't want to teach, but to ENTICE truant students to come to my classroom every day. Why, give everyone a hundred for a daily grade if the class has perfect attendance, a cheerful voice suggests, the voice, in fact, of the very administrator who told us moments ago that these children have no reason to value education, anyway. What, then, will a hundred on a daily grade DO for them?? Another teacher voices an objection at giving away grades, but is quickly and definitively overwhelmed by a chorus of voices explaining that you're not GIVING them anything, again, you simply don't understand where they're coming from. Another voice chimes in that if nutter butters is what it takes, he'll give his class cookies if they all show up, someone else agrees and insists that although many of these students will not in fact care about a hundred on a daily grade, we should find out what matters to each student and reward them accordingly.

I am disturbingly reminded of a passage from Kozol (whose style, no doubt, has influenced this post) in which he points out that, to a group of AP kids in a well-funded school district, "questions of unfairness feel more like a geometric problem than a matter of humanity or conscience," meaning that the entire discussion is taking place on a theoretical level that intersects with reality very slightly if at all.

Does the teacher who voiced the comment have nutter-butters in his classroom? Not to my knowledge. Will he next week? Probably not. Is this because he doesn't care about his students? My answer is no.

But it made the administrator happy, we all agreed that individual rewards would stem the flood of no-shows in our classrooms, and, fifty minutes of our wasted planning period later, we all returned to our nutter-butter-less classrooms to get back to the real work at hand.

And this is the best we have to offer our children, an administration that mandates that the most important thing is to reach the kids who aren't even there. We can't touch them and we all know it. The kids who are barely passing, who are trying, who are here, aren't worth discussing. Because they are not yet a statistic, they're still here for us to help them, they don't merit five minutes of the fifty that were just taken from us.

And our refrain continues to insist that they are the ones who don't care.