It's Your Time You're Wasting by Frank Chalk

[LitNetIsGreat]

Sounds interesting! My mum would like that as well - that could well be a Christmas present this year.

It reminds me a bit of the Teacher's Diary that was published in Private Eye. It's a very controversial issue, and you'll have strident views on both sides of the fence...

Yes it is very much like that one, but a lot longer of course and more extreme and outspoken in places.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Sounds like an interesting book! It actually sounds a great deal like the school I teach at, which is an inner city school.

I'm not sure I understand the references to his supposed liberality, though. I work with teachers, some of whom are conservative and some of whom are liberal. I have always considered myself somewhat liberal. What am I supposed to be learning about myself or my environment that would change my viewpoint?

I usually encounter principals who like their teachers to have a certain personality profile, like that of a general on the field of battle. I set boundaries, but I strive to help my students become actual readers and writers. It works, but there is not really a lot of support for that outlook, even when they think they do support it.

Hi, I think this is the sort of liberal approach that Emil is referring to, as expressed wonderfully and very accurately below. (Please forgive the odd typo as I have touched typed this out and only had a short time to check it.)

Outside in the corridor, I can hear Wesley, a Year 11 pupil, arguing with Mr Jones bout his coursework. He has missed the deadline for handing it in and, for no obvious reason that I can discern, was given another week to complete it. Needless to say, he has still not finished the work and Mr Jones is telling him that tomorrow is absolutely his final chance.
There’s an indignant screech from Wesley.

“Well, OK, then,” says Mr Jones. “Wednesday, since you've got football after school today.”

This charade simply reinforces the idea that they can ignore all deadlines while we bend over backwards to accommodate them. As preparation for the world of work it is absurd.

This sort of thing is so typical, completely an everyday thing. I am currently working with some students who have not yet finished coursework started a year ago. It should have taken two weeks. Max.

Or take the approach when dealing with difficult behaviour:

In common with many schools, we have a policy of “Inclusion”. This essentially means that not only will we take anyone, regardless of their impact on the rest of the kids, but also that we send a clear message to our persistent offenders: “Do that again, and you won’t be thrown out!”
Well that certainly teaches them a lesson.

As most children on the planet would give their right arm for the lifestyle and privileges our kids turn their noses up at, I refuse to fall into the apologies’ camp.

So many of our students (I find it so difficult to use that word without giggling) must be perplexed when, in later life, they are sacked from work for persistent lateness, petty theft, disobeying instructions and so on. After all, for the previous twelve years at school, this behaviour has been perfectly acceptable.

When Heads and SMT finally get round to chucking some brat our, usually after years of persistently appalling behaviour, culminating in something beyond the pale – they've murdered someone, say, or are using the maths classroom as the base for a drugs-and-prostitution racket – they have to get the support of the school governors.

The governors are a shady bunch, whose job seems to be to hinder our best efforts to teach by preventing the exclusion of such children.
Even if they do back us up, the pupil’s parents can still appeal.
What a joke.

Let’s consider the case of one of our ex-pupils, Shane.

For those of you who have no idea of what goes on in schools nowadays (maybe you have a position on the SMT) the exclusion procedure goes something like this.

Shane joins in Y7 and is a pain in the neck from the word go. We expect this: we've heard that he was a nightmare at his Primary School. He is rude to teachers, disrupts lessons, gets endless reports, detentions and whatever. He does not turn up to most of his detentions, with the backing of his mother, who claims that the school picks on her Shane; she phones up endlessly and threatens school staff with violence or persecution, or both. (She is familiar with court; that is where she met Shane’s father.)

