Reality On The Educational Front

Another cruel bit of economic reality on a par with the one I brought up two days ago-- I recently spent a couple of days substituting in a room specially designed (and legally required) for kids with learning disabilities. They are the kind of rooms regular teachers can only dream of—about six to twelve students.
In that particular high school there are several rooms for these kids. There are in most high schools around here. Under the proclamations that have come out of Washington—written by people in Congress who have never spent a day in a room like this in their lives—these kids must be educated up to the standards required of normal, college bound kids.
It cannot be done. To expect these kids to pass the ACT or the SAT with rigorous demands in Algebra and science and essay writing is both stupid and cruel. They often call themselves dummies because they know they cannot do the work in front of them.
They have been “mainstreamed” into precisely those academic endeavors they are unable to perform. Talk about convincing a kid he or she is a failure! “No Child Left Behind” was diabolically well designed to do just that.
Many would make excellent mechanics or capable nurses’ aides, performing economically and socially useful functions while supporting themselves at a decent level. Why in Heaven’s name do they have to take Algebra Two or Geometry? Or study American history from a text book inches thick, written for college bound students?
What was wrong with vocational education for those who would not or could not perform up to college prep expectations? “Mainstreaming” is allowing democratic theory to run amok. Academically, we simply are not all born equal. You can make fifty thousand a year if you’re good at repairing autos or other devices we depend on. But if you’re aimed at the algebra you cannot do, you’re liable to wind up flipping burgers for a lot less.
I certainly was never the equal of an athlete (should I have been democratically mainstreamed into an athletic scholarship at the University of Michigan?). I stand in awe of the magic a decent mechanic can work. I’m not his equal, but that doesn’t make me feel inferior.
At the same time we are mainstreaming kids away from what they COULD do well, we aren’t doing much for the kids we are depending on to create the jobs and technology of tomorrow, or the future physicians, engineers, lawyers and dentists in regular classrooms.
Teachers don’t get to meet and challenge those kids in rooms with six to twelve students. They too are mainstreamed into classes of thirty or more where their gifts may never be noticed or encouraged. That is when ALL of us lose.
I remember the first year I taught—junior high English. In one room alone I had five kids whose I.Q.’s were off the chart. They read what they could (kids still read books back in 1962) but neither the school nor the town had a library.
I suggested to several of these very bright kids that I would stay after school and establish a “lit club” for them—that I would procure challenging books for them to read and discuss. They were enthusiastic. But the principal got wind of my plan. He was horrified.
There was true shock on his face as he called me into his office and demanded that I abandon my plans. “It would,” he insisted, “be SO undemocratic!” He’s had a lot of company over the years. But how “democratic” is it really to leave the kids we depend on for our very future prosperity with nothing to work with that helps them grow?
(AP classes—I’ve been in a few—work at the level a normal classes did in the 1950s.) It is not economic sanity to throw so many of our educational resources into the battle to mainstream those who will never be able to grow our economy and IGNORE those who show real promise of doing so.
Brutal reality—Bill Gates was worth more of my tax dollars than a kid who will never be able to plot a workable algorithm. It’s not democratic, but it’s real.