In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to ensure “full educational opportunities as our first national goal.” Since that time, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2002) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015) have sought to uphold those ideals by increasing accountability and expanding access. While both have brought about positive change and exposed more challenges and barriers, neither has solved every problem. And, in the past two decades, issues surrounding education have become increasingly contentious and politicized.
Those featured in the Spring 2021 issue of Wabash Magazine represent only a fraction of the hundreds of Wabash alumni in the field of education. They have chosen to sacrifice to do the good work of teaching in a profession with increasingly less status, greater demands, higher pressure, and higher stakes. They may not have solutions for every problem, but they are change makers, innovators, and day-in-day-out creatures of compassion who are building the next generations of thinkers, doers, and creators.
For centuries school has largely followed the Little House on the Prairie learning model. August to May, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., four-walled classrooms, teachers giving the lecture in the front, quiet students following instructions, staying in line, right answers and wrong. Graduate, get more education, and then a job. And it’s been hugely successful. For some.
“We try to take 100 kids with differences in how they process and engage in learning and put them in 10 boxes. That’s fundamentally where we went wrong,” says Kevin Chavous ’78, president of academic, policy, and external affairs of Stride K12, Inc. “If you put 100 kids with 100 different challenges in 10 boxes, you’re going to have problems. That’s why two-thirds of our nation’s kids aren’t where they should be when they graduate.
“The focus became more on running efficient educational systems and structures, as opposed to tailoring our approach to education for each child.” Ideally, Chavous believes, “the future of education is in personalized learning—even in a system that may have 100,000 students.
”That’s not as easy as it sounds. Schools and school districts are complex infrastructures regardless of whether they are large or small, rural or urban, private, charter, public, magnet, or online. Schools are full of complex humans of all ages that have their own unique sets of needs, desires, and frameworks that define how they view and interact with each other and the world.
Part of both NCLB and ESSA is accountability to state and national departments of education. Some of that accountability comes in the form of national and state standards, as well as standardized testing, which has its own complex infrastructure that varies from state to state. Many schools in many states are considered “failing.”
Unfortunately, there is not an endless supply of money for schools to address many of the problems causing them to be defined as failing.
“You have to allocate those resources as best you can,” says Artie Equihua ’89, former teacher and administrator, and now chief human resource officer for Crown Point Community School Corporation in Indiana. “But you always want more. You’re left with this burning desire to just do more and more.”
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“The most important part about school is the teachers in the classroom, but there are so many factors that influence what happens in the classroom that have to be right,” says Patrick McAlister ’10, who serves as the director of the Office of Education Innovation for the City of Indianapolis. “Schools have budgets, contracts, and vendors they have to manage. They have funding sources to manage and report on.”
Many schools have seen community need and, as a result, taken on more responsibility as service providers for students and families.
“In Atlanta, we designed and started a whole wraparound service wing,” says Tyler Griffin ’13 who taught in urban Atlanta before becoming the dean for curriculum and instruction at Brooklyn Emerging Leaders Academy in Brooklyn, New York. “We had groceries. We had places for students to wash their clothes. We had additional social workers.”
“Schools have become community hubs,” says McAlister. “They serve roles that families need and facilitate connections to services, too. If you come from a place of privilege, you may not need or even recognize all of the different access points that schools provide.
”Equihua points to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which he learned about in psychology classes at Wabash. The foundation of the pyramid is the physiological needs—food, water, warmth, rest; followed by safety and security; and topped with belongingness and love needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization.“As educators, we see this and we feel it. We experience it as we interact with our students,” Equihua says. “When they leave the stability of the school, they may go home to a very unpredictable environment. So, the best we can do is just make school the safest, most enjoyable place they could want to be.
And that could be something as simple as providing clothing, shoes, and food.”Those basic needs must be addressed before students can move up the pyramid toward feeling a sense of belonging, accomplishment, or fulfillment.
“There’s a whole teaching technique based on engaging kids who suffer from trauma,” says Chavous. “And it can be the trauma of poverty, abuse, and can even be associated with living in an environment where their brains simply do not have adequate time to rest.”Chavous explains that a child who grows up with his or her brain in a constant state of activity rather than being allowed to rest, develop, and grow the right way often displays behavioral, social, and emotional challenges. “The result is more anxiety, more social connectivity problems,” Chavous says, “All these things also impact a young person’s ability to sit still and digest the traditional lecture format used in so many schools.”
