My Charter School - Part 5 (Foundational Behavior)

    Something is wrong with schools.  Here are some stories that I will try to weave together and guess what they have in common and some ways to fix or at least fight against. 

    The thing for me is the disconnect between what admin wants and what they're doing to get it.  School level admin wants students that are successful on State mandated tests.  It is sad to reduce it to something so simple, but isn't that the most basic thing that admin wants?  If the students perform well on tests then admin higher up won't be angry with them and won't bother them.  You can make the case that if they are performing on the state mandated tests it is because the knowledge of the students is also high.  Grades and scores go together to placate parents, school boards, superintendents, and government.

    My confusion is that admin doesn't seem to be doing those things that will ensure that scores on report cards and standardized tests are high.  

    This is a non-exhaustive list, but it is designed to show the simplicity of the things that admin has to do to ensure performance of the students.

1. Students must be well behaved in class.  If there is class chaos then there can be very little learning.  In a well behaved class, teachers hardly need to be there at all.  When the students listen they hear and are more likely to understand.  If they are not well behaved they will not listen.  Students who are well behaved cannot listen because the teacher is dealing with the students who are misbehaved.

2.  Students should be afraid to fail in school.  This is a parent issue.  Parents, by and large, are not doing their jobs.  I know that sounds accusatory or aggressive.  If you want to know if you're doing a good job of parenting school age children this is a good test.  If a student gets in trouble at school and begs the teacher not to tell their parents then that is a good parent.  But this is also a school administration issue.  Students should be afraid to fail in school.  This means that your disciplinary actions must hurt.  NO PADDLING.  I'm not talking about corporal punishment, and yet wall sits, laps, bear crawls, sprints, push ups towel pushes, all have an underutilized place in the pantheon of punishment.  But even without that, detentions should be boring, lines should be written, hands should cramp, students should have extra assessed if they weren't behaved.  ISS must be utilized.  Silence must be adhered to.  Lines must be written; busy, superfluous work should be assigned.  Saturday detention should be utilized.  Summer School must be utilized.  Failures must be utilized.  This is a simple obvious conclusion.  Students must be afraid to literally fail in school.  The fear is to have to retake.  The fear is to waste the first year.  The fear is drudgery and it must be real.   

There is the list.  Remember it isn't exhaustive.  But here are some disconnects between what the admin wants and what they're doing to get it.  

• One student who attended Tippit MS the year before I taught there was never in school.  According to teachers who were there before me, she had been in school 17 times the year before and was still passed along into high school.  
• One teacher assigned a detention to a student who disrespected a substitute.  The student was supposed to go to a teacher-assigned detention and write lines.  The student incorporated his mother to get him out of it.  The parent called the admin and the admin directed the teacher to tutor the student and let them out of detention.  
• One teacher has not failed a single student all year.  Her lesson plans are not dynamic, but stale.  She has no class management, but has great relationships with her students.  She doesn't ask difficult things of them and she underperforms on state assessments.  Her expectations are low.  The students always meet her expectations, but not the state's expectations.  She wears a onesie to class, but doesn't teach well.  
• One School stopped counting tardies.  Students acted as you'd expect, they stopped getting to class on time.  Now when the situation get really bad an announcement gets made that there will be a tardy sweep, and this is the time students really need to get to class on time or risk punishment.  The students behave the way you'd expect, they only get to class on time when the announcement is made.
• One school has had over a dozen bathroom vandalisms.  They have video evidence so after a bit of sleuthing they punish the offenders with detention and the custodian cleans it up.  The punishments aren't ramping up, but surprisingly the vandalisms are.
• One teacher has the worst classroom management I've ever seen.  Anything the students want she gives to them.  They are constantly leaving her class with her permission when they aren't supposed to, their noise is cacophonous, they horseplay in the room of the school with more technology value than any other.  
• One student was in seven fights in the first 9 weeks of school.  Some of those against SPED students.  The admin of the district wouldn't allow the school to remove him to alternative school or DAEP until he had 10 fights which is negligence, but he acquiesced and soon filled out his punch card.
• One district rid itself of the dangers of dress codes.  The old rule wasn't enforced.  The new code, much simpler, easier to enforce.  Thankfully the admin who didn't enforce the old dress code won't have to spend so much time enforcing.  Now the students break the much simpler, much more libertine dress code with impunity and the admin can spend its time NOT enforcing this dress code. 

