Commentary
Can teachers overcome poverty? A volunteer's view from the trenches
by Tim GihringBecause it was evening, and the students were gone for the day, the school was disarmed. The doors were unlocked and flung open. The security staff was dismissed. The walkie-talkies carried by teachers in case they need backup were put away.
It was Open House a few years ago at a high school in one of Minneapolis's most impoverished neighborhoods. As darkness fell, the teachers lined the hallway leading in, like a parade route. They were tired but excited, practically rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the parents who would, any minute now, stream through the doors.
I began volunteering in Minneapolis public schools when I was freelancing and had the time and interest, as well as some nagging career questions. Who knows, I thought; if teaching proved as fulfilling as it seemed, perhaps a change was in order. I went to training sessions, signed my name to a call sheet, and the first school that rang was this one, on the near North Side of Minneapolis.
I was asked to help students start a school newsletter. The reading teacher who would be my supervisor had assembled a handful of students to be the staff. And on our first day together, after they enjoyed a few laughs at my unbelievable whiteness, I gave them titles: editor, art director, reporters. I assigned their first stories and eagerly awaited their work.
The school didn't resemble the stereotype of a failing urban institution. It was relatively new, clean and stocked with decent Apple computers. It could have passed for a cut-rate consulting firm. The teachers were more diverse but otherwise little different from those I grew up with in a middle-class suburb. Draped in lanyards, their sleeves rolled up, they worked closely with students in groups of five to eight.
The principal was new, a sharp, skinny guy with the enthusiasm and honest smile of a young Arsenio Hall. He knew his flock well and his optimism rarely flagged, even when the school would go into lockdown mode because someone had brought a weapon to school.
The first newsletter deadline came and went. My editor had been attacked with a hairbrush that a classmate had modified with a long nail. One of my reporters had spent the weekend visiting her father in jail. My art director kept falling out of his chair, making machine-gun noises. After two weeks, all I had was a meager sports report and a page of memorials -- farewells to fallen students would become a regular feature.
By then, I'd noticed the walkie-talkies clipped to the teacher's belts. I'd learned that the classroom doors were always locked from the inside. And I'd wondered why the classroom helpers, who the students seemed to respect, all seemed unusually large and streetwise.
As the weeks passed, my news staff dwindled -- students would move, they would be suspended or transferred, their guardians would kick them out, they would become homeless and difficult to track down. In the end, I wrote most of the stories myself, interviewing my students when they dropped in and typing up their thoughts. I laid out the newsletter, too, my art director having declared himself uninterested. I was doing this when he assaulted a teacher in the hall and was wrestled to the ground just outside the computer-room door by one of the large classroom helpers. "Don't open it!" the guy warned me.
With the newsletter project slowing down, I began helping as a reading and writing tutor, working one-on-one with students who showed exceptional promise. My first was a soft-spoken 15-year-old I'll call Eduardo, a romantic who would write love poems to Mariah Carey and carry them around in his shoe where no one would find them. Programs like Teach for America and movies like Waiting for Superman, having cherry-picked their success stories, would have us believe that impoverished students in failing schools are all like this: bright, motivated, lacking nothing but better teachers. That poverty isn't causing the achievement gap but is merely an outcome.
On my first day with Eduardo, I grabbed a book that I figured a high-schooler would be reading. My teacher quickly corrected me: "Try this," she said, and handed me a book shaped like a fire hydrant. It had maybe 15 words on a page, and Eduardo struggled to get through it. Sometimes he would put his head down and nearly fall asleep. Though the school supplied students with breakfast and lunch, I quickly realized that Eduardo wasn't getting food anywhere else. I snuck him granola bars from then on. He also wasn't getting much sleep at home -- he didn't have a home. He'd been through at least two sets of foster parents and now the latest had kicked him out. He was living, when I met him, at a shelter.
