Who will speak for the children?

by Bruce Deitrick Price

When children are not learning, where can parents look for answers? Who will tell the truth?

  The experts, you say? The same people, you mean, who shaped and controlled the schools where these kids aren’t learning? These experts do not inspire confidence. There are too many signs of failure and dysfunction. It’s as if we glanced into the kitchen of a restaurant and saw insects scurrying on counters. No matter how fancy the decor, we would be suspicious.

 Clearly the experts have a conflict of interest. If they can’t do a good job, are they going to tell us why? Aren’t they more likely to make excuses and try to cover-up?

 What we know for certain is that the USA spends more per capita than almost any other country But we still don’t place well internationally. Mediocrity is our norm. We are paying for gold but getting bronze. 

 There are many theories to explain our poor performance. The machinations of unions. The greed of publishers. The poor training of teachers. The indifference of parents. The schemes of ideologues. The lazy bad habits a monopoly or a cult might fall into. And simple dimwitted incompetence.

 Even the possible explanations are scary. Probably it is better not to be distracted by the question of which factor is the most destructive. Probably all are working together. But none is the vital point.

 So let’s stay focused on the stats, that is, the hard evidence showing that millions of children don’t learn to read properly, don’t learn to master arithmetic, and don’t learn the most basic facts about this country or the world.

 Once upon a time, an eighth-grade education meant that one had a substantial amount of learning. Now a high school diploma could mean that one has hardly any education at all. Students reach college with huge gaps in their knowledge.

 Evidently, the Education stablishment has embraced theories and methods that are not the best choices. Some critics speak of schools deliberately dumbing down students. The tendency in general seems to be toward talking a good game, throwing around pretentious jargon, and doing the minimum that each community will tolerate. 

 The question that must haunt us is this: suppose our experts engaged in rigorous comparative testing and identified the best theories and methods. If we did things at a higher level, couldn’t we easily lift every student 30, 40 or 50%? Add that up across the society, and we’re talking about a Renaissance.

  We have millions of children who are quickly classified as failing readers. If they were taught properly, they would be good readers. That’s not a 30% improvement; that’s a 300% improvement, from someone who is sub-literate to someone who can read a book for pleasure.

 Who is destroying our schools from within? Are there ruthless social engineers trying to build a new world order. We have to ask them: where is it written that dumb societies do better?

  In this complex, competitive world, the opposite would seem to be the case. We want our society to be as smart as possible. That can happen only if each student is as smart as possible.

  There is a simple answer here. Americans need to demand a reversal. Away from dumb, toward smart. Every American must speak for the children.

  It will be so easy to tell. In the second grade kids are reading little books. In the third grade they are doing arithmetic. In the fourth grade, they know where their state is on a map of the country. In the fifth grade, they know who George Washington is. 

 Just the basic stuff. Nothing unreasonable. The problem now is that American children do not know basic stuff. They are in classrooms for years and years and years but by a perverse sort of alchemy, they learn virtually nothing. Aren’t you sick of it?

 If our Education Establishment insists on doing a bad job, let's all do what we can to counter that.

When Children Fail in School: Understanding Learned Helplessness

by Carmen Y. Reyes

Learned helplessness is the belief that our own behavior does not influence what happens next; that is, behavior does not control outcomes or results. For example, when a student believes that she is in charge of the outcome, she may think, “If I study hard for this test, I’ll get a good grade.” On the contrary, a learned helpless student thinks, “No matter how hard I study for this test, I’ll always get a bad grade.” In school, learned helplessness relates to poor grades and underachievement, and to behavior difficulties. Students who experience repeated school failure are particularly prone to develop a learned helpless response style. Because of repeated academic failure, these students begin to doubt their own abilities, leading them to doubt that they can do anything to overcome their school difficulties. Consequently, they decrease their achievement efforts, particularly when faced with difficult materials, which leads to more school failure. This pattern of giving up when facing difficult tasks reinforces the child’s belief that he or she cannot overcome his or her academic difficulties.

Learned helplessness seems to contribute to the school failure experienced by many students with a learning disability. In a never-ending cycle, children with a learning disability frequently experience school difficulties over an extended period, and across a variety of tasks, school settings, and teachers, which in turn reinforces the child’s feeling of being helpless.

Characteristics of Learned Helpless Students

Some characteristics of learned helpless children are:               

1.      Low motivation to learn, and diminished aspirations to succeed in school.

2.      Low outcome expectations; that is, they believe that, no matter what they do in school, the outcome will always be negative (e.g. bad grades). In addition, they believe that they are powerless to prevent or overcome a negative outcome.

3.      Lack of perceived control over their own behavior and the environmental events; one’s own actions cannot lead to success.

4.      Lack of confidence in their skills and abilities (low self-efficacy expectations). These children believe that their school difficulties are caused by their own lack of ability and low intelligence, even when they have adequate ability and normal intelligence. They are convinced that they are unable to perform the required actions to achieve a positive outcome.

