New School Year, Same Frustrations
Driving up Eight Street into town on the first day of school in my Wisconsin home town, it would only be a matter of time before we saw the yellow school buses driving into the middle and high schools. My brothers and I knew the school year was beginning because our mother would start crying as soon as she saw them. Once we saw the tears, we knew it was official – summer was over.
Today, the start of another school year doesn’t bring me anywhere near nostalgic tears. It brings me rage and frustration. Knowing what is about to happen in Baltimore city schools and in Washington D.C. schools just down the interstate from where I live is infuriating. Another year in America’s big city schools is about to be lost to disruptions that go beyond any complex intellectual, philosophical or political discussion. The chaos of urban high schools, a product of poverty, violence, high incarceration rates, joblessness and more, joined with the incompetence and apathy of the teachers and administrators who know just what’s coming to them the first minute the bell rings to signal the new year, will be too much for anyone to overcome.
As long as no one dies or any major crimes happen throughout the merciless seven-hour school day in our worst city high schools, the staff of these schools will go out to their cars knowing that the day could have been much worse.
New teachers stepping into inner city high school chaos for the first time will be rudely awakened by kids who cuss at them, run in and out of class, pick up cell phones with loud ring-tones, throw books on the floor and refuse to do anything. The new teacher will be shocked at the behaviors witnessed and will attempt to discipline the student(s). The new teacher will fail and lose control of the classroom. Lesson plans will go out the window for the day, week, maybe forever – it all depends on if this new person is really committed to the chaos they’ve signed on for. The new teacher will soon learn that he or she has a choice: survive the school day and make it a personal struggle, or dig and claw and try hard to teach in the face of relentless rudeness, misbehavior and demeaning frustration.
Administrators will have been told by the likes of Michelle Rhee, the over-hyped crusading leader of the D.C. Public School System, that they aren’t allowed to suspend kids this year; suspensions, they will have been told, will only lead to more kids out on the streets, higher incarceration rates, children out of wedlock, and on and on.
So every school will have something like a “timeout room” for disruptive students. Kids who roam the halls for hours on end will run in and out of the timeout room as hall monitors try and chase them down, playing on walkie-talkies like it’s a more important game of hide and seek. Kids who cuss teachers out or threaten them will be sent to the timeout room – not home. The assumption here must be that the children have no real home to go to.
The news today is that SAT scores for American high schoolers dropped to new lows last year. Asian-American students and whites increased a growing achievement gap over lower performing minority students. Experts tell you it’s because No Child Left Behind has failed, but that’s not true. School systems have failed, and they have failed in the same places year after year for decades now. And they will continue to fail as long as schools are out of control, unsafe and without discipline. Every administrator has a beginning of the year speech to their staff; inevitably, the speech will be something along the lines of this being a “new day,” or “out with the old, in with the new.”
But it’s not a new day in our worst urban high schools. Last year’s colossal problems had three months off. As soon as the bell rings and the buses roll in, the embarrassing reality of “education” in inner city high schools will resume. The problems of last year will have snowballed; a new crop of students will be sadly left behind.