He could be moody: sweet one week and impossibly distant the next. Concentration seemed difficult, as it was for most of the students I worked with; many had fetal-alcohol syndrome or some other setback. But I was hopeful about Eduardo. He deftly avoided gang trouble. He ignored the rampages of his peers, who we could hear battling with my supervisor in the next room over. "I don't give a f*** about no grade," they would shout at her. They would throw chairs and storm out of the room.
Eduardo made his literary debut at a school assembly after spending months working on a poem with me. He thanked me from the stage. It was one of the last times I saw him. By then he was staying at a shelter far from school. He was depressed, and he was embarrassed, he said, to show his face at school. My supervisor often worked long into the night, trying to reach kids like him, talking to social workers. But after a while, Eduardo disappeared.
I had other students like him -- boys who wrote poems to fathers who had died of bullets or drugs. They would often want me to write out their work for them, as they recited, since they were terrible at spelling. If I refused, they'd refuse to talk, as though I was being petty. They had nothing; couldn't I, who had everything, do them this one thing?
When I asked them about their future, many would say they wanted to be millionaires, as if that was a career. One asked how much money I made as a journalist and laughed when I told him; he never took me seriously again.
In a sense, the reformers are right: Teachers are often the most important people in these kids' lives -- no one else is helping. But I felt these kids slipping from my grasp one by one, even when they were sitting right in front of me. Stronger forces were pulling us apart: homelessness, depression, in utero setbacks, lack of parents or computers or transportation. Everything that had nothing to do with school had everything to do with school. When we did make progress, when our eyes would meet and we would acknowledge a moment of achievement, it always felt ephemeral, in passing, as though we were glimpsing each other across a great and growing chasm.
At that fall Open House, I waited with the teachers by the door. After 30 minutes, the first parent arrived and looked astounded by the reception line. The other guardians did, too, when they arrived -- all three of them. They were rare birds, and we followed them around the school like ducklings.
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Tim Gihring is a senior editor of Minnesota Monthly. He is a source in MPR's Public Insight Network.
Comments (14)
Student success is most highly correlated not with good teachers or good schools, but with good parents. Parents of any income level who drill into their kids' heads the importance of education, who stress written rather than visual media, and who support the actions of their childrens' teachers and schools produce consistently successful students.
The generation that survived the Depression and WW2 was able to provide a better life for their children, with lots of food and free time and fun, and few of the deprivations and horrors that had gone before. This indulgent behavior was reinforced and amplified in the generations that followed. We're now way too easy on our kids for their own good. Schools will never really succeed until parents force their kids to take education seriously, and allow hard work and discipline to be the watchwords at their children's schools. Teachers need to ask more of students, and adults need to stand resolutely in the face of their beloved yet lazy children, and force them to deliver.
Thanks, Tim. If our elected officials and pundits had the same experience that you did this discussion would take an entirely different. The achievement gap problem isn't about school funding. Of course there has to be enough, but when it comes to the problems you tell about, no amount of money can fix it. It takes a complex, multi-faceted, nuanced discussion. A discussion without sound bites.
You remind me of the experience I had student teaching in Milwaukee Public Schools and my most troubling student, who day decided it was time to work on algebra. We really connected that day...until someone started a fire in the locker outside my classroom door. We never connected again.
Then later, living on the North Side of Minneapolis. We read to our kids nightly, took them to museums, cooked with them, played with them, loved them, challenged them. The drug using & dealing neighbors had 4 kids, one born within a week of one of our daughters. Our daughter was almost reading before kindergarten. Their son could barely speak. He knew so few words. He had few meals, was kept awake by loud parties and drunken parents, witnessed domestic violence. A brilliant teacher will never be enough to solve his educational problems. Neither will politicians fighting over money.
As Al points out, so many of these kids are lost before they get to Kindergarten. They're years behind before they even get started. My preschooler has better academic skills and habits at 3 1/2 than many of these kids do in 3rd grade. And we expect teachers to solve everything! More money isn't the answer, but neither is attacking and blaming teachers, teacher unions and public schools in general. The families and our society more broadly have failed these kids. One teacher can never make up for a lifetime of neglect by family and community.
