I caught the tail-end of this Fox News special, Breaking Point: The Education Crisis in America. I came in at the "Teacher's unions are greedy/ No, they're not!" part of the program, in which pithy quotes from AFT and NEA representatives were interlaced with equally-pithy quotes from pissed-off parents and anti-union activists.
Most of what I saw focused on Rafe Esquith, a truly remarkable educator who has labored in the run-down, recent-immigrant, English-as-a-second-language neighborhoods of Los Angeles for 18 years. He teaches at Hobart Boulevard Elementary School and his efforts at producing well-rounded students, in the classic liberal arts tradition, have been amazingly productive:
Beginning his day at 6:30 a.m., Esquith tutors students in math, history and the classics. Lunches and recesses are devoted to music lessons, for Esquith insists that his students take up an instrument. After school, Esquith coaches volleyball, teaches computer use and offers additional tutoring.
As a result of his work, Esquith’s students consistently score in the top 5 to 10 percent nationally in standardized tests, and his math team has gone undefeated for the past five years. Many have made it past Hobart Boulevard and moved onto college and law school.
The Fox News special revealed a man who absolutely lives for his students, who basically has no life outside of his job (in a good way), and who spurs his current students on with a display of Ivy League college banners on his classroom walls; each Princeton or Yale or Harvard banner has engraved plaques beside it listing each of his former students who have made it through those doors.
Rafe has been feted, awarded, and knighted for his teaching skills. His standards are high, and his slogan is, "There are no shortcuts." His fifth-graders read Steinbeck and Shakespeare and learn to become good readers, and good people. One exercise that Fox showed involved a treasure hunt to parallel the class's study of Treasure Island; the teams had to solve math problems and remember important dates just to figure out what the clues were. Rafe noted that, if at the end of the hunt, the winning team shared their treasures with the losing teams, he'd done his job right.
Of course, he was asked about testing, and his reply was just what I expected. He uses tests as feedback to let him know how his kids are doing, but he doesn't want testing to be the be-all end-all of education. And he's right. He sees each student as an individual, but he also doesn't allow any "individualism" to interfere with education. This moral was conveyed very nicely in the story of one former student, a young Hispanic male (whose name I've unfortunately forgotten). On camera, Rafe admits to telling this kid to shape up or ship out, in a way that clearly favored blunt truth and high expectations over any concern for the student's "cultural expectations" or "self-esteem." The kid got his act together, and is now on a full scholarship at the exclusive Brentwood school, where he was just elected class president.
There may have been no one else in that student's life to set such high standards for him, or to tell him that, at some point, he had to take responsibility for his work and his life. Luckily for that kid, and for many other kids, Rafe gets that point across, every day, in his classroom.
Posted by kswygert at November 24, 2003 10:08 AM