By Y10, Shane is a serious problem child. He causes constant, low-level disruption, though the term ‘low level disruption’ is misleading: we use it to describe swearing and shouting out in lessons, fighting, refusing to carry out simple instructions and arguing with teachers. All of those would once have been considered serious incidents and dealt with accordingly. Occasionally, Shane is involved in what we still call ‘serious incidents’ he might have threatened someone with a knife or been caught with drugs on the school premises. These result in a few one or two-day exclusions, but are more often simply brushed under the carpet by SMT [Senior Management Team].
By this stage in his school life, there is more effort, time and resources being spent on Shane than on 20 better-behaved students. The Behaviour Psychologist comes to see him once a week for a nice cosy chat; she refers to him as a ‘Casualty of the System.’ She doesn't seem to notice the real casualties: the other children in Shane’s class, who have lost literally hundreds of hours of their education by now.

Halfway through Y10, Shane assaults a teacher. The teacher demands his exclusion, but Shane claims that the teacher pushed him out of the door and two of his friends (both known liars) back up his claim. The Head wavers and askes the teacher if he did anything to provoke the incident. The teacher backs down. The Head calls in mum and arranges a ‘Package of Measures’. This is a teaching term which means ‘backs down completely’. Effectively, this means Shane must attend only those lessons that he feels he can cope with. How nice!

A month later, he assaults another teacher. This one is made of sterner stuff and, despite Shane tying a similar argument with the backing of the same two friends, the entire department refuses to have Shane in their lessons (a rare example of teachers sticking together, caused by fear that they will be next and that it might hurt). The Head is faced with the option of having him taught on his own, at huge expense, or permanently excluding Shane. He reluctantly takes the latter course.

You may think it’s all over for Shane at this point. NO, no, gentle reader.

The school Governors decide not to support the Head’s exclusion. They believe the little brat’s claim that the teacher provoked him. This is no ordinary teacher, however; as we have seen, he has persuaded each of Shane’s teacher to refuse to have him in their lessons. The Governors are eventually talked around and Shane is thrown out.

However, he now has the right to appeal to an independent panel and mum intends to exercise this right.

She has persuaded a GP to diagnose Shane as suffering from ADHD or ODD and is claiming that the school is discriminating against him because of his disability.

While this appeal is going through, the school must accommodate Shane on the premises and provide work for him to do. As none of the staff will teach him, he has to have his own Supply Teacher, which costs the school a couple of hundred pounds per day.

If he wins the appeal, we’re back to square one. If he loses, he just moves to another school and he’s no longer our problem.

I can vouch that this is in no way exaggerated. This is absolutely typical policy. I wonder why there are problems in schools? Maybe we should invent a few new buzzwords or spent millions on new IT? Yes that'll do the trick...

[Emil Miller]

Yep,that's liberalism alright. Now lets contrast it with what happened to a couple of recalcitrant boys when I was at school.
Every Friday afternoon was a bad time for my class because we had a double maths lesson under Mr Geary, an ex-Irish international rugby player who stood no nonsense. One Friday, Mr Geary called the register and found that two boys, King and Calvally, were missing. The following week the same thing happened and when, after making enquiries, he discovered that they had simply decided that they weren't going to attend his lesson, he had them paraded in front of the class and then caned them.
The following Friday, King and Calvally attended the lesson.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

So, should we just separate all students, putting each in their own little homogenous group, all the time? Misbehaving kids . . . all of you in that room. Disabled . . . all of you in that room. Smart kids . . . in that room. That's the answer? Not all students should be in the same classroom. I agree that the idea of inclusion has gotten out of hand, but it can't go to the extreme in the other direction, either, because kids with disabilities deserve a "normal" class if they can handle it. A few outbursts by a kid with autism or Tourette's should not be enough to have that kid put in a "special" class.

Though, I do get what "liberalism" is now, at least in the eyes of someone like Emil. If a poor choice is made, bad teaching practices occur, etc etc, it's liberalism. Letting a student turn in assignment late, constantly letting them get away with bad behavior--it's poor teaching, or poor teaching policy, not being a liberal. By the idea that this laxity and over-inclusion is a product of "liberalism," I guess separating all students, even different races and sexual orientations (after all, having all that heterogeny would be a distraction), or being ultra strict to students, not accepting any excuse for late assignments, would be "conservatism." That's crap too. It's just the opposite end of the same bad-teaching spectrum.

