What I Learned From a Year of Visiting Schools

The “newsworthy” media reports on the state of education in our country are largely discouraging.  The articles I read in newspapers, magazines, and blogs often focus on failing schools, disappointing test results, or the tragic criminal behavior of a few isolated teachers or administrators.  Acrimonious school board meetings make the news, as do research reports showing how American 4th graders are falling behind students in other parts of the world, especially in subjects like science and mathematics.  If you take these snippets as representative of our educational system in the US, you could easily conclude that our young people are doomed.

But after spending some time during this last academic year visiting a wide variety of different schools, I have found the real picture to be much more complicated.  Yes, there are problems – many of them large, pervasive, intractable problems.  But there are also some reasons to feel grateful and even a few reasons to celebrate.  And above all, there is reason to feel hopeful.  Here’s why:

Teachers are Amazing

Granted, I set out to find some great teachers and great schools, not to fill out the Top Ten list for the Suckiest Teachers in America.  Even so, my travels gave me plenty of opportunities to spend time in huge spectrum of schools (public and private, rural and urban and suburban, crushingly poor and fantastically wealthy).  At most of the schools I visited I spent a whole school day, seeing a full range of teachers.  What I saw was inspiring.  These educators have a passion for teaching and care deeply about their students.  They manage superhuman feats, among them:

• Getting up at 4am every weekday to find time to prep for class, set up labs, or get those papers graded
• Juggling classes of up to 40 teenagers at a time – not just managing the chaos, but engaging and inspiring them
• Coaching, sponsoring clubs and activities, directing plays, doing dorm duty, counseling advisees, and generally providing a bounty of activities and support systems for students outside of class
• Writing their own curricular materials and text books, even though they gain little or nothing financially from these endeavors
• Using their own prior personal experiences as lawyers, historians, EMTs, park rangers, scientists, business executives, journalists, and soldiers to add to the educational experiences of students.
• Engaging 9th graders in a collaborative cancer research project with students and professors at a local university
• Meeting with students before school, through their lunch breaks, and after school – sometimes into the evening hours
• Fighting NYC traffic – 90 minutes each way – just to make it back and forth to school
• Spending their own money – often hundreds of dollars – to get supplies and materials to make lessons more interesting and more meaningful
• Holding the rapt attention of a class for up to 90 minutes by telling stories and jokes that deliver the content in a compelling way (several groaned disappointedly when a student realized that class had actually ended a few minutes ago and they would have to leave).

Teachers are Innovative

Some education critics and pundits complain that teaching today looks much like it did 150 years ago, with teachers lecturing at the blackboard while students passively take notes.  While this is a scene repeated in many classrooms across the country, I was surprised by the level of innovation and creativity teachers brought to the lessons I observed:

• Exploring ‘flipped classroom’ techniques, POGIL, and the Harkness method to use classroom time and ‘homework time’ more effectively
• Utilizing a huge variety on online resources in smart and effective ways: access to primary documents, physics simulations, journal articles, photo databases, educational videos, scientific safety data sheets, etc.
• Using Twitter and other social media to effectively communicate with their colleagues across the country, sharing ideas and scheduling massive online conversations about best practices
• Developing “student-centered” lessons and curricula in which students take responsibility for their own learning and get to practice deeper level cognitive skills like critical thinking, planning, analysis, trouble-shooting, and evaluation.
• Creating custom manipulatives and simulations that allow students to model complex systems and learn how they work
• Using real world problems to create context and allow students to relate to the lesson – how would you go about designing a high performance skateboard?  what architectural features of a house affect the rate of heat loss in the winter?  what kind of drug delivery system would release chemotherapy drugs in the presence of cancerous cells but not healthy tissue?

Students Love Learning

If you believe the buzz about kids in the 21st Century, you might conclude that they are all technology-addicted, zero-attention-span brats with an over-developed sense of self-esteem and self-importance.  While not all kids thrive in our schools, it was encouraging to see that the negative stereotypes of this generation are either over-simplified or just plain wrong.

