A random confluence of events can sometimes be clarifying. That happened to me one day last week. What got clarified was why U.S. kids aren't learning enough.
The morning brought fresh evidence that they're not: the 2000 NAEP math results. As you have read elsewhere (and can read below), while NAEP showed some gains (in grades 4 and 8, not 12), overall scores remain lamentable. The number of "proficient" youngsters is way too low while the proportion "below basic" is far too large. Although black and Hispanic students gained, for the country as a whole the majority-minority gaps actually widened. Once again, it's starkly clear that, if we're serious about leaving no child behind, urgent and profound changes must be made, above all by focusing schools more tightly on fundamental skills and knowledge in key subjects.
The same evening, I gained an insight into why that's not happening. The event was a VIP preview screening of a new documentary that PBS will air in early September. Entitled "The First Year," and produced by up-and-coming young filmmaker Davis Guggenheim with funding from the Getty Foundation, this 80 minute show-which is already beginning to elicit adulatory reviews-profiles five young teachers during their first classroom year in inner city Los Angeles schools.
The quintet is appealing, earnest, ardent, compassionate, sometimes heroic and generally noble. The well-wrought, skillfully edited film does a fine job of picturing many of the challenges that face a young teacher during his/her novice year on the job.
Plenty of kids are portrayed, too, including some who are winsome and lovable, many with problems, some in trouble. Nearly all are poor and minority, the very populations that NAEP tells us have farthest to go if not to be left behind.
But what actually happens in the classrooms that we see in this film? What do teaching and schooling consist of? Certainly not the three "R's" or other academic subjects. The viewer witnesses just a few seconds of conventional "content" as one of the teachers gives a mildly disabled youngster extra help with reading and arithmetic. Nowhere do we observe anyone teaching-or learning-history or geography, science or literature, grammar or composition, nor any math beyond the addition of single digits.
Instead, there is applied civics: a class of recent immigrants taught to lobby the budget-stressed school board for more money to preserve their non-mainstream classes. And there is human relations: much footage of a teacher trying to purge her high school students of their anti-gay prejudices.
But there's no conventional subject matter in core subjects, essentially none of the skills and knowledge prescribed in state standards and examined by state tests. Indeed, the film's testing sequence consists of a concerned new teacher prepping his pupils for California's statewide Stanford 9 administration not by cramming them with vocabulary words and math facts but by trying to relax them so they're not stressed. A compassionate thing to do, sure. Yet the film's message is that testing is something that gives stomach aches to innocent children, something utterly disconnected from the essence of schooling, and something that, thank God, was not being used for "high stakes" purposes, at least not that time. As a colleague of mine later remarked, "It's amazing that the [education] world is up in arms about kids being 'taught to the test' when right now, it appears from this film, they're being taught everything BUT what should be tested!"
Perhaps it's no coincidence that this documentary was created with much help from the California State University system, whence cometh most of the state's new teachers. For one way to characterize the film is "the first year of teaching as seen through ed school eyes." It brims with issues that concern teacher preparation programs: how to individualize instruction, how to meet the needs of troubled children, how to get a new teacher the help he/she requires, how tough it can be to fight the bureaucracy, how vexing are those tests, how challenging those parents, how prejudiced those adolescents, how miserly the system, how overcrowded its schools. But, as we have also come to expect from colleges of education, it has little to do with skills and knowledge in core subjects. The first year of teaching is revealed to the viewer-and presumably to the future teachers who are supposed to be attracted by watching it-as not about content, not about academics, not about helping kids meet standards.
At least two other preview attendees noticed, too. Not long ago, both were themselves first-year teachers in inner-city schools. One commented that the film contains a "subtle and insidious message: that what poor and minority children need from their teachers is empathy and help solving personal problems. That teaching is largely 'affective' rather than 'intellectual' work."
We watched this preview with an elite Washington audience in the posh surroundings of the Motion Picture Association of America. We nibbled wee crab cakes and sipped chardonnay. After the showing, those assembled had a chance to question the producer and one of the five young teachers-an admirable and attractive young man. Yet nobody said a word about the absence of education from these 80 minutes of skillfully edited footage about teaching. I don't believe most of the audience even noticed.
What will cause our NAEP scores ever to rise-and achievement gaps to narrow-if neither the places that prepare our teachers, nor influential filmmakers and "public broadcasters," nor sophisticated members of the viewing public regard it as odd to make a movie about teaching that has essentially nothing to do with learning the things that our children most need to get from their teachers and their schools?
For more about "The First Year," go to www.pbs.org/firstyear/.
For more about the 2000 NAEP results, scroll down to "Short Reviews of New Reports and Books."
