The Root Cause

A teacher at my school recently wrote a great blog post that is starting to get a lot of attention. You can read it HERE. She writes about the ways in which 'failing' schools like ours are subject to all sorts of mandates that limit our ability to do the things we know (and research shows) are what the students need in order to be successful in school. She makes the point that "the root cause of our students' under-performance continues to go neglected: poverty, crime, violence, and hunger". She is right, of course. No amount of teacher training on how to deliver vocabulary development lessons will ever make up for a student's lack of breakfast. No scripted curriculum requiring teachers to deliver identical canned instruction to each and every student can begin to address the needs of a child whose parent has just been deported. As much as we need to constantly improve our teaching practice, we also need to be realistic about what our students need and how those needs are all so very, astonishingly different.

This, of course, is a really hard thing to do. Each kid comes to school with unique, often hidden, baggage. Some of it is good, like the student whose father teaches at East LA Community College and takes him to all sorts of writers' events and art openings there. Or the young girl who has been playing violin for years and even got to sit in with the LA Philharmonic last year. We don't always know these things about our students, at least not right away, and to the detriment of their schooling. When teachers are forced to limit their interactions with students to a very expensive, very rigid set of activities defined by the school district to intervene in our 'failing' classrooms, there is no longer room for the kind of personal exploration and discussion that allows these character traits and special skills to shine through.

On the flip side, there is the other kind of baggage. The bad kind. The kind that we combat every day and only slowly, if at all, can change. In small, mundane ways, kids put up walls that block them from getting anywhere close to successful. These barriers tend to have a snowball effect, as in the case of a young lady who ended up calling me a bitch last week. Over a $9 book. Let me explain.

The 8th grader in question (let's name her Shontae) owes a book to the library. It was due June 2. This has prevented her from checking out more books from the library, since the policy is that the books must be returned or paid for in order to check out more books. We often allow students to make weekly payments on lost books so that they can continue to use the library. All of this has been explained to Shontae many times, but she still will not take care of it.

On the day in question, Shontae's teacher and I were trying yet again to find a way to clear her account. You see, she needs an independent reading book for her English class. All 8th grade students in the state of California are supposed to read one million words independently. This is worked into her grade. This is the way she can improve her reading skills. This is one of the ways she can prepare for the strenuous state reading tests at the end of the year that require her to have staying power in her reading habits (and that determine whether our school is failing or succeeding). Without the ability to use the school's library, Shontae cannot really do any of these things. One might suggest that we just forgive Shontae her trespasses and let her use the library in spite of the overdue item, and maybe that will be the end result since I hate to deny anyone books, but the truth of the matter is that this sort of policy is ubiquitous in schools, important, and relevant to educating kids about the real world they will soon inhabit.

On this day, Shontae came up with some new information about her missing book. She said that she never checked it out, that a friend of hers stole and used her library card to check out the book. Skeptical but open to the idea, we called in the friend to ask his version of the story. If he confirmed that he indeed had the book, we would happily transfer the item to his record and Shontae would be free and clear after 6 months of stalemated negotiations. The friend (let's call him Deshawn) denied the charges against him. Yes, he once had the book, but it was simply a short-term loan from Shontae, who was the one who checked out the book inthe first place. Deshawn had returned the book to Shontae months before.

Ok, so, Shontae....we have a bit of a problem. Would you like to talk with Deshawn a few minutes and figure out the discrepancy in these two versions of the case of the missing book?

Sadly, Shontae did not want to speak to Deshawn about it. She wouldn't even look at him. She stood right next to him, shoulder to shoulder, and stared straight ahead, shrugging her shoulders and muttering, "I don't care." I sent poor, sold-out Deshawn back to class and turned to Shontae to say, "I'm not sure you told us the right thing. I'm afraid we can't put the book on Deshawn's account, so what are we going to do?" This is when it happened.

She turned, walked away from the counter, and spat out, "I don't care. I'm not gonna pay for any book. I really don't care....BITCH!"

Shontae's teacher turned to me and simply said, "Do you have a referral?" She sent Shontae to the dean and had her suspended. The teacher later told me that Shontae's mother also said that SHE didn't care either and did not intend to pay for the book, and she expressed surprise and dissatisfaction that her daughter would be suspended for so petty a crime.

All of this trouble for $9.86. Why is Shontae so angry? Why is her mother so angry? Do the powers that be really think that more teacher training, more assessments, more workshops, more meetings would change this? Shontae's difficulty is not stemming from the educational system or her teacher's abilities in the classroom, except for the fact that we are not allowing that teacher (or me) the time to really focus on her, to help her see her strengths, to help her identify her glowing abilities and draw them out, to build her self-esteem and reduce her stress and anger. The Root Cause of her under-performance is not being addressed, not by the educational system and certainly not by the political system that drives the choices about our schools. Our 'failing' school may be failing Shontae, failing to reach her, but it is not for lack of trying. Apart from completely disregarding her negligence and allowing her to lose a library book with no repercusions, I have done everything possible to accomodate her in terms of replacing that book. She doesn't want to. Neither does her mother. So now what?

