|
||
 |
A Kappan Special Section on Urban Schools Urban Schools:
|
IS THERE anyone who doesn't recall the famous opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities? "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us. . . ."
Such a string of seeming contradictions applies to the late-20th-century world, in which more people have more money than ever before, yet there is more grinding poverty than ever before in isolated rural areas and in the slums of our cities. Affluence exists side by side with deprivation. More young people graduate from high school, yet more young people are classified as dropouts. Good education coexists with miseducation. While there is more security, there is more uncertainty.
For those of us who work in schools, it is also the best of times and the worst of times. Our urban schools, once the pride of our nation, are now a source of controversy and inequity. We have watched with dismay their descent into confusion and failure. Time and space do not permit a thorough discussion of all the factors that bear down on urban schools. However, in this article I will deal with several of the factors that I believe are forcing urban schools to fail.
The Bureaucracy
The decision-making process in urban schools contributes to their failure. But first let me try to define that process broadly. According to many observers, the "decision process" by which both government and private corporations are run in America is a group process. It is not individual ability that determines success in our society; it is the efficient operation of the decision-making process, which is the sum of accumulated information and the skills of a group. The only implication we can safely draw from this fact is that the process has worked for government, private enterprise, education, unions, medicine. No single person or committee can govern these mammoth domains. The "leader" depends on the actions of others, and his actions are dictated to some extent by subordinates who are considered "specialists." This is how a bureaucracy operates.
And that is how things work in America. But making decisions in this way is not always in the best interests of the majority of citizens.
The settling of the American colonies offers an early example of the decision-making process. When the oppression of the controlling powers of 17th-century Europe became too burdensome for the powerless colonists, many fled to the colonial "suburbs" -- the new frontiers of America. Flight was their strategy for solving the problems of taxation, inadequate housing, legal injustices, and unemployment.
Flight and the displacement of other people became a pattern in America, but it is a pattern that was determined by the decision of the group. For example, the colonial settlers had to displace the Native Americans in order to establish themselves in new territories. The Native Americans were forced to move on to less desirable areas, to what amounted to ghettos created by the people who displaced them. This policy could be carried out with a clear conscience as long as the Native Americans were considered "different" -- barbarians, savages, inferiors, not humans. Of course, no one person made such judgments or decisions. They were made through myriad individual decisions of all members of the group. In this way, everyone and no one was responsible for the outcome.
Such a system continues to operate to this day. The decision-making process is itself an institution, and urban schools are deeply rooted in the decision-making process. To go against it is to be a noncomformist, to act against the group, which amounts to a kind of heresy that can bring misfortune to the offender.
This decision-making process can be described as "bureaucratic." Bureaucracy operates when decisions require that all information be moved upward from one level of specialists to another through a management hierarchy whose multiple levels often distort the nature of the information. Although the bureaucracy is composed of people (aided by computers), it is not controlled by individuals. It is self-generating, self-regulating, and self-perpetuating.
Because the decision-making process is what drives the institution or the organization, the bureaucracy is quite powerful. Because it is an anonymous and faceless collective, it is difficult to control, sidestep, or subvert. Because it seeks to perpetuate itself and its processes, it frequently serves as the brakes that bring innovation and change to a halt.
How does this bear upon the urban schools? They are run by institutional bureaucracies that resist change. Yet the urban schools must change in response to the growing complexities and demands of our society that have made the existing networks and organizational structures obsolete. When the bureaucracy blocks meaningful change, it is inevitable that the urban schools will fail a large number of their clients, the students.
Buildings and Sites
Environment affects learning. We can surely agree on that, but we have yet to measure the magnitude of the role that environment plays in learning -- both in aiding it and in hindering it.
While curriculum, school organization, and communication technology undergo significant changes, school buildings themselves are often too old to accommodate to these changes. Many urban schools are well over 50 years old and designed to provide an environment different from what we need today. Often located in the oldest parts of the city, many of these buildings are in violation of modern fire codes and are hazards to safety. The plumbing is obsolete; asbestos insulation poses health problems; lead poisoning from paint and soil has a negative impact on student learning and the brain development of young children. Furthermore, these buildings cannot accommodate the activities, the equipment, and the materials that new programs and modern technology demand.