[LitNetIsGreat]

So it's the teachers' fault?

[Drkshadow03]

So it's the teachers' fault?

It's both.

[Vonny]

The people whose fault it is don't spend their time off the battlefield reading books like this and writing to others, searching for an understanding or solution.

It's poor policy. It's collective values, or something. It's unfair to dump it on the teachers there in the trenches.

But there's some who benefit from having these powerful children and illiterate masses, and everyone contentious so that no one can agree on anything, and that's why it won't get any better. (I think.)

Children need to be raised by their mothers until first grade. The problem is TV and advertising. Some TV is probably okay and necessary, in this world, because if you don't understand TV you are culturally illiterate, there is no culture apart from TV, but parents need to correct the twisted attitudes it presents. But parents aren't able to distinguish what is wrong with the way advertising is molding people, that being obnoxious isn't desirable, so parents can't teach their children. And then the job of mothering isn't really valued anymore. Both parents need to work so they can afford more larger screened TVs.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

So it's the teachers' fault?

You're going to have to clarify on what the teachers' fault is, because it could apply to multiple things in my post (unless you meant the whole of it). Reading over my post, I don't really see anywhere that is a veiled accusation of something being the teacher's fault, as I think I make it pretty clear what I feel is and isn't the teachers' fault (mostly pertaining to teaching methods and policy [which wouldn't be a single teacher's fault, but that of administration, which is a whole other issue, and also where I think labels like conservatism and liberalism could be better applied]). It's obviously the teacher's fault for being a crappy teacher, whether that crappiness is a product over laxity or over-strictness.

Still, I'm wondering what the inclusion naysayers would like. How extreme do you want it to be? Should all classes be tailor-made for one particular type of student: a class for the smart kids, a class for the dumb kids, a class for all those in between, a class for the mildly mentally disabled, a class for the severely mentally disabled, etc. etc.? Or should there be a middle-ground?

[Vonny]

It's obviously the teacher's fault for being a crappy teacher, whether that crappiness is a product over laxity or over-strictness.

Let a teacher try being overly strict, and they'll have parents, everyone coming down on them. There are a lot of pressures and constraints on teachers to perform a certain way.

For one thing class sizes are too large, and if students have very diverse needs, and many are unruly, it becomes more difficult for one teacher to do it all.

When my brother was in second grade he was determined to have a "mental block" and he simply couldn't learn in a regular classroom. When he was moved to "special education" into a small class where he was less stressed, he made rapid progress. The only problem was that he felt ashamed to be in special education. But he wouldn't have learned to read without special education, so I don't know if we're doing kids a favor by trying to make them all equal if they aren't.

[Drkshadow03]

Let a teacher try being overly strict, and they'll have parents, everyone coming down on them. There are a lot of pressures and constraints on teachers to perform a certain way.

For one thing class sizes are too large, and if students have very diverse needs, and many are unruly, it becomes more difficult for one teacher to do it all.

When my brother was in second grade he was determined to have a "mental block" and he simply couldn't learn in a regular classroom. When he was moved to "special education" into a small class where he was less stressed, he made rapid progress. The only problem was that he felt ashamed to be in special education. But he wouldn't have learned to read without special education, so I don't know if we're doing kids a favor by trying to make them all equal if they aren't.

Generally in special education, they're not separated from the main class for the whole day, but they get pulled to do one-on-one or small group learning for select subjects.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Still, I'm wondering what the inclusion naysayers would like. How extreme do you want it to be? Should all classes be tailor-made for one particular type of student: a class for the smart kids, a class for the dumb kids, a class for all those in between, a class for the mildly mentally disabled, a class for the severely mentally disabled, etc. etc.? Or should there be a middle-ground?

A healthy middle ground on inclusion would seem logical to me and I’m sure some schools achieve this. However, the failing schools, the ones typical in this book, do not. You have to remember that inclusion policy was purely a cost saving exercise and nothing else. With swamped classes full of students, with such a diverse range of issues and problems, the result is that everyone fails together. This is because there is often a massive amount of time being wasted on trying to deal with poor behaviour at the loss of everyone else. The biggest loser ironically, is always the quiet student who causes no problems and always tries his or her best, these are allowed to slip through the net time and time again.