Here's my question:  These stories are the tip of the iceberg, but they beg the question, if you want good scores why are you doing these things?  

    I genuinely do not understand the motivations of the administrations both district and campus level. If you don't enforce order, scores will go down.  If the scores go down you will get attacked by parents and higher ups.  But if you create order, then you don't have to put out so many figurative fires.  If you promote discipline because students are afraid to fail then students will succeed.  The parents will approve of any sensible solutions that cause success.  The district level admin won't bother you if you have order and a healthy fear of failure.  District leadership, you should be promoting this too.  If you don't want to be in the news, if you don't want to have bad ratings, then you have to create an atmosphere where success is possible. 

    Finally, what is the solution.  I think there are some obvious ideas.  The success and knowledge of students must be the number one priority.  This must be drilled into the heads of our teachers often.  They must be reminded oft that their mission is not to create relationships, but to create knowledge and understanding.  In Professional Development teachers are taught too often about the importance of relationships and not often enough about the importance of knowledge for knowledge sake.  

    I know that relationship is important, but we are wrong to assume it is a necessity.  Good behavior and a healthy fear of failure are necessities.  I think schools should focus on mission statements if they want to have success beyond their socioeconomic standings.  Every semester admin and teachers should read, reread, and dissect a mission statement with stipulations like...

1. We will teach the students all the information they need to know. 
2. We will cultivate a safe and orderly atmosphere so that all students can learn.
3. We will discourage behavior that limits our students ability to learn.
4. We will teach the students that misbehavior has consequences.  
5. We will give clear and fair consequences to students who do not succeed.
6. We will always try to challenge our students and never make success easy.
7. Knowing that students cannot succeed without character, we will encourage character.
8. We will aggressively build up the capabilities of our coworkers, because our students deserve it.

My Charter School - Part 1 (Athletics)

    My future charter school needs a lot of work and planning.  What makes up a school what makes it good and what makes it bad?  I know very few people read this blog, but one day maybe I make a charter school and people read this in order to understand it.  First, I'm going to spend a significant amount of digital ink on EXTRA curriculars.

    The first football game was between Yale and Harvard.  It wasn't nigh unto professional sports.  I cannot imagine those students spending more than a couple of hours a week practicing and they were the only teams that filled out a team that year.  Soon many others would join.  Other schools in the last century and a half have had football teams much faster.  Yale and Harvard were open over a hundred years a piece before they started playing intramural sports.  But even colleges that were started between 1850 and 1950 started small, a college, that focused and grew and changed and added sports over time.  Now new schools race to have athletic programs.  

   And high school follow along the same trajectory.  They had no programs in small towns, then they had small programs, then they had large programs.  Now, middle schools have programs that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.  The costs are in some ways hidden by the labor.  Four coaches in athletics means $200,000+ but they also teach.  Well, some of them.  They use trainors from the high school, their gear is nike, or under armour, the kids bring in some money, they fund raise.  Middle school programs now I would guess cost more even with inflation than college programs did say 75 years ago.  Sounds like a long time?  High school programs I believe cost more than college did 35 years ago, is my guess.  There are exceptions.  Big college verses little high school might not be close, but the point is there is an unquestionable gradual growth.  And there doesn't seem to be a limiting principle.  

    Why would there be a limiting principle.  The more colleges spend on athletics, the more they get from advertising dollars for being on TV.  The more they're on TV the more students that matriculate.  The more students the more money, the more money the more athletic potential.  The more they get from donors.  High schools and middle schools get a great deal of prestige from Athletics for some unknown reason.  The average person cannot name which school was last years high school state champ unless it was your school.  The kids care so much about winning district in middle school, but who cares.  It is no great predictor of Division 1 success or professional potential.  Who cares?  Almost everyone does.  If the money is to indicate interest then teachers, parents, students, voters, and everyone else cares who wins.

    So...everyone is wrong.  Especially in the school setting.  Athletic programs were invented between the world wars and especially after WWII to teach discipline and athletic ability to a large swath of society.  Our schools are failing in this.  Football is failing in this.  Football creates prima donnas who don't listen or respect, do not achieve in the classroom.  Coaches are trying to get players to play whether they pass or not.  Coaches are leaning on admin and teachers to pass students so they can play.  There are reasons for kids to play, to learn discipline and respect, to work off some excess energy, to have an outlet for aggression and even corporal punishment.  But it should always be subservient to education.  Students who cannot read and do math on level shouldn't be double blocking athletics, but reading and math.  

