Students Offer Prescriptions for Teachers

Fixing the nation’s urban high schools has become a near-obsession among educators in recent years. Create smaller campuses, many say. Build more charter schools, others urge. Don’t let students graduate until they pass a test.

Amid all the feverish reform talk, however, the adults might want to listen to what the kids have to say about their teachers. That philosophy is behind an unusual national effort to tap the opinions of American high school students.

“Part of a teacher’s job is giving teenagers the practice at ... independence,” says Mahogany Spears, 17, of San Francisco. And that means giving students the ability to “try things out for themselves.”

Vance Rawles, 19, of New York agrees, to a point.

“I hate to admit it, but respect and authority are part of the job,” he says. “Kids expect adults to give us directions and boundaries, but it’s a balance.”

And 17-year-old Tiffany Metts of Providence, R.I., says teachers should maintain their distance.

“If you are too friendly with the students, when things get out of control and you try to get authoritative, they’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever,’ and don’t pay any attention,” she says.

The three are speaking to the age-old tension experienced by anyone dealing with teenagers: give them freedom, give them guidance -- sometimes at the same moment.

Such comments fill the pages of “Fires in the Bathroom,” a soon-to-be-published book in which 40 high school students from across the country offer advice for the adults who oversee their education. In the book, produced by the Providence-based nonprofit education group What Kids Can Do, students get a rare opportunity to voice their opinions about what works and what doesn’t in the classroom.

More than anything else, these young people -- from San Francisco, Oakland, New York and Providence -- want teachers who care about them and respect them. They want teachers who can strike the delicate, if difficult, balance between authority and flexibility.

As the book emphasizes, teenagers crave relationships that make learning possible.

“What we’re hearing from students is that they want partnerships,” said Kathleen Cushman, a veteran education journalist who wrote the book along with the 40 students, whom she interviewed at length last spring.

“Everyone knows that teenagers can be hard to communicate with,” Cushman added in an interview last week. But “people who think of teaching as simply the delivery of information are missing the point.”

The book, to be published in April by the New Press (New York) arrives at a time when government and philanthropies are investing tens of millions of dollars to transform oversized American high schools -- some with 5,000 students or more -- into smaller learning communities where students can get more attention and develop closer ties to teachers and campus life.

Among the most prominent of these efforts is a $350-million project by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The group is donating money to organizations that will create or redesign 570 small high schools around the country that will each enroll no more than 600 students.

Although those efforts are important, they still pay little attention to what’s on young people’s minds, the book’s authors say.

“You can restructure schools until the cows come home, but you need to get these relationships right from the start,” Barbara Cervone, an education reformer who co-founded What Kids Can Do two years ago, said in an interview. “Certainly smaller classrooms and smaller schools create some of the basic elements for more positive relationships between students and teachers. But that alone isn’t sufficient.”

The book’s title, “Fires in the Bathroom,” speaks to the breakdown in order that afflicts some classrooms.

As 17-year-old Lauraliz Rivera of New York says in a chapter titled, “When Things Go Wrong,” her class gave trouble to her first-year teacher for the whole first semester. “But then, by second semester, we let up on him, because we saw he was doing things right.

“Another teacher, we kept going on her, because she was still scared.” Students would go to the bathroom at times when they were not supposed to and then would “set fires in the bathroom, while she was trying to be so friendly.”

Another student, 17-year-old Luis Martinez, felt alienated at the nearly 2,000-student Fremont High School in Oakland, where he says he got little personal attention from teachers in ninth grade. Then, in 10th grade, he moved to a new, smaller public school called Life Academy, which concentrates on science and health studies. There, he says, teachers took an immediate interest in him, even giving out their home phone numbers in case he needed to talk.

“The teachers are always there for you, always helping you out,” Luis said. “They are like your friends. They tell about their own life experiences. The more you know your teachers, the more they can help you.”

Cushman and Cervone originally set out to produce a modest workbook for new teachers at the request of the MetLife Foundation, which supports education and health initiatives. MetLife paid for Cushman’s time and travel and for small stipends for the students.

The pair found students through their contacts in the four cities. As Cushman began meeting with students, she realized that the teenagers had plenty to say. And so the project evolved into a book.

To help teachers understand the job better, “Fires in the Bathroom” doles out practical advice, much of it from the students. The book, for example, suggests that teachers hand out questionnaires on the first day of school.

Among the recommended questions: What do you do after school? What do you imagine yourself doing 10 years from now? What’s a fair amount of homework time to expect?

Rawles, the New York student, said he welcomes letting teachers learn more about him as he figures them out, too.

The best instructors, he said, have a form of telepathy about teenagers’ shifting moods.

“They are perceptive. They look behind your activities. They are inquisitive,” he said. “The closest thing you’ll get to reading a person’s mind is being empathic.”