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More To Education Than Test Scores

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 31, 2007

Imagine being a child of 7 and never having taken a shower or bath before. You are scared to death because you believe it is going to hurt. You must go to school, but you're not allowed in your classroom until you've cleaned up.

Believe it or not, during my first year of teaching, we had a little boy who came to school so filthy that the administration took him to the showers in the Physical Education Department before school and scrubbed him. That little boy had never brushed his teeth or shampooed his hair. He came to school in grimy clothes that were washed by hand from a stream a couple of times a year. His teacher would give him clean clothes out of a collection box of items at school, and his own tattered ones were thrown in the trash.

I was teaching in the beautiful mountains of the Ozarks, and it was 1980. Surprising? Teachers can tell many stories that would shock most people. I taught in three different states, from poverty-stricken schools to wealthy ones. My students came from broken homes, homes with two parents, homes where each child had a different father and homes where the child lived with a grandparent instead of a parent. I had students who had been abused, students who were hurting themselves and students who were hurting others.

But, I saw that the most important thing their teacher could do for them was provide a safe, stimulating, controlled environment in which they felt free to learn.

Imagine being a student today where you walk into a classroom and feel threatened - not from outside the school but from within it. The classroom is in a chaotic state, and the teacher has no control over what is occurring. You would really like to learn, but other students are taking all the teacher's time and attention away from you because they are being disruptive. You can see the teacher trying different methods to get control of the class but cannot. You don't feel safe because there is no order, and you know the teacher really has no power to stop the other student's behavior. Imagine many such disruptive students in countless classrooms and you have the schoolroom of today.

The emphasis in Florida's classrooms today is testing. Accountability is overshadowed by the effort to prove that students are learning by elaborate formulas. Yet, students' test scores are not an adequate picture of what is really happening.

In a classroom where teachers are given the tools to spend their time doing what they got into teaching to do, children will feel stimulated and will learn. But, the pressure on teachers today has become overwhelming, and the overemphasis on test scores is misplaced. Let the teacher take back the control in their classrooms that they have lost over the years, and you will see test scores go up.

Many of my children told me they wanted to stay in my classroom after school. They would hang around and want to "help" me and not go home. Because these kids felt safe, they learned. Maybe it was not in the way the state would have mandated, but they did learn.

Now, think of that first little boy I described and imagine how wonderful it felt to be "clean" for the first time in your short life. In today's politically correct world he would not have been allowed to be cleaned up at school. This would have violated his rights. His parents loved him and were trying to do their best for him. Weren't we doing the same?

Sandy Lankford is a former educator who taught various subjects including general music, choir, ESOL and reading. She now lives in Sebring with her husband. They have three children and three grandchildren.

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