    Athletics are therefore beneficial, but must serve the school.  Athletics must prepare boys and girls for all futures rather than a future in professional sports.  So in my charter school there will be no sports against other schools.  I think organizing games within the school will be much cheaper, will tamp down any fame that students may achieve for a couple of touchdowns on Friday night.  Basketball played within a single school will allow many students of varying skill levels to make an impact.  It is terrible that so many students don't play any sports and then they don't have any athletic activity in their boring PE class.  The Gym teacher doesn't push this class, many times because they cannot be useful to them on a team.  

    I know there are some students who come to school for sports.  I know there are some students who achieve in the classroom in order to play on the team although that number is shrinking.  To them, I think this could be even better than the system we have now.  If games are played daily at school among students then there is always the opportunity to achieve and play.  Because many students also practice in order to play.  Let them practice for half a class and then play everyday, there are too many, most schools, who are so business, they rarely scrimmage.  That is also bad for kids.  But what if a scrimmage isn't good enough, and what if two or three students dominate the games?  Play a bigger game after school.  Have a blue team and a red team within your school.  Trade players to resist factions.  And believe it or not, there are a lot of dominate players in intermural sports.

NO PASS NO PLAY

    I have a student named E.  He's tall, like 6'1 which is tall for an 8th grader.  I've never seen him play basketball, but he seems like he'd be good at least on defense with his size and apparent agility.  First day of school he said, he wanted to be a coach, a player, or a soldier.  He never talks out of turn, but he doesn't work.  He doesn't seem to care to turn work in.  The young boy would benefit from failing in class, because he needs to realize why he needs to perform in well in class.  But I truly wish he could figure that out without failing a nine weeks.  If he would play outside of UIL and on the school team, then he could sit out a day or a week, because faculty told him he couldn't play for a short period of time.  Not three weeks, or six weeks, or a unfigurable term that no one can figure out in UIL which is arbitrary.  The punishment, the consequences, should fit the crime.  E and others should receive swifter, simpler, more direct consequences for misbehavior, or lack of effort in the classroom.

COACHES

    In many middle schools there are 9 coaches.  Four for the boys, four for the girls, and one more for tennis or golf.  When I was a kid, 2 coaches coached 7th grade football, and 2 coached 8th grade football.  Now four coach 7th in the morning and the same four coach the 8th in the afternoon.  This is unwise.  Our coaches are becoming less educators and more coaches.  When these programs started 60 and 70 years ago there was a single coach for all the intramural sports and PE.  That is also unwise, coaches can't have impact on too many students.  That is why there should be more teacher coaches not less.  How many teachers could be utilized to coach a single class?  Two teacher coaches per period one man, one woman now there are 14 to 16 teacher coaches.  Who has the most authority in the classroom?  Teacher coaches.  Who are the most beloved after leaving school typically?  Teacher coaches.  When I have a behavior problem with an athlete who do we call?  Teacher coaches.  Now there are no stipends which are trash anyway for coaches.  There are no students who are receiving special treatment because they're 'taking us to state.'  There are students who practice a wide range of athletic pursuits, with a wide range of skill and interest levels, taught by a wide variety of teachers who cannot help, but keep their main focus on education, because they only coach an hour, but also dole out some consequences, and positive rewarding activities to students who're achieving in the classroom.

READY FOR WHATEVER

    I think football is wrong for students.  It does hurt too much.  There is brain damage with every hit.  The linemen aren't getting exercise.  Concussions and broken bones are too common.  One of my favorite movies is Necessary Roughness.  Scott Bacula is a college Quarterback and he's 40.  There are two antagonists for the football team.  One is the Texas State, the other is their own dean.  He doesn't think that college's hard earned money should be used on the barbarity of football.  I watched it when I was young and hated that guy, but I agree with him as I get old enough to be the arm of the armadillos.  No football, yes basketball, yes track, yes soccer, no hockey, yes relays and cross training, yes hiking, yes boxing with gear and hitting bags more than each other, yes field events including javelin.  Yes tag and wall ball, yes ping pong and cross country.  Yes gymnastics maybe swimming.  Yes wrestling yes volleyball.

