Articles

Teacher Excellence Retains Students

Opinion by Mae Kendall
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
June 8, 2005

Georgia's high failure rate and dropout tragedy can be cured. I know. I was born poor and black in Thomasville, but graduated salutatorian of my high school class.

This was during those terrifying years when segregation was the norm. Yet, I went on to graduate on the dean's list at New York University. I earned my graduate degree at New York's Bank Street College and my doctorate at the University of Georgia. I was appointed the first black professor in UGA's College of Education.

Highly trained, caring, hardworking, clinically oriented and self-confident educators will not allow children to spend nine months in their schools and then blame the children when learning deficiencies and soaring dropout rates are the outcomes.

We continue to blame our victims, the students. We ignore and systematically fail to own our problems. We fail to attack and treat the lack of organized professionalism in our classrooms. We view curriculum in the same old, tired, book-only, read-and-regurgitate terms.

Instead of offering global-centered, ethnically diverse, meaningful, rigorous, truly "hands-on" student-involved, energetic curriculum, we vegetate.

When I look at the strategies outlined by Georgia Schools Superintendent Kathy Cox to combat the state's dropout epidemic, I keep searching for clarity.

As one of her planks, Cox lists "Making sure students are ready." But how can our students become ready if the adults who teach them are not truly ready?

Does each teacher know human growth and development; does each teacher know and understand how to prepare the learning environment and its optimum use on a daily basis? Are teachers held responsible for knowing and applying diversified methodology? Do they know how to teach and teach, and teach?

Are our teachers required to teach and practice critical thinking, interactive questioning, evaluative thinking, critical analysis, appreciation of the arts, the sciences, test-taking skills, vocabulary analysis, problem-solving and application of skills? A child cannot learn "basic, core knowledge," nor systematically apply it, unless he or she spends classroom hours with a professional who knows and lives the belief that education and learning are intertwined.

Until those of us in the education profession vow to become highly trained, learned, articulate, well-dressed, thinking, skilled, respectful and caring individuals, nothing will change.

Congratulations for all that Georgia is doing. But we must add teeth and substance. If we keep on doing what we are doing, we will continue to get what we have always gotten: a bunch of young people who are intellectually deficient, globally dumb, prison-bound, ugly-behaving, sloppily attired, poorly educated, inarticulate wanderers.

Don't we want more for our children?

Mae Kendall lives in Atlanta.

Copyright 2005 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. For more information, visit www.ajc.com.

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