Picture a typical day in the District of Columbia Public School system.
The corridors are flooded with loud teenagers, teachers losing the battle to shepherd students to class and security officers patrolling their assigned areas. In the classrooms themselves, which are far too often overcrowded and under-supplied, the educators fight the real battle.
Blithely caught up in the elite academia of the Hilltop, I was woefully unaware of this crisis until recently, even when I was preparing to do my DCPS teaching thesis through the Biology Department. This Rise and Teach thesis calls for intensive research coupled with first-hand experience teaching science in a D.C. school. I relished the opportunity to teach high schoolers a subject I loved. When I stepped into my teaching position in DCPS, my blissful unawareness was met by the failing DCPS administration.
I expected public education’s usual blights: underfunding, under-supplying, over-enrolling. I even expected real academic struggles. The school where I would be teaching had almost shut down barely five years ago for failing rates under No Child Left Behind standards.
My ninth grade classroom, full of students who are bright and enthusiastic, has an average reading level of between first and fifth grade. These smart young men and women are floundering in a system that has never seen fit to push them to attain a level of education on par with their age and abilities.
But, that’s not to say their teachers have lapsed in their duties. Yes, there are undoubtedly inferior teachers that hinder rather than help their students’ learning. But far more often, in the DCPS, the issue is systemic.
Teachers face an interminable and unwinnable struggle in their efforts to educate. The deplorable status quo of public school administrations has allowed students to simply pass classes in which they are hopelessly unprepared, poorly informed, or even downright absent.
Administrations often force teachers to pass students who are failing. While this practice has likely been an attempt to both reduce the failing rate at a given school, at best, it’s underhanded and self-serving on the part of the school’s administration. At worst, it tells these bright, young students that their work is worthless, that their drive for success unnecessary, and their teacher is another member of a system that has failed them.
Yet, when a teacher, often a young and idealistic one, puts their foot down and refuses to cooperate in administrator’s push to allow students to pass, their job, their livelihood, their security is on the line. That pressure from above is excruciating, and so easy towards which to capitulate.
And what comes of that artificial passing rate, beyond the blow to the quality, efficacy, and benefits of the students’ educations? When those same students take standardized tests at the end of the year—and in D.C. those now extend into biology as well as the traditional reading, writing, and math—those students are going to fail. They will. That’s a fact. They are not ready. Teachers have not instilled the motivation needed to truly learn the material, and the integrity of the classroom environment has been sapped by the meddling of the administrators. And so, students fail at exorbitant rates, which damages their self-confidence, sets back their desire to continue in a given subject, and diminishes their beliefs in the value of education in itself.
The same teachers who face the dilemma whether to pass students who should not have and opted for it are now facing the same crisis of job security. Fired if you pass the students, fired if you don’t. And people wonder why no one wants to be a teacher.
Artificially increasing the passing rate in schools is no long-term solution to the educational crisis that creates the need for pushes such as No Child Left Behind, nor is it beneficial to the students, the teachers, or the ethos of the school system itself.
Solving this quagmire of a crisis cannot come from the teachers, or the students. It must come from these schools’ administrators. It seems that the maelstrom of D.C. educational politics has led many school administrators to leave their path, and that is deplorable. Schools are meant for the good of the children, and that should always be the only guiding principle.
