Posted for your edification by J. E. ARMSTRONG, BIOLAB SYSOP. Any typos & errors are probably mine.
Chicago Tribune, Monday, August 2, 1993
Firing of teacher for flunking Students offers a lesson to American teachers. By Ron Grossman, Tribune Staff Writer
Georgetown, Del.--Two weeks hence, the national averages for the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the widely used college entrance exam, will be announced--an event that regularly marks the opening of America's hand-wringing season.
But before they dust off shopworn explanations for 30 years of plummeting SAT scores, pundits should visit this Colonial-era village near the Delaware shore and listen carefully to Adele Jones.
Jones, 33, used to be a mathematics teacher at Sussex Central High School here. Now she's a waitress at the Lamp Post restaurant in a nearby resort area.
"I just couldn't pass kids who were failing my algebra course," said Jones, who had just worked the breakfast shift. "I couldn't do that and still sleep at night."
After 10 years as a math teacher, Jones was fired by the local school board in June because she flunked more students than her principal wanted her to. The official charges were incompetence and insubordination.
The school's students voted with their feet against the first accusation.
Upon news of Jones' dismissal, virtually the entire student body walked out of the school in protest, wearing improvised buttons and carrying hastily scibbled signs saying, "I failed Ms. Jones's Class and It Was My Fault," and "Just Because a Student Is Failing Doesn't Mean the Teacher Is."
An impartial observer would probably have to agree with the school board that Jones was guilty of the second charge, insubordination. Essentially she lost her job because her concept of teaching conflicts with a philosophy of education that reigns not just here but across the nation.
"The message I kept getting from my supervisors was, 'Keep the kids happy, even if you have to lower your standards,'" Jones said. "But it doesn't do any good if we keep passing students on, then they get a rude awakening when they get to college and find they can't do the work."
Ever since high school test scores began to decline in the 1960's, pundits and parents have wondered why today's teenagers don't seem as smart as their predecessors. A decade ago, a federal report on the sorry state of American education, noting that a strong economy requires an educated work force, proclaimed the U.S. "A Nation at Risk."
The drop in SAT scores draws red flags because it parallels so many other indicators that America's schools aren't what they used to be. A generation ago, American students would outscore their foreign counterparts when given comparable tests of academic ability. Now American students place way down the list.
American industry is bedeviled because survival in international markets requires the introduction of new, high-tech assembly lines, yet the younger workers who will operate them are less skilled than their predecessors. Corporations have built training programs and classrooms into factories and offices, essentially giving up on the school system and teaching employees their three R's on the job.
Johnny can't read, the experts incessantly tell us, because he watches too much TV. The school's failures are blamed on inadequate funding, the decline and fall of the American family, the chaos in our inner cities, even fast-food diets young people favor.
Yet none of these explanations is fully satisfying. Spending on the nation's schools has increased during the same period that SAT's have been declining. Student preformance is down in the most-favored suburbs as well as on the mean streets of America's cities.
So it might be instructive to set the saga of one obscure teacher alongside the standard hypotheses about what is wrong with America's schools.
"I believe in hard work and don't accept excuses," Jones said.
Aimee Karr knows that Jones means what she says. Karr attended Jones' dismissal hearing in a show of solidarity because she considers Jones the best teacher she has had. Attending the hearing didn't leave Karr time to do the next day's homework for Jones' Algebra 2 Class. The other students said Karr needn't worry, that she surely would be excused on those grounds.
"I told the kids, if they thought so, they didn't really know Miss Jones," said Karr, 17. "Sure enough, she gave me a zero for not having my homework."
Karr and the 300 students who carried banners on Jones' behalf accept her Draconian discipline because they know she holds herself to the same standards. She would work with students needing extra help before and after school. The first teacher to arrive in the morning, Jones rarely left the building before 6 p.m. She gave out her phone number so students stumped by a homework problem could reach her in the evenings.
Her attorney, Craig Karsnitz, asked for some of Jones' time the evening before her hearing, explaining that they needed to review her case.
"She turned me down cold," said Karsnitz, whose office is near the high school. "Adele said she'd promised to hold an evening review session for kids who were about to take her final exam."
If Jones couldn't spare the time to help with her defense, others did. Jennifer Oliva, a former student, urged the school board to save Jones' job, writing on stationary of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where she is now a cadet. William Geppert, a retired Delaware state superintendant of mathematics instruction, testified on Jones' behalf.
Kevin Brittingham came in from the University of Delaware, where he is an undergraduate, to testify that Jones flunked him when he was a Susses High student.
"After I failed algebra, Miss Jones got in touch with me," said Brittingham, 18. "She said I'd no reason to fail because I was the brightest kid in class. So I took the course over, did the work this time, and got a B-plus. If she hadn't spoken to me like that, who knows if I'd have gone on to college."
