While reading one of the links from Alison’s most recent post, I came across not one, but two links on the CNN article link bar that pertained
to the field of education…sort of. One story was
about an honors student in Texas who was jailed for missing class due to the
fact that she works a full time job and a part time job to make ends meet. The other was a story about a tenured teacher
in New York with frequent absences and accusations of sexual harassment that
took three years to receive a year-long suspension; she still may return afterwards
if she receives a positive psychiatric evaluation. All in all, it was a pretty lousy day in the
news for schools, or as we’ve been learning in class, just an average day in
the news.
To be fair, the honors student story did make it clear that
the local courts were responsible for the sentence, not the schools, and the
tenured teacher story did acknowledge that this was a rare case, but the
overall tone of both stories, a mere three spaces from one and other on the
page, leaves one with the impression that schools don’t care about the needs of
students. It’s frustrating to see that
in a society of rules and order, our own laws can fail in some pretty extreme
cases to recognize that certain exceptional circumstances require different
approaches. Even more frustrating is that someone would go through all the work to become a teacher, and then seemingly go out of her way to discredit the profession.
To steer this post back to class topics, the one thing I wanted
to see most, but didn’t, was some sort of teacher advocacy, or at the least a
teacher response, to the two stories.
For the girl working two jobs and going to school, why wasn’t there any
teacher standing up for her and volunteering to help with supplemental lessons
and support; surely if the state can support completely at-home cyber schools,
they could support a modified lesson plan to meet the extreme needs of the
student. And for the other story, I
wondered why the teachers in Rochester, especially the ones who have filed
sexual harassment claims against the accused teacher, weren’t advocating for
changing tenure qualifications. The
union representative in the interview did acknowledge that these changes needed
to be made and that poor teachers make the entire profession look bad, but it
would be nicer if a week later CNN could come back and see teachers actually
lobbying for these changes. When we concede
the problems with the system and then do nothing about it, it does feed into
the narrative of schools not caring about children, something news
organizations are all too happy to continue to portray because angry viewers
are tuned-in viewers.
My first link from another blogger! I'm taking this as proof that I should write less about students and more about rockets.
ReplyDeleteI'm really glad you brought up the media, because I think they play a huge role in public perceptions about school problems and solutions. For instance, the narrative of miracle charter schools is really popular even in more liberal-leaning media outlets. Unfortunately, I think that the media is just more likely to play up stories of conflict than to cover stories about schools doing their job everyday.
On the flip side, this story also made me think about how the documentary we watched used bad discipline policies as an argument against charter schools. (I think this is really an argument against bad discipline policies, unless you can demonstrate that charter schools systematically promote these policies to a greater extent than public schools, which I suspect is unlikely.) So it's not just the media - people are using these same tactics on both sides to get their message across.
In the end, then, I suppose the best we can do is go back to the research and back to a clear vision of the school's mission. And of course, make sure that as educators, we are always doing our best to look out for the students. See you tomorrow, Joe!
Oh the media. Joe your post makes me think of an increasingly important topic that needs to be covered in school but sadly is probably too radical (not to mentioned underfunded) to be common - critical media literacy. Students and citizens need to be able to pick apart media messages, ask critical questions, and look into the evidence to make their own opinion. Unfortunately, this type of deep, critical analysis is not what is being rewarded in todays test-driven reality.
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