Educational malpractice

The most recent episode of This American Life , “An Argument,” is devoted to one story: the decision two affluent, Black Brooklyn parents made to send their daughter to a low-income, mostly Black public school, and the years of education (or miseducation) that followed. A 2016 New York Times article (gift link) told the beginning of the story. A Times article (gift link) published earlier this month brings the story up to date. The TAL episode adds details.

Reading the Times articles and listening to the podcast reminded me of what I used to tell my students: whatever form educational malpractice takes, it’s always the student who’s left holding the bag. I think of the daughter in this story, Najya Hannah-Jones, crushed when she fails a statewide eighth-grade algebra exam. It turned out that despite her great grades and the confidence they inspired, she knew very little algebra. What’s more, she had great deficits in her knowledge of fractions and long division.

And I think back to the last freshman composition class I taught, many of whose students had taken AP English in high school. Granted, they hadn’t received test scores that would have exempted them from a college course, but still — I thought it’d be a great class. I began to think differently when I assigned some reading — Betty S. Flowers’s “Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process” and an excerpt from William Zinsser’s “Writing English as a Second Language” — and some short writing.¹ So many of these students were lost. During conferences (that inflated word), I asked, Did you do much reading last year? Did you do much writing last year? No, and no. So many students disappeared from that class. The work, at least at that time, was beyond them.

Whatever form malpractice takes — and I assign far greater blame to teachers and principals and the shitstem in which they’re embedded, not to the Hannah-Joneses, who thought that they were doing the right thing and worked mightily to improve education for everyone in their daughter’s school — it’s always the student who’s left holding the bag. And who, sometimes, is able to trudge their way to real improvement and set the bag down.
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¹ The class was not for second-language learners. I omitted Zinsser’s opening paragraphs about languages and began with “So what is good English — the language we’re here today to wrestle with?” Written English is in many ways a second language for anyone.