Hang on, this is going to be a long one.
A warning: the following is an opinion. As a journalist, I
don’t like having those. Understand that opinions change and evolve as time
does, and please respect the place I was coming from whilst writing this. Also
I use Oxford commas, don’t judge me. I do not advocate for any candidate or
particular legislation or anything beyond dialogue. Want that to be clear
before I proceed.
So last week I shared a post from a Carlynton alum that I
attached some comments to. I was under the impression that the commentary was
an assessment of the district I graduated from in the aim of opening a dialogue
on the faults in the education system as a whole.
Boy was I wrong.
I completely own up to sharing it, and further to
misrepresenting a blanket approval from me of this statement with added
commentary. I thought it was (and, full disclosure, I didn’t read the whole
thing that late at night) an attempt to open dialogue and I shared to push
further the reach of that dialogue. I also did it as a way to promote someone I
felt at the time should be heard by my reach. I recognize that the alum can
stand behind what was said as an opinion, but I want to make it clear: that
opinion expressed in the piece isn’t mine.
The fact of the matter is when you share across your stage
or your platforms, the assumption is that anything you further share you agree
with. I need to add the whole “RTs do not equal endorsements” bit to my Twitter
for this reason, but I’m not here to preach about social media, I’m here to
preach about what my views are on the education system and what I meant to say
originally.
I graduated two years ago from the Carlynton School
District. If you’re fairly new to my adventures, the Carlynton School District
is a tiny (and I mean tiny – my graduating class was 92 strong) school district
five miles outside Downtown Pittsburgh. I’m currently pursuing a B.A. Journalism
degree at Point Park University, a subject I consider a passion and a school I
consider the best decision I’ve made.
The original alum commented on apathy at my alma mater and
said quite bluntly (and quoting an unnamed source) that “this place is a
disease.” I won’t argue that apathy exists within the education system but I
have to argue that the source misidentified the problem. This place – being Carlynton
High School – is not the disease. It has the disease that comes along with
being (against its own will) a part of a governmental system that puts numbers
ahead of people and tests ahead of education.
I’ve said for years privately that the strength of the
Carlynton School District lies in its faculty and students. Teachers (and I’m
dear friends with some education majors, I count them here also) don’t get into
such a cutthroat business without a passion or a drive to accomplish something
greater. It’s a drive to change what they experienced, or to provide something
greater than themselves to their students. If you don’t have a drive to change
it or to affect some sort of change, you’re not going to last in education long.
You. Burn. Out.
I want to challenge the original poster to think about what
honestly was said: was the lack of challenge you described you had experienced
your senior year a result of climbing an academic pinnacle as I had, or was it
because of a chosen apathy on the part of the participant? You said you chose
against taking Advanced Placement yet expected the same level challenge at a
general level class, what did you expect? I am genuinely curious.
I’m not going to lie, by my senior year I wanted to get out
of Carlynton but that was because by that point I felt I had outgrown it and I had a taste of the real world and college
life and wanted to move forward beyond the K-12 system. It’s a system that
I strongly believe is designed that way for a reason so you can make a clean
cut when you walk across that stage and be ready mentally to take on the next
step, whatever you determined that to be.
If I didn’t feel challenged in the classroom, I did this potentially
self-destructive thing I do in college where I get CRAZY involved with stuff to
challenge me further in a way outside the classroom and to challenge the ways I
think and the means by which I communicate. I’m not saying it’s the best way of
doing things, but I will say that the challenges I didn’t find in a classroom I
found elsewhere through in-class resources.
I want to step back for a moment and talk about resources.
Carlynton doesn’t have many because, well, it’s tiny and is not the wealthiest
district. But isn’t that a shame to say? I mean, seriously. Should size even
matter when you talk about resources for students? Why does the per-student
cost to educate vary from district to district and why should resources be tied
to standardized testing?
Further, why are we allocating resources with preference to
certain groups? It’s a television trope to have schools buy new equipment every
year for a football team while the band uses decades-old instruments. I’m not
saying that is true within Carlynton, but I have heard stories along these
lines at other schools.
Also, why is the education system still structured in the
way it was during the Enlightenment where local government meant something? It
makes NO sense to penalize a district’s funding because of standardized test
results, frankly those that struggle should be given MORE resources to bring
them up to speed in my humble opinion.
Single A designation should not be a death sentence, nor
should it inspire any sort of victim situation. It doesn’t at Carlynton (with
the only exception I can think of being an oddly specific school board meeting
in 2013 or 2014 where the justification by the superintendent for class scheduling
problems was “well, we’re a single-A school, you’re lucky you get to have
electives) but I know it’s true in some other districts. Being small means more
individualized and community-based education.
Parents pick a school for its resources, and I’m proud to
say my family found a district whose nonphysical resources (teachers, programs,
etc.) are incredibly abundant. We have fall plays and spring musicals and 19
sports. How could a school of less than a thousand do it except by having
people who care and others who can stretch a dollar?
