When I was a child, there was a huge old house about a mile from mine. It sat, eerily enough, on a street called Sleepy Hollow Road. It was in a terrible state of disrepair. The lawn was never mowed and the shingles on the roof had seen better days, but it was older and statelier than the other houses in the neighborhood.
You could tell there was something important about this house, that it had a magnificent past. But there was a cast iron fence all around it. Nobody from the neighborhood had been inside. I do not ever recall seeing an actual person in or around that house. Of course, stories abounded among us kids about what went on in there. One friend heard a couple lived there who years ago killed and ate their children. Another was certain the house was owned by an old lady with 23 cats. Other friends advanced varieties of the “haunted house” theory. At some point, I probably believed all these stories. What is notable is that while nobody had ever been inside the house or met any of the people who lived there, everyone had a clear and strong view about what went on in that strange place.
Today’s schools are a lot like that mysterious house on Sleepy Hollow Road. Our schools are perhaps not quite so spooky, but we drive or walk past them every day and speculate about what goes on inside. There are no large metal fences, but real barriers exist. We citizens, parents, politicians, and even educational researchers and administrators really know precious little about the inner life and daily rhythms of our schools since we see them mostly from the outside. But at the same time, most of us have strong views about what is wrong with the schools and how to fix them.
I want this book to crack open the creaky front gate of that old house on Sleepy Hollow Road. I want to summon up the courage to knock on the door and take a real look inside. This book will provide a tour of today’s elementary schools. I will point out the important things I see in there, what I am proud of, and what I am worried about. You can tell me if you see the same things and feel the same way about them. Perhaps you will see and worry about different things.
The American public school system is the most radical and just social project in the history of the world. I will say that again: in the history of the world. Our system is better, kinder, fairer, and more ambitious than any other country’s on the planet. We should all be supremely proud of it. But our system is a work in progress, a bold idea trying to realize itself and failing to do so in many important ways. For it to have a chance of success, we must all involve ourselves much more in the life of the elementary school than we currently do. We cannot allow our schools to be that scary house on Sleepy Holly Road that we have never been in but have strong opinions about. Let us go inside!
I want you to imagine making a visit to a public elementary school. Perhaps it is the school you attended as a child. Perhaps it is the school you have kids in now or is the one your kids used to attend. Perhaps it is the one your kids will attend someday. The important thing is to visualize right now an actual elementary school building. Imagine getting into your car or taking the bus to this school. Your tour begins at 8:00 on a Monday morning. You have arranged your tour with the principal, so they are expecting you. You will spend the day inside of a second-grade classroom. If you are driving a car, it may be hard to find a parking spot at this time of the morning. But after circling around several times, you eventually see one. You park your car, get out, and make your way to the front office. You notice a few small jitters in your stomach as you press a button near the door to be buzzed in. After a little waiting, the door clicks open and you step inside.
Before we go in, let me say a few things about myself, your tour guide. I have spent the past 25 years studying the way elementary-aged children learn and grow. I have talked with them, observed them, tested them, analyzed their artwork, and interviewed their parents and teachers. For much of my career, I have worked as a college professor. I have researched children, published my findings, and taught adults how to understand, parent, and teach young people. I have also been a Cub and Boy Scout leader for the past ten years where I have mentored hundreds of young children. I have two children of my own who went through the public elementary schools. My brother has been a fifth-grade teacher for the past 25 years. My wife is an elementary paraprofessional of six years. And my mother-in-law taught elementary school for almost 40 years. Many of my friends are public elementary school teachers. Education is in my blood.
About seven years ago, following a lifelong dream, I decided I wanted not just to study children’s learning but to teach children myself in my very own classroom. So I went back to school to earn my state teaching certificate, a gray-haired man in his late 40s amidst the millennial generation’s earbuds and smartphones. Though I had a doctorate in child psychology, I returned to classes to take about 60 hours of undergraduate courses, which were required to become a certified, public elementary school teacher.
In addition to the coursework, teachers-in-training must get hands-on experience by doing practicum work in real elementary classrooms. I had the opportunity to work at four different public elementary schools over a three-year period. Two were poor and two were affluent. These field placements involved me in almost 1000 hours of supervised experience in elementary classrooms at almost every grade level. Four hundred of my supervised hours involved full-time student teaching in a second-grade classroom. In 2014, I finished my coursework and passed the state licensing exam in Georgia. For this book, I have interviewed 18 elementary school teachers and over 30 elementary school students from across the country.
