When school gets in the way of education

The Washington Post has a story today that I suspect will resonate with many parents and children.

It’s about Caitlyn Singam, a child prodigy in Montgomery County, Md., schools whose teachers and school administrators kept getting in the way of her academic progress and trying to make her fit their education models.

I can relate.

In third grade, we were allowed to progress at our own pace. In fourth grade, we were required to stay on reading level. I got immensely bored, and my inattention was attributed to difficulty understanding the material. It wasn’t until seventh grade that a teacher realized that I didn’t belong in an intermediate reading group.

My oldest two children had similar problems. The school simply had no idea how to handle them and their academic needs.

As it was explained to me — and I was on the school board, so I assume the director was being on the level — the state allows individual districts to find their own approach to satisfying the needs of gifted students.

Our school’s leaders felt that was done adequately through a personal education plan that allowed each student to set their own goals and develop their own projects to pursue their interests.

In theory, this is wonderful. In practice, it has proved difficult to implement and over the past ten years it’s been largely dismantled except in name.

And you know, to a large extent I get that. I used to teach middle school, myself. Differentiated instruction is a challenge. How do you teach Johnny fractions and negative numbers at the same time you’re trying to teach James the difference between the tens and ones columns? How do you provide a meaningful classroom experience to some kids who barely know the subject from the predicate while others can conjugate by mood, voice and tense?

In third grade teacher tried to rate my second daughter’s reading level back a grade or two because she reads at a slow pace. We had to have a special meeting to demonstrate her reading skills and explain that her pace doesn’t indicate a lack of comprehension as much as a slow, deliberate pace.

A couple years later, she was reading a Victor Hugo novel, and her teacher that year wondered how much she really understood. So I asked my daughter explain in Hugo’s words why Napoleon lost Waterloo, and five minutes later, after she had finished, the teacher was satisfied.

Some teachers can manage differentiation — my daughter’s first- and second-grade teacher was a pro — but for many, it’s a challenge. It doesn’t get any easier when teachers are under tremendous pressure to make sure that everyone can perform adequately on a standardized test that is being used not to evaluate the kids but the teachers themselves and the school they work at. (Or when the governor scapegoats them for everything.)

On the other hand, my oldest daughter learned algebra in sixth grade, and had learned geometry, Algrebra II and parts of trigonometry by the time she reached ninth grade, only to be told she had to retake geometry because that was all the school offered for honors students in ninth grade.

No exceptions were possible, and they wouldn’t even test her, because that’s not how the system works. I don’t know words foul enough for that.

The problem isn’t with the teachers per se; it’s with the administration and the bureaucracy that runs over them all.

The public school system was created to serve students; students were not created to fit into the smooth operation of the public school system. The needless rigidity of school administrations and education bureaucracy does a tremendous disservice to kids who want to outpace expectations.

It’s really no surprise that the happiest experiences my oldest daughter had in public education were in first and second grades, when she had a teacher who let her go as fast and as free as she wanted; and at her most miserable when teachers have made her stay on grade level.

Aside from my time with Mrs. Cromer in third grade, and those too-brief sojourns my older daughters have had with quality educators, I feel like the public school system has failed myself and my children. Waiting to see how it works out for my youngest.

But we’ve had a lot of frustration otherwise, especially in math.