The Culture of Incompetence
The Mind-Set That Destroys Inner-City SchoolsBy John CartainaiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2009 John Cartaina
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4401-6413-2Contents
Preface..........................................ixThe Culture of Incompetence......................1The Teacher as a Person..........................13Teacher-Student Rapport:.........................24The Twinkle in the Eye...........................33The Living School................................43Classroom Instruction............................55Messages to the Stakeholders.....................69Epilogue.........................................95
Chapter One
The Culture of Incompetence
Oh Well, That's an Inner-city School
Incompetence is accepted as the norm in poorly-run, inner-city schools. "Oh well, that's Paterson, Chicago, or New York" is a common expression used by teachers and administrators throughout the cities of America. Expectations for success are low due to a history of failure. Failure breeds more and more failure. It feeds upon itself. We assume failure and never expect success.
Visualize an inner-city school with a majority of students from low socioeconomic and sometimes broken families. Some of the students are African-American, and others do not speak English at home. Is your vision similar to one of the Hollywood movies about schools in the inner city? Why is the Lean on Me movie our image rather than an image of students working productively? Some schools are blackboard jungles, but when we accept that image as the norm, we perpetuate the problem and produce more incompetent schools.
Low expectations are compounded by our culture's historic confusion about race and poverty. Are poor people lazy, and do they really want to be poor? Can black children really learn as well as white children? Those questions have haunted our history, and they lay among the muck and silt of any river of change. Try to initiate change, and those sometimes dormant sediments rise from the bottom and cloud the chances of success.
If any initiative is introduced to improve the quality of education, some people simply say, "Be patient, this too shall pass." They are veterans of the inner-city wars, and they know the history of previous efforts. The effort to change is stymied by a failure to recognize the complexity and scope of the problem, which is centuries old and intertwined like a spider's web.
All problems must be attacked simultaneously. Sure, we need new school buildings, but if we don't improve the quality of teachers and administrators, what good will the new science lab be? Yes, we need smaller class sizes, but how much more successful will we be with twenty children from dysfunctional families instead of thirty? If a child is up all night because of an abusive mother and an absent father, will she learn more because there are fewer children in the classroom? Money alone will not solve the problem. Smaller class sizes alone will not solve the problem. Higher pay for teachers alone will not solve the problem. To break the cycle of unequal educational opportunity for inner-city children, we must break the backs of many problems simultaneously. We must attack racism among and between whites, blacks, and Hispanics. We must unchain the grip of sleazy politics from the halls of boards of education. If only one aspect of the problem is addressed, the winds of change are destroyed by the remaining overwhelming problems. Only then can we change the culture of failure and incompetence. Willy-nilly stopgap measures will always fail. The problems of inner-city schooling have historic implications, and there is no magic pill. If we attempt one solution without considering its impact on the other problems, the ignored weeds will strangle the seeds of change. Racism, incompetence, politics, and money must be addressed at the same time.
The core of the struggle to break the cycle of incompetence must include a belief system that all children can learn. Community leaders, administrators, teachers, students, and responsible government agencies must believe in the value and ability of poor children to learn, leave their egos at the entrances of the cities, and concentrate all their energies to redeem this national disgrace. All stakeholders are responsible for the quality of education in inner-city schools and therefore must make choices. Those choices can be responsible, or they could be to bury one's head in the sand and blame someone else for the problems. Let's be responsible for the future generations of American citizens.
The culture of incompetence incestuously breeds itself. It gives grossly inefficient teachers an excuse to continue working the same way. Why? Initiatives for change are either ill conceived or inadequately implemented or funded. So when they fail, incompetent teachers can smugly say, "I told you so." They continue to teach poorly, give everyone a passing grade for substandard work, and the community has a new pool of illiterate adults who help perpetuate a culture of crime in the city-"It's not me, it's the system"; "It's downtown's fault."
I witnessed so many new literacy programs and testing strategies that were heralded as the latest panacea. They were to be the best inventions since sliced bread. Most failed because they were poorly funded, were not supported by the staff or the community, or were devoured by other problems. The incompetent teacher simply bided his time, waiting for the program to fail. His incompetence was rewarded and perpetuated.
