I grew up in Indianapolis which has a higher per capita murder rate than Chicago (that’s from 2021, our per capita rate has never been great despite sleepy depictions of midwestern cities.) The new school choice movement isn’t bad, but it wont have the significant impact that many proponets insist it will. I can tell you from first-hand experience that the ONLY thing that can make a significant difference is two-parent homes. Period. I know it sounds like an over-simplification of a complex problem but I can assure you it is not. I am a child raised by a single mother whom I love and respect, but women CANNOT do it all, and more importantly, they should not have to.
Former school-based therapist in urban Midwest for 20 years. This is a real snapshot of what it’s like in our public schools. No one knows it unless you see it for yourself & it has just gotten worse. The debate about IQ in the comments is not even relevant, imo. Average learning-especially new learning, is extremely compromised by even average students when you consider the chaos & emergency room-like atmosphere in these classrooms. Majority of pre-K & K students arrive with few daily living skills of children 40 years ago (social, hygiene, bathroom, communication). The past 5 years or so I noticed school districts started bringing in “trauma-based” training for teachers; they finally realized regular teaching & management models were inadequate for the majority of students. What does that say about our society, that so many of our school children are living in homes, neighborhoods which are traumatizing them?? As we know from an abundance of research & data over many decades we know that the traumatized & abused don’t do well themselves but also often do the same to others, and not just to other children, as this young man experienced. Like most failures in our society, there is a vast amount of funding for education in this country. Unfortunately the bulk of which goes to the huge administrative body which never see the inside of a classroom.
This is heartbreaking. My husband taught in an alternative high school in Detroit for awhile, and the experience sounds similar. He was expected to be part security guard, but fortunately he has significant martial arts experience. When he had to confiscate a firearm from a student he started wearing a vest. Many of his students had been shot. They all had food insecurity and a lot of what they did eat was crap. One year he had two students graduate, which was a record for that school. Then the school had to eliminate the position due to budget cuts. My husband went on to graduate school and saw one of his former students on campus, so that really was a success story. However, the idea that teacher quality can control for severe poverty and violence is blatantly ridiculous. Most of these kids won't have a chance unless that environment can be changed.
This is a profoundly thought-provoking and candidly written essay. It simply lays bare what all teachers know. The issue, of course, is not about race. It's about culture. For instance:
"When ‘Black’ & ‘Hispanic’ Students Outscore ‘Asian’ & ‘White’ Students on the ACT, Nobody Notices"
As a lifelong teacher (special ed., high school, and college), I can attest to the fact that milder and less violent versions of these incidents occur even in well-funded suburban schools, and in selective liberal arts colleges. It's a matter of degree, not kind. In the end, teaching is a two-way street. Half of the responsibility for success (or failure) belongs to the student. The best teacher in the world cannot force information into the brain of a student who is ill prepared — intellectually, emotionally, or behaviorally — to learn. Conversely, students who want to learn will not be stymied by a poor teacher.
Thank you for this very important essay. Sincerely, Frederick
If ‘whiteness’ was the real problem, we would expect schools in Haiti to be thriving (no white people around). They are not. Of course, schools in Vietnam, China, and Singapore are thriving (no white people around). Maybe kids (and parents) really make the difference? This theory has actually been tested.
A generation ago Scientific American published a study showing that the children of poor Vietnamese immigrants were thriving in the same schools where black and Hispanic children were failing. See Nathan Caplan, Marcella Choy, and John K. Whitmore, “Indochinese Refugee Families and Academic Achievement,” Scientific American (1992), 36-42. Quote
"The scholastic success of Asian children is well recognized. Their stunning performance—particularly in the realm of science and mathematics—has prompted American educators to visit Japanese and Taiwanese schools in an effort to unearth the foundations of these achievements. Experts recommend that American schools adopt aspects of their Asian counter-parts, such as a longer school year or more rigorous tasks, in order to raise the scholastic level of US. students. Yet there is no need to go abroad to understand why these children do so well. The achievement of Asian-American students indicates that much may be learned about the origins of their triumph within the American school system itself.