5.      They underestimate their performance when they do well in school, attributing success to luck or chance, e.g., “I was lucky that this test was easy.”

6.      They generalize from one failure situation or experience to other situations where control is possible. Because they expect failure all the time, regardless of their real skills and abilities, they underperform all the time.

7.      They focus on what they cannot do, rather than focusing on their strengths and skills.

8.      Because they feel incapable of implementing the necessary courses of action, they develop passivity and their school performance deteriorates.

The Pessimistic Explanatory Style

Learned helpless students, perceive school failure as something that they will never overcome, and academic events, positive or negative, as something out of their control. This expectation of failure and perceived lack of control is central in the development of a learned helpless style. The way in which children perceive and interpret their experiences in the classroom helps us understand why some children develop an optimistic explanatory style, and believe that they are capable of achieving in school and others develop a pessimistic explanatory style, believing that they are not capable of succeeding in school (Seligman, Reivich, Jaycox, and Gilham, 1995).

Children with an optimistic explanatory style attribute school failure to momentary and specific circumstances; for example, “I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Children with a pessimistic explanatory style explain negative events as something stable (the cause of the negative event will always be present), global(the cause of the negative event affects all areas of their lives), and internal (they conclude that they are responsible for the outcome or consequence of the negative event). A typical pessimistic explanatory style is, “I always fail no matter what I do.” On the contrary, when the outcome of the event is positive, a pessimistic child attributes the outcome to unstable (the cause of the event is transitory), specific (the cause of the event is situation specific), and external (other people or circumstances are responsible for the outcome) causes.

Learned Helpless Students Need Learning Strategies

Due to this perceived lack of control of the negative event, a learned helpless child is reluctant to seek assistance or help when he is having difficulty performing an academic task. These children are ineffective in using learning strategies, and they do not know how to engage in strategic task behavior to solve academic problems. For example, learned helpless children are unaware that if they create a plan, use a checklist, and/or make drawings, it will be easier for them to solve a multistep math word problem. With learned helpless children, success alone (e.g. solving accurately the multistep problem), is not going to ease the helpless perception or boost their self-confidence; remember that these children attribute their specific successes to luck or chance. According to Eccles, Wigfield, and Schiefele (1998), trying to persuade a learned helpless child that she can succeed, and asking her just to try hard, will be ineffective if we do not teach the child specific learning and compensatory strategies that she can apply to improve her performance when facing a difficult task. The authors state that the key in helping a learned helpless child overcome this dysfunctional explanatory pattern is to provide strategy retraining (teaching her strategies to use, and teaching explicitly when she can use those strategies), so that we give the child specific ways to remedy achievement problems; coupled with attribution retraining, or creating and maintaining a success expectation. When we teach a learned helpless child to use learning strategies, we are giving her the tools she needs to develop and maintain the perception that she has the resources to reverse failure. Ames (1990) recommends that, in combination with the learning strategies, we help the learned helpless child develop individualized short-term goals, e.g., “I will make drawings to accurately solve a two-steps math word problem.” When the child knows and implements learning strategies, she will be able to experience progress toward her individualized goals.

Learned Helpless Students Need to Believe that Effort Increases Skills

To accomplish this, we need to help learned helpless children recognize and take credit for the skills and abilities that they already have. In addition, we need to develop in children the belief that ability is incremental, not fixed; that is, effort increases ability and skills. Tollefson (2000) recommends that we help children see success asimprovement; that is, we are successful when we acquire or refine knowledge and skills we did not have before. We need to avoid communicating children that, to succeed in school, they need to perform at a particular level, or they need to perform at the same level than other students. When we help children see success as improvement, states Tollefson, we are encouraging them to expend effort to remediate their academic difficulties. In addition, we are training them to focus on strategies and the process of learning, rather than outcomes and achievement.

Concluding Comments

To minimize the negative impact of learned helplessness in children, we need to train them to focus on strategies and processes to reach their academic goals, reinforcing the belief that, through effort, they are in control of their own behavior, and that they are in charge of developing their own academic skills. For example, to help a child focus on the learning process, after failure, we can tell the child, “Maybe you can think of another way of doing this.” This way, our feedback stays focused on the child’s effort and the learning strategies he or she is using -within both the child’s control and modifiable. When children themselves learn to focus on effort and strategies, they can start feeling responsible for positive outcomes, and responsible for their own successes in school and in life.

References

Ames, C. A. (1990). Motivation: What teachers need to know. Teachers College Record. Vol. 91, No. 3, pp. 409-421.

Eccles, S., Wigfield, A., and Schiefele, U. (1998). Motivation to succeed. In Eisenberg, N. (Ed.) Handbook of Child Psychology. Vol. 3 (5th ed., pp. 1017-1095). New York: Wiley.

Seligman, M. E., Reivich, K., Jaycox, L., & Gillham, J. (1995). The optimistic child. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Tollefson, N. (2000). Classroom applications of cognitive theories of motivation. Educational Psychology Review, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 63-83.

