IndianaTalks | Mel Hawkins & Associates

Bullying was the topic of Justin Oakley’s online radio program “Just Let Me Teach,” which is broadcast, live, every Wednesday evening at 9:00 PM EDT on IndianaTalks, an online talk radio network. Notwithstanding the number of teen suicides, in recent years, bullying is an issue that must be taken seriously by every school district in the nation. It is a sad reality that some students who suffer from bullying choose to take the lives of other people as well as their own.

No school principal or classroom teacher in these troubled times can afford to ignore even rumors that bullying is taking place in their corridors, playgrounds, and classrooms or that bullies are following their prey home or are stalking their targets through social media.

Brittany Mason, one of the guests on “Just Let Me Teach” shared her own experiences that ultimately led her to choose to be home schooled as it seemed the only way to escape the harassment. Of particular interest in Ms. Mason’s account is the fact that her school principal reportedly suggested to Ms. Mason’s parent that she could be making the whole thing up.

What school principals, classroom teachers and parents must realize is that a student’s complaint about bullying is a cry for help and attention whether or not the child is telling the truth. If we truly believe that every child is important, how can we turn our backs on young people who are not only suffering but may be in real danger?

Schools need to be aggressive in developing programs to provide comfort and counseling to the victim while thoroughly investigating and adjudicating the bullies themselves. Many imaginative programs have been developed in schools to educate students and faculties about this serious issue and principals and school administrators should be diligent in their search for a program suited to their particular school or community. We all know what they say about an “ounce of prevention.”

What we rarely discuss is the fact that bullying, like so many of the problems in education, is a symptom of a larger problem. The power of the peer group, relative to the influence of parents and families, may be stronger than it has ever been and social media has changed the game for parents and also teachers. It is difficult enough for parents to stay in touch with what is happening in their child’s life whether at school or when they are off with their friends. For all but the savviest parents, following their children through the labyrinth that is social media must seem as difficult as it is intimidating.

The absolute best chance parents and teachers have to compete with the power and influence of the peer group is for parents and teachers to partner up. Such partnerships strengthen the ephemeral connections that keep students linked to the community that is comprised of family and school making it that much more difficult our children to slip off, unnoticed into the Netherlands of today’s sophisticated web of subcultures.

It is relatively easy for schools to become impersonal places where students feel no connection to many of their classmates, particularly those who are different. We have always known that human beings can have irrational fear and hatred for things that they do not understand or for people with whom they cannot relate. We also know how powerful jealousy can be in influencing the lives of children.

Bullying is a symptom that some children have lost their sense of connection to the community that school can offer and are, themselves, struggling to find positive attention and affirmation. We need to work diligently to restore that sense of community. The best place to start is by pulling parents into active partnership with their children’s teachers and their schools. There are many other things we can do to strengthen that community and that will also have a positive impact on the quality of education we are able to provide.

In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, the action strategies that are offered are not independent actions intended to address this problem or respond to that. The plan is a coordinated strategy to address both the educational system and process as integral, interdependent whole. A big part of what we hope such a plan will accomplish, particularly during the elementary period of a child’s time in school is to elevate the level of intimacy and sense of family that embraces the child and makes them feel connected to teachers, parents and classmates.

We know very well, or at least we should, that the level of control and influence we have over the lives of our children during adolescence is determined almost totally by the quality of our relationships with them when they are small. Everything we do at school should be part of a well-conceived, comprehensive plan of action that is designed not only to teach young children but also to nurture them.

Wouldn’t it be more productive to focus our energy and attention on supporting and protecting our good public school teachers?

It seems that we always focus on the negative. Bad teachers can already be fired, tenure or not. Tenure does not prevent school corporations from dismissing incompetent teachers it simply requires that they take the time to do it right and to make a well-documented case.

At a time when teachers are already under attack, falsely accused of being the cause of the failure of so many American students, this decision comes across as more of a “witch hunt” (or witch/warlock hunt if we want to be politically correct) than as a reasoned decision in an attempt to address our nation’s most important issue – the crisis in education!

It is similar to what happens so often in the work place when a few problem employees abuse the rules and privileges of their employer. In these instances, management rushes in to create more rules or take away privileges and the only people they impact are the good employees who come to work every day and do the best job of which they are capable. The new rules and restriction of privileges are like water off the proverbial duck’s back to the abusers because the problem employees do not care and will not abide by the rules, new or old.

In education we are in a state of public panic in which government officials, corporate reformers, and other policy makers are rushing around like incorrigible children, looking for someone at whom to lash out—looking for someone to blame. Teachers just happen to be the most obvious target.

Few if any of these officials and reformers, and also judges, have ever spent so much as a single day in a public school classroom, striving to understand the challenges with which our teachers are confronted.

Instead, they see teachers as easy targets. They tell themselves and the world that they are taking bold action and they puff out their chests in false pride over their bravado, oblivious to the great harm they do.

Not only do they hurt all of the good public school teachers who come to work every autumn to continue an important and seemingly impossible job from which the majority of us would abruptly shirk. What they also do is distract us from taking the time to understand the dynamics of our educational process and taking meaningful action to fix real problems.

If the critics of teachers would take the time to walk in the shoes of our public school teacher these high profile reformers, officials, and policy makers would see that teachers are as much the victims of the dysfunctional system that is American public education as are the students whom they strive to teach under what are often adverse circumstances. They would see minimal support from parents in our most challenging schools and an alarming lack of motivation to learn on the part of the children of those parents.

They would see the damage that is done when they provide incentives, in the form of vouchers for the small number of families who are motivated to take advantage of them, to abandon our most challenged public schools. In the process they leave the teachers and students of those abandoned schools in their wake to deal with the unforeseen and often invisible consequences of their action. They also deprive those abandoned schools and their teachers of much needed revenue.

It is the symbolic equivalent of washing their hands of the problems facing those schools and their teachers and, most of all, our nation’s most vulnerable kids.

This is unacceptable and it will not do! It is time for teachers to rally together and fight to put a stop to the misguided and paralyzing reform initiatives of people who know not what they do!

It is time for teacher unions and associations to re-examine their mission and work together with school administrations to develop meaningful measures to improve teacher skills on the one hand and to develop measures of true accountability on the other.

Just last night, on “Just Let Me Teach” a program host by Justin Oakley on Indiana Talks, an online radio network, a caller told us about a peer review program called PAR in Anderson, Indiana. It is a program making real strides to improve rather than harm our public schools and their teachers. It is a program in which teachers and administrators are working together to create real, meaningful, and sustainable accountability.

These are the kind of programs our elected officials and so-called reformers should be supporting and replicating all over the nation.

And, why are these high profile leaders not talking about the important role that parents play in the education of their children? Why are they not brainstorming with local educators to come up with meaningful programs to reach out into our communities and pull parents in as partners in the education of their children? Why are we not taking the obscene amount of money that is being squandered on meaningless reforms and investing it, instead, in a nationwide initiative to Pull Parents in as Partners?

We need to recognize that the absolute most important things we can do to fix the systemic deficiencies in the American educational process is for teachers, both individually and collectively to partner up with school administrators to work on teacher training and accountability while, in our classrooms, parents and teachers partner up to give our nation’s children the best education possible!

Tag Archives: IndianaTalks

The Vergara Ruling in California will do more harm than good!