These old buildings are hard to heat in winter, and they retain heat in the summer. They require constant renovation, but they can never be properly updated to meet the needs of modern students. Even when their condition is not especially dilapidated, their appearance is often oppressive. And research has shown that such oppressive, unattractive surroundings are detrimental to the learning process.
Costly as it is, remodeling offers one solution. But, once again, the process of decision making gets in the way. Of course, flight is still one solution to the problem of these ancient, inadequate structures. Build somewhere else. Build on the periphery of the city or in the suburbs.
When an existing urban school is remodeled or replaced, its architecture often doesn't meet the real needs of the school community. The physical plant often works against successfully housing the thousands of students who attend the urban school. Elementary schools, built for smaller populations, often cram a thousand students into a small building, while large high schools must accommodate up to 3,000 students in a single building. Handling the volume of students entering, passing through the halls, and exiting the building is a tremendous problem. What's more, the lack of a campus means that many interscholastic and intramural activities -- such as soccer, softball, and tennis -- cannot be offered.
Planners and decision makers do not often consider the importance of environment to the inhabitants of school structures. When it is possible to do significant remodeling and upgrading of an urban school to create a positive educational environment, the needs of the inhabitants of these buildings must be considered. We must ask and answer some basic questions: What should happen in the urban school? How can the environment of an urban school be planned so that desired behaviors and educational goals can be accomplished? Unless sensible and realistic actions result from answering such questions, the physical environment of urban schools becomes just one more factor in the process of failure.
Overload
Most people agree that the central goal of the public schools is to teach students to read, write, and compute. Urban schools today simply have too many other things to accomplish under too many unfavorable conditions. The urban school is no longer merely an academic institution; it is also a social and welfare institution. Among the necessary services it provides are recreation, cultural growth, emotional development, basic health care, food service, voter registration, draft registration, driver education, sex education, employment service, immunization, and the collection of census data. The urban school is, in effect, like a government of a small city. Yet the added responsibilities have come without any administrative or structural change and without the addition of essential personnel. Problems increase, but the means to solve them are not available.
Too much responsibility without the means to carry it out overloads the urban schools. Students come to see their educational experiences in these institutions as if they were looking through the small end of a telescope: their experiences appear artificial, remote, unreal, and irrelevant.
When the system cannot afford to fulfill its responsibilities -- already enormous -- the solution is often to cut "nonbasic" school programs rather than to reduce the burden of the outer layers of the organization. Because of the power and influence of those people who have positions in the outer organization, the programs cut tend to be the very enrichment programs that children in urban areas need to make use of their basic education. These programs, too important to appear on the list of superfluous classes, include remedial reading, remedial math, guidance counseling, school newspaper, the media center, art, music, and any extracurricular activities that might have survived the last round of cuts. For indifferent students who often come to school unwillingly and reluctantly, these courses -- last to be added, first to go -- can offer inspiration and a reason to learn.
Unless the organization of education is restructured to handle the additional demands placed on schools, the urban schools will continue to fail large numbers of their clients.
A New Population
"What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child," John Dewey remarked in 1899, "that must the community want for all of its children. Any other idea for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy." Our democracy is in peril because the community is not providing the best education it can for its poor and urban youngsters. Too often minority students and poor students are not provided with the intellectual skills and the academic knowledge needed to earn a decent living and to participate fully in the economic, social, and political life of the community.
Our urban schools were not designed for their present clients. The urban school population changed radically after World War II. Prior to that time, the urban school population included large numbers of white and middle-class students, with even a smattering of the children of the wealthy. Today, this population consists largely of minorities: immigrants, African Americans, and the poor.
In the early 1950s the exodus of the white middle and upper classes from the cities was as dramatic and sudden as the departure of Moses and his people from Egypt. But, once again, this flight was the secondary result of the decision-making process in two areas: the development of the interstate highway system, which made commuting more convenient, and the creation of federal mortgage programs, which financed suburban housing construction. The advertising industry reinforced the desirability of migrating to the suburbs. Automobiles were shown being driven through beautiful suburbs, not through city streets. Children were seen running in from lush green lawns for their Campbell's soup, their Kraft macaroni, or their Cheracol cough syrup. They weren't shown coming in from the city streets where they had been playing basketball so that their mothers could wash their shirts in Tide or give them Kool-Aid from the refrigerator in their middle-class kitchens.
