by Clark Vandeventer
All of my life I’ve maintained an interest in public policy and I’ve been no stranger to strong opinions. Taxes, healthcare, energy, foreign policy. If you want an opinion I’ve got one for you. Yet there’s been one area of public policy that I’ve had very little interest in: education. Until now.
Lately, I find myself stating some very bold opinions about education. My Facebook page is littered with quotes from Seth Godin’s new manifesto on education, Stop Stealing Dreams: what is school for? At night when I’m ready to curl up and watch a movie I find myself forgoing the oldies but goodies and instead turning on documentaries on education like Waiting for Superman.
What happened? Why the sudden interest? Wait, strike that. Why the sudden passion for education policy?
It’s because my wife and I have reached that point with our oldest child. Our son Jackson is 4 years old. Suddenly the theoretical question about what we’ll do in regards to our kids’ education has become a very practical one.
I’ll admit I felt a little unqualified to discuss the topic when my Facebook posts elicited responses from teachers who’ve spent, in some cases, decades in the classroom. What did I know about how to reform education? What gives me the right to be such an adamant critic of the current education paradigm?
I can’t and won’t claim to be a definitive voice in the discussion. Having struggled through modern American education through most of my schooling years I do have some serious questions to raise though.
- Why did my 4th grade teacher tell me and my parents that I would never amount to anything?
- Why would I, as an 11-year-old, think I was stupid?
- Why did my 7th grade science teacher tell me I was dumb when I gave the wrong answer after being called upon?
- Why did my pre-algebra teacher berate me for finding the right answer in the wrong way?
- Why were all of the things I was interested in not important in school?
And after asking these questions I ask this one:
Why would I subject my kids to that kind of environment?
Is the education system broken? Some, like Rachel Denning who opened this series on education reform, would say no. Rachel would say that our education system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: training compliant workers for an industrial, consumer-based society.
I don’t know if it’s broken or if it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. Here’s what I do know:
The current education paradigm is not serving the needs of our emerging (already here) world. Whatever the original intent of compulsory education — whether sinister or altruistic — our world has changed, and school, largely, has not.
This is not a public school problem. Private schools, with few exceptions, operate within the same paradigm as public schools.
Yet for all my criticism of the modern education paradigm I have this one stark contrast for the way education could be. It’s an anomaly in the paradigm.
Mr. Babbitt
It’s Mr. Babbitt.
I never did well in school and by the time I was a freshman in high school I was placed on the lower-track. The system placed me in classes that were less likely to challenge me and less likely to prepare me for college in a world that places immense value on pieces of paper handed out at ceremonies by famous institutions.
Occasionally I hear people talk about how early on schools in Europe determine which kids will go onto advanced schools and which will continue on for a more basic education. We do the same thing in America, only in America the system doesn’t tell you.
As a freshman in high school, on a 4-point scale, I had a 1.2 grade point average. Yet I remember this being a time of heightened academic curiosity on my part. Most days after school I walked the 14 blocks to the public library. I was practically an amateur baseball historian, but my interest went beyond balls and strikes. I was interested in Babe Ruth as a marketing icon. Jackie Robinson became my hero and baseball became my gateway to learning about the civil rights movement. To this day I can still recount word-for-word the dialogue between Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson when Jackie was about to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball.
But in our education system, learning about the civil rights movement through baseball was like getting the right answer the wrong way in pre-algebra.
Report cards came and mine were laced with C’s, D’s, and F’s.
But then something happened.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered what my life would be like today were it not for Mr. Babbitt. It was like I was on that lower-track conveyor belt and he just reached down and plucked me off it and placed me on a different track.
He did something for me that no other teacher ever had. He believed in me.
As a junior in high school I sat in his U.S. History class and achieved something I hadn’t done in years. I got an A.
When I think back to my final two years of high school I realize there were other teachers along with Mr. Babbitt who inspired me. There’s something wrong, though, with a system that allows a kid to float through for 10 years thinking he’s stupid before a teacher like Mr. Babbitt performs a miracle.
I’m thankful for Mr. Babbitt. But systems shouldn’t be built on miracles.
When I think about education reform I think about Mr. Babbitt. What did he do that was so right that so changed my life?
Mr. Babbitt gave great lectures. Had I said so at the time I think my friends would have laughed at me, but I remember sitting in his classroom being absolutely captivated. But more than being my teacher, I would say that Mr. Babbitt was my coach. I still remember little comments he interjected into discussions he heard me having before or after class. I still have books that he gave me in response to those same conversations that challenged my way of thinking.
None of that stuff was on the test. He didn’t care if my introduction to the civil rights movement was Jackie Robinson and he let my fascination with Ronald Reagan open up a whole world of learning about economics, communications, global politics, nuclear war, and on and on.
