Are You Being Underserved? Pt. 1

What is it that our underserved schools are not being served? What are the resources, intellectual or otherwise, that these schools are not getting? What is missing from the education of our students? The only short answer is that many things are missing, and there is much that has not been served. But we must start somewhere. . .

Mr. Stickfigure started teaching in an underserved school in the fall of 2000. As evidence that his school is underserved, Mr. Stickfigure points to the fact that he is now a statistical veteran, despite the fact that six years of teaching should barely count as an apprenticeship. Upon his arrival, Mr. Stickfigure began the slow process of learning what the City of New York thinks is missing from its underserved schools. . .

Appropriate pedagogical techniques! The first thing I learned as a new teacher was what not to be as a new teacher, namely, Mr. Chocintok. Since then, I have become immersed to my neck in researched-based pedagogy and, more specifically, the fair art of balanced literacy. Balanced literacy, for those who don’t know, is a researched-based approach to literacy instruction that is built upon the three pillars of reading, writing, and word study. Reading and writing take place in Readers and Writers Workshops, generally in 90 minute blocks. Workshops are structured so that students have the daily opportunity to work independently or in small groups on some aspect of reading or writing. This independent work is facilitated by the teacher through short, whole-class mini-lessons and differentiated small-group instruction. . .

In the abstract, balanced literacy is preferable to interminable lectures that span from bell to bell and result a chalkboard draped in chicken scratch. Indeed, it is preferable in most concrete cases and actual classrooms. Nevertheless, balanced literacy has not been enough to serve my underserved school. Not to say that we haven’t tried to make it fill the gap, and won’t continue to do so. But this is the answer we have been provided to the question: What are our students not being served . . . ?

There are true veterans at Mr. Stickfigure’s school, people who have actually been in the business for thirty years. Mr. Stickfigure does not always agree with the pedagogical practices of his seniors, but he respects the fact that they have been able to stay around practicing anything at all. Because as a premature veteran, Mr. Stickfigure has seen enough to know that the first thing an underserved school must be able to do is keep teachers in its classrooms, however they teach. Only then can these teachers learn to provide service to those who really deserve it.

We will find, of course, that we need more than just a teacher in every classroom. We need sixty teachers lined up to take any one of those classrooms, should the opportunity arise. Mr. Stickfigure may be getting jaded, but he does not think that the censure of Mr. Chocintok and the offer of research-based best practices will encourage prospective teachers to beat a path to our door.