More specifically, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, devastating political and economic circumstances forced many Vietnamese, Lao and Chinese-Vietnamese families to seek a new life in the US. This resettlement of boat people from Indochina offered a rare opportunity to examine the academic achievement of their children. These young refugees had lost months, even years of forma schooling while living in relocation camps. Like their parents, they suffered disruption and trauma as they escaped from Southeast Asia. Despite their hardships and with little knowledge of English, the children quickly adapted to their new schools and began to excel."
“I did not process these things as the byproducts of America’s system of funding schools through property taxes.” In reality this is BS. Urban schools are overflowing with money and it doesn’t come from property taxes. See NCES (National Center for Education Statistics) table 235.10.
As for poverty, my guess is that, in dollars, the slums of Baltimore have far more money than Vietnam (where the schools are vastly better). What does Vietnam have (that Baltimore lacks)? How about two-parent families.
When Dan Quayle attacked Murphy Brown for having a child out of wedlock, all right-thinking people criticized him. Of course, he was right.
The number of patients I saw in medical school and residency who were barely literate -- often elementary school level -- was shocking. It really is tragic.
I write a lot regarding discipline and changes to the discipline policies here at our schools in Evanston IL. One major thing that has changed the last few years is the administration absolving themselves of any responsibility when it comes to this. Even in the IL legislature they passed SB10 designed to keep kids in the classroom, no matter what. At this point, teachers cant kick out kids unless the child is literally doing arson. Its a big issue designed to protect politically connected admins, at the cost of teachers and kids. All done in the name of “social justice”. Parents here have given up on the admin and just call the cops at this point...
I was also in TFA, significantly earlier than you, 1997-1999 teaching 3rd & 5th grade innercity Houston TX. It is creepy how similar my experience was. I would sit in my car absolutely dreading getting out and starting the day. My 5th grade class was 33 large fifth graders and of course as a new teacher i had all the kids the two other veteran teachers didnt want. (There were three fifth grade classes, one gifted class, one ESL class - well behaved kids of immigrants, and i got the leftovers) What made me feel the absolutely shittiest was the one or two students from stable families who really wanted to learn but i was too busy stopping kids from fighting to pay them much attention. That crushed me inside. I think i've actually blocked out much of my time with those 5th graders. At the end of my two years (I still cant believe i made it, but to be fair my 3rd graders were slightly less traumatizing) I learned simply how little the teacher mattered. Like you I could write a long essay about how naive some of ideas behind TFA were.
Meanwhile, I taught English at a public school in rural Thailand right after college. In absolute terms, the students must have been more impoverished than the students in this piece. The school definitely expended far fewer dollars per child compared to American schools, probably by orders of magnitude. But the kids were absolutely lovely and respectful, both to me and to each other. There was some naughtiness, sure, but I never saw physical violence of any kind aside from the occasional wack from a teacher’s ruler (note, this was around 16+ years ago, so social media, and screens in general, had not yet poisoned their minds. Things may be worse now).
The kids who put in the effort were getting a decent enough education and going to college. Others dropped out, but that’s better than forcing disruptive, uninterested students to stay in the classroom. They generally would go on to farming, factories, warehouses, etc., and would be more or less fine.
Not sure what the takeaway from this anecdote is, other than: it’s the culture, stupid. How do you repair a broken culture? Unfortunately, for all of our societal wealth and education and technology, we have no good answer to that question. So we choose not to ask it.
Year Zero is terrifying. I’m a big proponent of choice and parental rights, but stories like this underscore how futile these efforts are.
In lily-white suburban suburban CT parents have willingly handed to public schools all responsibility for educating kids. I’ve talk to upper-middle class parents who think schools should provide their kids free breakfast and lunch because they’re too busy to make it. I talked to a grandma who lamented her third grade grandchild can’t read. She surmises that even though she’s given the child a library’s worth of beginner Dr. Suess books, her son has never read to his child.
And then there’s this. Yesterday I was in our local FedEx. A late-teen early twenty something guy came in to ship a blank box. No address. When the attendant asked for the recipient and address, the kid asked why she needed that information. The contents? A gender reveal test for the baby he and his girlfriend were having.
I don’t know what the answer is, but we’d better come up with one quickly.
