In my last two articles for Occasional Planet, I lambasted two current trends in our country\u2019s educational system: over-reliance on standardized tests <\/a>and the desire to lengthen the school day and school year<\/a>.\u00a0 And, to be honest, lambasting is easy (not to mention fun).\u00a0 It\u2019s easy to point to something and say, \u201cThat\u2019s stupid, here\u2019s why.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s much tougher to come with an alternative that makes sense.\u00a0 But having been a teacher myself for six years, and now being a parent for seven years, I do have some ideas about reasonable, common sense ways to improve schools.<\/p>\n

Smaller class sizes, better learning<\/strong><\/p>\n

No question about it, this is the single most effective way to improve student learning.\u00a0 I\u2019ve taught classes of sixteen and I\u2019ve taught classes of thirty, and I can tell you unequivocally that the students in my smaller classes learned more.\u00a0 They received more of a chance to participate in class discussion, I could spend more time with them conferencing about their writing, I was able to contact their parents and give them feedback more often.\u00a0 In large classes, particularly classes with high numbers of struggling learners, teachers are forced to create lessons that keep things under control and orderly rather than interactive and creative.\u00a0 It becomes about crowd control, and that doesn\u2019t lead to fun, high quality learning.\u00a0 It leads to teacher burn-out and bored students.<\/p>\n

More support staff, like social workers and counselors<\/strong><\/p>\n

A tremendous amount of my time that I should have spent planning lessons and grading papers when I was a teacher was spent trying to manage my students\u2019 very real, very urgent personal crises.\u00a0 We had a social worker whom we shared with another middle school–she came only on Tuesdays and Thursdays\u2014so if some emergency came up I (and my fellow classroom teachers) often spent our very scarce planning periods dealing with it.\u00a0 I remember a winter afternoon I spent with a student named Hernando trying to figure out how to get the gas turned back on at his house (where no one spoke English) so that his family would have heat.\u00a0 I\u2019m not patting myself on the back here\u2014I was no different than most of my other colleagues in this regard\u2014but I\u2019m just saying that sometimes grading and planning gives way to emergency phone calls home and intense one-on-one conversations with kids who are hurting.\u00a0 If all schools had enough social workers and counselors to really help their needy students, teachers could teach more effectively, and students would learn more effectively.<\/p>\n

Assume good will<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most teachers are professionals who are passionate about student learning, not lazy incompetents who are wallowing in their tenured security and biding their time until retirement.\u00a0 Similarly, most parents love their kids more than anything else in the world and want desperately for them to succeed and be happy.\u00a0 Of course a teacher will have a bad day occasionally, and a parent might drop the ball from time to time (I will not bore you with the story of my second grader\u2019s landform diorama drama, but suffice to say it wasn\u2019t my best parenting episode).\u00a0 But let\u2019s all acknowledge that we\u2019re human beings doing the best we can.\u00a0 Let\u2019s assume good will and get on with the business of helping children learn to love learning.<\/p>\n

Treat teachers as the professionals they are<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I graduated college and started teaching, I never would have guessed that teachers would be demonized the way they are today in some political circles.\u00a0 Yes, bad, lazy teachers exist, and they should lose their jobs when they show no real improvement.\u00a0 But most teachers are not like that, and they should be accorded the same respect shown to other professionals.\u00a0 And part of that respect is pay.\u00a0 If you want to attract and retain good teachers, you have to pay them well.\u00a0 Teachers have mortgages, student loans, and kids of their own, and you shouldn\u2019t have to choose between a job you are passionate about and supporting your family well.\u00a0 Whether right or not, in our society, money denotes respect and prestige.\u00a0 If society wants to show teachers they are valued, then teachers should be compensated as the highly trained professionals they are.<\/p>\n

There is really nothing radical in these four suggestions for improving schools.\u00a0 I would hazard to predict that if you walked into any faculty lounge or PTO meeting and started a conversation about school reform, all four of these ideas would quickly gain a consensus.\u00a0 The bigger question might be why, in a time when more lip service than ever is being paid to the importance of education, do we lack the political will to enact even these very basic reforms?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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