Listen Up, America!
A Teacher's Guide to a More Perfect Union
by
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SEVEN
I remember the cold, dreary morning I stood at my
lectern, thinking and thumbing through my grade book, waiting impatiently for
the bell to ring. When it clanged I
snapped the grade book shut, hurried upstairs, and trotted into the counselor’s
office.
“I have to see all the sophomores’ standardized test
scores.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
I doubt I
had asked the counselor for more than a dozen individual scores during
my eight years of teaching, and I did
not explain why I wanted them now because I couldn’t. I simply said, “Something is wrong.”
After the counselor showed me the categories of the
ITED ( the Iowa Test of Educational Development), I decided the scores from the
Reading Comprehension and Language Arts sections would tell me
what I wanted to know. (2) We got busy,
the counselor reading the two scores to me while I jotted them beside each
student’s name in my grade book.
About half way through the list he looked up and
remarked, “I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, am I?”
I shook my head, and we continued. Once I murmured, “Do you notice how many
bright kids have low scores?” He
nodded. Within the hour we were
finished, with the test scores of the eighty-plus students listed in my grade
book.
I knew,
finally, what was wrong.
One-third of my kids could barely read.
No wonder they were having trouble, caught in a
tough tenth grade English class, trying to fake it, when they probably had
trouble reading the comics. . .
No wonder I was having trouble, trying to coax and
bully them into comprehending literature they could not read.
I thought of the hurt look I had seen in the eyes of
some of my brightest students, old enough to be thinking of college careers and
bright enough to realize they should have known the answers to the background
questions I had been asking classes for eight years. When one-third of the students in a class can barely read,
everyone suffers.
For a moment or two I could not move from that chair
in the counselor’s office. I just sat
there, remembering how eagerly my students had put up their hands, competing
for a turn during discussion periods, when I first started teaching. This year I almost had to beg to see a
single hand go up.
Even the bright kids acted embarrassed when they
finally volunteered, as if they knew they were guessing, most of the time. With the leaders of the class scoring so
low, I wondered what we would do. The
year before Jim and I had taught both history and literature during the tough Leader
Unit, which was coming up next. How
could I teach both subjects to kids who could barely read?
Oh, Lord, maybe things weren’t as bad as they seemed
after all. . .the ITED is a timed test, and maybe kids choked up during a test
like that. Maybe our ITED scores were
always low. Maybe. . .one way to find
out was to compare this class’s test scores with scores from earlier years.
So I asked the counselor if it would be possible to
see how classes had scored in previous years, starting with the first sophomore
class I had taught, during the 1970-71
year. Eight years and almost
eight hundred students would give me a solid comparison.
“Sure, no problem, “ the counselor replied, so
during the next few days he and I spent my spare time digging in old files,
gathering scores, scores that supported my suspicions.
Somehow our school had managed to regress, rather
than progress. In fewer than ten years
we had dropped from the high sixties to the low forties in both Reading
Comprehension and Language Arts. We were below the national average
and holding; the current ninth graders had scored as low as my sophomores.
Something dreadful had happened--a catastrophe--and
I knew that the whispered warning the fifth grade teachers had given us the
year before, “A third of them can’t
read!” was five years overdue. This
plunge had not happened overnight; the middle school teachers had seen it
coming but had been afraid to say so out loud, for God and all to hear.
Now at the high school level we were inheriting non-readers, students who had been denied the most b
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Book Details
About the Book
DANGEROUS TEACHER TRAINING!
DECEITFUL ACCREDITATION!
DISTORTED TEST SCORES!
Dionee Schwenke, four children of her own, a long
lineage of teachers, and twenty years of research, lays it on the line. A unique, if not brave, exposé of the
problems in education that plague America.
Her teaching experience and research unmask the
Dirty Little Secrets of the teaching profession in tales she tells out of
school. No Hush Hush policy in this
book!
Her story explains why 40 years of reform, guided by
presidents from Johnson to Reagan to Bush, have sputtered, backfired, and failed.
Reforms that promised much but delivered little.
After years of public demand to Do Something! that
only made matters worse, it may seem as if America can’t get it right. BULL! claims the author of Listen Up,
America! America can provide
schools to be proud of, if we just start asking the right questions.
Dionee guarantees to raise those questions! Provoking you, her fellow Americans, to act,
get involved, and provide the answers.
And to assist you, she provides a study guide, “Reading to Drive Away
the Night,” at the end of each chapter.
May classes commence!!!
About the Author
Dionee Schwenke’s unique blend of public notice,
professional exposé and private memoir indicates how firmly education has been
woven into her life. Born into a long line of teachers, she and her children
took part in the 1960s Sputnik reform.
While America went to the moon, Dionee trained to become a teacher, and
her children studied classics in a tough, new English curriculum.
In 1975, while teaching the new English, Dionee
earned an M.S. in Education. When the Sputnik reform failed she began asking WHY?, ultimately uncovering a century
of failed reforms.
Writing Listen Up, America! became a
spiritual journey, the telling of an American
story that has no ending; it is published in Florida where the author
now resides.