12/5/97 ... Tales out of school.

One job of a homeworker is to act as a decompression chamber for those who work out. When Peggy rolls up the drive at whatever late hour, I put down my tools and put on the tea water. Or I should.

She rarely arrives with gleeful news about some joyful haps in school. Mostly she's exhausted with the sturm and drang. This week's news about another teen going berserk with a gun in an high school makes my blood run cold. West Paduca could be anywhere USA. Maybe even here. We found the Mississippi lowlands to be the most depressing place in the country, but the turmoils of public high schools are endemic to the beast.

In addition to teaching their chosen subjects, teachers take on certain roles in the school community. Peggy has gone from students' confidant, to a missionary for cultural relativism, to informal college advisor, to proponent of team teaching, to fervent advocate for high standards and heterogeneous classes.. while she's taught French, Geography, Anthropology, U.S. History, and American Studies. Just as an artist's work must change and grow, so teachers have to find new perspectives on the daily march.

They're in it because of the kids, of course. And the only redemption for all the bureaucratic maneuvering, inter-personal conflict, paperwork tedium, and emotional exhaustion, is the one-on-one contact with the kids. Helping them put a foot on the ladder, and watching them climb by themselves. Pretty intangible reward for all the grief. But they say it's worth all that to see a young mind blossom, and put out intellectual roots. On a good day.

On a bad day Peggy comes home trembling with rage, or frustrated to the edge of tears. If she wasn't so passionate she wouldn't be as good a teacher, I suspect, but she might not be such an easy victim for bronchitis every winter, either. Anyone who thinks the school year isn't long enough should live with a teacher for a month. Anyone who thinks teachers don't care about the kids has been out of school too long. Maybe they care too much.

It's the small victories that carry teachers from day to day. One of Peggy's students this year has been the class bad girl. Hostile and intransigent with teachers, threatening and dangerous to her peers. That's been her role. "Don't touch me, I'll cut you." Peggy likes the misfits, of course. They tickle her fancy.. like toymakers. And she believes that every kid can and should come to grips with American History, regardless of their personal strife.

Peggy takes the misfits aside and gives them her rap on learning how to wear masks, and their utility. You want to control your life, you have to learn how to present yourself in different situations. Being class bad ass is the road to a wall. In the case of this student the alchemy worked. She suddenly began delivering sterling work, stopped being disruptive, got engaged.. in American Studies, at least.

Then she disappeared. Truant for two weeks. Family trouble, of course, but also a severe conflict in roles. She was suddenly vulnerable. And plagued by her old persona. She told Peggy, who kept calling her at home, that she wanted to become a good student, but she couldn't escape her old role at Freeport HS. Now she's back in school, but the other teachers don't trust her, she blows hot and cold in the tough girl role, and who knows the upshot. But she now knows she can do A work, and get approval and encouragement on that road. She may escape her past. That's the sort of tenuous success that keeps teachers teaching.

It's not made any easier by the annual fashion parade. Every year some new Ed fad inundates your local school, usually propelled by some political agenda. Often the hot new approach has a lot of merit, if only by focusing attention on the craft of pedagogy. Reading across the curriculum. Skills training. Mainstreaming. On-line connectivity. The process of selling, integrating, and implementing each new fad is so time consuming and disruptive, however, that it's seldom worth the candle. Peggy has gone from one after-school meeting a week to spending 8 hours a week in special meetings. Often in the evening, when she would be grading papers, or decompressing with me.

It belabors the obvious to say that the best way to help kids learn is to give teachers more time to be with students, and to deal with students' work. But the system seems determined to pile on extraneous teacher busywork, to the students' detriment.

Teachers revolt, eventually. Either the fads become institutionalized, because they work. Or they die from inattention. Or they become a political issue, especially when they are mandated. It looks like Special Education is about to burst into flames.

Some fundamental truths and high ideals are embodied in the Special Ed mandates. Every kid deserves an appropriate education. Every taxpayer/citizen should feel his kid gets equal treatment. We should include everyone in our civic community regardless of needs. But the implementation of this mandate has distorted the educational process all out of proportion, and a reaction is setting in.

When mainstreaming was first forced on teachers, some dozen years ago or more, Peggy was adamantly against it. She honestly believed that lumping mixed ability students together would water down the curriculum for the "upper level" kids, and make things harder for the others. And she simply didn't know how to teach kids for whom the text and lecture method was ineffective. The kids taught her she was wrong. Now Peggy is a vocal advocate for heterogeneous classes. She's learned a whole new array of pedagogical methods, has proven that all kids can master the material without diluting what the more intellectual students can absorb. In short, that you can tailor your curriculum delivery so it suits all the students in your class. And wasn't that the idea?

Not quite, apparently. Special Education has its own agenda. The kids who get identified as special are entitled to MORE than everyone else, and at stupendous expense. This is not to deny that some students are severely handicapped, and require special access, devices, attention.. in order to learn at all. But the mandates for mainstreaming have been used as an excuse to disrupt schools in at least two ways.

Special Ed has taken from Peter to teach Paul. Severely challenged children, or their parents, demand and get costly special services.. personal tutors, individual guardians (for the emotionally disturbed), travel to distant specialized facilities, and endless consulting. There is no extra money in beleaguered school budgets, so these expenses come out of the common pot. The notion was that all kids should get served equally. Now, to twist Orwell, some kids are more equal than others.

It's hard to argue that a spina bifida kid shouldn't have a tutor, a wheelchair, a life. What's more insidious is the manipulation of the mandates by parents whose kids have marginal handicaps. Peggy spends an unconscionable amount of time in meetings where she's being told how she must teach in order to meet Peter's needs.

Peggy believes that EVERY kid is special, and should have a teaching plan tailored to his needs. But the reality is too few teachers and too little time. So she attempts to educate ALL her students, together. She gives each of them one-on-one time.. and team teaching enables this.. to the degree that she can. But that's not good enough for the activist parents who think their kid is slipping through the cracks. Or should be doing better, and that it's Peggy's fault. So she is dragged into meetings where the experts tell her what she must do for the special child, at the expense of all the others.

That's not her mandate. Peggy's job is to teach all the Juniors American History. By empowering a few parents who want their children to get more attention, the mainstreaming mandates have meant that all kids get less teacher time on task. At some point the other parents will catch on, and it'll be in the fan.

But what's a special needs parent to do? He knows that Peter has a problem, a special condition, a need.. and wants the school to address it. The school has a problem, because it can't afford to serve the special needs of every kid.. nobody's willing to pay the bill. The teachers are left doing triage. And the kid who slips through the cracks may show up in the morning with a gun.

I hope not.

Peggy caught laryngitis a month ago by sleeping on the floor in a college dorm, doing one of her volunteer college tour weekends. She's been suffering flu symptoms since. The enthusiasm she brought back from our tour of America is wearing thin. Special Ed meetings, where she's told she doesn't know how to teach. Faculty meetings where she sees the tide running against heterogeneous classes and high standards. Days when her classes announce that they don't want to know the context, just dabble in the details. It's hard to keep coming back for more.

It's been another long day at the Education Outlet in Freeport. I've got the water boiling, and an ear to bend, when she gets home.