Michael Swickard
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” – Thomas Sowell
The entire staff of a Rhode Island high school was fired last week as part of a school improvement project. One headline opined that the mass firing of school personnel may signal a trend.
Actually, it is a trend already in place of doing stupid things in the management of schools.
This mass firing of teachers was a political rather than educational solution. As a former high school teacher, I realize that I would have also been fired regardless of my teaching ability.
Many politicians cheered the strong action to fix that “broken school.” Those cheering the most seem to have spent the least amount of time in schools. They favor burning down schools to improve them.
Problem reflects back to elementary school
Let us reason:
When students do not thrive in high school we must look at the earlier grades. On the very first day of school every kindergarten student comes to school excited about learning. Over the years only some of the students thrive and maintain that interest, while many others do not.
Again, as a former high school teacher, I understand that when high school students say, “You can’t teach me nothing,” they are right. If they are there in body only, I cannot teach them.
Students’ not doing well in high school reflects back to elementary schools where the students left without an adequate foundational education. Without effective intervention, we are faced with two equally awful realities.
When students do not thrive in elementary school they can be held back year after year, awaiting a miracle. This creates problems where a peer-group of students all one age has some older students in their midst who are often disruptive because they are not engaged due to a lack of foundational skills.
Secondly, the statistics are compelling that holding students back almost uniformly guarantees that they will drop out of school later. There is an adhesion of students all the same age that helps carry them to graduation. Holding back ultimately causes drop outs.
So most often students are passed on to upper grades without adequate fundamental basics, which means they do not fit in the classes since they cannot keep up. And, in the Rhode Island High School, those students who came last August without foundational learning caused all of the teachers, administrators and counselors to be fired.
The leadership could have just as easily fired all district personnel. But the reality is the school officials not yet fired must immediately look for replacements for the fired teachers even though there is already a nationwide shortage of teachers.
What well-functioning teacher would ever work for a district that is so stupid as to fire teachers in mass? Mass firings will not change the outcomes.
Deal with the fundamental skill problem
The area of fundamental skill intervention is what I do in my professional life, so this hits close to home. I see students who make it into high school still reading on the second-grade level, which means the vocabulary and comprehension skills they have are very inadequate.
Middle-school and high-school teachers can only take what comes from elementary schools. I am working with some school districts who are greatly improving the fundamental skills of these students, but these districts are the exception rather than the rule.
There are methods that can repair this lack of fundamental skills, but many school districts are not focused on these effective interventions; rather, they want a loud splashy political intervention like firing all the teachers.
There is no standard for intervention in New Mexico. Every district goes its own way, resulting in many fragile students being left behind. It is the main reason for our high dropout rates. These students feel stupid and out of place in class, so they leave.
Rather than politically threatening to fire all of the teachers, it would be more effective to just deal with the fundamental skill problem educationally and much earlier. That would work better than to politically burn the schools down, thinking it an improvement.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.
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