Don’t Blame Public Schools for All of Society’s Ills

My only grandchild, Sophia, recently celebrated her birthday. During the last year, she has been to Disneyland six times, Sea World, two museums, the beach club many times, several movies and a lot of parties.

She has taken a couple of vacation trips out of town and is never bored. She watches educational television, loves to be read to and and she listens to classical music daily. She goes to the gym twice a week and loves to interact with other children.

Sophia just turned 1. Her parents are professional people who hold advanced college degrees and live in comfortable suburbia. They are white and speak English as their first language.

Sophia’s four grandparents are also professional people who dote on their granddaughter and provide constant loving care and affection. Sophia had excellent prenatal care, takes vitamins and has had all her shots. She will continue to be loved, intellectually stimulated and exposed to all the good things that society has to offer.

In a few short years she will be ready for school. Her tool bag will be packed. She will know colors, shapes, numbers, how to hold a pencil and print her name and her address, how to wait in line and maybe even how to read a little bit. Her cousins and neighbors will share these abilities too.

When she is given the test du jour during her first year in school she and her friends will score at least two years above grade level. Her school will be deemed an “achieving school” and her teacher and principal will earn bonuses. Is this fair? Of course, it is. Underpaid educators deserve that and more.

As a recently retired principal of an inner-city middle school, I had the pleasure of meeting many wonderful and interesting kids, but I seldom met a Sophia. Most of my students had not been exposed to the stimulating experiences during their first 10 years of life that my privileged granddaughter had in one year.

Many tools were missing from their bags and “catch-up” had to be played from day one. Median test scores usually showed a deficit of at least two or three years by the time they reached middle school.

Those schools, located in poorer sections of the city, were then labeled “underachieving” or “bad” by some, and teachers and administrators didn’t earn that extra bonus. Is this fair? Of course not.

The school reform movement seems to miss the point that schools don’t “achieve”; the individual students with their varying levels of understanding on the day of the test are the achievers or non-achievers as the case may be.

Would-be reformers run around shouting for accountability, testing and/or retention and looking for someone to blame for the perceived lack of success of the schools.

For the most part, the educational system is not broken and doesn’t need to be fixed. The ailments of society--starting with poverty and racism--need to be addressed by society, not by the hard-working school staffs that accept and try to teach all students.

Schools can’t and shouldn’t be expected to solve the problems of the greater society that adversely impact their students and then get blamed for the lack of success.