"There are plenty of negative things I could say about Mrs. Holmes as a teacher. I honestly doubt her kids learned much more than mine, despite the relative tranquility of her classroom. Still, for two years, she was my savior. I can’t even remember the number of times she had abandoned her classroom and come to my rescue, appearing suddenly at the back of the class and silencing the storm with a mere “Excuse me!”."
She sounds pretty cool tbh. I hope she convinced you to convert to Christianity.
Imagine what it might take to gain enough control over these classrooms to actually teach something to these kids. Probably talking about extreme measures like classroom police, authority to discipline these children in ways the author would find very uncomfortable: running the school like a prison, low tolerance for disruptive behavior, forgetting about concerns surrounding "disparate treatment", ignoring parent's complaints about "picking on my kid" (also happens in white schools btw). Sounds harsh right? But allowing the wild and terrible environment described by the author seems like a much greater evil perpetrated on these kids.
Instead we'll hire coordinators and curriculum directors and bloated state make-work officers to play with numbers and propose useless programs because we can't stomach what is necessary.
My son was a TFA teacher. My son is not a white man. His experience in the DC public schools was 100% like that described above. The rules and regulations of TFA made it impossible to actually reach and teach these children.
These classrooms are not teaching platforms, but breeding grounds for the Lord of the Flies culture that progressives want, so that they can present themselves as the saviors of the oppressed (the great white hopes).
I'm curious how much money is spent on those schools despite how disfunctional they are. Where is it going? If kids are really going hungry it seems like the first thing to be done is to feed them a decent breakfast and lunch.
Just an FYI. Baltimore Public Schools spends about $16k/student. In 2022, 93% of 3rd-8th graders could not do math at grade level. Out of the 150 public schools in Baltimore, 23 of those schools did not have a single student proficient in math. ZERO STUDENTS out of 23 schools. An additional 20 schools only had 1 or 2 students proficient in math. 41% of Baltimore public high school students earned below a 1.0 GPA.
The average number of students in a Baltimore school is 500 students. 43 schools at $16k/student comes to about $345 million. So, for $345m in taxpayer funds, Baltimore Public Schools produces about 30 students who can do grade level math in nearly 1/3 of all of their schools.
I grew up in Indianapolis which has a higher per capita murder rate than Chicago (that’s from 2021, our per capita rate has never been great despite sleepy depictions of midwestern cities.) The new school choice movement isn’t bad, but it wont have the significant impact that many proponets insist it will. I can tell you from first-hand experience that the ONLY thing that can make a significant difference is two-parent homes. Period. I know it sounds like an over-simplification of a complex problem but I can assure you it is not. I am a child raised by a single mother whom I love and respect, but women CANNOT do it all, and more importantly, they should not have to.
Former school-based therapist in urban Midwest for 20 years. This is a real snapshot of what it’s like in our public schools. No one knows it unless you see it for yourself & it has just gotten worse. The debate about IQ in the comments is not even relevant, imo. Average learning-especially new learning, is extremely compromised by even average students when you consider the chaos & emergency room-like atmosphere in these classrooms. Majority of pre-K & K students arrive with few daily living skills of children 40 years ago (social, hygiene, bathroom, communication). The past 5 years or so I noticed school districts started bringing in “trauma-based” training for teachers; they finally realized regular teaching & management models were inadequate for the majority of students. What does that say about our society, that so many of our school children are living in homes, neighborhoods which are traumatizing them?? As we know from an abundance of research & data over many decades we know that the traumatized & abused don’t do well themselves but also often do the same to others, and not just to other children, as this young man experienced. Like most failures in our society, there is a vast amount of funding for education in this country. Unfortunately the bulk of which goes to the huge administrative body which never see the inside of a classroom.
This is heartbreaking. My husband taught in an alternative high school in Detroit for awhile, and the experience sounds similar. He was expected to be part security guard, but fortunately he has significant martial arts experience. When he had to confiscate a firearm from a student he started wearing a vest. Many of his students had been shot. They all had food insecurity and a lot of what they did eat was crap. One year he had two students graduate, which was a record for that school. Then the school had to eliminate the position due to budget cuts. My husband went on to graduate school and saw one of his former students on campus, so that really was a success story. However, the idea that teacher quality can control for severe poverty and violence is blatantly ridiculous. Most of these kids won't have a chance unless that environment can be changed.
