Lincoln Elementary was (and is) a wonderful school because of its diversity. While it is 92% Asian, we, as students of all races and ethnicities (although a bit more integration would have been positive), were exposed to the traditions, cultures, and beliefs of the world. In 3rd grade, I had a teacher who took our class on more that seven field trips and had a Native American author come to class to discuss his childrens book – “This Land is My Land” by George Littlechild. I was exposed to Algebra in 4th grade because of this school and was on CNN because of my involvement in the Chinese Bamboo Orchestra.

Lincoln was wonderful because of its teachers, its leaders, and its use of resources.

It certainly was not simply because it was 92% Asian and Asians are high-performers. This is too simplistic an explanation to deserve retort except to say that I am a Black male who went on to go to schools without resources and saw the education gap. However, because of my initial start, I went to on to college and am currently finishing law school.

We need more schools where teachers and admin are as committed to the students as the folks at Lincoln are.

Discipline is not evil, it’s not hurtful, it’s not punishment. It can be as simple as taking the fruit cup away from a student who is loud at the lunch service. Or as major as expulstion and transfer to alternative schools. I see discipline a critical as teaching the students that fire burns.

Last night I had dinner with a friend who just terminated a college student from her (entry level professional) job. We discussed the case and it’s clear to me that this person should have been dismissed earlier. There had been two significant incidents of irresponsibility in the 6 months she’d been employed. The last thing she did was making false entries in records to cover up her failure to do her work. Rather than fire her outright for dishonesty she was allowed to resign during the confrontation upon the discovery of the false entries (she recorded completion of a large number of customer transactions that were never done and couldn’t be done after the recordation). The silly girl resigned then demanded a meeting with top management to protest. That move will now result in documentation of the dishonesty beyond the initial discovery which in turn will surely lead to her blacklisting in the industry. She will never work in the field again. No one is surprised at her compounding the damage because she was known for poor judgement in the first place which is why she should never have been allowed to remain this long.

So we had a conversation about how bad things are with the generation of workers compared to previous ones, how they turn early mistakes and what could have been survivable bumps in their careers into career ending episodes. There is a notable lack of even basic discipline and prudence. And of course the fired worker is a single mother trying to get through college… Did I say “bad judgement”?

The lack of basic discipline from the high school experience, discipline that should have come from the school, directly and quickly leads to unemployment, career limitation and housing problems/lower living standards and worse. I can see it as I deal with people on a daily basis. My generation in the East Bay Public Schools learned much better than the 20 somethings we hire and fire now. These problems shouldn’t be happening on this scale.

Even the young people who are not acute in discipline are so inured to the behavior they are not effective in reacting to it. They are too likely to tolerate it in others, so they are still subpar workers.

The don’t seem to get it that dishonesty on or off the job is incompatible with a responsible position and you will be terminated (in jobs involving trust and discretion) whenever you can’t be trusted. MySpace and Facebook antics are an issue.

It seems the best way to manage now is to not hire public school products (at least on a school by school basis). Eagle Scouts are identified and given VIP status as job applicants – even as grad students.

Brave New World.

Some Asian families come from countries where a good public school education is not available; only the rich send their kids to school. Going to school is a privilege that should not be wasted.

I also think Asian students, regardless of income, benefit from a higher likelihood of living in a 2 parent homes and having a large extended family. I’m not saying that other cultures don’t love their children the same but it certainly is an advantage if a child’s personal village is behind him.

Congratulations Lincoln School. Regardless the reason, it is a terrific achievement.

However, I do believe that the “soft bigotry of low expectations” line resonated for Bush because there is some kernals of truth to it.

As a teacher, I believe it is my job to hold two often competing states of mind simultaneously: 1) Deep empathy and understanding of where my students are coming from, AND 2) a rigorous set of expectations attached to positive and negative consequences that will prepare them for future school, work and life.

Reality is, though — and I see this at the younger grades in my childrens’ schools as well — it is quite easy over time to lower expectations steadily, even unwittingly, until you are moving children through the system despite a lack of growth or accountability.

In the public schools I attended, taught at, and my children attend, I have seen well-meaning teachers and administrators frequently lower their expectations for minority and low-income students, in terms of academics and behavior. Often, these teachers were white and full of “white guilt”, but not always; one of my kids’ elementary school principals is an African American woman who simply can not bring herself to discipline troubled children because she is TOO aware of the pain and suffering in their home lives.

Some lowering of expectations is inevitable: We have to teach kids where they are, in terms of making curriculum fit previous learning. No matter how old you are, you have to learn your letters before you can read, etc.

However, some of this lowering is just misplaced sympathy (as opposed to empathy). Most of us know we don’t help a troubled kid by being too soft, but we all slip up sometimes, because we have a heart.

