Failure of the American Educational System, Part 1

The following is a true story. I was there.

If you have read my profile you know that I am a teacher. When I was doing my student teaching we had a transfer student assigned to our mult-cultural, mult-lingual (mother toungue multi-lingual, the language of instruction was English) public school classroom. Nothing unusual, so far. The resource teacher came to us (me and the master teacher) to warn us that this student currently qualified for services. "Currently"? Was she about to lose her acess to resource services I asked? Yes, she might, see she (we will call her Dora) was currently listed as mentally retarded, but the resource teacher believed that she wasn't actually mental retarded. The resource teacher believed that she was of low but normal intelligence and had known so little English when she took the intelligence test that she showed up as mentally retarded, even though she wasn't.

So what is the big difference between being mentally retarded and of low intelligence? Afterall, what label they placed on Dora did not have any effect on what she could do in class. A fourth grader who needs a physical object (like cubes) to figure out an addition problem is not suddenly going to be able to perform addition in the abstract because we label her as having a normal level of intelligence. The big difference is whether or not Dora qualifies for additional services to help learn addition in the fourth grade.

To qualify for additional services like resource help, a child has to have a defined disability (for instance cerebal palsy or mental retardation) or be working two grade levels below their intelligence level. Dora did math at a first grade level. If she was mentally retarded she qualified for services because that is a defined disability. If she had normal intelligence (i.e. was capable of fourth grade math, just did not know it) she would have qualified for services, because she was achieving at more than two grade levels below her abilities. However, Dora wasn't mentally retarded she was just...well...stupid (low intelligence, if you prefer) and therefore she was working at the level of her abilities. So, she recieved no services at all.

Now, I can hear all of you saying, "Well, if she can't learn why should we waste precious (in the sense of scarce and limited) resources on her?" But that is not the end of the story. See we really do not know what Dora would ever be capable of because of two factors. One, is her parents. Where were her parents in all of this you say. Why aren't they fighting for their precious child's educational rights? Easy. Remember I told you, dear reader, that Dora was a transfer student? She was transfering because she had been reassigned custodial parentage. Her mother, who had been her custodial parent, was going to jail so she was being transferred to the custody of her father. Good, he must be the better parent, right? Well not really, see Dora hardly knew her father because he had only been recently released from jail and the last time he had spent any time with her before she had been placed in his custody she was a baby. These parents just did not have the skills to advocate for their child even if they had the language skills and knowledge that such advocacy would make a difference. But there is another reason that Dora was consigned to failure by the system.

Social promotion. We do not have the resources to educate every child to the highest level of that child's abilities. (We also do not have the knowledge of how to do that in anything but a one-to-one teacher-student ratio, but that is another article) So despite the fact that Dora is working out of a first grade reading book and doing first grade math, she has to do so in a fourth grade classroom. The fourth grade teacher has no additional help nor resources to assist Dora in making the transition to fourth grade work. The system has given up on Dora. She will be allowed to slide along falling farther and farther behind until she drops out. If the fourth grade teacher offers her additional help, it will come at the expense of the other students. Either she will help Dora after school and have less time for lesson planning or grading papers; or she will help Dora during class which means less time for the other students in her class.

The teacher cannot win in this situation and neither can Dora, all because of a label change.

Education is supposed to be about more than labels, too bad no one in Sacramento, CA ever met Dora.