Are Schools The victim?

Publication: Mooche News
BY Sophisticated Lady-2004-11-21

W hat is a failing school? How does a school become a so-called "good school"? Schools are just buildings that have no control over what happens to them. When you classify schools as 'good school or bad school', it doesn't really paint an accurate picture of what is at play.

I know 'good school' and 'bad school' are code words, but even in that context the meaning isn't complete. Some schools are aesthetically better than others, but a beautiful school doesn't make a good student. The school by itself is nothing more than a building or a group of buildings.

Doesn't matter if they are old or new buildings, the fact remains they are just buildings and any building can be retrofitted. If you get nothing else from this article at least remember that a school is nothing but a building that has no say in what happens to it. So, never say "that is a good school" or "that is a bad school".

How these buildings are treated is where the debate begins. School buildings like apartment buildings and office buildings are a direct reflection of their management and tenants.

The school board is the owner, the teachers are the managers and the students are the tenants. Bad tenants in a nice apartment building will soon destroy it. Good tenants in a bad apartment building won't be there long. What makes an apartment building bad? Bad owners, managers and tenants.

What makes a school good? Owners who care, managers who care and students who care. How do you fix a situation where there is total breakdown on all levels in an apartment complex? It either has to start with the owner or the tenants.

You change a failed school either at the owners-level or at the tenant-level; that is the school board and the students. The school board has to lay down the law. The owners have to be in charge. Tenants must play by the landlord's rules. The rules protect the teachers, the teachers don't make the rules.

Schools have become places of employment rather than institutions of learning. The school board is responsible for the quality of its teachers. Just like apartment buildings tend to do better when there is a manager living on-site, the same can be said about teachers who live in the community and send their kids to the schools where they teach.

School boards should mandate teachers have a vested interested in the school where they are employed. In other words, if you don't live in the community where you teach, then you should consider moving there.

Resident managers know the tenants better than absentee managers who only come around once a month. Most tenants live where they live because they can't live anywhere else. If you are stuck then act like it. If this is the only school you've got then you need to try to take care of it.

It is unfair the way we treat the dynamics surrounding education. Buildings, tenants and managers are good metaphors but that is all they are. The truth is, external forces have highjacked the education system and polluted it to the point where it has become toxic. The ground is very fertile and the seedlings of conspiracy are already planted.

Why was the federal government so proactive when it came to dismantling functioning school systems but now takes the hands-off approach when there are so many failing systems? I repeatedly ask myself that question since I can relate to it so well. You might say I had a front row seat at the lynching of a functioning school system whose only crime was it wasn't diverse enough.

A good school system that was not diverse enough drew the wrath of the federal government and it got trampled upon. What was it replaced with? A bad school system that is less diverse. This wasn't the intended outcome obviously and there are external forces at play here, so the government isn't entirely the blame.

The government is guilty of not fighting the good fight for a cause that it believed in. The government started the job and quit before finishing it. It loaded folks on the bus, drove them to the transfer point, and dropped them off without telling them they were holding transfers to nowhere.

Schools shouldn't be the battleground where social policy battles are fought but they are. The federal government could correct a terrible mistake it made by declaring the public school systems off limits to the warring factions engaged in America's ongoing social wars.

If you take all the ideology crap out of schools and get back to basics, schools can once again become a place where teachers who want to teach can teach and students who want to learn can learn.