The official answer is to test Shontae more and evaluate her teacher on the results of those tests. Maybe they'll even fire the teacher someday for not being "highly qualified" enough to raise Shontae's test scores. In the meantime, what will happen to Shontae? How is she being served by this model?

In a classroom where a student like Shontae sits right next to the student who plays with the LA Philharmonic, the teacher needs to be able to approach each student's needs differently. Doesn't that make sense? Aren't they totally different personalities with different support systems and different messages and values circulating at home? The teacher needs to be allowed to work like Ms. Beadle in Little House on the Prairie, with each child one-on-one, learning about their lives, coaching them as they grow up and outward. Ms. Beadle wasn't given binder after binder of lessons prepared by non-teachers and told to follow them to the letter. Because Ms. Beadle was a teacher - a person with a craft that is personal and progressive in its development. And Ms. Beadle's students weren't numbers in a database. They were children, with likes and dislikes, families, abilities, disabilites, hardships, and successes. They needed her, and they respected her because she was able to act as a guide and a stabilizing, nurturing force.

The more I think about it, the more I have to wonder. Did anyone ever call Ms. Beadle a bitch? WWMBD?

Hear Them Roar

For Women's History Month (March), I invited our 8th grade girls to partcipate in an essay contest. The Woman In Me was the title of the contest, and the girls were asked to write about women they admire and the kind of woman each hopes to be. The results were both disheartening and touching. First, the disheartening part. How far could we possibly have come if the 8th grade girls of 2007, in Los Angeles no less, write things like this?

"I see the role of women as second class in our world. The reason I say that is because women are still being beat this day and age by their husbands and boyfriends. Also women are still being controlled by their husbands or boyfriend which means they tell them when they can leave, talk on the phone, have friends or not all of these things. Some women have no role and it's sad because their man just walks all over them like a candy [w]rapper."

Spelling and grammatical errors aside, this provides a pretty clear picture of what this girl sees at home. Other essays included these phrases:

• women must "not care about people telling you ugly, dumb, and letting them make you lose confidence in yourself, and making you fell like your not worth a thing"


• "we help do most of the house cleaning, since most men can't even handle a broom. We women have to cook, even though some men DO know how to cook but are just to lazy to do work"


• and a very hopeful: "Boys rule the house. Women can rule something bigger like the world!"

What does this say about how our young women are being taught about womanhood? The men in these scenarios seem like pretty big dopes if you ask me, but they are somehow maintaining control over the women in their lives. I worry about these girls in South LA. They're thirteen, yet they wax off their eyebrows and pencil them on. They have lip rings and tongue rings. Their bodies have developed well beyond their years, possibly due to poor nutrition. They know that they have to fight for their place in the world, but they are ill-equipped to do so. At thirteen, the battle against the boys is still fun. It's flirtatious. It gets them attention.

When will it turn on them, I wonder? When does note-passing and hand-holding turn into obeying orders and answering to the man (literally)? How will these girls learn to overcome the suffocating gender roles that serve as their models?

The good news is, they've been paying attention. Somewhere, somehow, the idea that women know how to struggle and beat the odds has wiggled its way into their adolescent brains. One girl wrote about Tyra Banks, saying that she is "a great speaker, creeative, humble, and furthermore outgoing." Another girl writes that "A fierce personality will take a person a long way if she really wants to make it in life." Another says that "women are as important as men are", which is both hopeful and infuriating, making me want to scream, "OF COURSE THEY ARE!"

My favorite passage, however, is so lovely, so thoughtful, so sincere, that it leaves a big lump in my throat. It goes a little something like this:

"I want to be a mother who takes pride in herself and her children. I want to be a wife who takes good care of her husband. I want to be a loving sister who looks after her siblings. I want to be a niece who treats her aunts with all the respect in the world. I want to someday be a grandmother who can teach her grandchildren how to be brave and live life to the fullest."

She goes on to say, later in her essay, "I want to be the woman who steps up and speaks out for woman across the nation. I see the role of a woman being important and leaving a mark in history. I live to see women make it with or without the help of a man. In the end, I want to be me, [insert name here], a self-respected woman of her word."

Can't you just picture this girl standing behind a podium someday, telling it like it is? This girl makes me excited to be a teacher. They all do, really. All of the girls who turned in essays had something they needed to say. Whether their thoughts struck me as uplifting or tragic doesn't really matter in the end. They thought about womanhood long enought to write 500 words about it. They considered the women in their lives, noticing the bad and the good. I so want good things for these girls.