Another development that shifted the demographics was the rapid mechanization of farms, which displaced many rural people and sent them to the cities and their children to urban schools.
The new wave of immigration of the last 25 years from Hispanic countries, from the Middle East, and from Asian countries has washed over the urban schools like a tidal wave, bringing with it additional challenges, this time cultural and linguistic.
As the total population of major cities decreases, the school population decreases as well. But at the same time, the minority population of urban schools increases, and the duties and problems that come with the new population are overwhelming to the institution. There is the need for food and sanitation and for keeping records and storing supplies. There are demands for safety and surveillance, including fire rules and drills and protection against intrusion, robbery, assault, and vandalism. And there are gangs and the problems that come with drugs. Special education is the fastest-growing element in the urban schools. And it is an element for which urban schools are poorly prepared.
Delinquent behavior is too mild a term to describe a problem that can be devastating for urban schools. In the high schools, for example, there is a kind of anarchy or civil war that is more serious than most people outside the schools realize. Students are angry young people, and they question every rule. Students commit acts of defiance that are astonishing in their destructive effect on the population and the institution.
In the face of this multitude of problems, those in authority react with stricter punishments, armed hallway guards, metal detectors, and forms of repression meant to stem the tide. The rules become more mechanical, rigid, and impersonal. The students are known by their I.D. numbers, and the personalities of teachers are effaced by the need to maintain order at great cost to everyone in the school.
I can barely touch on the causes of delinquent behavior in this article. However, as far as the schools are concerned, the following deficiencies are key to delinquent behavior:
When school experience is irrelevant to life experience and to employment opportunities, it contributes heavily to dropout rates. When the school organization isolates and excludes according to ability, race, or economic class, it denies young people the opportunity for meaningful interaction with all segments of society. The resulting alienation lies at the heart of delinquency. The system is a machine that is not equal to its task, and it forces the urban schools to fail.
Cost of Security
Imagine the high school as a giant marketplace where consuming and selling occurs every day. In the course of a day, the student purchases food, school supplies, tickets for school events, and items sold for fund-raising. Money is exchanged as a matter of course in a relatively unguarded atmosphere.
Imagine also the young entrepreneur who attends the urban school. What does he see? A free flow of money that is unprotected except by teachers, and those teachers already have more than enough to do. He sees no barriers to taking clothes, shoes, or jackets from his peers. He sees few restraints on the sale of illegal drugs and narcotics. He sees the marketplace, filled with goods for the taking, as a source of income for himself.
Elsewhere -- in fact, everywhere else -- security measures have been taken to deal with the criminal element that pervades the larger marketplace that we call our society. Security personnel are included in the operating budgets of supermarkets, banks, parking lots, service stations, laundromats, restaurants, and department stores. Security has been a fact of life everywhere except in the marketplace of the school.
When it became obvious that the exchange of money demanded protection for the consumer -- the high school client, who is still a child and in the care of the adults who staff the school -- the first line of defense was the teacher. Put teachers on hall duty. Put teachers in the lunchroom. Then, when they have expended enough psychic energy to exhaust themselves, send them back to the classroom, where they are expected to provide meaningful and challenging instruction in math, science, history, and English.
It never did work, and it isn't working today. It takes away from the teacher preparation time and refueling time. Professionals, who are being paid professional wages, are doing the work of security personnel. In terms of dollars alone, that is an expensive mistake.
Today, even when teachers are used to staff the halls and lunchrooms, at least 10% of every urban school budget is set aside for security-related measures: security personnel, metal detectors, replacement of stolen property. The equivalent of an entire police precinct has been created to serve the security needs of urban schools, and that means more expense for patrol cars, officers, supervisors, and uniforms, as well as coverage for special events and board meetings.