The only solution I've seen real promise in is early childhood education - preschool interventions. But even that can be insufficient when you're dealing with malnutrition, sleeplessness, homelessness, insecurity, abuse, brain damage, and all the other problems these kids have been saddled with. These poor kids never stood a chance. Meanwhile, our "leaders" spend their time arguing about who can marry whom, where to build and how to pay for sports stadiums, and how to give more tax breaks to rich people. Sometimes I just want to crawl in a cave and pretend I don't exist.
Susan - I may join you in that cave.
Early childhood education is so, so important. Most public school's curriculum are set up in a way in which kids learn to read through 3rd grade, but after that they read to learn. There are huge numbers of students who "pass" 3rd grade and are still illiterate - compounding their academic struggles year after year. It is a failing system - imagine where this gets them when they reach high school (the reporter shares just a glimpse into their experience). I work with pre-k kids in a high poverty school in Minneapolis specifically on early literacy and can tell you from experience that for many students, academic struggles start at 4 and 5. You can't blame the schools, and you can't blame the students, and you really also can't blame the parents (although not all, many do everything they can to provide what they can for their children). Overall it's an incredibly difficult and heartbreaking situation that no one has been able to successfully address in decades.
Illegitimacy, single parent (mother), teenage parent, multiple fathers/boyfriends, violence, substance abuse, abandonment and a government that does much to discourage the stability of the family, replaced by social workers.
Thanks for sharing your experiences.
I taught music in North Minneapolis from 2001-2004, and it burned me out. I was essentially scared out of thinking about teaching anymore.
I remember the teacher workshops before my last year. Several of the teachers were in a meeting trying so hard to start on the right tone, and to keep order in our classrooms and hallways. We tried so hard to create a positive atmosphere, and to challenge them, and to support each other.
I worked so hard those first months trying to stay consistent. But having student constantly swearing at you, and disrupting class wore me, and many of my colleagues, down.
There were moments of course, when I made a connection with a student. Some of the kids I worked with had real skills and talents I had the pleasure of working with. As a white guy working in minority dominated building, I worked hard to be open to the ways I conducted my classes and lessons.
But it didn't seem to be enough. Essentially my position was cut in the end, and the school would not have a band program the following year. I really feel guilty sometimes that I let my students, and that community down when I was done. Those kids deserve better.
I find it problematic that the author can accuse Teach for America of "cherry-picking" success stories yet broadly claim that students living in poverty face too many insurmountable challenges for a teacher to overcome - with the exception of "ephemeral" improvements - based on his own extremely limited volunteer experience.
If we can't dramatically change the lives of every child before pre-school or coach people how to be the best parents possible, the burden (and accountability) to catch students up falls to the teachers. There are teachers out there up to this challenge and hold themselves responsible for each student in their classroom. There are also teachers that aren't up to the challenge whether they realize it or not. Research shows that the best teacher can help a student grow 1.5 years in a single school year while the worst teacher produces .5 years of growth in the same period, if that. Give a child held back by the achievement gap the best teachers 3 years in a row and they can counter the effects of poverty. With a third of MN children living in poverty, we need to start figuring out who the best teachers in MN are.
Gihring's experience was similar ours in an alternative program. Our 27 students had failed all their freshman year classes, hated school, an came from the toughest of circumstances. We were overwhelmed by their plight. We saved 11 of the 27, and the board thought well of our work, but the 16 we didn't reach were just a few drops in the ocean of lost souls in our schools. People from successful alternative programs told us it takes about 10 to 12 years to figure out how to make such a program work. If we had been evaluated by these kids' test scores, as some are suggesting, we'd have been fired, as would most teachers in such programs. Just getting kids to come, particularly when when you start to get them interested, is as close as you can come to victory sometimes. The fear of succeeding (a success is something that can be taken away and just raises expectations ) is huge. Unless we begin very early, it's fighting a battle already lost. The best place to start is in utero, to prevent drug, malnutrition, and disease-related maladies and to get parents off on the right foot in child-rearing. There have been a few notable school successes but these were by larger-than-life educational geniuses who are rare and who, all too often achieve fame that takes them from the classroom. The U.S.'s anti-intellectual is no help. If singing, sports or pyramid schemes make one a winner here, we have no chance of competing with countries that value education and educators
Many thoughts arise here. I totally understand the story, having worked as a teacher in Preschool and Kindergartens for St. Paul Schools. I do think that schools need to reach out to parents to encourage them to be teachers for their children. I also see large companies, such as Target giving charity, but I would like to see them giving their store workers (who are often parents) a living wage.
