Caste and Class in the Classroom Part 3

Maestro Harrell plays Randy, an intelligent and enterprising student at a Baltimore public school, on "The Wire".

Today's trivia question to prepare you for the “Clash of Civilizations”.
According to Marxist theory, what is the “haute bourgeoisie”?
Click here and Scoll down to "Interests" for the answer.
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I received this letter recently. (Irrelevant material indicated by […] has been deleted.)

"[…] I attended Knox high school a little over a decade ago. While I currently reside in Illinois, my family still lives in Starke Co., Indiana. I found your site quite interesting on many different levels. […] I also found interesting is the income of Mr. Condon for being principal of Knox Sr. High School. You see, I am currently enrolled in college in Illinois, but while attending Knox Sr. High, I was forced to drop out of school. Mr. Condon didn't make exceptions to rules with students that have a lack of parents in their lives. Although I attended school every day, I was also late because I worked a full time job at a factory 2nd shift, and my friends would pick me up 5 miles out of town in the country and bring me to school. Therefore, with me raising myself, working full time and attending high school full time, I was tardy often. Nearly everyday he would call me to his office and give me the lecture of being on time. I explained my situation to him, but he didn't care. I wasn't his problem, nor were the other record number of dropouts in his first two years in term. Now I will get to the point. Seeing his salary as high as it is, I find it unfortunate that the state wastes so much money on someone that doesn't take the time to care about his students, and maybe try to work with them on their situations rather than sit back, collect the salary as it rolls in, and discipline students to show an effort of work ethic, an expressing the lack of better judgment."

This letter is an interesting confirmation of the ideas set forth in my earlier blogs Caste and Class in the Classroom Part 1 and Fixing the High School. Our dropout rate is, at least in part, a symptom of the disconnect between students legitimate needs and the administration’s apparent indifference to those needs. The administrations attitude is that the students must conform to the schedule and rules of the school. My reader here may very well ask, “ Well what is wrong with that? Shouldn’t students learn to be on time, conform to the schedule, conform to the rules?” in this blog I want to examine this very question.

One of the sub plots in HBO’s Peabody Award winning series, The Wire, is the abysmal inner city Baltimore public schools. It is fascinating that the teachers and administrators are depicted as skillful, intelligent, caring, and hardworking. Likewise students are shown to have intelligence and drive. In spite of the great personal qualities of the staff and the students it is nevertheless a terrible mess. Knox is in a similar state albeit not so strikingly severe. I think that Mr. Condon is skillful, intelligent, caring, and hardworking. But I also believe that he did a disservice to our letter writer and a great many other similarly situated students. A great many of our students don’t have the luxury of conforming to middle class expectations.

What are some of these middle class expectations? We assume that a student is financially supported. We assume that a student will be able to conform to the school’s schedule. We assume that a student will be able to catch the bus. These assumptions are all correct when we are dealing with a middle class family. But what about the student that is self-supporting and works the second shift and consequently is tardy every day? Survival is more important than not being tardy.

I suggest that our school needs to rethink the middle class assumptions that underlie the present system. Our letter writer is in college today, not because of our school, but in spite of our school.

Doesn’t it seem terrible that it is possible to make such a statement?

Tootsie Duvall plays Edward J. Tilghman Middle School assistant principal Marcia Donnelly on "The Wire."

Treating Teachers like Crap

One would hope that the Knox School Board could aspire to a level of honor equal to their mascot "The Redskins". Ironically the School Board demonstration of honor is more akin to that of "The Whiteskins", General Howard and the Government treaty-breakers.

The Knox teachers belong to a union that negotiates a contract with the School Board. The last agreement reached was for 2 years, last year and this year. The teacher’s accepted a very low pay increase: 1% increase the first year and no increase the second year. Given that the cost of living keeps increasing about 3% or 4 % per year this was a reduction in pay in constant dollars. There was a reason that the teachers accepted this poor pay package. The School Board pleads poverty and at that time the revenues were reduced and the budget was stressed. Perhaps you remember the local headlines? There was a few hundred thousand dollar decrease in revenues. The situation seemed dire so the teachers sacrificed.