In the last two decades, the decision makers in urban school districts have recognized that the schools need the same level of security as any other agency in the community. After all, aren't our students our most precious commodity? But perhaps that doesn't include urban students, because allocations from the state for education do not allow for security expenses. Therefore, the urban schools have to use some of their classroom allocations for security. It turns out that security eats up from 10% to 12% of their budgets.
What does this mean in terms of dollars? An urban district with a budget of $500 million or more must subtract at least $50 million from its classroom budget, which includes teachers' salaries. In many cases, the costs of security for urban school districts exceed the total budget for many smaller municipalities, and the security force of an urban school often outnumbers the entire police force of small towns.
When we talk about the costs of security in urban schools, we are talking about numbers with a lot of zeroes. And we can't even count all the costs. The hidden expenses of security cannot be calculated. Indeed, it might be too frightening if we examined the costs any further than we have here.
The Professional Staff
Given the new populations in our urban schools, the number of professional staff members working in them is inadequate to perform the duties required of teachers, counselors, and administrators. The shortfall of professional staff members is not the result of any general shortage in the supply of teachers. In suburban communities that surround large, urban districts, the ratio of professional personnel to students is higher than in urban districts. Where the need is greatest, the supply is smallest. The higher salaries, better working conditions, and better recruiting methods of the suburban districts are magnets that draw personnel away from the urban districts.
The teacher turnover rate in the urban schools is much higher than in the suburban schools and in other more stable communities. The result is that urban schools, especially those in the inner cities, are often staffed largely by newly hired or uncertified teachers. Teachers who have remained in the urban schools through the traumatic and radical changes of the last three decades are in need of retraining and of rethinking their roles as educators. These teachers, who were trained to teach students from middle-class families and who often come from middle-class families themselves, now find themselves engulfed by minority students, immigrants, and other students from low-income families -- students whose values and experiences are very different from their own. Teachers who are unaware of these differences or who are alienated from the norms of their students are often unable to communicate with or understand them. Retraining for these teachers, while essential, is not generally available.
The staffing of urban schools has also been affected by the shift of populations from city to suburbs. Many teachers who have remained in urban schools no longer live in the city where they work but have moved to the suburbs. This is the first step in the disengagement of urban teachers from the urban situation. The teachers withdraw themselves from the community of the students, and the only result can be a growing reluctance to be a part of that community in any way except to earn a paycheck. It is a form of disloyalty to the students. This withdrawal and this disloyalty cannot be cured by a program or a workshop. Yet those are the cures now being offered.
On the other side of the ledger, teachers are forced to fail by the bureaucracy of the decision makers. The loyal teachers experience what can only be called disloyalty on the part of the system, which withdraws from its teachers. The system is reluctant to reward teachers for their devotion to students. The system disengages itself from the classroom, the teacher's workstation, by not providing adequate support in the form of supplies and encouragement. Teachers suffer from a lack of psychic nurturing, and they are virtually alone in the classroom, without adult support.
Indeed, teaching, as it is now practiced in urban schools, is the most isolated of the professions. Some nonurban districts have begun to move toward cooperative teaching, team teaching, and common planning. The professional isolation of the urban teachers must end as well.
One severe ramification of this isolation is that talented teachers do not have the opportunity to pass their talents and expertise on to others. Their skill dies in their classrooms -- and, with every teacher retirement, a vacuum is created. Experienced teachers have gotten that way by learning from their mistakes over many years. Sharing the fruits of their experience -- the successes and the failures -- could help new teachers avoid making the same mistakes. Moreover, it could inspire new teachers to reach the best in themselves.
The teacher training institutions have not placed sufficient emphasis on preparing new teachers to work in schools that serve minority students. There are no lucrative college scholarships for prospective teachers, as there are in athletics. Nor are there significant bonuses offered for those who will teach in urban schools. Teacher candidates are not offered courses designed to familiarize them with the history and the culture of their potential students, much less with their learning problems and their psychology. Teachers who are already part of the school organization are generally not provided with inservice training to make them more effective in their classrooms. The current practices of awarding bonuses and scholarships, making personnel assignments, and offering inservice training must be changed.