TITLE NINE

    Girls will train with boys and will play in PE with boys.  When preparing for afterschool, more competitive games, there should be girls, boys, and co-ed.  

ANTS SPECIALIZE

    One hard fast rule for me is that I don't think kids should have to choose.  When I was part of a high school program as a student in the late 90's there was time to be an athlete and a nerd in the band or orchestra.  I think that is essential to the cultivation of students and societal members.  When I was part of a high school program as a coach (admittedly supporting role) in 2018 the time to be engaged in multiple activities was dead and dying out.  When I was in high school there were football players who pulled off their pads at halftime and marched with the band.  That is highly irregular these days.  Band members and football players both think they should specialize more to be ready for the next level.  This is a bad practice of our educational system.  It is tragic.  I think it should be reversed and it will be in my charter school.  Time will be alloted to make sure students can participate in multiple extracurriculars.  Will students be as competitive in state competitions?  No, thank God.

Substituting as a Civic Duty

You know those blogs that you see on the internet sometimes and they’re really pretentious.  They think they know everything about anything and they have very few facts, studies, and statistics to prove their points.  You read the blog and you know all the stuff in it is more or less true, but the writer acts as if they’ve discovered the wheel.  You know a thing or two.  You have lived in two centuries.  You got a lot going for you and you even read blogs and articles about education and parenting on the internet so how on earth does this writer think they’re telling you anything?

You know what schools need?  No, this isn’t a trick question and it should be the most obvious answer; many times it isn’t.  It isn’t materials.  We have a lot of those.  It isn’t smaller class sizes although I’m sure that could help.  I like the idea of teachers being allowed to Taser students.  But that isn’t it either.  It's parents.  

Now before you go getting a big head and start thinking that you’re the most important person in your kid’s life, you should know, this sucks.  By the way, there are a bunch of studies that show a parents influence over the lives of their children are decreasing.  My own belief on this topic is that an orphan's parents don’t have much influence over them.  By that I mean, that parents can have as much influence as they want to have. 

Parents can know what’s going on in the lives of their kids.  Parents can pay attention.  Parents can sit down every evening and talk at the dinner table.  Parents can make it their business to know who their kid’s friends are and what music they listen to.  Parents can check their kid’s homework and help them decide where to go to school and what classes they should take in middle school and high school.  Parents can have a ton of influence over their kid’s lives.   You can be one of the most important things in the world for your kid.  And let’s face it, if you’re the kind of parent who reads blogs/articles on the internet about parenting and education you probably are.  Odds are you do some of the stuff listed above.  You might neglect some of them, but you also, probably did it consciously to teach your kids responsibility.  You’re likely, to have a bunch of things listed that I haven’t even thought of.  You’re more likely to be a helicopter parent than an easy going one.  You’re conscientious. 

So what about the people that aren’t?  What about the people that can’t tell you what grade their kid is in?  What about the people who are really mad about their kid getting suspended because they’ll have to stay home with them rather than angry because they did something bad?  What about the parents who AREN’T mad when their kid does something wrong? 

As a teacher I know there is a huge difference between a struggling student and a struggling student who has an involved parent.  The one with the involved parent is getting a B the last week of the six weeks and EMAILS to find a way their kid can get an A.  The struggling student with no parent involvement doesn’t email me and they get a C, a D or an F which isn’t even based on the child’s talent or knowledge because without effort supplied by the parent, the student’s talent and knowledge really doesn’t come into effect.  If a parent is withholding television and or a cell phone in order to get good grades and enforcing a bedtime in order to make sure the student is calm and well rested/level-headed then the student can show off their talents and capabilities.  In my class it doesn’t take much effort to get an A.  It takes even less intelligence.  Parents who are involved are fulfilling a tough job.  But how can we, you and I, those people who are engaged, invested, and adult bring along the people who forgot to take their birth control pills?  How can the upright people bring along the Darwin award recipients?  How can the white collar and blue collar workers bring along the unemployed by choice and the collarless? 

I think there should be a law that everybody has to work in a school as a substitute like Jury Duty.  I don’t think they should be the teacher of record although I’m not opposed to that.  I much more simply think that parents and even non-parents should go to school once a year and take the pulse of our future society.  Everybody, after passing a background check, could go to a school their kid goes to and go with their kid to class. 