Am I saying Carlynton fell behind? No.
What I am saying is that as a whole the education system has
fallen behind. Money that could have gone towards offering unique electives and
challenging students’ ways of thinking is instead going toward mandated
remediation on testing, diagnostic programs, and compliance with further
regulated yet seemingly innumerable and indistinguishable revenue-sucking
mandates. It’s not the Carlynton School Board or the principal deciding this,
it’s someone at the federal and state level telling these people they have to.
Do you know how often I was given diagnostic testing ahead
of the Keystone or PSSA exams? Nearly monthly. Imagine, that’s at least 10 days
outside of the classroom every year. Don’t forget, several of these tests were
multi-day, and you had to do some sort of buildup prep to the diagnostics, and
then the build up to those tests...
This testing obsession is classroom time spent chasing your
tail in an effort to save the school that you’re being set aside from. It’s
circular and so, so wrong. And let’s not forget those diagnostic tests are
expensive to use, and could go to, I don’t know, journalism books, or
psychology books?
So where am I going with this? It’s no myth that the
education system is broken (at least by my assessment) but it is a myth that
the individual district is to blame. Do you feel trapped? Good, it’s the system
that got you to the point where you can realize it. Challenge that system.
I was reminded recently that the successes I’ve had and the
career I’ve chosen didn’t come from the classroom. I never once took a
journalism class, and it wasn’t for lack of trying either. The teacher of the
journalism course did pull me aside at one point and told me I wouldn’t have
benefitted from the curriculum. Why? In part, it was out of date books and a
lack of resources to do real journalism. But at the end of the day, it’s
important to remember this positive: my love of radio stemmed from a gifted
education teacher passing along the information for a program at WYEP.
Yeah, Carlynton didn’t teach me a lede from a nut graph but
can you seriously blame the high school for that? There should be no reasonable
expectation that every profession should have an offered elective that prepares
you for that individual, specialized profession. It’s unreasonable.
What Carlynton did offer me was the access to that gifted
teacher who shared the WYEP project, or to that band director who let me try my
hand at announcing, or that English teacher who (and I still don’t understand
how this happened) let me run a newspaper as a high school senior or the drama
teacher who rescued me from hating theater after a bad experience and let me
anchor the TV morning announcements after being a technical director there, and
I could go on but hopefully you get the point.
Was I saying to myself junior year “dang I wish I could drop
out and move on to college”? Of course. What teenager wants to be a cog in a
politicized state-level machine that hasn’t been working well?
But why do you stick around? Two key reasons in my case:
because your end goal is a diploma so you can keep moving on to that liberal
arts school in the city, and you stay out of respect for how you came to that
conclusion.
The reason you want to leave high school in the first place
is because you discovered the ‘real world’ a teacher on the inside helped share
with you. In other words, you can’t realistically wish to be a part of a
different world if you had never heard of that other world in the first place.
So what was draining about Carlynton? The public school
system. The helplessness you feel on a daily basis where the decisions are made
for you in either a board meeting or some faraway marble castle in Harrisburg.
It’s not some sort of deeply engrained lackadaisical work ethic in the teachers
or administrative support staff, it’s an apathy at the extreme top that
trickles its way down to resources at the feet of those who truly care.
If Carlynton didn’t challenge you, it’s you that failed. Not
because it was supposed to consistently hit you with ridiculous workloads or
whatever effort you expected of it but because you didn’t seek more. In the
real world, people don’t work with you or for you. You have to seek out your
own challenges or support for what it is you’re trying to do.
It’s a lesson I feel this alum missed. By choosing to enter
and remain in this supposedly toxic environment (read: it isn’t) then
complaining afterwards it didn’t help you, apparently you hadn’t sought those
challenges out through the system? I don’t know, I can only guess your
position, but from mine I feel like there is some action on the participant’s
part that is missing here.
I know this much, however: the reason I got where I am is I
sought out and sucked up every opportunity I could inside and outside the
classroom. There isn’t any professor who asks you to become Editor-in-Chief of
your campus newspaper your freshman year. It’s Josh Croup and your friends who
you’ve surrounded yourself with who convince you to take that leap. It’s the
professor who tells you you shouldn’t be doing it.
This is probably the longest post I’ve written in a long
while but I wanted to make this incredibly clear: I can’t endorse the notion
that Carlynton is some sort of wretched wasteland where dreams go to die or
whatever yarn that you want to spin. It’s a wonderful place where teachers do
the best they can with what they have. It’s a place where you have to find your
own path because that’s how the real world works. It’s a place where you have
to seek a challenge, you can’t expect it to be served to you because that’s not
how the world works.
If there’s a problem, it’s the lack of resources allotted to
these base-level programs because of a flawed administrative/governmental
system. I’m not endorsing anarchy, I just want to start a responsible dialogue.
Comment if you’d like, I only delete straight profanity.