Much of what I experienced about the way teachers are trained and what really goes on in elementary school classrooms inspired me. Other things surprised me. Perhaps the most surprising thing of all was how different the world of the elementary school is from almost anywhere else in the world. It has its own rhythms, tone, and rules. Most of the time I felt like I was living a double life: there was my neighbor-father-husband life at home and there was my teacher life at the elementary school. The closest analogy I can draw to describe this situation is the military. When soldiers return from battle or from an extended stay on a military base, they often need time to adjust to the vast differences between these two worlds. During my classes and field experiences, I would often ask myself, “I wonder what the parents of these children would say if they could see this?” or “If the governor or my congressman could just sit with me for an hour in this classroom and watch what really goes on, I wonder how they would think about their policies when they returned to the legislature?” I would come home at night after spending all day in an elementary classroom and it felt like I was returning from another planet.
Bridges and Potholes
While politicians and administrators are responsible for funding, managing, and supervising the educational system, it is not clear to me how much time they have spent in actual classrooms, much less teaching a classroom themselves. Yes, they visit occasionally and even read a story to a pre-selected group of kids in the library, but anyone who has spent more than a few hours in a real classroom quickly realizes that when most politicians and administrators talk, they sound like people who know almost nothing about education. They speak passionately about schools and teachers using words like “accountability,” “testing,” “standards,” and “merit pay,” but almost all teachers know politicians and administrators are not talking about things that will really make things better for students. Administrators roll out new plans and initiatives with great fanfare every two or three years, but teachers have seen this dog and pony show before. Most of them will simply roll their eyes and yawn, knowing when the initiative fails or runs out of funding in a few years, they will be left all alone with their students once again.
A good education is the key to a successful life, especially in today’s “information economy.” Nobody wants their kids “left behind” and people are terrified it will happen to them. Teachers know that politicians and administrators respond mostly to the fears and ignorance of parents, not the daily rhythms of the classroom and the needs of real students. But fear and ignorance are not the soundest foundation upon which to build an educational system. The gap between those who work with elementary children all day and those who do not is alarmingly large.
When parents ask their kids how things are going at school, the most many get is a “fine.” Yes, there are carefully staged visits for “curriculum night” or to chaperone a field trip, but these glimpses do not give them anything close to a sense of what really goes on in there. Most of us parents have no clue what goes on inside our kids’ classrooms. This book is my attempt to build a bridge between these two worlds, to give people who are not a daily part of elementary education a sense of what really goes on there. Harkening to Dr. Seuss’ “Thing 1” and “Thing 2,” the book reveals ten surprising and even worrisome Things in our elementary schools and then considers what to do about them.
I offer one cautionary note before I return to our tour. There are a few areas of life I think of as “potholes.” These are not actual gashes in the road, but potentially disastrous topics that you steer clear of in polite conversation. Politics can be a pothole. So is religion, parenting, nutrition, and exercise. We can get extremely emotional about these topics when they are discussed in public. We can become rigid and defensive, closed to different points of view. It seems these days there is less and less space to talk rationally and to deliberate together about controversial topics. Education is a pothole as well. Think of the last time the plight of the schools came up over Thanksgiving dinner. How did that go? So, another way to think of this book is that I am driving straight into a big pothole!
Given the emotional attachment we all have to issues of education, some things I say might at first seem uninformed by the latest theory or research. They might even seem ignorant, or worse, crazy, sexist, or as though Western civilization itself will collapse if they are implemented. These are the kinds of reactions that come up when people talk about education. Please trust that I care very much about all children and their development. I am a fierce supporter of public schools and the teachers who work in them. My point is not to advance an ideology, or dismantle one, but simply to share what I see and think in an open space where hopefully we can talk together about important matters. So before I advance specific ideas in this book, it is important to first establish a rational, deliberative space where we can reflect calmly on the state of contemporary public elementary education from a teacher’s perspective. All of what follows cannot sink in if this zone is not first opened. I hope you will give me this space as a reader. I will give you this space if you respond to me as an author.
There are many—far too many—books about education on the market. While some offer real contributions, many are written by either ideologues or salespeople. Ideologues seek to change the way you see education, the lens you use to look at the schools. Some ideologies want you to view teachers as lazy and unaccountable. Others will have you view schools as spiritually desolate places in desperate need of prayer or corporal punishment or as bastions of racial oppression. Others will have you look at schools as institutions that are desperately underfunded, or wastefully overfunded, or as places where there is not enough testing, or too much testing, or the wrong kind of testing.
For the most part, ideologies are not helpful in the realm of education. Ideologies offer neat theories and coherent causal narratives. But education is messy and complex territory with many different factors in play, and so it is not easily understood from a single perspective. Further, schools vary greatly within single districts and across states, making general statements very difficult. Pablo Picasso once said, “When art critics get together, they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” Using this analogy, teachers are the artists; educational researchers, political advocates, and administrators are the art critics. Rarely do teachers themselves advance any grand theory of education, have an ideology, or even a political position. Most teachers work together every day with very diverse colleagues and students to achieve concrete and practical tasks. They often...