It would seem you are also taking about setting classes according to ability, which is not the same thing as inclusion. The question of do you set according to ability or do you have a range of abilities in the class is a hard choice and not one that I could fully be happy with either way. If you group according to ability what happens is that lower sets tend to get worse as they pull each other down. If you provide a mixed range of abilities is it better for the weaker students as they have better role models, in theory, but very difficult for the teacher to pitch across such a diverse range and difficult to keep the lesson to a fair pace or standard. So neither of them is really ideal to be honest and it is down to individual schools to choose between them or to try to reach some sort of compromise.

It's both.

There are poor teachers, and believe me Frank Chalk does not forget about those, just as there are poor workers in every section of every society. However to lay the blame solely, or even anything more than the slightest part at the hands of the teacher, is ludicrous, just as it would be to lay the problems of crime in society at the hands of the police.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

A healthy middle ground on inclusion would seem logical to me and I’m sure some schools achieve this. However, the failing schools, the ones typical in this book, do not. You have to remember that inclusion policy was purely a cost saving exercise and nothing else. With swamped classes full of students, with such a diverse range of issues and problems, the result is that everyone fails together. This is because there is often a massive amount of time being wasted on trying to deal with poor behaviour at the loss of everyone else. The biggest loser ironically, is always the quiet student who causes no problems and always tries his or her best, these are allowed to slip through the net time and time again.

It would seem you are also taking about setting classes according to ability, which is not the same thing as inclusion. The question of do you set according to ability or do you have a range of abilities in the class is a hard choice and not one that I could fully be happy with either way. If you group according to ability what happens is that lower sets tend to get worse as they pull each other down. If you provide a mixed range of abilities is it better for the weaker students as they have better role models, in theory, but very difficult for the teacher to pitch across such a diverse range and difficult to keep the lesson to a fair pace or standard. So neither of them is really ideal to be honest and it is down to individual schools to choose between them or to try to reach some sort of compromise.



There are poor teachers, and believe me Frank Chalk does not forget about those, just as there are poor workers in every section of every society. However to lay the blame solely, or even anything more than the slightest part at the hands of the teacher, is ludicrous, just as it would be to lay the problems of crime in society at the hands of the police.

Pretty much agree with everything here. And, unless I'm mistaken, I don't think I ever said the blame should solely be laid on teachers.

[Drkshadow03]

There are poor teachers, and believe me Frank Chalk does not forget about those, just as there are poor workers in every section of every society. However to lay the blame solely, or even anything more than the slightest part at the hands of the teacher, is ludicrous, just as it would be to lay the problems of crime in society at the hands of the police.

Well, a really good teacher can turn around a difficult student's behavior and academic performance. I recognize, too, that teachers often take the bulk of the blame in society, which is often unfair given that there are some real problem students in schools. As an interesting aside to the political dimensions of this discussion, in many of the discussions about "Why our schools are failing" variety that I've seen in newspapers and on politic blogs it's always the conservatives whining about poor teachers and performance. The reason our schools stink and our students aren't learning is because of terrible teachers and the Unions that protect them, tends to be the conservative view. So I think a few of the commenters were right to point out that it doesn't always fall down neatly along political lines.

I'd also point out that inclusion/special education doesn't automatically equate to bad behavior. There are high academic performing students with atrocious behavior; meanwhile there are plenty of special education students who are well behaved students.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Pretty much agree with everything here. And, unless I'm mistaken, I don't think I ever said the blame should solely be laid on teachers.

No, I think I was mistaken with with thing you said about poor teachers previously or I didn't read it right.