In elementary, we’d all see how hard the teachers work.  Maybe we’d know how difficult it is to give a kid personal time even when the teacher only has 15-20 students.  Maybe we’d see how easy it could be to give our own kid fifteen minutes of personal time every night, something that would drastically improve reading and writing in the lower primary grades.  We could play tag with the kids at recess and then maybe we could advocate for longer recess than the kids are getting because kindergartners don’t need to study 6 hours a day.  We could see our kids interacting with other kids.  We could try to help them practice this at home.  We could find out which kids we’d like our kid to be friends with.  

Maybe you don’t have a kid.  Why should you have to substitute?  Our schools are sometimes understaffed and we need help.  Our schools, as the founders agreed, and as most political philosophers believe, are more than just a service or a utility.  Our schools create our future generations assisting our parents.  That’s why we pay for them with our taxes even if we don’t have kids of our own and sometimes we need to pay time with our taxes (sometimes more important than money).  By the way, what about the people who aren’t paying any money into the education system through property taxes, but are being served with their kids in schools?  They should have to serve twice a year.  Adults without kids, properly vetted, could be a valuable asset for individual help, directed encouragement, clerical or manual support. 

In secondary schools, we’d see who the kids are in our schools who are the biggest problems.  We may see how our child is part of the problem.  We may see how hard our teachers work and how much support they really can use.  We could see how the kids talk.  The vapid language of the American secondary school student is a society-wide dumpster.  Would 10-15 extra adults walking around our halls everyday help that?  Maybe.  If it was YOUR mom would it clean up YOUR language?  If it was your friend's mom sitting at your table at lunch would it clean up your table’s language even if just that day?  Could it help papers get handed out quicker, could it help adults remember some of the incredible amount of stuff we’ve forgotten from our school careers?  Could it help us with our gym classes?  Gym is incredibly unimpressive these days.  No weights, no push-ups, no hurdles, no climbing the rope.  I think back to my gym class and remember with fondness the physical intensity that children scoff at today.  Could we remind them?  Could an insurance salesman who is over 50 and completely bald encourage our kids to run an extra lap because it’s good for them?  Could a single mom convince a bunch of apathetic high school girls how lucky they are to play basketball or soccer or lift weights and that they should take full advantage because adulthood doesn't offer many of these opportunities.

This brings more adults into the lives of our kids; a good thing, in my opinion.  I know there are going to be so many laws and lawsuits along the lines of, ‘I don’t want so and so, blah blah blah, hanging out at a school, infecting kids.  Okay, in jury duty there are challenges and dismissals why not substitute/assistant challenges and dismissals?  This also helps create adults who have to be a little more involved in their kid’s lives.  They have to be better advocates for education in the public sphere, they have to be better disciplinarians of their children, and they have to be better advocates for their child’s effort in class.  They know what the districts and schools need.  They know what the parents and administrators need.  They know what their kids and the world needs.

Now, I’m not saying that everybody should do this.  Doctors don’t have to serve jury duty.  They might not need to do this either, but doctors would be really good substitutes for science classes and probably jury foremen. 

I’m not saying everyone needs to be in a classroom or everyone needs to be with their kids if they have a kid.  I’m sure district or school employees could give you a list a mile long of things parents and non-parents could do that would be valuable, effective, safe for children and adults, and tailored to different personalities, interests, and capabilities.

I’m sure some will have a problem with using the force of law to compel work (sounds like the healthcare mandate).  But systems could be devised to get out of these expectations or we could decide to fight hard to make sure that something like this happens that makes our schools AND our communities better.  Could a small town do this?  Could this be a municipal ordinance in a small town with a few thousand in population?  Yes.  Could a school board and a city council make it a referendum and have the community vote on it?  Yes.  Has this world veered too far from the good?  No. 

Without a big city-wide program to get every adult, within reason, to be a substitute at a local school can you and your church small group go through the annoying process to get certified to be a substitute and go substitute on one or two off days a year?  No.  Your church can have an initiative to have half of the members serve as a volunteer.  Your golf team can all make a pact to follow all your kids to each class they have once a year.  Your kid’s soccer team’s parents, or your drinking buddies, or your political party, your book club, the moms of your Boy Scout Troop, or Girl Scout Troop could all make a pact to go to each of your kid’s schools and ask if they need help and how.