This is a profoundly thought-provoking and candidly written essay. It simply lays bare what all teachers know. The issue, of course, is not about race. It's about culture. For instance:
"When ‘Black’ & ‘Hispanic’ Students Outscore ‘Asian’ & ‘White’ Students on the ACT, Nobody Notices"
https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/when-black-and-hispanic-students
As a lifelong teacher (special ed., high school, and college), I can attest to the fact that milder and less violent versions of these incidents occur even in well-funded suburban schools, and in selective liberal arts colleges. It's a matter of degree, not kind. In the end, teaching is a two-way street. Half of the responsibility for success (or failure) belongs to the student. The best teacher in the world cannot force information into the brain of a student who is ill prepared — intellectually, emotionally, or behaviorally — to learn. Conversely, students who want to learn will not be stymied by a poor teacher.
Thank you for this very important essay. Sincerely, Frederick
If ‘whiteness’ was the real problem, we would expect schools in Haiti to be thriving (no white people around). They are not. Of course, schools in Vietnam, China, and Singapore are thriving (no white people around). Maybe kids (and parents) really make the difference? This theory has actually been tested.
A generation ago Scientific American published a study showing that the children of poor Vietnamese immigrants were thriving in the same schools where black and Hispanic children were failing. See Nathan Caplan, Marcella Choy, and John K. Whitmore, “Indochinese Refugee Families and Academic Achievement,” Scientific American (1992), 36-42. Quote
"The scholastic success of Asian children is well recognized. Their stunning performance—particularly in the realm of science and mathematics—has prompted American educators to visit Japanese and Taiwanese schools in an effort to unearth the foundations of these achievements. Experts recommend that American schools adopt aspects of their Asian counter-parts, such as a longer school year or more rigorous tasks, in order to raise the scholastic level of US. students. Yet there is no need to go abroad to understand why these children do so well. The achievement of Asian-American students indicates that much may be learned about the origins of their triumph within the American school system itself.
More specifically, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, devastating political and economic circumstances forced many Vietnamese, Lao and Chinese-Vietnamese families to seek a new life in the US. This resettlement of boat people from Indochina offered a rare opportunity to examine the academic achievement of their children. These young refugees had lost months, even years of forma schooling while living in relocation camps. Like their parents, they suffered disruption and trauma as they escaped from Southeast Asia. Despite their hardships and with little knowledge of English, the children quickly adapted to their new schools and began to excel."
“I did not process these things as the byproducts of America’s system of funding schools through property taxes.” In reality this is BS. Urban schools are overflowing with money and it doesn’t come from property taxes. See NCES (National Center for Education Statistics) table 235.10.
As for poverty, my guess is that, in dollars, the slums of Baltimore have far more money than Vietnam (where the schools are vastly better). What does Vietnam have (that Baltimore lacks)? How about two-parent families.
When Dan Quayle attacked Murphy Brown for having a child out of wedlock, all right-thinking people criticized him. Of course, he was right.
The number of patients I saw in medical school and residency who were barely literate -- often elementary school level -- was shocking. It really is tragic.
I write a lot regarding discipline and changes to the discipline policies here at our schools in Evanston IL. One major thing that has changed the last few years is the administration absolving themselves of any responsibility when it comes to this. Even in the IL legislature they passed SB10 designed to keep kids in the classroom, no matter what. At this point, teachers cant kick out kids unless the child is literally doing arson. Its a big issue designed to protect politically connected admins, at the cost of teachers and kids. All done in the name of “social justice”. Parents here have given up on the admin and just call the cops at this point...
The first step to solving a problem is to admit that there is a problem.
I was also in TFA, significantly earlier than you, 1997-1999 teaching 3rd & 5th grade innercity Houston TX. It is creepy how similar my experience was. I would sit in my car absolutely dreading getting out and starting the day. My 5th grade class was 33 large fifth graders and of course as a new teacher i had all the kids the two other veteran teachers didnt want. (There were three fifth grade classes, one gifted class, one ESL class - well behaved kids of immigrants, and i got the leftovers) What made me feel the absolutely shittiest was the one or two students from stable families who really wanted to learn but i was too busy stopping kids from fighting to pay them much attention. That crushed me inside. I think i've actually blocked out much of my time with those 5th graders. At the end of my two years (I still cant believe i made it, but to be fair my 3rd graders were slightly less traumatizing) I learned simply how little the teacher mattered. Like you I could write a long essay about how naive some of ideas behind TFA were.