The teachers’ negotiating team had seen this situation in the past. What happened in the past was that the missing money later showed up. So there was a clause added to the contract that specified that if the administrators later got a raise, then the teachers would get a matching percentage raise. Seems fair enough doesn’t it?

It turned out that extra money did appear. Of course there were not any headlines to correct the earlier headlines. So you never heard about that, did you? But suddenly there was a nice surplus. So the School Board decided that they really wanted to give the administrators a raise, but they really didn’t want to honor their agreement with the teachers. The answer was that the administrators all got an extra contribution into their 401k-retirement plan equal to 4.5% of their annual pay.

Now, I ask you, I this honest or honorable behavior? I think this is cheating, dishonest, and dishonorable. I suppose the School Board thinks that they have pulled off a clever deal. If so, their joy is that of the crook, the con artist or the thief. Is this the way that we want our School Board to represent us?

Knox : Average Teacher Salary: $44,200
Kankakee Valley: Average Teacher Salary: $49,200
North Judson: 2006-07 Average Teacher Salary: $44,900
Oregon-Davis: Average Teacher Salary: $42,700
Winamac: Average Teacher Salary: $44,772
LaPorte: Average Teacher Salary: $47,200
Plymouth: Average Teacher Salary: $48,300
Valparaiso: Average Teacher Salary: $53,400

The only school in our area that has worse pay for teachers is the truly pathetic Oregon-Davis. Also O-D is the only school with a worse Real Graduation Rate than Knox. (See earlier blog, How’s the High School Doing? The 800 pound gorilla.) If a really sharp teacher wants a job, would they accept a job at Knox, or Plymouth, or Valparaiso?

It is interesting to break down the elementary, middle and high school pay differences.
Averages by school:
High School: Salary: $40,113 Age: 40
Middle School: Salary: $42,693 Age 42
Elementary School: Salary: $45,154 Age 45
As you can see the High School has a problem with teacher retention.

The salary information for school administration is not available on the web. I have emailed klane@doe.state.in.us for this public information. I will post this information ASAP.

Here is the information that I requested from the state:
Kimberly Knott $89,500
James Condon $82,232
August Gappa $67,036
Glenn Barnes $58,900
Joseph Carey $74,000
Stephen Cronk $74,420
David Miller $64,999

Caste and Class in the Classroom Part 2

...................... The SUPERBOWL in 1922 ....................
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Today's trivial trivia question.
1869 was a first for what 2 American sports?
Click here and Scoll down to "Interests" for the answer.
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How middle-class identity holds down the performance of our school, resulting in low SAT scores and poor college attendance.

From time to time exceptional individuals apply for teaching positions at Knox. Often the applicant is the spouse of a professional or manager recently transferred to this region. The applicant may have been “Teacher of the Year” in a prominent suburban school or have some other professional distinction. Personally, I lust for that sort of teacher for our students. However, it is sad but true, these teachers generally don’t get hired. If they make it past the initial hiring obstacles (difficult for any teacher with experience) they often get shot down in the final stages in staff-review. This is a committee composed of peer teachers that makes and reviews hiring recommendations for the Principals. The comment most often heard is, “They wouldn’t like it here.” or “They wouldn’t be comfortable here.”(See note below)* Of course what is really meant is “We wouldn’t be comfortable with somebody that outstanding working in the classroom next-door.”

Knox schools have an unofficial hire-local policy. That is another way of saying hire someone with the same class identity to which we now hold. A Knox High School graduate will generally be shown hiring preference. Well, OK, let’s be honest, they will have to get in line behind the families of the School Board. But in any case, newly hired teachers are generally well within the local comfort zone. The outstanding applicant from Barrington, Illinois isn’t going to compete strongly against this hire-locals attitude. Ironically, here we see middle-class bias morph into a sort of self-destructive “caste-like” behavior of a minority lower class. The Knox middle class isn’t very self-confidant, suspecting they might be “out-classed”.

By embracing insular and mediocre middle-class values, Knox High School has become very comfortable with mediocre performance: mediocre performance from the educational professionals due to lack of competition, lack of decent examples of professional excellence, weak administrative leadership, and a school board hostile to teachers: also, mediocre performance from the students given weak academic challenges, low expectations, and a lack of decent examples of academic excellence.

