I’m writing this aboard another
plane heading to another spot away from home. As much as I am not enamored with
time in planes, airports, and hotel rooms, I consider myself fortunate to have
the opportunity to work with, and learn from, so many talented and gifted
educators. That I get invited to your workplaces, to your conversations, and to
your challenges is a real honor.
Just as I think I did some of my
best teaching with my most reluctant learners, I find that working with colleagues
as they deal with their reluctant learners is the most satisfying. The dynamic
has taken on greater importance as the options available to students who don’t
experience success are getting slimmer and slimmer. Recent statistics indicate
that a high school dropout is not eligible for 90% of the jobs in today’s
workforce. When you couple that with the statistic that says the 50 largest
cities in the United States had a graduation rate less than 60%, the challenges
mount. Where once, rightly or wrongly, a person could leave school and find
“living wage” work, those days are gone. In fact many currently employed folks
struggle to get by on the wage they earn. High school plus further training is
the minimum requirement for many jobs today.
What then, can we do for those
kids who struggle - the kids who take up most of our time but seem to generate
little success? These are the kids who periodically cross our minds when we
think if I didn’t have them in my class, I could offer the others so much more
and could yield better results. But here’s the catch – I just don’t know with
any certainty which of those kids can be turned around because an adult
invested in them. I do know this. Left unchecked and in the absence of any
intervention by caring and compassionate adults, I can easily predict the
options available to those kids. And so can you.
As Ron Edmonds noted in 1979,
“We can, whenever and wherever we choose,
successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us; we
already know more than we need to do that; whether or not we do it must finally
depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven't so far.”
Perhaps the sense of urgency wasn’t as profound in that
time, and society on the whole was able to absorb low graduation rates with significant
employment in manufacturing and agricultural sectors. This new urgency compels
us to go further, do more, and push through our frustrations to minimize theirs
and set them on a path to making a less bumpy transition to work or further
training.
I’m sure
most readers are familiar with the story of the starfish on the beach. While we
may not be able to save them all, start with one. It would be so easy if they
were clearly labeled. In the absence of that begin with the first one you see whether it's starfish on the beach or kids in your school.