Every time teachers serve on hall duty or lunchroom duty, their talents are being misused. Teachers could be tutoring students or mentoring other teachers. They could be conferencing, sharing, and doing observations. But urban teachers are denied professional renewal during the course of the school day. The only time they can engage in professional activities is after school -- after they have already taught five classes and performed many other mentally and physically exhausting duties. At the end of the day, their minds are not fresh, their energy is low, they are fatigued, and their spirits are depleted. How much professional renewal can we expect? Such abuse of teacher talent is a crime against the profession, but its ultimate victims are the students. When teachers are forced to fail, then the urban schools themselves are forced to fail.
Lack of Political Courage
Revolutions that benefit society rather than destroy the good in it require revolutionary methods and processes. To date, urban school problems have been handled in an ad hoc and inefficient manner. Confusion about goals is matched by lack of commitment to the real cure for educational ills. Indeed, the resistance to change is strong because many people benefit from the status quo in urban education: owners of ghetto housing and small businesses, privileged white workers protected from minority competition, and all those who gain when society's dirty work is done cheaply by others.
But the changes that assault our urban schools are producing a cultural revolution that will spread throughout the entire education community in time. Brought about by vandalism, drug abuse, poverty and unemployment, and changing sexual mores, this revolution could be as significant as any past revolution, whether it be political, religious, military, industrial, or technological. Existing structures are being undermined by immigration, racial integration, freedom schools, court decisions, vouchers and charters, and school takeovers. We have no way of successfully predicting the extent of the changes that the future might bring.
But the current pseudo-revolution that is benefiting no one is called "restructuring the urban school." The social engineers want to rebuild urban education on a shaky foundation; they want to build pyramids on an eroding base of sand. They think, for example, that they can mandate parent involvement with people whose time is totally consumed in a struggle to survive. These social engineers want full participation in the school from parents who lack the means to do what they want to do for their children.
A number of generalizations can be made about minority education in the United States, and they apply in particular to urban schools, where most members of minority groups are educated. First, substantial minority deprivation does exist, along with exploitation and segregration. Second, these types of discrimination are endemic to the form of internal colonialism that has been developed in this country. Third, they continue because important segments of white society profit from such arrangements; therefore, while significant social and educational legislation has been enacted, there is only token enforcement. Fourth, political influence follows economic power, and those with vested interests use their power to resist progressive reforms in education. Indeed, when there is change -- either for the sake of appearance or as a result of popular pressure -- educational programs are set up in a manner that ensures failure. For example, a special program may be funded for only one year, or an inconsequential appendage may be added to a program. Significant and long-lasting reforms are nearly impossible to bring about because our national priorities are set so as to preclude meaningful change.
There are some things that urban educators never talk about in public. Urban educators are silent when the bureaucracy mandates better student attendance. The problem is bigger than the school, and it is beyond the school's power to solve it. Urban educators know some things about the lives of the people in the communities they serve. They know that the poorest of the poor live farthest from the school. They know that it is dangerous to walk the city streets on dark mornings -- or even in broad daylight. They know that an automobile is still a luxury among the very poor. And, in case no one else has noticed, urban educators know that city transportation is just not available.
Urban educators shake their heads over the cures proposed for the ills of the public school system: the creation of charter schools or magnet schools or the implementation of vouchers. Tear down the old system and start again -- but only in urban areas. Although criticism is leveled against all public schools, the remedies are to be applied only to the urban public schools. Suburban school districts have sufficient funds and political support to reach their educational goals. Only an educational heretic would propose the purposeful demolition of an affluent suburban school system. Yet this very demolition is what is being offered as a cure for the ills of urban schools. Only an urban bureaucracy would support such a notion.
By their very nature, institutions resist change. Institutions are power, and power concedes to nothing but greater power. If the urban schools are to offer their population of minority children access to the American dream, a powerful political force must move into the educational arena to represent their cause. The alternative is complete failure and the destruction of urban schools.
For urban schools, it is now "the season of light" and "the season of darkness." We have "everything before us," we have "nothing before us." We are going to succeed, or we will surely fail what rests in our charge -- the urban schools and the children who attend them.
PDK Home | Site Map
Kappan Professional
Journal
Last updated 8 December1999
URL: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kcro9912.htm
Copyright 1999 Phi
Delta Kappa International