“How has it come to be that in one of the most affluent nations in the world, a student can attend school for 10 to 12 years and graduate illiterate?” is the question raised in my first class with Dr. Gilmore in Fall 2011. Frankly speaking, for a moment, I was trying to figure out what that country was! The United States of America! The problems of the United States’ education system can be divided into two inseparable categories that I will separate for the purpose of analyzing and discussing the problems: students and teachers.
In her book that is entitled ‘Jocks and Burnouts’, Eckert, Penelope stated that “what’s good for the Burnouts is good for America.” Now, we all understand that not all students are Burnouts, but since schools are built around the middle-class contexts, the majority of students will experience alienation and marginalization. Equality in education is requirement number one and when education system focuses on one culture or social category then it is not showing equality. In a system that does not support bilingual education, students will face problem of achieving the standards set by the states. Some scenarios that take place as a result are that students drop out as statistics in 2009/2010 show that 3.4 per cent dropouts are English language learners in Arizona State according to Arizona Department of Education, or that states lower the standards and the end result will be illiterate graduates. Missouri, for example, improved testing scores but openly admitted that they lowered the standards according to a Wikipedia page on No Child Left Behind on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act#cite_ref-22. Another issue that can stem from the lack of cultural diversity is that students can feel discriminated against or stigmatized and they need to adapt to the culture that they do not belong to. Gilmore and Smith wrote an article in1989 entitled “Mario, Gary, Jesse and Joe: Contextualizing dropping out” stating that “done with often the best of intentions, that is to provide appropriate ‘help’, students find themselves assigned and ascribed to low tracks and special education classes which maximize the likelihood of school failure, low literacy achievement and dropping out of school.” They concluded that “schooling in the United States, particularly for minority students, are predicated upon an assumption of incompetence…if this assumption is the prevailing context of schooling, by the same token schools have the power to recontextualize schooling experiences.” How can students succeed when they are looked at as incompetent and pulled out from a mainstream class to an ELL class, or when they are declined the right to have their identity and practice their mother tongues? For instance, there are thousands of Saudi children who are here with their parents who came to study for years not exceeding 5 or 6. Those children cannot go to Arabic school. They need to learn English so that they can learn. So, imagine a kid who is 5 year old (and his youngest siblings) who needs to learn English and most likely will, by the means of the subtractive instruction, loses his mother tongue and who will go back to the home country when he turned 10. Back home, all courses are taught in Arabic with some EFL classes. So, he will face problems again adapting to the situation plus the awkwardness that he will face attending a required EFL class when he is a native speaker of English. Philips in her study on Warm Spring Indian children and their different way of communication in the classroom in 2009 concluded that “where the classroom situation is one in which children of more than one cultural background come together, efforts should be made to allow for a complementary diversity in the modes of communication through which learning and measurement of success take place.” This kind of miscommunication (or ‘sociolinguistic interference’ as Hymes in 1967 described it in his article “on communicative competence”) inside the classroom is a normal result of differences in styles of learning between teachers and children of different cultural backgrounds. Inequality practices in schools that serve communities of different backgrounds can lead non-mainstream children to believe that education leads only to humiliation as stated by Eckert.
Furthermore, poverty is said to be one of the biggest problems that affect children’s education. 20 percent of American children are poor according to an interview with Diane Ravitch http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-3-2011/diane-ravitch. Students cannot do well in their schools when they are hungry, homeless or sick. In the same time, the government and the billionaires are spending billions of dollars on education but to them poverty does not matter. In that interview, Ravitch pointed out how children in places with intense poverty and racial isolation like Detroit, Washington D. C. and Baltimore have the lowest test scores because poverty matters. Students from poor households take the responsibility from early ages. While schools ask them to study for exams or to do their homework, they are busy with helping in their houses with taking care of youngest siblings, cleaning and cooking because parents might be away from home for long hours to provide family members with their basic needs.
Also, the focus on testing prepares students to learn for exams. Standardized testing and ongoing evaluations seem to overwhelm children. Schools are required under No Child Left Behind to administer state-wide standardized tests yearly. Student progress on those tests is measured to see if the schools met their Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals or not. Schools that miss those goals for several years in a row could be restructured, replaced or shut down. Standardized tests are more likely to increase the trend of ‘teach to test’ because standards that are required to be met are known, so some teachers, sometimes even recommended by school districts, could focus on how students pass the tests so that they score high and subsequently their schools will be on the safe side. The quest for improvement could also lead some states to lower their standards as mentioned above. I think if we want learners to be successful, then we might adopt what Goldman and McDermott in their article that is entitled “The culture of competition in American schools” described: "The idea was that we could get success if the classroom was organized for success only."
Teachers, on the other hand, are part of the problems of the United States’ education system.
On October 8, 2011, Diane Ravitch was interviewed by Christine Romans for the program Your Bottom Line on CNN and she said that “the Finnish government started their reform about 30 years ago and they decided to focus on helping and improving and supporting in getting the best teachers and we are going by this process by saying let’s find teachers and fire them!” Race to the Top just like No Child Left Behind focuses on evaluation and testing. What is worse with the former is that not only does it test children but it also tests teachers jeopardizing their careers. The obsession of good teachers and bad teachers is demoralizing teachers. Ravitch said in her above mentioned interview that “there is huge body of research that says that students are responsible for their scores; the tests test kids and they are not measures of teachers’ quality”. Putting pressure on teachers by sorting them out and classifying them to good and bad could result in them lacking interest to teach or to help students, and less creativity with regard to teaching methods or teaching materials. Finland for example started the process by setting high requirement for entering teachers’ programs. Not any one can become a teacher. But this is also accompanied by high prestige that is held for teachers and not only high pays. Teachers in Finland are looked at in the same way as doctors and lawyers. In the United States, on the other hand, CEOs and governors, according to Ravitch’s abovementioned interview with Stewart, think that teachers are overpaid and they are doing easy jobs! However, in Arizona for example the average teacher’s pay is somewhat under 40 thousand dollars a year, and she continued “I would like to see a governor live on 40 thousand dollars!”
No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have continued to focus on testing and measuring students and teachers and schools. They have never tried to improve the situation; rather they fire bad teachers, fire bad principals and destroy education. Teachers and students are the core of the education system and yet if we have not focus on supporting them and engaging them in the learning and teaching processes, failure of the education system will still be looming. Students need to have education set for success only as much as they need equality in access to resources, treatment, respect. Teachers, on the other hand, need to have respect, confidence, job security, and good pays. I conclude with what Gilmore and Smith concluded in their article mentioned above “schools have an obligation: first, to recognize and respect the range of meanings and costs associated with staying in or leaving school; second, to formulate policies that routinely support recontextualization and give voice to students and teachers.”