Well, a really good teacher can turn around a difficult student's behavior and academic performance. I recognize, too, that teachers often take the bulk of the blame in society, which is often unfair given that there are some real problem students in schools. As an interesting aside to the political dimensions of this discussion, in many of the discussions about "Why our schools are failing" variety that I've seen in newspapers and on politic blogs it's always the conservatives whining about poor teachers and performance. The reason our schools stink and our students aren't learning is because of terrible teachers and the Unions that protect them, tends to be the conservative view. So I think a few of the commenters were right to point out that it doesn't always fall down neatly along political lines.

I'd also point out that inclusion/special education doesn't automatically equate to bad behavior. There are high academic performing students with atrocious behavior; meanwhile there are plenty of special education students who are well behaved students.

Yes there are always those amazing teachers that just have an incredible presence in whose classes you can hear a pin drop. (This is also covered in the book). There are one or two of these in every school, real gems. These are well above the norm though. The political aspect is complex and goes beyond any particular ideology yes.

Yes definitely SEN often doesn't equate to bad behaviour. SEN is such a wide and complex issue that behaviour is only one fraction of it and often not related at all. The problem with inclusion in this context is that often the SEN students do not get the attention they need and deserve because the class teacher is too busy trying to deal with poor behaviour. The problem is not with the heavily dyslexic, the partially blind student, the aspergers student, the student with the reading age of 4, the one who speaks no English (all in the same class + 25 others) but that behaviour and the sheer gravity of the situation often prevents the teacher from working effectively. It is just not practical at that point. It is also not fair to expect a teacher to suddenly become an expert in all these different issues with no training. There is some focused SEN help in most schools though, but it is often just not enough.

I take the point that behaviour is not automatically linked to high/low achievement, their are some sods in top sets for sure, but generally it is the disaffected students, the ones in the lower groups who cause the most problems. To be fair, many of these students just aren't benefiting from a one size fits all policy (more money saving perhaps?). I'm not excusing atrocious behaviour mind.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Well it appear that Frank Chalk is back with a second book, which seems to be a mix of more anecdotes and rants, good stuff! The book is called Education, My Part in its Downfall (which obviously plays with the Spike Miligan book, Hitler, My Part in his Downfall).

Anyway, in the early part of the book there is another rant against inclusion policy which I thought I would put up, considering the points raised towards the end of this thread:

There are a couple of kids in this class who can barely read and Nathan is one of them. Coban, I believe is the other. Sometimes they have a support teacher to help them, but other times they don’t for reasons that are never made clear. However, even when a support teacher is timetabled for them, half the time they don’t turn up and the only explanation given usually involves some mysterious ‘meeting’ with the Educational Welfare Officer (a complete loon) or the child’s parents (ditto). It is a total lottery and unfortunately today we have lost.

“Nathan, work with Lewis and Tyrone”
“I’m working on my own”
“But you can’t read the instructions Nathan!”
“Course I can!”
Before I can puzzle this one out, Coban throws a pen I have given him across the room. Nobody wants to work with him and he is frustrated because he never really knows what is going on. (Imagine sitting in a lesson where all the notes are written in Mandarin Chinese).

Someone outside the teaching profession might suggest that we should remove the likes of Coban and Nathan, put them in a class together and teach them to read, persevering until they can do so. However like most schools we follow the holy doctrine of Inclusion, which insists that these two do the same lessons as everyone else. It is utter madness.

Educational experts often recommend putting the less able children next to the brightest so that both groups benefit. I look round to Jessica and she shakes her head mouthing the words “no way!”
I can’t blame her.
Coban also sees me.
“I’m not sitting next to those boffins” he says sulkily.
“Alright go and work with Lewis and Kyle.” Another great educational theory bite the dust. It’s not Nathan or Coban’s fault. It’s the lunatics who dream up these mad polices but never have to carry them out who will ensure they leave school at 16 unable to read. It is one of the most shameful indictments of our state education system that such an outcome is possible in the 21st century.

That's really quite true. You should really be asking questions why, after 12 years of education, thousands of students leave barely able to read and spell their own names. You have got to love the never ending polices that try everything but common sense. Brilliant.