Last Sunday Ken Hartnett’s article quoted Jean Duval, the head of the New Bedford teacher’s union: “Sooner or later, people have got to talk about the human material in front of the teachers and administrators. They are doing the best they can with the material in front of them.”
Since then, Ms. Duval has been roundly vilified in the editorial pages. In a Wednesday editorial, Mara Honohan, a seventh-grader from Normandin Middle School, wrote of resenting being spoken of as “material.” Warren Berube sarcastically observed that a union person would never say such a thing. On Tuesday, Mary Worden’s editorial asked the rhetorical question, “What exactly is the human material in front of teachers today? Is it a person who shouldn’t be there?” And then she proceeded to put words in Ms. Duval’s mouth by assuming that was what she meant. The Standard Times’ own editorial unfairly rips Duval for her “negative attitude toward the students.”
It’s clear society wants teachers to see only an individual and not just a socioeconomic statistic. And teachers do precisely that in classrooms every day. But there is also a bigger view in which the statistics are shocking, shameful, and frightening –- and it serves no one’s interests to pretend they don’t exist. Most administrators and teachers (and I am one) don’t blame the students, but it is hard to ignore increasing percentages of kids working full-time jobs, falling asleep on their desks, or not showing up for class, living in cars when dad’s drunk, or changing foster families every other month. Add to this high numbers of special needs, intellectual challenges, juvenile offenses, substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, non-English speaking, and lack of parental guidance -– and all the innovative educational programs in the world can’t offset these strikes against learning.
And it’s worse than that. Perhaps someone should state the obvious even more forcefully than Ms. Duval –- that public schools in general -– forget New Bedford for a minute – have become a dumping ground for children no one seriously intends to educate. By “no one” I mean their parents and society. The absent or dysfunctional parent isn’t helping. Public schools are expected to work miracles with a student population that a Tabor Academy or a Bishop Stang would never admit. Meanwhile, the cities, states, and federal government play politics with education but never fund it adequately. New Bedford and the state of Massachusetts couldn’t even agree on the importance of the MCAS. We seem to want public education to deliver educational miracles and cure social ills, but we don’t want to talk about it unless it’s a four-letter word like “MCAS” – and we sure don’t want to pay for it.
So hats off to Ms. Duval for telling the Emperor that he’s buck-naked. It seems strange to me for a community to react so strongly to a little tactlessness on the part of someone stating the obvious, but not to concern itself at all with the real causes of student failures.
This was published in the Standard Times on September 1, 2006
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20060901/opinion/309019917
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