Every faculty room has a "Donut Dan" who sits in the corner and complains about parents, students, administrators, and the board of education. His constant complaining masks his incompetence. Every time incompetence is rewarded, Donut Dan wins and teaches another day. Every time we fail, we provide Dan with more ammo for his negativity. When an uncertified, incompetent administrator is appointed, Dan simply throws up his hands and says "it" is the new administrator's fault. When we accept inferior teaching as the norm, we make Dan look like a prophet. The acceptance of the culture of incompetence validates his existence. We justify his sitting in the corner and getting another donut stain on his tie. He is the mascot for the culture of incompetence. When we slay the dragon of incompetence, we will eliminate the necessity for his existence.
Dedicated teachers and administrators fight the pervasive culture of incompetence every day. Instead of rewarding those dedicated teachers, we give them more work: "Please be on an extra curriculum committee"; "Please take this extra troubled child"; "You're the one who can do this report well." How many years can we expect our excellent teachers to bang their heads against the wall? Thousands of young, quality teachers leave the poorer systems, disenchanted and disgusted. They are the people we should nurture and support not the winners in the system of incompetence. The future success of any school system lies in the hands of new, young, energetic teachers. We can't afford to lose them.
I lost an outstanding, young teacher who was not supported or appreciated at a large, comprehensive, inner-city high school. According to an administrator in the school, she wasn't very good. She was intelligent, bold, and displayed initiative to make changes. She was exactly what that administrator didn't want. He wanted someone who would say "Let's keep quiet, maintain the status quo, and just get to 3:00 pm." She moved on to an excellent suburban school where she immediately began teaching an advanced placement course. She wasn't good enough to teach in the failing school, but she was good enough to teach an honors class in an excellent school. Maybe if she had just kept her mouth shut, hadn't expected any change, she would have been evaluated glowingly. Part of the culture of incompetence is the acceptance of inferior teaching as the norm-"What the heck, these kids can't learn anyway."
When I hired that excellent teacher, I had also hired three other young, white women for the same department. Silly me, I hadn't checked their race or gender. When I came to visit the four of them, the security guard told me that some people in the school were guessing how long the four white women would stay. The implied message for most schools is always the same: "Give us some big men, preferably dark in color and skilled in Spanish. Only they can handle the kids. We don't care if they can teach; can they control `them'?" We must ensure that great teachers are not like salmon swimming upstream, struggling to reach the top of the waterfall, and then too exhausted to continue.
Some poor teachers who stay become administrators. They learn the system well-keep your mouth shut, play the game, fill out the paperwork. They align themselves with the correct political group in power, and get appointed to positions in order to get out of the classroom. They run a school and are supposed to exhibit educational leadership. However, they are followers who wouldn't recognize quality instruction if it bit them on the behind. Some incompetent supervisors haven't left their offices "downtown" for so long, they would need a map to find the schools in their districts. No one would know they were alive if they didn't pass around a meaningless memo several times a year. They never cause "trouble," and remain in their jobs forever.
No supervisor or principal observed me during my first ten years of teaching. At that time, many inner-city districts were just looking for warm bodies to fill positions; they were not concerned about the quality of instruction, just with the body count. Some administrators raised the level of incompetence to an art form.
One administrator collected plan books and asked bilingual students to open the books to the last page with writing on it. Then the young girl or boy used the administrator's stamp on the current week's lesson plans. Why choose a bilingual student? Because she didn't know what she was reading. The administrator lasted for a long time in the district. She was politically connected, and when the school and parents finally got disgusted, the superintendent simply transferred her to another school. Her incompetence was rewarded.
