Ed Boland, a successful non-profit organization executive, takes an $80,000 pay cut to become a teacher in a New York City school. Boland discovers on Day One that he has the Classroom from Hell. The students insult him. They ignore him. The students smoke weed in the back of the classroom. They fight. They have sex in the stairwells. The classroom is complete chaos. The Battle for Room 314 is Boland’s description of his year of teaching in a failing school. We learn about his sexually abused students. We discover many of the parents of his students are drug addicts. The bleakness of life in this school and the surrounding neighborhood unfolds as Boland tells his story. If you have any interest in our schools and learning, The Battle for Room 314 will be an eye-opener for you. Do you think our schools are failing? GRADE: B
I wouldn’t know about Schools these days. I haven’t been in one for fifty years, and never had any children or grand-kids to keep me updated. I will say that young people seem a bit different these days, but I don’t think schools can be judged on the basis of a single classroom in NYC.
Dan, American schools continue to slide downward when compared with the schools in Singapore and Sweden. The trend is not encouraging.
Some are failing, some are succeeding, most are probably somewhere in between. I’ve always found the idea that someone with no educational background who thinks he can just walk into a school and teach to be a mistake, if well intended. Teaching is a tough profession and should be left to professionals who know what they are doing. The Bloomberg-Joel Klein plan of bringing in inexperienced people to be principals was a disaster for the most part,
I know Jackie wouldn’t want to be starting out in teaching today, and I’m sure Diane fells the same.
Jeff, Diane taught for 32 years. She admits her teaching job changed over those decades. Less teaching, more “monitoring” and paperwork. We went out to dinner with a teacher who teaches Second Grade told us he has to take attendance in his classroom NINE TIMES a day. Every time a child leaves the room, he has to document it. He’s decided to retire next year.
That’s nuts!
Interesting point, Jeff.
The governor of our state (and presidential contender) John Kasich has said that pretty much anyone can take a textbook and teach it to a class full of kids.
George, in many cases schools are failing. Also parents are failing. Society is failing. And so on and so on. This has always been the case but somehow we continue to muddle through. Imagine what would happen if we as a society paid attention and started to tackle these problems in a positive way.
Jerry, you are so right! Our schools are a reflection of our society. And it’s in trouble.
Couldn’t agree more with Jeff’s comment. No one would choose a surgeon who’d never been to med school, no one would choose a mechanic who knew nothing about cars, but there are people (unfortunately, influential people) who think that a person who has no educational background at all can walk into a classroom and perform miracles. No…it ain’t gonna happen.
I’m not a teacher, but I’m a classroom aide in a school that pulls most of its students from low-income areas. Here’s my take:
1. We hold teachers accountable for too much. A teacher who interacts with 130 students for less than 60 minutes per pupil per school day is not going to be able to reverse over a decade of bad parenting, low expectations, and social promotion.
2. We aren’t drilling the basics into students in the early grades. I see high school students who don’t know their multiplication tables, who still count addition and subtraction problems on their fingers, who don’t know the basics of phonics or how to break a word down into component syllables, who have no idea how to write a simple paragraph (let alone an essay or research paper).
3. We do not take into account the utter chaos in which some of our students live their lives: drug-addicted/incarcerated parents, living with grandparents or even great-grandparent (who are, in turn raising a number of grandchildren), living in cars or cheap hotel rooms or couch-surfing wherever they can land, food insecurity (we know of students who don’t know if they’ll eat between Friday’s school lunch and Monday’s school breakfast), the list goes on. How can you ask a kid who doesn’t know where they’re going to sleep tonight to care about ODE ON A GRECIAN URN or the Articles of Confederation or the circulatory system?
We don’t have a problem with education, we have a problem in our society with how we interact with its poorest and most powerless citizens–and this extends way beyond the school system!
/Sorry for going on and on. Will dismount soapbox now.
Deb, I agree with everything you said. Drug-addicted parents (or no parents) is a common problem for kids today. How can we expect them to learn when their lives are chaotic. What ever happened to Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic? The Three “Rs” aren’t taught enough. And the craziness in our culture is reflected in our dysfunctional schools.
Well put, Deb. You are on the front lines and see it on a daily basis.
Joel Klein – the now former Chancellor with zero education background – with the agreement of Bloomberg (ditto on the lack of education know how) set up the so-called Leadership Academy. They recruited people in business and other areas who KNEW NOTHING ABOUT EDUCATION to be Principals. Perhaps they thought it would be fun. After “training” they spent a year as an intern and, voila! You’re a Principal. Never mind that theyou hadn’t taught a day in their lives and only knew what they were told – “standards,” testing, teacher accountability, etc.
As Bill Crider would say, what could possibly go wrong?
Jeff, you’re right about people who’ve never worked in a classroom trying to run schools and school systems. They have no concept of the problems and limitations.
You’ve all said it well. My big problem is parents, and others, putting the blame on teachers for everything. So many parents take no responsibility for their children.
Children should begin the learning process in the home. It’s not just the poor families, the haves may be too busy with work, etc. to give the children the attention they need.
We have to get a license for so many things (water heaters???) why not to have children?
Maggie, during Diane’s last years of teaching in a rural school district, 40% of the children in her Fifth Grade class were NOT living with their parents. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, and foster home folks were performing the parental functions…but not well in several cases.
Jackie said that book sounded like Up the Down Staircase 50 years later.
She was asked by the District Superintendent to “do her a favor” (this was around 1999 or 2000) and take over running half of a middle school because the assistant principal was having a nervous breakdown. She said there were kids having sex in the staircase there too. The previous guy had a black eye from someone throwing an orange at him in the lunchroom! It was a lousy school in a decent neighborhood because so many of the kids came from a nearby housing project.
Jeff, on any given school day in Buffalo, 40% of the students are absent. You can’t teach kids who don’t show up.
If he’d watched The Blackboard Jungle he’d have known his task was impossible.
Bob, the more things change the more they stay the same.
George, sadly, this is the impression a lot of Indians have about American schools. For instance, I’m told teachers are not allowed to scold or reprimand students for any misbehaviour. I don’t know how far this or the other things are true. In India, students in schools and colleges are seldom unruly and attendance is almost 100 per cent, especially in schools.
Prashant, there are Good Schools and Bad Schools. Schools in communities where income levels are high tend to be Good Schools because parents insist on it. Schools in poor communities struggle to educate those students. It’s a socio-cultural problem.
I just hope that these are the exceptions (especially what Deb described …) and not the norm!
Though I know that all over the “developed world” you find similar situations, of course also in Europe.
My granddaughter told me she was lucky (training to be a teacher) her partner not so much with his class – maybe that’s why (after taking their exams) they’ve been travelling around the world for more than a year now before looking for jobs as teachers?
From India they went to Australia – her mother is getting nervous, will they ever come back?
Maybe they are trying somehow to evade that teaching job …
But picking oranges and grapes in Australia isn’t a long term perspective either …
Wolf, teaching is a difficult profession. I’m lucky I’m at the College level where most students want to learn. The lower grades are an entirely different story.