Education Autobiography (Gabrielle Crossnoe)

Chapter 1: Criss-Crossing the Map

Chapter 2: “Extra Extra Retarded”

Chapter 3: Here at Camp Phoenix

Chapter 4: The Chocolate Factory Manager

Chapter 5: Build Me Up Buttercup

Chapter 6: Symphony v. Latin

Chapter 7: The Letter

Chapter 8: 2am Steak ‘n Shake, Water Balloon Fights, and the River at Dawn

Chapter 9: Eastern Standard Time

Chapter 10: The Mawrtyr Returns

Chapter 7: The Letter

            At this point, I was not simply upset with my high school administration. I was livid. I had spoken to teachers, principals, even the district school board, and yet, the only response I had received was silence. Perhaps they were under the impression that if they continued to ignore me, I would lose heart, sit down, give up. But this seventeen-year-old was not about to be muted.

            “Are you brainstorming?” Isaac asked, sitting down next to me. He had agreed to help edit my letter. All the kids in our small community had grown up together, which meant that by the time we could carry awkward driver’s license photos in our pockets, we were either fast friends or fierce enemies. Isaac and I had too many common interests to dislike each other, and one thing we shared our senior year was our frustration with our town’s school. When I came to him with the idea of publishing a complaint in our school’s newspaper, he instantly jumped on board; as the editor of The Red and Black, Isaac was all too happy to provide his journalistic insight.

            “I am going to start by explaining the absurdity of the CHARACTERplus program,” I explained. This was our district’s newest attempt to combat misbehavior. Three times a week, students met in a homeroom-like environment and discussed the character word of the month. Past ideals had been “respect,” “integrity,” and “honesty.” No teacher had been given a curriculum, but was encouraged to think of a creative way to discuss these traits with their students, in hopes that it would instill those values in them. I had heard of classrooms drawing pictures of respect, writing anagram poems of integrity, and translating the word honesty into different languages.

            And I thought this was absolutely ridiculous.

            “We are young adults,” I told Isaac, bloated with the confidence of a teenager who thought she had reached the peak of maturity. “We are developed. If we have not learned how to be respectful by the time we are in high school, color-by-number is not going to do the trick. The school needs to stop focusing so much on our character, and more on our academics.”

            Thus, I transitioned to my letter’s second argument. “According to the data on the Missouri Department of Education’s website, our school is falling way behind in test scores. On standardized tests, on end of course evaluations, and even on the ACTs, our high school pulls in scores that are, on average, much lower than a majority of other schools in the state. We need a plan to improve our achievement, not to talk about our feelings.”

            On that humid afternoon, Isaac and I thought we were discussing a single isolated incident, unaware that we were participating in a clash between two educational ideologies than spanned both space and time.

            My district’s new goal of improving the character of its students harkened back to the early days of public education, when schools were created to “civilize” and “Americanize” children. The schools of the early twentieth century hoped to teach poor, immigrant children how to be polite, hard-working, punctual members of the work force. The goal was not necessarily to produce academically intelligent people, but to instill specific traits and eliminate others. My high school was hoping to change our character.

            On the other hand, my friend and I were proponents of the recent obsession with academic measurements, standards, and accountability. We believed the purpose of education was to fill our heads with knowledge, and bought into the idea that our school’s success could be determined by test scores. We judged the quality of our school by the grades its students received. Our perception of education’s purpose could be traced to the public response to the launch of Sputnik and the publication of A Nation at Risk, when the nation feared our schools were failing. Additionally, we had internalized the framework of No Child Left Behind; low test scores were our biggest concern.

            Jeannie Oakes and Martin Lipton claim that as the American perception of the purpose of public schooling as changed throughout the centuries, “none of the earlier expectations disappeared” (Teaching to Change the World, 36). Although the assimilation schools of nineteenth-century New York have disappeared, some of their fundamental values have not. They continue to play an active role as educators and administrators grapple with whether or not is their duty to mold students into today’s “successful” human, and whether that should take precedent over academic achievement.

Gabrielle Crossnoe

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