Toxic Culture of Education Katz 1A: The Myths and Realities of "Failing" Schools

Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its entire life believing it is stupid. There she was working with a student Natalie solving equations, she had to multiply 2 * 9 and she got stuck and this happens. I'm used to it all the time but I decided to go for the teaching moment all you had to do is count by twos now you tried and failed four different times with your fingers on paper in English and Spanish 2 4 8 12 Natalie She was 16 years old and she was in ninth grade and she is not alone, far from it.

I teach at a high school with a student population of about 3,000, it's one of 30,000 high

schools

in the entire United States, so you have to imagine how many natives there are. I have now seen the best of our school system and I can say that our best students can compete with the best students around the world, in fact when I look at the PZA results that compare our students with other countries that we currently rank . 20 years still, if we break down our results by district poverty level and compare U.S. districts to countries with the best poverty rates, it's clear that our students are at the top, but our best students are just a small percentage of the general population, even in the honors. classes and then what about Natalie?

I specialize in teaching algebra to the bottom 25% of high school students and work primarily with those students. Now, the best of those students want to do well, but by the time they realize what they are capable of doing, they are either stuck on a path of academic mediocrity or they are so close to graduating that they only need one credit to pass. It's almost like a scene of wasted potential. Now the worst of those students have had no character

education

, no common decency, no appropriate language, no appropriate behavior. They barely distinguish between right and wrong, these are the students who are at risk of leaving prison or abusing welfare.

Now, what's out there waiting for those students to find jobs at the university? They are in an

education

system that says if you don't go to college, you're not worth it, so their only alternative is to be underemployed to find illegal work or abuse welfare. These students are marginalized by what I call a

toxic

educational

culture

. It doesn't matter if a student is a talented artist, a loving caregiver, a talented musician or poetic writer, those students are the fish who are judged by how they climb trees because we say that N everything is college or we are leaving students in the lower skill level work, even in honors classes, these students are so focused on grades and answers that they are afraid to learn and that is impacting their performance in college, but I'm not here to talk about the current crisis of student loan debt.

Now you have to understand that I don't blame them, yes, they can take credit. because of who they are, but it's about something much bigger than the students, our

toxic

culture

, the culture of education begins with a classic supervillain archetype. I focus on Incredibles Syndrome. The supervillains' plan is to unleash a doom on the world that only supervillains can stop. The villain can thus gain all the desired power. This is exactly what happened in education in the 1980s and before and after culminating in No Child Left Behind. Private education companies realized they could use public education, a multi-billion dollar industry, to create a nearly infinite industry. flow of taxpayer money, they funneled millions of dollars into lobbying efforts and focused on two words: rigor and accountability and put everything in its place.

State statutes were passed. District rules were enforced and eventually No Child Left Behind became the National Standard. Don't get me wrong. Policy-wise, these efforts were underway long before they were passed, so both parties take full credit for their disastrous results, especially with the race to the top. In some ways we took the educational system that produced the individuals who put man on the moon with less technology. powerful than the phone in my pocket and I characterized that education system as a failure using the word accountability, we only have one way to address accountability, standardized testing, so we implemented standardized testing and then in 1983, a publication called a nation at risk showed that standardized tests showed that

schools

were teachers were

failing

students were

failing

and when everything is failing guess what we need new textbooks new workbooks new resources new training accountability systems new schools private schools charter schools and who is the one who creates all these things that we suddenly need our super Villainous private education companies, the only way to fuel a business model in this toxic culture of education is to perpetuate an image of failure.

I would love to meet any education company that has a business model that is based on long-term student success, it just exists. There is no money in long-term student success.