After all, do YOU want to be the principal telling a foster care kid with cigarette burns on their neck who has missed half the semester they can’t go to the next grade with their peers because they never learned fractions, grammer, etc.? Do you want to keep a senior from walking the stage when you know that kid was miseducated for 12 years as they bounced through 30 ghetto schools in 5 cities up to the point they entered your classroom and they worked hard all semester but still failed every grade-level test? Is it easy to make an 8-year-old boy sit in his chair for an hour when you know from his IEP that he was born addicted to crack? You can let him run and stand all year, but that won’t help him.

If there’s one thing that maddens me about the national debate on education, it is the endless simplifications of what are insanely complex issues. That’s why I get so made at Nextset sometimes; he is all about black and white analysis. (Although, I’m glad to see he now says we *may* avoid a depression after all!)

We don’t need to be paralyzed by complexity, but to ignore it is to simply polemicize based on pre-formed political and corporate agendas. And yes, Caroline, liberals like me — and you? — have them as well.

I don’t have low expectations. I think it’s fun to take a student and push them beyond what they thought they were capable of. But it’s wrong to deliberately set people up for failure. We don’t need to put people in college prep when they want no part of it and they have real potential for navigating a half million dollar bus through downtown rush hour traffic in San Francisco.

And sometime shortly after puberty public school students should have to choose by their behavior and performance if they want to be at a college prep campus or elsewhere in Voc Ed. Just like in Europe.

But instead, teachers get blamed for not successfully chasing students down the street shouting at them that they have to change and they have to do their homework. And it’s your political compatriots who initiated the blaming — GW Bush with his “soft bigotry of low expectations” line — so could you please tell THEM your views on this? Unfortunately, the “neo-liberals,” including (I’m sad to say) the Obama administration, have adopted that attitude too.

Though actually, I think that teacher-blaming is insincere and it’s just a ploy to weaken public education and clear the way for privatization.

If the kids don’t cut it – in the six hours you do have them – and they wind up with deficits (like being unable to read) they are supposed to be deselected for college prep and sent to programs more suitable, like Bud Driving, if they are suitable for that.

There is no future in chasing people down the street shouting at them that they have to change and they have to do their homework because you say so. If the students and their families cannot perform the school’s academic requirements, get them out of the academic tracks & campuses and away from those students who do.

Let people be free to live as they select. It is more efficient and a better use of the limited school budget. What you should do is make the process transparent so there is never any ambiguity as to how everybody is doing and where they are going to be next year (as in out of here and over there).

if people want to change and want assistance in doing so make that help easy to find. Stop trying to force feed what is not to the taste of the consumers.

I think what sets Lincoln apart is that the families are poor, often very, very poor with poor literacy, just as those poor families studied in the book. Here is the difference in my estimation. Lincoln culturally aware of the their students families. They don’t pander, make excuses or threaten. They simply ask their questions in a culturally appropriate manner and work around the problems. An example, without threatening they ask if there is someone at home to help with homework, no? The child will need to do homework at school, after school hours so that someone can help. A child has problems with their eyesight – does the family have insurance? No, the school or school volunteers help find where the child can get glasses.

Now, let’s take a large flatland school (no names for fear of offending) – an African American mother is asked if there is someone in the house who can help with homework – parent often is offended that we are calling her stupid – we are not even implying that she is stupid we are gathering information to help the student. We have a group of teachers and teachers-in-training who can help D’Ante with his homework. He needs to come to room 313 everyday after school and he can do his homework. We also have computers to help with his report and the library is also open to help. Parent responds that she has to pick him up by 3 pm. We ask how can we work together to help D’Ante with his homework and we are told that we have him 6 hours everyday and that if we were good enough we could teach him in those 6 hours.

I don’t know how we are going to get past the cultural differences that families have for their expectations about the learning needs of the students. Even the teachers who want to stay after school to help are battling against the after school programs who will not allow students to work with their classroom teacher from 3 – 4 PM and then have students join the program because too many students are out getting into trouble and then going to the program.

There has to be ways to meet the needs of the family in culturally sensitive ways while making sure that the students are learning at very high levels. Two years of attitudes of the Lincoln parents in their second grade student and two years of attitudes of D’Andre’s mom will give you a learning gap of about four to five school years in learning. If the students are not reading fluently by the middle of grade four, statistically speaking, the student has an over 80% chance of being a high school drop out.

I would say that in lieu of the child having two adults in their lives of the type described above, they should be provided with a classroom adult/child ratio at least as low as 1:10 — that is if we’re going to be serious about shifting the scene.

In the home life, any of the following combination of parental figures would probably be fine, as long as they both are consistently devoted to rearing the child from day one and are capable of transmitting middle class values: mother/father, divorced couple (but still highly functional re child rearing), mother/mother, father/father, mother/grandmother (or aunt or uncle), consistent foster parent/consistent adult mentor, or others along that line.

This is just my personal fantasy about the “it takes a village” thing. But hey, some people actually propose that the only way to fix the problem is to send all inner-city children to boarding schools like the SEED schools.

By the way, a good book about the class differences in parenting styles is “Unequal Childhoods” by Annette Lareau.