This series explores the most compelling reasons you have to declare independence from the peculiar institution of American schooling and make significant life changes to ensure your kids get a real education, something public schools no longer provide, if they ever did. These essays are based on my observations and thousands of conversations with students aged 13-18 and their families over the span of my 20-year career teaching in state-run schools in California.
On graduation day, 2014, I had a spectacular breakdown at work. Two of my colleagues watched as I ugly-cried at my desk from the end of minimum day until I put on my gown to walk the seniors down to their seats on the football field. There they would wait to shake the superintendent’s hand as he defrauded the entire audience by handing their beloved young men and women diplomas signifying those kids could read, write, speak, and calculate.
Like so many teachers, I didn’t blame the school system at the time; I chalked it up to social, economic, psychological, and other factors the school couldn’t address in our very poor, mainly immigrant-populated district.
But when I moved to a school that served some of the wealthiest families in our metro area, it was the same damned story.
Many kids were functionally illiterate and innumerate. The writing of 9th-12th graders in English was often incoherent, full of fragment sentences and errors in English grammar, usage, and mechanics. Students couldn’t seem to organize their thoughts meaningfully and employed little vocabulary beyond the 6th grade level. Only the most proficient and frequent readers produced work that didn’t require major revision. Students didn’t know enough about Western civ to turn out an intelligent paper on any piece of literature, whether novel, short story, or poem. They hadn’t read enough in any genre to have a working model of how to produce good, clear writing.
Math didn’t look much better. Every AP Econ class I taught at that school audibly gasped when told calculators weren’t allowed on Econ tests, which at most require knowledge of basic arithmetic. (Many kids struggled to finish timed tests because of this rule.) One of the hardest-working seniors in my class last year, a 17-year-old from a wealthy, supportive family, needed help multiplying two-digit integers; he wasn’t sure what to do with carried numbers.