This article is the first in a two-part series on teens’ ideas for improving schools.
Last month, the Washington, D.C., school district, among the most troubled in the country, was forced to lay off 545 teachers in response to a $21 million budget deficit. The district's predicament attracted national attention, but it's not the only public school system approaching a state of crisis. Across the country, problems such as underfunding and an exploding teacher retention problem are straining the public schools.
No Child Left Behind (NCLB), President Bush's signature education reform legislation, hasn't made things easier on beleaguered urban schools. The National Education Association, the country's largest teacher's union, intends to challenge NCLB in court for imposing increased demands on school districts without providing commensurate funding. One critique of "legislated excellence" initiatives such as NCLB is that they are generated by "outsiders" -- lawmakers out of touch with what actually works in the classroom. Some critics have argued, for example, that NCLB wrongly assumes all students learn at the same rate, and restricts the flexibility that teachers need to keep their students engaged and learning.
The most recent Gallup Youth Survey* asked for input from the ultimate insiders -- the education "consumers" themselves. Teens (aged 13 to 17) across the country were given a chance to say how they would change things at their schools to improve their own learning processes.
Teens were presented with the following questions and asked to respond in their own words: Thinking now about your high school/middle school, do you have any ideas for changes your school could make to help students learn better? What are they? About one in three respondents gave no response, and slightly less than 10% said they liked their schools just fine the way they were. The remainder offered a wide variety of suggestions, many insightful and a few startling.
Teachers Matter Most
The most common theme by far -- appearing in more than twice as many responses as any other -- was the quality of teaching. About one in six teens specifically expressed dissatisfaction with their teachers, for a variety of reasons.
Most commonly, teens expressed a yearning for more creative teaching methods, as illustrated in the following responses:
"Some teachers just lecture, which gets boring. The teachers who demonstrate what they are teaching and come up with creative ways to get it into our heads are much more popular, and we enjoy going to their classes and learning." -- 13-year-old girl
"Teachers could make it a game to see who knows the answers and have contests. Teachers could try not to talk so blandly, but try to sound excited to catch the attention of students." -- 16-year-old girl
Several respondents felt that there was a disconnect between teachers and students, citing a lack of empathy:
"[Teachers] can be real negative towards students, which makes concentrating hard. Giving us so much homework keeps us up so late that we are tired the next day and they wonder why we are not paying attention." -- 13-year-old girl
"The teachers should be more caring and less judgmental. They should make things fun so people will think it's worth paying attention to." -- 16-year-old boy
"Teachers should treat the students as people and not just as 'stupid kids' -- then the students would want to learn more." -- 17-year-old boy
A few students expressed sympathy for the plight of teachers struggling to be effective in the face of increasing administrative burdens:
"Teachers are burdened with so much stuff that has nothing to do with teaching that they never get down to really teaching. My grandfather relates [the situation] to a teacher in the 1950s teaching most of the 55 minutes of the class hour, and we may now get 10 or 15 minutes." -- 17-year-old boy
Bottom Line
Many of the students' thoughts regarding their teachers reflect a comment made by education researcher John Goodlad in his 1984 book, A Place Called School: "On the whole, teachers at all levels apparently did not know how to vary their instructional procedures, did not want to, or had some kind of difficulty doing so ... The emotional tone is neither harsh and punitive nor warm and joyful; it might be described most accurately as flat."
For many students, that still seems to be the case 20 years later. Unfortunately, schools in crisis often have to be satisfied with getting warm bodies in front of classes. Legislation like NCLB aims to address this problem by forcing even the bad teachers to cover all the necessary topics. But as the responses above suggest, when it comes to effective teaching, it's not quantity but quality that counts most.
Part II of this article will discuss teens' other ideas for improving their schools.
*The Gallup Youth Survey is conducted via an Internet methodology provided by Knowledge Networks, using an online research panel that is designed to be representative of the entire U.S. population. The current questionnaire was completed by 517 respondents, aged 13 to 17, between Aug. 1 and Aug. 29, 2003. For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±5 percentage points.