The ten-hour Megabus ride back to Kansas City gave me more than enough time to think back and reflect on the trip individually and collectively. Each one of us had experiences that were unique and highlighted challenges in urban education and the way that TFA teachers are working to combat them. As promised, the rest of this post is dedicated to some of the experiences from various people in our group that I felt were noteworthy.
In one of my earlier posts I talked about the regimen that Urban Prep follows. The students’ ties are always over their top buttons, they have to ask to take their blazers off, they are always on time, etc. Sadie Simon volunteered in an eighth grade classroom at a UNO charter school where the student body was primarily disadvantaged Hispanic students. She commented that a similar structured approach was taken at her school. Her teacher commented that so many students do not have structure at home and the school has discovered that the students perform the best when they have a regimen and know what is expected of them each day. As a group, we discussed how privately run charter schools have adopted structure as a way to try to boost students’ performance. This structure that holds students accountable is found much less frequently in public schools. Sadie also shared with us a very interesting way that her teacher deals with the wide-ranging abilities of his students in the classroom at the same time. It seems like an impossible task to teach all of these students the same material at the same pace without leaving some in the dust or some unchallenged. On the other hand, splitting students into groups based on ability only reinforces the idea in the slower students’ minds that they are incapable of achieving at the level of other students. To combat this issue, Sadie’s teacher has students split up into random groups and teaches the lesson to one, has one do an activity, and one review the previous homework. When the groups rotate, he has some of the kids who struggle stay behind and listen to him teach the lesson again. This is a way to avoid propagating the “smart” group and “dumb” group stereotypes.
While seven of us worked at charter schools, Dani volunteered in a first grade classroom at a Chicago public school. The structure that most of us had in our schools was far from present in Dani’s experience. It’s hard to say if this was entirely due to the age of the students or if the students would have been better behaved if they would have been in an environment such as that at Urban Prep where a premium was put on obedience. Nonetheless, Dani shared that most of her days were spent wrangling six year olds, not helping them with reading or other foundations for the students to build their educations on. After hearing this, I wasn’t entirely surprised. It made me contemplate how students were expected to progress at the same rate and achieve at the level as kids in suburban public schools or private schools when they get behind so early in their educations. Dani’s teacher repeatedly expressed her gratitude for Dani being there. She had upwards of thirty students in one classroom and could not ask for a full-time assistant until she had forty kids! I’m convinced this is the true problem. No matter the way that a school is organized, thirty some first graders in a classroom with one teacher is a problem and the Chicago public schools must get more funding someway or another to hire more help.
I’ve enjoyed other group members and my experiences throughout the trip. Of course I’m biased, but The TFA Chicago trip should never go by the wayside. The achievement gap in urban education is one of the greatest issues facing our country and it’s vastly overlooked.
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