• Students love learning.  When presented with an interesting and well-designed lesson, the vast majority of kids are willing to jump right in.  While school doesn’t have to be “fun,” there’s no denying that learning can be enjoyable and engaging.
• Students respond strongly to skilled and knowledgeable teachers who care about them.  It was interesting to follow the transformation of a single student from a classroom with a talented, passionate teacher (3rd period) to a tired, less effective teacher (4th period).  The student’s engagement and performance changed by orders of magnitude.
• The harder the problem, the harder they try (at least up to a point).  As any video game designer can tell you, challenging activities can be really fun.  Lessons that push students to the limits of their capabilities while still allowing them to experience some success and a sense of accomplishment can be highly effective learning environments.
• Students care about each other and the broader world.  More than any generation before them, students are attuned to global issues and want to do something to make the world a better place.  They talk about international human rights, climate change, and disaster relief.  They join clubs and organizations, volunteer their time, and raise money.  And many of them are planning careers that hope to address some of the great problems of our modern age.

Resources Matter

While I found some very effective teachers and highly motivated students in every school I visited, it was also shocking to see the enormous disparity between well-funded schools and those that were sorely lacking in resources.  In one weekend I went from a school with lavish classrooms and labs, an average class size of about 10 students, and an endowment of nearly $1 million PER STUDENT to a school without books or basic supplies, classes of 35+, and a building that hadn’t been renovated in 60 years.  While there was some good teaching happening in both places, the challenges faced by the students and teachers at the second school were extraordinary.  It’s hard to teach chemistry without equipment and supplies, without books and computers, and without classroom and lab spaces big enough to adequately accommodate all of your kids.

After seeing some of these schools, it makes me sick to hear the pundits on TV saying things like “throwing money at the problem won’t fix the problems with our schools.”  Some of these political hacks think that they are suddenly educational experts, perhaps because they once spent time in a classroom.  Their diagnosis: bad teachers.  Their prescription: more teacher accountability, more student testing, and less government interference.  My response?  They are clueless idiots.  OF COURSE throwing money at the problem is the solution.  Let’s imagine some other scenarios outside the realm of education, shall we?

***

Doctor: Chief, patient care is suffering.  Our MRI is broken, and the X-ray machine needs to be recalibrated.  Also, if we got some new lab equipment, we could run more sophisticated blood tests to better diagnose disease.

Hospital Exec: Why is it all about technology these days?  Back when I was a doctor, we didn’t even have MRIs.  Being a good doctor isn’t about having fancy tech toys to play with – those things are expensive, and I’m not sure we need them.

***

Engineer: We can’t seem to find and retain highly skilled engineers for the new NASA project.  Maybe we should think about increasing pay and benefits?

Project Manager: Engineers are overpaid as it is.  The problem is that they are lazy and poorly trained.  Why would you pay engineers more if they are not doing a good job?  What we need is more effective college engineering programs to prepare future engineers better.

***

Researcher:  Boss, we have no new pharmaceuticals in development.  Once our other patents expire, we’re sure to lose market share.  Maybe we should spend some money on research & development?

Pharma Exec:  Throwing money at the problem is not going to help.  Instead of spending MORE money on R&D, we just need to spend it in SMARTER ways.  We need to think outside the box – maybe we should just test our current drugs more extensively?

***

In most other professional endeavors, providing money for competitive salaries and paying for basic materials is a no-brainer if you want to achieve quality outcomes.  Why should education be any different?

While there are courageous doctors who accomplish noble things in areas of the world without diagnostic equipment and proper medical supplies, they are hampered by the lack of appropriate resources.  Imagine how much more good they could do with a little technological and human support.  Likewise, teachers in poor schools are able to accomplish some incredible work with little or no money.  But their efforts could be greatly amplified if they only had access to decent teaching resources.  And if we want to attract and (more importantly) retain talented teachers, we’ll have to actually pay them a competitive salary (unlike, say, the $36K we pay Washington teachers with a BA and 5 years of experience – per http://www.k12.wa.us/safs/pub/per/salallocschedule.pdf).  That is not even a living wage in Seattle, and other professionals with similar amounts of training and experience make double or triple that amount (see for example http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=Engineer&l1=Seattle%2C+WA).

While teachers in more wealthy schools have many more options for putting together effective lessons for their kids, most of them work just as many hours as teachers in poor schools – and often for the same pay.  Most of the teachers at the prestigious boarding schools I visited are required to live in the dorms, and regularly work 80+ hours a week for a surprisingly small salary.  Like their teaching colleagues elsewhere, they do it because they love their jobs, feel that their work is meaningful, and honestly enjoy working with young people.

Looking back on my year, it is all of the teachers that I have met that make me feel hopeful and inspired.  They are smart, hard working, and courageous.  They often make sacrifices of time and money in their own lives because they believe that educating the next generation is critically important.  Teachers of America, your passion and dedication is amazing.  Your students love and appreciate you.  And you are making a difference in their lives, and in the future of our country and our world.