Students are graduating but the adults in charge are failing

It’s graduation time.  Social media feeds are filled with pictures of students in caps and gowns.  Parents are gushing about their children’s accomplishments.  It’s a happy time, simultaneously focused on the past while looking to a brighter future.

We, as the adults, have spent a dozen years preparing the seniors leaving high school for whatever is next – college, trade school, military, and the job market are all possibilities.  Those leaving college ostensibly are leaving even more prepared and focused.  

At least, that’s what we tell ourselves.  Are we telling ourselves the truth?

A few friends of mine who work in the education advocacy space were sharing a post amongst ourselves that should cause alarm for parents, students, and taxpayers alike.  A high school in Washington D.C. has a 70% graduation rate, yet only 3% of the students are proficient in math, and only 5% are proficient in reading.

This isn’t what the success we’re celebrating this month looks like.  This is past, present, and future failure.

The tweet notes that the annual cost per student is $25,412 per pupil.  The implication is that this is too much.  That’s certainly not cheap, especially when only one in twenty students leave the school able to read proficiently.

I would be willing to bet that the students of this school come from some of the most challenging situations for educators. Generational poverty runs deep through many parts of Washington, like many other urban areas, including those in Georgia.  These students do not arrive at school every day prepared to learn, and the teachers in their schools are often the least experienced who face a challenging work environment every day.

In fact, most students don’t even arrive at school every day.  A reply post to the original one noted that 90% of the students at the school missed at least 30% of all classes.  Teachers can’t teach students who aren’t present.  

The failure here is that we continue to pretend this isn’t happening.  The debate over education standards in our country is usually quite succinct:  We hold out statistics like these, demand we pay our educators more, sometimes some of that “more” is appropriated, and then we pretend things will get better.  When the next budget cycle begins, we repeat the above steps.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.  Our expectations of our public education system are now insane.

The problem isn’t our teachers.  The debate on how much teachers should be paid is a separate one.  No matter how much the next teacher pay raise is, students from chronic poverty conditions will not show up at school nor be better prepared to learn than if the teachers were paid $1 per year or $1 million per year.

Note however that we pay our public school educators based on experience, not on their own proficiency or results, nor on the degree of the challenging environments in which they teach.  The more experienced – and thus higher paid teachers – are generally found in the schools with more stable and affluent student populations.  

When educators receive raises as a percentage of their salary, we actually end up sending even a larger proportion of education spending to the higher performing schools.  Those making more get even bigger raises.  It’s quite a paradox.

But, again, the problem and paradox at hand is one of failure, and lack of failure. Bureaucrats in charge of education decided at some point that pretending failure isn’t happening means that success is.  We tell the students they’ve accomplished something they haven’t, then send them into the world woefully unprepared for even basic tasks, much less sustainable employment.

We’ve become more concerned with the students’ own self-esteem than we have of their base of knowledge and their ability to apply it.  By refusing to allow the students to fail – and show them how to overcome these failures – the adults here are failing, and failing hard.  The adults in charge have slowly yet methodically absolved themselves and their bureaucracy from any accountability. 

Those in charge of public schools are failing their students.  They are failing their profession – especially and including the classroom teachers. They’re failing taxpayers. And they’re betraying the basic premise and promise of a public education. 

We’ve saddled our schools with too many, often conflicting goals.  Schools are now a “one-stop-shop” that are supposed to cure or at least mitigate all of society’s ills.  If we’re to fix this problem – especially in the neighborhood schools that we’re failing the most – we’re going to need to reinvent the entire process.  We need to separate the goals and responsibilities of a classroom education with the anti-poverty and social welfare programs that many of these students desperately need.

For us to fix this pressing problem of today, we’re going to have to clearly admit and define the failures of the past. We need accountability and responsibility for today’s failure to transform into tomorrow’s promise.