Parents are also discouraged from higher expectations for their children. If their child wanted to apply to a prestigious Ivy League college, neighbors and friends would accuse the family of elitism, of trying to be superior. They would be told: Indiana schools are certainly good enough, if not even better. Of course, Notre Dame’s the best. Those Eastern schools are dangerous, liberal places where your child will get all sorts of wrong ideas. It seems odd that in any dusty, destitute village in Africa, a parent would say that their ultimate dream for their child would be to go to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Yet in Knox these places are somehow undesirable. That is the irony of Knox’s embrace of the “good enough”.

Watch for upcoming Blog on “Treating Teachers like Crap”.

*(Note) This so-called reasoning is nearly identical to the governmental board’s I described earlier in On the History of the Negro in Knox Part 5 when the board declined to interview a professional candidate because they “might” be African American.

Caste and Class in the Classroom Part 1

Today's trivia question to prepare you for the “Clash of Civilizations”.
What is creole language?
Click here and Scoll down to "Interests" for the answer.
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I have been discussing the low graduation / dropout rate and the low college attendance / low SAT score problems. The subject of this blog is the closely related concepts of caste and class and the negative impact of caste and class on Knox’s educational environment especially the dropout rate.

We ordinarily associate caste problems with India and don’t consider this to be an issue in America. John Uzo Ogbu described “caste-like” behavior in black students as a major factor in educational underachievement. Ogbu described a phenomenon he called "oppositional identity" to the mainstream culture. Oppositional identity is a fancy set of words for what might be called a “chip on the shoulder” or “pride” or “inferiority complex”. Caste-like behavior is common among certain lower socioeconomic groups in Knox and is a big factor in dropping out.

In 1950 we would have easily recognized caste-like behavior patterns among the recent Appalachian transplants, AKA hillbillies* (see comment 4 below). The Appalachian students brought cultural attitudes to school that got them in trouble and often caused them to drop out. Attitudes like low academic confidence, anti-intellectualism, and distain for mainline cultural values. Low academic confidence combined with “southern pride” and we ended up “with a chip on the shoulder” or "oppositional identity to the mainstream culture”. These students had difficulty getting along socially and academically. We have the same sort of problem today. However it is no longer an easily identified set of Appalachian transplants with a distinctive dialect. There is a more diverse and ethnically complex socioeconomic set that exhibits the same caste-like, self-destructive behavioral patterns that we had to deal with in the 1950s.

Caste-like behavior is a problem of self-identity. Of course there is not an actual caste structure in Knox or in our schools. Using the word caste is only useful insofar as it accurately describes how a sub-cultural group’s attitudes hinder their advancement in mainstream society.

While there is no caste system in Knox there most certainly is a class system. Class behavior goes the other direction. Class behavior by the cultural mainstream is directed against those same students that exhibit caste-like behaviors. This creates a non-virtuous cycle that exacerbates the caste problem. There is a tendency to identify students as being from “good families” or “bad families”. Judgment is based upon little clues like non-vaccination, non-payment of book rental, free lunch participation, and prior family history with the school. There is, at a minimum, a subconscious tendency to more readily accept poor performance from a difficult student from a “bad family”.

I have received two interesting comments to my earlier blog, “How’s the High School Doing? Bright Kids. Middle Class Kids.” One comment praised the school because their children have done quite nicely. The other comment bitterly condemned the school for not caring for their children on the basis of class. This illustrates the great fault line that runs down the middle of our school. I believe this is the most significant contributor to the dropout problem. Our school has been run as a middle class sanctuary. The values of the middle class may be worthwhile and even, at times, virtuous. The challenge is to recognize that the students in our school system don’t all hold these values, yet still give them a decent education.

Incidentally, John Uzo Ogbu is the fellow that pushed for Ebonics, the classroom use of African American Vernacular English. I know how hilarious our community finds the idea of Ebonics. We also wouldn’t think of taking off school on M. L. King day. Nor would we consider getting rid of the “Redskins” mascot. Thus, our middle-class demonstrates our own caste-like behavior. As I am a member of this class I will say that “We” hold ourselves back. Our own middle class "oppositional identity" with its attendant self-destruction is in full bloom. My next blog: "Caste and Class in the Classroom Part 2", how middle class identity holds down the performance of our school, resulting in low SAT scores and poor college attendance.