At the beginning of my senior year of high school I approached Mr. Babbitt about participating in the Hoosier Academic Super Bowl. Schools throughout the State of Indiana fielded teams to participate in particular topics and because of my interest in history I was interested in participating in the Academic Super Bowl as a part of the history team. Mr. Babbitt was the coach of all of our school’s academic teams and thus the man to talk to.
He told me he thought I should instead do Academic Decathlon, where each student participates in 10 subjects. Math, science, literature, music and visual arts, history — the gamete.
I asked him if he knew my track-record in those other courses. He did. And he wanted me on the team anyway.
Clark Vandeventer participating in the Academic Decathlon
Participating in Academic Decathlon was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It was a rigorous academic exercise that intensified as the year went on. It was collaborative. I was on a team with eight other students. We had a coach, a leader. Other teachers became resources we turned to to fill in gaps. It required a significant commitment, arriving at school very early in the morning and staying late into the evening. Then we’d do a full day on Saturday.
After months of work we won the state championship and advanced to nationals. It was the first Academic Decathlon team Mr. Babbitt coached to the state championship. He hasn’t lost since –15 years running.
After my team competed in nationals we came home to wrap-up the final few weeks of the school year. For months we’d been arriving at school at 5:30 in the morning and that first Monday morning after nationals several of us arrived at 5:30 again, and we continued to do this until graduation. It became a time for reading, collaborating, and throwing around ideas — the type of stuff we didn’t typically get to do at school. We had become life-long learners, but not learning for learning’s sake. We wanted to figure out what we could do with this stuff.
Seth Godin titled his treatise Stop Stealing Dreams. I experienced a bit of that.
Mr. Babbitt taught me to dream again.
Mr. Babbitt is an anomaly. Anomalies destroy paradigms.
Because of modern education’s emphasis on test scores and doing things the “right” way, my wife and I have decided to (you choose the term) home/world/road educate our kids. Like all parents, it’s something we’ve been doing since they were born. The only difference with us is that we’re choosing to continue to be the primary facilitators of their education while many of their peers enter the school system.
Having made the decision to continue to be the primary facilitator of our kids’ educations, why worry about all this public policy stuff?
The question isn’t whether I care about my own kids. The question is whether I care about kids everywhere. My kids are going to be fine. My wife and I will help provide a truly world class education for them. But our path is not the path of every family and I’m not willing to look at a kid somewhere whose parents aren’t involved and say, “Sorry, kid. Your education was your parents’ job.They didn’t do it.You’re just out of luck. Sorry.”
That’s why I’m a part of this discussion. I write this with trepidation, but I personally feel a moral obligation to do whatever I can to ensure that kids everywhere — not just my kids — have access to an educational system that will excite them, challenge them, and help them develop into dreamers and doers.
Those doers of dreams will create a future my kids and I will want to live in. They’ll develop new technologies, alleviate hunger, and cure diseases. Those things will happen not so much by memorizing the periodic table or the English monarchs but through the type of creative collaboration I learned from my learning coach, Mr. Babbitt.
Clark Vandeventer is on a quest to work less, live more, and travel the world with his family. Just setting out on that quest was no easy task. It came after a ridiculous amount of success in his career followed by a steady dose of failure. A former non profit executive, Clark is now a fundraising consultant and a merchant services rep while working to become what Mr. Babbitt always told him he was: a writer. You can follow Clark and his wife Monica on their journey at Family Trek.
This post is one in a series about Redefining Education. Other articles in the series are:
Why the School System isn’t Educating Your Child (And What To Do About It)
4 Steps to Improve Education in the USA
You Can’t Reform an Education System Based on Oppression
Educating Kids Through Teacher/Student Partnerships
Let’s quit arguing about what’s wrong with schools and man-up as parents
Imagine something better than school
How to improve our schools from an unschooler’s perspective
Thinking out loud, outside the box
Learning is the new paradigm of Education
Schools & Jails: What’s the difference?
Education for Today’s Global Economy
Wisdom: Knowledge that has been tempered by experience
How to use parental mentoring as a solution for educational reform
Very well done!
Ughhh, what to do about all this.
You got to care. You got to help yourself and then help others. You can’t run away from it all, you got to work from within. I guess that’s what Mr. Babbitt was doing.
You know, some people think our “escape” is about running away, but it’s not. It’s about escaping the ideals and agendas we held and opening ourselves up so we can do more. Escaping ourselves. I won’t fear countries, or people, or even school systems. I will work to help.
We are on the same page. Nice Post!
