If you've ever spoken to principals about the problems in their schools, you've probably been told that people on the outside can't really understand what goes on in school. At a meeting of teachers, you'd hear the same thing: "If you haven't walked a mile in our shoes ... " And of course they're all right. Fixing what's wrong with our schools means looking at problems from as many angles as possible. But one group whose opinions probably would not be solicited as the students who are unsuccessful in school. That's too bad. The education system is apparently failing them, so their point of view ought to be especially valuable. In Lives on The Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America's Underprepared (New York: The Free Press, 1989, Penguin Viking Paperback, 1990), Mike Rose helps us to see what these kids see and understand what they need.
Rose, associate director of the UCLA Writing Programs, has had plenty of experience with students who are not successful in school. He used to be one himself. And he's gone on to 20 years of teaching students at the edges of our education system, from fourth and fifth graders classified as slow readers and Vietnam veterans trying to finish high school to shut-ins he taught via telephone.
Our school system wastes people by underestimating them; it is oriented towards finding out what kids can't do rather than what they can do -- especially if the kids are poor and disadvantaged. And then, with all good intentions, schools remediate these kids to death. Rose found this right away, in his first teaching assignment with fourth and fifth graders in a largely Hispanic East L.A. school.
According to the assessments, Rose's students were 15 of the poorest readers in the school. But when Rose got them writing, some of the kids produced remarkable things. Here is what one boy wrote: "He is going to the world of rotten people. He is rotting already. He is getting scared. He is seeing rotted people. He don't know he is rotting. Already they are getting uglier." This isn't the kind of vision we think belongs in a 10-year-old's mind, but the child who wrote it has a powerful sense of what words can do -- and he doesn't belong on the bottom level in an inner-city school.
Our narrow tests are often responsible for misplacing kids. And the results are likely to follow a youngster from grade to grade and school to school, ensuring that the diagnosis -- or misdiagnosis sticks.
Schools compound the problem by sticking the "poorest" students with the least interesting and inventive lessons; that's called remediation. Rose found that the language-arts text for his students consisted of mostly grammar drill: Fill-in the blank with the correct noun or verb, identify the type of sentence and so on. This kind of thing is deadly dull - and of questionable value -- for anyone. It's especially wrong-headed for youngsters for whom English is a foreign language and who might already be having trouble. And it should be no surprise if a steady diet of this kind of thing leads such students to tune out, fall behind - and turn off to all reading and writing.
The result: Unless these children are lucky (as Rose says he was), they allow themselves to be defined by the system when they are very young. And they probably grow into the definition. So much, Rose observes, for equal opportunity in education: If the kids Rose taught in East L.A. "had their equal chance, [they] forfeited it," he says, "before leaving the fourth grade."
Rose is not simply a critic of the rigid systems of evaluation and teaching that often misdefine people on the boundaries. He's hopeful because he has everywhere found students who believe in the power of education to change their lives and who act on their belief - like Willie, the ex-convict in Rose's class of high-school dropouts, or Lilia, the "slow learner" from the neighborhood where Rose grew up, who is now an undergraduate at UCLA And he's hopeful because he has found teachers capable of teaching these students. When the system nearly trashed him, some of his teachers saved him. They were the teachers who understood that teaching is not standing up in front of the room and talking at students (and expecting them to get it all at the same time and in the samed way). They understood that teaching is talking with students; Rose calls it "a conversation."
Rose doesn't have a program for reforming our schools. But he does talk about how we need our system more flexible to accommodate students who come to it from outside the cultural mainstream. And he talks about how teachers need to rethink the ways they look at students' mistakes so they can analyze and understand the cultural assumptions or the logic that often lies behind the mistakes.
Is he a soft-headed apologist for incompetence? Is he confusing making kids feel good about themselves with helping them to achieve results? Not at all. Rose believes we must expect to get results for underprepared, underprivileged, underclass students as well as for children of the middle class. And he is right. We can't afford to have these kids give up on school, and we will encourage them to do so if we go on giving them more of what's already failing them. Paying attention to Mike Roses hopeful, generous book could help us do it right.