Philadelphia

The following is a letter from an imagined retired Philadelphia high school teacher to Technology.

Dear Technology:

We have not formally met, yet I feel I know you well enough to call you a friend. I see you everywhere: cell phones and laptops and texting and video games and Facebook and Youtube and Twitter and Skype and Google and Tivo and Slingbox and BlackBerry. I see people talk to small metal devices pinned to their ears, in the street, in airports, hospitals, grocery stores, schools… Today, we seem to depend on your connective tissue for every moment of our lives. And your popularity shows no sign of abating.

I write to you now for your help. Of course, in doing so, I see no way to avoid the fundamental differences in our views on education. You believe in a paperless classroom where teachers e-mail parents and cumulate final grades with a few keystrokes and a flick of the mouse; I used to painstakingly record my student’s grades by hand in a gradebook and meet the parents face to face. You believe in an academic world where all students own a laptop and turn in their assignment by simply dragging and dropping it into a folder where the instructor can wirelessly retrieve it. You believe in speed. I believe in workbooks, chalk and blackboards. I believe in sweat.

You may ask at this point, Why me then? If our views are so different, why even bother asking me for help? Simply because ultimately, we share the same world, and, in this digital age, you have become the connective tissue that unites us all.

Granted, the gulf separating our views on education is wide, polarizing even, but does it mean that they are irreconcilable? No. You may be wrong; I may be wrong. We both may be partly right.
Does it mean that we have nothing in common? I do not think so.
You value the notion of community. So do I. So please, let us forget our differences.

I suggest we set aside our (virtual) disagreements in order to deal with the imperatives of the real world we share and save our school system. Dear Technology, we need your help. The school system_ our youth_ is in deep trouble. I believe you have the power to help solve a great problem about which I care deeply. I hope you have the same concern. And if you do, then let us meet on this common ground and save our school system.

Before contacting you I spent the last few weeks visiting some schools in the district.

Dear Technology, let me tell you what you are up against. Let me tell what I saw.

I saw an inspiring math teacher. Sometimes more social worker than educator. She did her best, with genuine compassion and real hope, to create a bunker of sanity and productivity within their classroom. She came in early and stayed late.

Few weeks before my visit, the young teacher was assaulted by a student. The student was mad because he was told he could not participate in the school play due to his poor grades and low class attendance.

I saw parents and students who seemed to think that daily attendance was as optional as homework. Dear Technology, I believe a school should be as much a lifestyle as it is an education.

I saw a teacher who failed at least 25 percent of her students. I saw the end of a fight in her sagging shoulders.

I saw an appalling achievement gap between the richest and the poorest students.
I saw a city where 84 percent of its students live in poverty
I saw graffiti-smeared buildings.

I saw a school hemmed in by competing neighborhoods and absolute destitution.

I saw a sprawling, faceless, and complex school system and the ingrown nature of its bureaucracy.

I saw an administration in chronic conflict with its teachers.
Yes, today’s teachers score the lowest quartile of college grads. But tell me, Dear Technology: Should we blame the teachers? And if yes, do they deserve all the blame?

This school system, however battered and helpless it may seem to us at this moment, is a dear to me. It is an institution worth saving.

I looked at the school system, and I saw a corporation, a big business (the Superintendent’s official title has been changed to CEO). I saw money, and the lack thereof. Technology, help me understand: Where does all the money go? All the millions? All the billions? Where did/do they go?

Clearly the city Philadelphia faces expenses suburban areas don’t. With many of its schools in high-crime areas, the Philadelphia system spends millions on its police force of 6,600 personnel, whose overtime pay alone would be enough to provide the starting salaries of at least twenty full-time teachers. But the city must also pay the routine expenses faced by every school system, the largest of which is always salaries.

Textbooks, which have been at the heart of public debate over how school budgets are spent, represent less than 1 percent of the District’s expenditures.

Dear Technology, help me understand. Please.

Amidst the chaos, I saw a new superintendent. I saw hope.

According to Cities in Crisis 2009: Closing the Graduation Gap, the Philadelphia School District raised its graduation rate from 39 percent in 1995 to 62 percent in 2005, making its gain the highest of all major urban school districts in America.

Better, but not enough for a school system that still has more dropouts than most cities have students.
In a typical school year, about six percent of the 130, 000 students in grades six through 12 in Philadelphia’s public schools (including charter schools) drop out, and another 4% are “near-dropouts” (i.e. students who were officially enrolled in school but attended less than 50% of the time). In total 13, 000 students (15% of which are in grades six to eight) could be classified as dropouts or “near-dropouts.” [Researches conducted by Ruth Curran Neild, a research scientist at the Center for Social Organization of Schools, Johns Hopkins University]

Surely we can agree that the impact an uneducated mass has on the moral behavior of the country and the health of the (already battered) economy cannot be underestimate. Technology, tell me: Can you help our kids stay in school? Tell me, I need to know.
Can you save our schools?

*Inspired from Edward O. Wilson, “Apocalypse Now.”