Meanwhile, I taught English at a public school in rural Thailand right after college. In absolute terms, the students must have been more impoverished than the students in this piece. The school definitely expended far fewer dollars per child compared to American schools, probably by orders of magnitude. But the kids were absolutely lovely and respectful, both to me and to each other. There was some naughtiness, sure, but I never saw physical violence of any kind aside from the occasional wack from a teacher’s ruler (note, this was around 16+ years ago, so social media, and screens in general, had not yet poisoned their minds. Things may be worse now).
The kids who put in the effort were getting a decent enough education and going to college. Others dropped out, but that’s better than forcing disruptive, uninterested students to stay in the classroom. They generally would go on to farming, factories, warehouses, etc., and would be more or less fine.
Not sure what the takeaway from this anecdote is, other than: it’s the culture, stupid. How do you repair a broken culture? Unfortunately, for all of our societal wealth and education and technology, we have no good answer to that question. So we choose not to ask it.
Year Zero is terrifying. I’m a big proponent of choice and parental rights, but stories like this underscore how futile these efforts are.
In lily-white suburban suburban CT parents have willingly handed to public schools all responsibility for educating kids. I’ve talk to upper-middle class parents who think schools should provide their kids free breakfast and lunch because they’re too busy to make it. I talked to a grandma who lamented her third grade grandchild can’t read. She surmises that even though she’s given the child a library’s worth of beginner Dr. Suess books, her son has never read to his child.
And then there’s this. Yesterday I was in our local FedEx. A late-teen early twenty something guy came in to ship a blank box. No address. When the attendant asked for the recipient and address, the kid asked why she needed that information. The contents? A gender reveal test for the baby he and his girlfriend were having.
I don’t know what the answer is, but we’d better come up with one quickly.
IQ is destiny.
"There are plenty of negative things I could say about Mrs. Holmes as a teacher. I honestly doubt her kids learned much more than mine, despite the relative tranquility of her classroom. Still, for two years, she was my savior. I can’t even remember the number of times she had abandoned her classroom and come to my rescue, appearing suddenly at the back of the class and silencing the storm with a mere “Excuse me!”."
She sounds pretty cool tbh. I hope she convinced you to convert to Christianity.
Imagine what it might take to gain enough control over these classrooms to actually teach something to these kids. Probably talking about extreme measures like classroom police, authority to discipline these children in ways the author would find very uncomfortable: running the school like a prison, low tolerance for disruptive behavior, forgetting about concerns surrounding "disparate treatment", ignoring parent's complaints about "picking on my kid" (also happens in white schools btw). Sounds harsh right? But allowing the wild and terrible environment described by the author seems like a much greater evil perpetrated on these kids.
Instead we'll hire coordinators and curriculum directors and bloated state make-work officers to play with numbers and propose useless programs because we can't stomach what is necessary.
My son was a TFA teacher. My son is not a white man. His experience in the DC public schools was 100% like that described above. The rules and regulations of TFA made it impossible to actually reach and teach these children.
These classrooms are not teaching platforms, but breeding grounds for the Lord of the Flies culture that progressives want, so that they can present themselves as the saviors of the oppressed (the great white hopes).
I'm curious how much money is spent on those schools despite how disfunctional they are. Where is it going? If kids are really going hungry it seems like the first thing to be done is to feed them a decent breakfast and lunch.
Just an FYI. Baltimore Public Schools spends about $16k/student. In 2022, 93% of 3rd-8th graders could not do math at grade level. Out of the 150 public schools in Baltimore, 23 of those schools did not have a single student proficient in math. ZERO STUDENTS out of 23 schools. An additional 20 schools only had 1 or 2 students proficient in math. 41% of Baltimore public high school students earned below a 1.0 GPA.
The average number of students in a Baltimore school is 500 students. 43 schools at $16k/student comes to about $345 million. So, for $345m in taxpayer funds, Baltimore Public Schools produces about 30 students who can do grade level math in nearly 1/3 of all of their schools.