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In two high profile articles in The New York Times Magazine and Newsweek, the country is reminded once again that not only does K-12 education have collosal challenges, some teachers now have to go.  

He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach. (From the New York Times)

K-12 education, with all its highly publicized issues, has become a labyrinth for change agents and policy makers.   So many people have their hands on so many parts, that it has become truly confusing–at least from an observer’s eyes–what the real problems are.   One thing we all know for sure, America’s children are bearing the brunt of all these public confrontations.   Soon enough, when they grow up, we might just know the impact of a population that reads and writes below the level of most of the literate world.   A frightening prospect for a country that prides itself for being “the first world.”  America’s future?  Think again.

I told my mother earlier, that as an educator, I have thought about entering the K-12 profession.  But for a few reasons, I may be too much of an “alien” in their world.   First, I don’t have kids and am not planning to have any.   I personally think that teachers with children get much of their training at home.   Parental patience is a gift that can’t be taught.   Second, I was privately educated–in another country!   The public school system is foreign to me (as I am to them).   In the Philippines, we have both  Elementary and High School in ten years!  Ten!  Four year colleges were still a time for growing up.  I often wonder why American kids have to stay in school that long.   Given the state of many public schools, they must be so discontented they can’t wait to get out.   Since they grow up so fast in this country, their pubertal minds are probably somewhere else.  So much for teaching them Shakespeare when they want to practice his life lessons at sixteen.

Last, and worthy of another paragraph, I have spent most of my working life in Adult Education.   Yes, with Adults.

Adult Learners are Their Parents

The four years I taught in the welfare system of New York made me look at the K-12 issues directly by staring at the eyes of the parents responsible for these kids.   Many of my students were too caught in the systemic traps of poverty to pay attention to the educational values that America has cherished for decades.   Many of them were single mothers who were on the constantly revolving doors of unemployment and welfare programs.   Their literacy issues might be familiar to a K-12 teacher who deal with them every day, except they’re not children.  And if we connect one dot to another, we might ask ourselves, what happens when the children go home to these parents?   What does education mean to those who don’t understand it, or worse, don’t value it in life?

The biggest irony of all is this:  for the past years, my students have been younger.   Adult literacy programs have become the repository for those who drop out of high school.    And because of the lack of supportive environment, many of them are having children, too.

So goes the cycle.  

Considering the many employment opportunities in K-12, I have decided to stay in Adult Literacy Education.   It may be tough to find a job in my underfunded field right now, but I am a believer in families, in strong families.   The problems we see around us did not emerge from the streets.  Children just don’t suddenly learn to pick up guns and start shooting each other.   They don’t just start using the N word because they think it’s cool.  They just don’t get disconnected from the lessons in American history.  In so many ways,  it all began at home. 

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These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power…that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid. – Franklyn D. Roosevelt

One of my favorite books of recent years is The Bottom Billion by the economist  Paul Collier.    In the book, Collier zeroes in on fifty failing states in the country and “analyzes the causes of failure, pointing to a set of traps that snare these countries, including civil war, a dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources, and bad governance.”  This may not sound familiar to this generation of middle class Americans.    Most of us are so far off from the greatest generation of World War II that we don’t understand any longer what economic strategies built this country that guaranteed our absence in the world’s failed states.  

Having worked in the lowest rung of the economic ladder in the U.S., I see a lot of the same problems operating in the inability of the American poor to improve their lot, and advance.   Unfortunately, many of these people caught in the poverty traps are the traditional marginalized populations: blacks, urban poor, single mothers, and immigrants.    When big government decides to cut costs, they target social services  for radical budgetary slashes.   Yet, at what cost?  Education is getting worse, and jails are getting bigger, homelessness is invading the clean suburbs.   And we don’t make the connections readily.   The disenfranchised remain disposable.   As long as they are kept there.  (There where?)

Poverty in Numbers

The Bottom is the biggest part of the pyramid.    If history fails to remind us, we simply have to look at its shape to understand how much power there is in numbers.   If that is not scary enough, the bottom is now becoming a big hole where many in the middle class are slowly slipping into.   The media is full of personal stories about people losing their homes and their jobs and now living in tent communities (see this recent New York Times article about recent evictions in poor communities).   There are lines to food drives of people who had never thought they would end up there.    Economic recovery gets extended every month.   The leaders of this country are in some battle over rhetoric on how to save the American dream.  

We are faced with a huge challenge in America as the numbers at the bottom of the pyramid grows.   The middle class is slipping into the cracks.  Government is scrambling for solutions.   Big businesses are big businesses as usual.   CEOs are giving themselves huge severance packages for failing to run their companies.   America is returning to its pre-World War II shape, excavating deep divisions similar to the civil war era’s.  In all these goings-on in politics and the economy, the poor suffer most. 

Hand-outs

What many of us learned about Haiti is the absence of infrastructure for international aid.   Public outcry generated an an influx of millions for recovery and aid, with no organized system to distribute it.   We found out later that Haiti was a home base for thousands of international aid agencies for years, yet there was no organized system of cooperation and collaboration.  This is hardly old news, as Collier’s in his book, The Bottom Billion would find the same oppressive song sung in the other failed states.  

For many of us, the idea of helping poor people is likened to giving a dollar to a beggar on the subway.  It is a random act of giving.  There is no introspection of where that money would go.  We hope that the beggar get to eat, that the dollar travels far.  I asked myself the same questions during the four years I worked in the welfare system.   Once I was sucked into the system, was I helping to eradicate poverty or was I promoting it?  Was I stuffing the cushion of those who are receiving hand-outs with feathers so they don’t hit the pavement as hard?   Where does generosity of spirit cross the line of true action?

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