Poor Elijah: Challenges and distractions

By PETER BERGER
By Peter Berger

Getting stuck on the title page when you’re reading an education article is easy if you’re as cranky as Poor Elijah. The title itself, “Top 10 Challenges Facing Educators,” was annoyingly predictable. If dogs wrote education commentaries, we’d be talking about eight challenges, but since most education experts sport ten functioning digits on their forepaws, education issues typically come in sets of ten.

Poor Elijah was next irked by the word “educator.” He prefers “teacher,” on the grounds that if it was good enough for Jesus, it’s certainly good enough for him. “Teacher” also has fewer syllables and sounds like you’re actually doing something, which is consistent with his position that teaching is more a craft than a science.

His final stumbling block was the headnote declaring “the good news is that the nation is finally listening to educators.” First, teachers rarely get invited to deliver inservice wisdom. Second, the quickest way to get excluded from an education policy decision is to be a classroom teacher. Third, none of the authors of the article about teachers’ challenges are teachers.

Money is the first challenge on their list. Many school budgets haven’t yet recovered from the belt-tightening measures imposed after the recession, and many schools do contend with “leaky ceilings” and “old textbooks held together with rubber bands.” Education is labor-intensive and legitimately expensive.

On the other hand, many of the cars in school parking lots don’t belong to teachers. Schools have progressively added non-teaching staff, from behavior interventionists and case managers to social workers and home-school coordinators. We may disagree about how necessary some are, but they definitely make public education more expensive.

In addition, while regular teachers are still paid significantly less than comparably educated professionals in other fields, most of my colleagues who left teaching over the years weren’t driven out by low salaries. Many left because schools are commonly crazy places that hop from one bandwagon initiative to the next. Nonacademic, social-emotional demands keep burgeoning. Classroom disruption grows every day more extreme and commonplace, while school policies and the current fashions in classroom discipline render teachers every day more powerless to deal with it.

Implementing “a better way forward on discipline” is itself one of the challenges, the spotlighted better way being Restorative Justice Practices. Instead of allegedly “harsh” discipline policies, suspension, and expulsion, RJP promotes techniques like “peace circles” to “handle problems more positively,” transform classrooms into “communities,” and lead offenders to “make amends.”

Sometimes making sincere amends teaches a more powerful lesson than a punitive consequence does. Some offenders genuinely want to be “reintegrated.” But classroom discipline seldom leaps directly from a cautionary look to expulsion. Before we glibly conclude that “students are better off in school than they are when they’re kicked out,” we need to consider what’s better for the other students in the class and whether restorative justice for disruptive offenders is more important than everybody else’s opportunity to learn English or algebra.

The authors also list stress as a challenge. According to one quoted counselor, today’s students face “pressures to fit in,” “the pressure to achieve,” and the “pressure of social media.” Schools have reportedly become “pressure cookers” for teachers, too, with ninety-three percent of surveyed elementary teachers describing themselves as “highly stressed.”

I’m not claiming to be immune to stress. None of my daily stresses compares, however, to those facing a Syrian Kurd. If that many teachers consider themselves highly stressed, maybe part of our problem is our societal definition of highly stressed. As for students, the malignancy that is social media has made pain more public, but there’s nothing essentially new about the desperation to fit in. My heart goes out to adolescents because I remember being one. Growing up in 1960s suburban New Jersey, I also remember the angst of academic competition. Our mothers knitted our baby booties in Ivy League colors.

Compassion for the tribulations of children is always fitting and proper. Unfortunately, the authors go well beyond that. They prescribe that we “change homework policies, class schedules,” and “school start times,” which in plain English means little or no homework, less intensive instruction, and sleeping later in the morning. In my experience those purported remedies don’t offer a likely route to boosting student achievement.

The authors see another challenge in the “hype of new technologies” that roils schools and the “questionable purchasing decisions” that result. They trace schools’ excessive silicon zeal in part to officials who covet a reputation as “cutting edge,” and they credit teachers who voice “healthy skepticism” with “curtail[ing] somewhat” those officials’ “impulse to buy into” every latest technological “game changer.” I’ve more often found that, as the authors note, skepticism frequently “gets teachers branded as resistant to change.” The consequent threat of workplace reprisals understandably leads many skeptics to voice their skepticism out of the earshot of less skeptical administrators.

I share the authors’ distaste for squandering money on the latest incarnations of gizmos students often didn’t need in the first place, but my disenchantment with education technology rests more on the questionable alterations in classroom practice that result. Technology can be a useful teaching tool, but I’ve found more often it distracts us.

Resisting all the distractions from school’s proper purpose should count as a challenge of its own.

Of course, in many schools the first challenge facing us is remembering what that purpose is.

Peter Berger has taught English and history for thirty years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.