Communities must hire visionary, charismatic superintendents for inner-city school districts. Children need superintendents who believe in their abilities to learn and succeed. People need to rally behind this leader and trust that he has a mission along with the ability and stamina to see it through. Arrogance should be checked at the board of education's door. The superintendent must be willing to work with the existing staff and community. He must be humble enough to recognize that one person does not have all the answers. Troubled districts don't need bullies or egomaniacs with the my-way-or-the-highway mentality. A good superintendent does not want the job to pad his resume; he wants to make positive, sustainable change. Such a candidate is difficult to find for boards of education, because the pool of superintendents shrinks every year. However, if the political culture strangling districts is eliminated, more and more people will be attracted to the position. Currently, many superintendents are products of the political system where back-scratching and arranging quid pro quos replace vision and integrity.
A great superintendent or principal in a district that is predominately black or Hispanic doesn't have to be black or Hispanic. That's racism at its insidious worst. We need the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to remind boards of education that they need to hire based on the content of a man's character not the color of his skin. If the mentality is that a black school must have a black principal, then the community is cutting off its nose to spite its face. The small pool of qualified candidates for the position drastically shrinks when we limit the list of hires to one ethnic or racial group. Students need quality not color; they need to expand their horizons not limit them. Do communities that have that mentality really have the success of its children first and foremost on its agenda? Or do politics, racism, and hatred of anything white cloud its vision. It's about the children and no one or nothing else.
To break away from the culture of incompetence, we must take the appointment of teachers, administrators, and supervisors out of the hands of politicians. They do not have the right to dole out educational jobs as patronage to loyal supporters; I don't care how far back in our history this practice has been active. Because it has been done for so long doesn't make it right. It was wrong "back in the day," and it is wrong today. In addition to examining potential principals' resumes, trace their ties to local, state, or national politicians.
We must limit tenure for principals, administrators of schools, and all central office supervisors. These people affect the lives of too many children every day. They are not justices of the Supreme Court of the United States; they should not receive life appointments. Principals should be groomed in the same mold as superintendents. They should be instructional leaders and organized managers. They must believe and trust that all students can learn. Again, arrogance and ego need to be left at the schoolhouse door. Principals need to nurture and support teachers rather than conduct power play exercises. The message must be simple: "I demand quality instruction, will support sound educational projects, and will praise every positive act."
The principal must be a highly visible person in the school. I've been in schools where the main office counter is like a Berlin Wall. Administrators live happily on one side and believe that the school on the other side has no problems. Teachers and students have as much success seeing an administrator as East Germans had climbing over the wall during the Cold War.
Additionally, there should be written and oral tests for all administrative positions. The results of the tests should be made public, so everyone knows which candidate should get the next available opening. The written test must be created by a committee of trained professionals from the local district, university staff, and educational experts from the community. Oral tests should be conducted by a committee of teachers, administrators, and parents.
Unions and district officials should establish merit pay for teachers and administrators. The criteria could include, but should not be limited to, evaluations and observations, attendance, punctuality, parental contact, curricular and instructional initiatives, and extra curricular activities. Merit pay should be above and beyond normal contractual raises. If we want quality people, we must recognize their efforts and accomplishments.
We must fight to keep excellent teachers. Give new teachers buddies from within the school who can see them through difficult times. Professional development aimed at practical classroom experiences should be provided for all new teachers and should provide a support system for all teachers in their first three years of service. They should meet regularly with new teachers from other grades in the school and even from other schools in the district. They need to vent their frustrations, exult in their successes, and listen to fellow colleagues who are in a similar situation. New teachers should not feel alone and isolated in the classroom. They must feel that despite socioeconomics, decrepit housing, and unsafe streets, they have a chance to reach children who really need help.
I was very wet behind the ears as a first-year teacher. My enthusiasm was certainly tested by my lack of both preparation and supplies and an abundance of students. Many new teachers struggled along with me during that year. We went to a local bar/restaurant every Friday after school with some veteran teachers for food, drink, and conversation. Those venting sessions really helped me through that first difficult year. Like me, new teachers need support from all quarters.
University professors from local institutions should be hired to conduct some support sessions, because this places accountability at the appropriate levels. Education professors who prepared students for teaching must then support them in the field. If a professor's original message was accurate and effective, then encouragement, support, and refinement of the message are all that are needed.
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Excerpted from The Culture of Incompetenceby John Cartaina Copyright © 2009 by John Cartaina. Excerpted by permission.
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