“One thing I’ve learned from my students is as they get older, they actually need adults in their lives more than when they’re younger,” says Chris Lazarski ’94, a teacher at Wauwatosa West High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “Coming up through high school can be very stressful and difficult. Everyone’s asking you what you want to do, and where you want to go to school, and what you’re going to study. You have friendships, and those relationships shift. You change friends or friend groups. There are all kinds of things going on.
”Brandon McKinney ’10has always taught and worked in high-needs schools—similar to the schools he attended while growing up. Now as an assistant principal at Alliance College-Ready Public Schools in Los Angeles, California, he places high value in listening.
“They just need to be heard,” McKinney says. “I tell them, ‘When it’s just you and me, you can say whatever you need to say, just get it out.’ And they really appreciate that. I don’t care about their choice of language. What I really care about is hearing how they are feeling. Then I can decipher that message. Right there, when my kids are having a moment, they need to feel heard. We can work on the professional language later.”
McAlister reflects on his time in the classroom before he moved into state and national policy and advocacy.
“Going into that role, I didn’t fully appreciate the resilience my students had. I hope I was a person of deep empathy coming out of college,” he says, “but I didn’t really fully understand the amount of privilege I had until I saw the work my students had to do and what they had to overcome in order to accomplish everything they did.”
Like careers in many other fields, teachers’ salaries have not kept up with the rise of inflation. In addition, the increased pressure on teachers and schools to achieve on standardized testing and tighter constraints on flexibility within curriculum, recruiting high-quality, empathetic teachers has become a real limiting factor as schools try to meet the needs of their students.
In his sixth year as a principal, David Wagner ’05, now at IDEA College Prep North Mission in Mission, Texas, has discovered his biggest limitation isn’t in funding or support. It’s more human.“
We have a lot of brilliant kids,” he says, “but human capital is our greatest need. I have a great staff and the more diversity we can expose the students to the better. But I have an AP English Literature course that’s opening up and I might have two applications,” he continues. “When you have only two apps for a rigorous course, sometimes you feel yourself settling. There is a difference in finding the best person for the position versus settling for what’s available.”
Equihua agrees and argues retaining talent is just as difficult.
“Many of my teachers were phenomenal educators. They had 40-year careers. That’s not the case anymore. We’re finding that we really need to pay attention to the quality of life for our employees because the pressure and the fatigue for education has people contemplating career change now at about 10 years,” he says. “Some of it relates to the educational pressures of the profession. Some of it is generational. Young adults becoming teachers now are more willing to say, ‘You know what, this was great. I worked hard, but yet I want to go do something else.’”
Educators recognize kids are far different than those of 20 years ago.
“One of the challenges we have in education is we’ve been slow to transition from the traditional education structure that is neither appealing nor relevant to many of today’s kids,” Chavous says.
Lazarski sees a shift in teaching to focusing on thinking, processing, and evaluating information. “
So much of what kids can access now they can just find on the internet,” he says. “I teach a civics class where we talk government and current events. My job is to say, ‘This is what this is. One side says this, the other side says this.’ My goal is for students never to really know what I think, but to teach them how to think it through and come to their own conclusions. “
Now we’re really teaching how to confront, manage, organize, and evaluate all this information that’s coming at them all day every day via their cell phones,” Lazarski adds. “Education today is helping students learn those skills because they have access to all the information already in their pockets.”“
The goal has to be lifelong learning—to engender the curiosity two- and three-year-olds have,” says Chavous. “Figure out how to continue to excite and keep kids curious. Stop teaching with the idea of a finite beginning and end of education. The insatiable sense of curiosity is what's been lost.“
Kids ask questions, someone says ‘let me Google that.’ It’s not just about getting the answer; it’s about extending to the genesis. Where did this come from? Did this happen before? Who was the first? Who was the last? How is it different? No matter what gets put in front of them, arm them with the means to answer who, what, when, where, why, and how for themselves as opposed to a teacher telling them this is it.”