Seems like open season on students and families. We certainly have examples of schools serving challenging students that have a terrific record of success.
I think this is a great example of how worldviews limit your perception and I don't think that Mr. Gihring has any glimmer of how offensive his essay is.
So he went into a minority school with his middle-class professional values and it didn't work out the way he expected! He concludes that teachers (such as himself) cannot overcome poverty. The image that comes to my mind is a plantation owner visiting his slave quarters and concluding
that Blacks are lazy, stupid, and immoral...without the slightest glimmer that it's the institution and his role in it that has initiated and perpetuates the problem.
Mr. Gihring cites Eduardo's difficulty in reading as one factor that prevents him from making a serious contribution, but how did Eduardo get to this point? For years, the MPS practiced social promotion, moving students
beyond their ability to achieve. And what did Mr. Gihring do when he discovered this problem? Did he refer Eduardo to an intensive remedial reading program? Did he take the time to learn how to help him? Well
of course not! Because these problems are intractable and caused by poverty. Not!
HEAR THIS! What worked in your (predominately) middle-class or suburban school high school doesn't work for kids who have a different culture and worldview than you do. They need more discipline and explicit
instruction in how to learn and study. And they need people who believe they can be successful even if they come from families living in poverty.
While I understand Mr. Gihring's frustration, I would tend to agree with other comments which cite Mr. Gihring's limmited volunteer experience and perspective on teaching in a low income setting.
As a teacher at a community school in a low income area, I aknowledge that there are socio-economic and outside school issues that influence the students' ability to achieve. However, I believe it is necessary for teachers to hold firmly to the belief that ALL students are able to learn. It won't take one year of volunteering in a failing school to bridge the achievement gap. It will take years and lifetimes of dedicated and skilled educators who meet their students where they are at and believe in the value of education for everyone.
I don't know what Mr. Gihring suggests by his article, and quite frankly I don't think he does either. If he just felt the need to let the world know about his disenchantment with urban education-- I'm glad he was able to get it off his chest. Disenchantment is inevitable for all who work in settings like the one described. But disenchantment doesn't require us to lose our passion. It doesn't require us to lose our desire to teach. And, it should not stop us from helping the few students we can reach just because we can't reach them all.
Its not mainly about overcoming poverty although poverty is an important component of the solution..We must find proven interventions which work in Black inner-city schools ..Please preview our latest book " Between the Rhetoric and Reality" Lauriat Press; Simpkins &Simpkins,2009: co-authored by Dr. Gary Simpkins, an African American graduate of Harvard ..(Amazon.com)..
I appreciate Mr. Gihring's sharing of his experience -- it's a story from inside the walls of a school that too few of us will ever really experience or understand. Although his experience certainly isn't the same as those teachers, students, and families who are in the trenches every day, there is value to his story all the same. Part of figuring out how to solve the problem is beginning to understand what's really going on.
As an educator, I'm pleased Mr. Gihring is shedding light on the issue of poverty in schools. This past year felt so disheartening with all of the negative attention on teachers by the media and politicians. Certainly, teachers have tremendous influence on students' learning and should be expected to be doing top quality work. However, it seems the bigger issue of the influence of families and poverty has been largely missing from the conversation! Ask any educator and they'll tell you families hold much more influence over kids (good or bad) than any school staff member can. Educators should be held accountable, but why aren't we holding everyone else who's a stakeholder accountable as well? Families, students themselves, communities, social service agencies, education policies -- all of these players share part of the responsibility. Students are not educated in isolation from the world outside of the school walls.
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