Kids Are Better Than You Think

Does this sound familiar?

Forty years ago a national teachers survey found the most pressing problems in schools were: talking, running in the halls and chewing gum.

Then, very recently, teachers were surveyed again about the biggest problems in the classroom.

This time they cited guns, drugs and assaults on staff.

Every day, versions of these surveys are stuck on bulletin boards of teachers lounges, mentioned in strategic planning sessions for education and used by those who are worried about moral decline.

My clipping about these surveys came from a Spokane Chamber of Commerce publication of a few years ago.

I have kept it in my desk for years.

Recently, Steve Gigliotti, a school board member from Davenport, Wash., sent me a research paper done by Yale University about these surveys.

The research by Barry O’Neill, associate professor in the Yale School of Organization and Management, was quite revealing.

O’Neill spent a year trying to track down teacher surveys from the 1940s that said chewing gum or running or talking was the biggest problem in schools.

“What he found was that there was no survey,” Gigliotti said.

Teachers in the 1940s didn’t say gum was their biggest problem. No comparative studies of schools today vs. 50 years ago could be found.

Although everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Jocelyn Elders has quoted the supposed surveys showing the changing problems in schools, the Yale study found that the list of problems from long ago actually was put together by a born-again Christian businessman from Texas, T. Cullen Davis.

In 1981, Davis assembled his list from his own recollections of Texas schools in the ‘40s. He assembled his list of today’s problems simply by reading newspaper stories.

That’s not to say things haven’t worsened in schools. But the surveys aren’t science and what they imply doesn’t necessarily track with what actually is happening.

This was the point Gigliotti, school board member and father of two girls, wanted to make.

“I remember when I first heard about this supposed survey,” Gigliotti recalled. “It was a number of years ago. I started seeing it cited everywhere, including a recent letter to the editor in your paper.”

That’s not all. Dear Abby has cited it. So have Barbara Bush and the Reader’s Digest.

“Then my superintendent of schools passed along this article from Yale that showed the survey never really existed,” Gigliotti said.

“It got me thinking that this might be a good opportunity to try to get people to stop and take a look at what really is happening in schools.”

Gigliotti knows another side of public education.

His first daughter was valedictorian at Davenport High School. His second daughter, Pam, is carrying a 4.0 average into the final semester of her senior year.

“There are still a lot of kids who are working their tails off and have a good plan for their future,” he said. “But they just aren’t in the news.”

He’s right in many ways.

The public schools are now being highly scrutinized for the actions and failures of a few.

This focus may cloud the more complete picture of what is happening to the better half, and the best.

Spokane School District 81, for example, has struggled all this school year with concerns over at least four students who brought guns to school.

Stories of these incidents raise the hair on the heads of parents and created a buzz about unsafe schools.

The accounts of the guns, while serious, accurate and newsworthy, need to be put in the context of other news from the schools.

For example, look what is happening among the advanced placement students in District 81.

Last May, a record 237 students took advanced placement exams in the district.

Scores achieved by Spokane’s advanced students were higher than the average AP scores in both the state of Washington and the region.

This suggests that many of the best and brightest are managing fine, despite the few celebrated incidents of guns and increased incidents of bad behavior by some of their classmates.

The point is that schools can work, and do work for many kids. And when they don’t, it’s probably because of something besides the frightening, but isolated appearance of a gun.

Back in Davenport, Gigliotti notes that half of this year’s senior class will make the honor roll.

“We have some crime, some drugs, the potential for gangs,” he said. “But the big plus we have is that the community keeps a lot of eyes on kids. There are pretty good odds a kid is not too far from some relatives, or a friend of the family.”

This was the same issue that Yale professor O’Neill finally turned up as the genuine, Number 1 concern of teachers today.

It’s not guns the teachers worry about.

Their biggest worry is that too many parents and others are just apathetic and won’t really pay attention to what happens in school.

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