The school board voted 6-4 to uphold the decision of Jones' principal, John McCarthy, to fire her. One member of the minority faction, Charles Bireley, 53, said he saw nothing that persuaded him that Jones was incompetent.
Basically, the evidence against Jones was statistical.
"The smoking gun in this case is her grades," David Williams, the school district's attorney, told a hearing officer whom the school board appointed to conduct the investigation. "The numbers of F's and D's are extraordinary."
Jones came to Sussex High from another school in the district three years ago. Her first year, she flunked 59 percent of her students. Her second year that figure fell to 27 percent, and by the middle of this year it was 22 percent. That trend could be interpreted as a sign students had started to realize they couldn't bluff their way through Jones' classes.
But Williams wouldn't buy that theory, nor would he accept the explanation that some students did badly in Jones' Algebra 2 class because they came to her poorly prepared by their previous math courses.
If that's true, Williams argued, then Jones should "start at Algebra 1 1/2."
Jones said she wasn't willing to do remedial work in class by cutting back on her Algebra 2 syllabus, though she offers tutoring sessions so that inadequately prepared kids can catch up.
When Algebra 2 become Algebra 1 1/2, she said, the trigonometry, the next course in the curriculum, has to be reduced to Algebra 2 1/2, and so on, until students go off to college unprepared for university-level courses.
Currently, 30 percent of university students taking first-year math on American campuses have to be placed in remedial classes--essentially getting college credits for high school- level work. A quarter of a century ago, the figure was half that.
"I've been helping a student enrolled in the University of Delaware," Jones said. "He wasn't my student but doubled back for tutoring because he couldn't keep up with his pre-calculus course, even though it's really high school math, not college math."
Brian Pettyjohn, a former student of Jones', said he knows why his classmates were unprepared for Algebra 2. At Jones' hearing, he testified that their geometry teacher preferred sitting on his desk jawboning with students to teaching them math.
"The guy is still living in the '60's," said Pettyjohn, 19, a University of Delaware student. "He had us making tie-dye T- shirts in class."
Many of Pettyjohn's former classmates agreed with that account, which went unchallenged at the hearing. Williams, the school board's attorney, declined to cross-examine Pettyjohn.
Given two such teachers--one who uses class time to make T- shirts, another who demands that students learn something--one might assume that a principal would chew out the former and praise the latter. But these days, some educational administrators have a logic all their own.
In his testimony, Principal McCarthy called D's and F's "negative grades," and spoke of the need to provide students with "unanxious expectations."
"My goal," he said, "is to use positive reinforcement to improve the self-esteem of kids."
McCarthy's educational philosophy, like that of other administrators, reduces to a simple formula: all carrot, no stick. But does it work?
Jerry Peden, one of Jones' former colleagues at Sussex High, doesn't think so.
Peden testified on Jones' behalf that he had conducted a little experiment, comparing her grade book with his. Jones based 75 percent of her grades on student's test scores. Peden based only 40 percent of his grades on test scores, allowing students to build up their grades by giving them credit for things like classroom participation, keeping a notebook, and doing outside projects.
"But if I applied her system of grading to my students," Peden said, "my students would have gotten 67 percent 'negative grades'- -D's and F's.
When the board confirmed Jones' firing, Peden, Delaware's history teacher of the year for 1990, became one of two teachers who felt honor bound to leave Sussex, too, taking positions at other schools.
Peden's experiment shows that when you strip away the educational extras and place students in a situation similar to the SATs--where they have to demonstrate on a test what they've gotten from their schooling--they don't know the material.
In fact, Peden's experiment and Jones's grade books suggest a far simpler explanation for the decline in SAT scores than those offered by some educators and sociologists: If you dont force students to learn something, they aren't going to know very much.
The support of Georgetown's young people for Jones seems to indicate that they recognize they are being educationally shortchanged.
One of Jones' students, Jodie Edwards, wrote her a note that in a sense confirms the principal's theory about a student's need for self-estemm but also suggests that self-esteem is built by challenging, not coddling, young people.
"I'm proud of my 92 average! Why? Because I actually earned it," Edwards, 17, wrote her teacher. "Probably it's the first time I had to earn a grade."
Yet educators don't seem to grasp these things as quickly as lay people and students do. Rita Kramer, a longtime critic of American schools, recently made an extensive study of teachers colleges, where the agenda and philosophy of American education are set.
"Over the last 20 years, professors of education have preached to their students, who go out to become our children's teachers that teaching kids the basic skills of language and numbers should take a back seat," said Kramer, author of "Ed School Follies."
"Teachers now are indoctrinated with the idea that the schools exist to promote self-esteem and make kids feel good about themselves."
Meanwhile, students such as Jodie Edwards wonder what kind of educating is going to go on inside Sussex High.
"I'm a senior, so I'll be out soon, but what kind of education are my younger brother and sister going to get?" Edwards said. "How demanding can their teacher be, knowing what's happened to Miss Jones?"