The War on Teachers

The stats leave no doubt. There is huge dissatisfaction among teachers. The turnover rate is very high. We need to answer the obvious question, why don’t principals and administrators take better care of their teachers? 

The most recent MetLife Survey revealed: “Teacher Dissatisfaction At An All-Time High.” The NEA Today website continues: “Teacher job satisfaction has plummeted to its lowest level in 25 years, from 62 percent in 2008 to 39 percent in 2012 –- a total of 23 points…More than one-half of teachers report feeling under great stress several days per week, as opposed to one-third in 1985.”

 “High Teacher Turnover Rates are a Big Problem for America’s Public Schools….46% of all new teachers in the United States leave the profession within five years…Teachers cite lack of planning time, workload, and lack of influence over school policy among other reasons for their decision to leave…”

Edutopia sums up the situation this way: “Every year, U.S. schools hire more than 200,000 new teachers for that first day of class. By the time summer rolls around, at least 22,000 have quit.” 

Interestingly, less than 20% of teachers cite salary as their primary complaint. About 70% say the big problem is workplace conditions.

This Edutopia story, written by a failed teacher, concludes: “Many of these reasons are just euphemisms for one of the profession's hardest realities: Teaching can exact a considerable emotional toll. I don't know of any other professionals who have to break up fistfights, as I did…. New teachers, however naive and idealistic, often know before they enter the profession that the salaries are paltry, the class sizes large, and the supplies scant. What they don't know is how little support from parents, school administrators, and colleagues they can expect once the door is closed and the textbooks are opened.”

Let’s consider all this bad news from the point of view of the teacher. You might be only 27 or 28 years old. You’ve dreamed about being a teacher for as long as you can remember. You wanted to make a difference in the world. You thought you could help your kids to build a better life. But now you feel you have to walk away from all that. it’s been a horrible experience and you’re pretty sure you can never go back. Just as bad, you borrowed a lot of money and you still have a huge debt to pay. Dreams and money, all gone.

Now let’s consider this situation from the point of view of the Education Establishment. By losing all these burned-out teachers, they have room for a whole new set of starry-eyed rookies who’ll need classrooms, books, and lots of instruction. Thousands of professors will earn a good living making sure these newcomers have the credentials to be sent into the trenches. What if the public schools filled up with experienced, long-time teachers? That could be the end of the gravy train. Point is, the people at the top don’t have a lot of incentive to protect their teachers. Maybe that’s part of the reason they don’t.

Let’s face it, the common denominator in all K-12 education is that teachers are pushed around or left to fend for themselves. The paradigm story is where a teacher has trouble with students, the teacher goes to the principal for help, and the principal grandly declares: you’re a professional, it’s your classroom, take care of it.

There are many separate assaults: constant interruptions; loudspeakers making announcements; students drifting in and out; many unnecessary meetings and so-called professional development (PD); and a general tolerance of disorder and violence. Teachers can’t feel safe. They can’t do much teaching.

It almost seems as if the school system is cunningly designed to make sure only the toughest, most desperate people can survive. Sensitive, highly intelligent teachers would probably be the first to crack. There really does seem to be a war against teachers. Does it have to be this way?

Suppose, first of all, that schools of education prepared teachers at a higher level. (According to Rita Kramer’s book “Ed School Follies,” the training is actually very sketchy.) Then suppose that principals aggressively supported their teachers, and made clear to students that there will be no disrespect shown. Suppose the administrators got a bonus when teachers survived past a third or fourth year. Suppose that was a clearly announced social contract between the school and the community: children are expected to behave, or they will be punished appropriately.

Unfortunately, many teachers think they’re being pushed around by parents, the community, or commentators like me. The teachers seem to identify with the Education Establishment. Isn’t this an example of the Stockholm Syndrome? Teachers actually think they are in the trenches with the Education Establishment. No, teachers are alone in the trenches. I think there are three sets of victims in K-12 education: students, parents, and teachers. The situation can’t be improved until teachers have a clearer view of their reality. They are cannon fodder; they are expendables.

Finally, we’re forced to consider the idea that the indifference to teachers is part of a war on education generally. It’s part of the whole deliberate dumbing-down of America that Charlotte Iserbyt described in her book by that name. 

Undercutting teachers and rendering them ineffective will obviously produce the miserable results that the Education Establishment, in Iserbyt's view, deliberately seeks.

To put that over another way, the last thing the Education Establishment would want is a stable corps of highly professional, experienced teachers. So, by hook and by crook, our education commissars give future teachers inadequate training, and then set them loose in a blackboard jungle. Cold, very cold.

You will know that our Education Establishment is serious about improving education when they start to be fiercely protective of their teachers.

The one thing that has to be done in schools is called teaching. Administrators ought to be reassigned to teaching or security. Perhaps then their priorities will change.

 (This article first appeared in American Thinker with the title "Public schools chew up teachers and spit them out.")