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Nancy Reply:
April 12th, 2012 at 11:04 am
@Justin, Every time you run AWAY from one thing, you run TO another. Sometimes we truly are running away, but I think more often than not we’re running toward something else.
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Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this discussion. As we think about education reform, I believe we have to look to the miracle workers like Mr. Babbitt.
One thing I thought was interesting was how much I talked about collaboration — and then, when I went looking for the old newspaper clippings the caption under the photo of Mr. Babbitt in the Indianapolis Star which is included in this post reads: “Wayne Babbitt says the students’ success stems from the way they share their knowledge.” COLLABORATION!
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Nancy Reply:
April 12th, 2012 at 11:01 am
@Clark Vandeventer, the beautiful part of this post (for me anyway) is that it shows so clearly that all it takes is one miracle teacher per student. If each kid in the system can “click” with ONE teacher, they’re good. That’s all it takes.
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I’m almost embarrassed to share it (are those really my quotes? was I really that skinny), but you can see the entire Indy Star article the photos in this post are taken from here: http://www.familytrek.org/indianapolis-star-academic-decathlon-clark-vandeventer/
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Nancy Reply:
April 12th, 2012 at 11:03 am
@Clark Vandeventer, That’s a great article! Congrats Clark!
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I am Clark’s Dad and I remember the instance with the 4th grade teacher. I did not have a positive impression of her before she made this statement during a Parent-Teacher Conference and it sure didn’t improve after it. As parents, my wife and I experienced with Clark a system that failed him.
Mr. Babbitt was an answer to prayer for all of us. The encouragement he gave Clark and the comments from high school teachers who went to help with decathlon who remarked to me after the competition that Clark should be running for Congress today told me he had really been turned on to learning. It didn’t stop. He went to Indiana Wesleyan University, where I now work, and excelled. Since then he has both excelled and failed, but who hasn’t. He made a run for the U.S. Congress—not in his home state of Indiana, but in California. That takes drive and determination.
I have no doubt he will achieve his dreams. I have
never doubted that since high school, but it took a unique teacher to help ignite the flame that will never go out.
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Nancy Reply:
April 12th, 2012 at 7:44 pm
@Lonnie, I am THRILLED that Clark found Mr. Babbitt. As a long-time teacher, I’ve often heard that all it takes on one teacher to make a difference in the life of a child. I totally believe it – and this example shows how true that really is.
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Wonderful guest post from Clark! Thank goodness for that one teacher!
I also remember an instance in 8th grade where a teacher pulled me aside and decided and told me she wanted to put me in an advanced writing honors writing path in high school, despite my test results (testing my knowledge of English labels…i.e…verbs, nouns, and a lot of other stuff that I still can’t remember)! I excelled in writing in high school and English, but likely would have never reached that level had that teacher pushed me further than the system wanted to allow me to go.
No one should be allowed to teach if they have it in their heart to tell a kid they will never go anywhere in life, when they are not yet even 10 years old! RIDICULOUS!!!
Anyways…you ARE a great writer, Clark. Thanks for sharing it with the world!
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Clark Vandeventer Reply:
April 12th, 2012 at 10:58 pm
@Living Outside of the Box, Thank you, Alisa! I’ve thought a lot today about many of my teachers over the years. I had a few really bad ones – like that 4th grade teacher! I had some that really did care about me and my fellow classmates, though. Looking back, I can recall a few from middle school who I would say were actually saddened by the fact that they could not get through to me. I think the vast, vast majority of teachers out there really do care deeply about their students.
That’s what makes reforming the system so important. How can you have an army of talented and passionate teachers producing such miserable results? It’s a failed system.
So happy you had that 8th grade teacher. It seems appropriate for me to quote Ronald Reagan… after all, I do mention the Gipper in this post! “There’s a flickering spark in all of us, which, if struck at just the right time, will light up the rest of our lives.”
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Nancy Reply:
April 12th, 2012 at 11:32 pm
@Clark Vandeventer, I can tell you with certainty that there were teachers who were saddened they couldn’t get through to you. I remember I had a student one year who was heading down the path toward drugs. We tried so hard to reach him. We did everything in our power to bring him back from the brink, but no matter what we did he just pushed us away.
Finally, in May at the end of the school year he was found to be dealing drugs and put into juvenile detention. Mu principal and I were both in tears – we wanted so badly to help that kid but just couldn’t do it. We had failed regardless of how much effort we put into him.
I think kids have to be in a certain place to receive the help. Yes, the help has to come from the right person, but it also has to come at the right time. Chances are that if Mr. Babbitt had come in to your life a year or two or five earlier you wouldn’t have been ready for him. We’ll never know, of course, but I believe that’s how it works.
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Clark Vandeventer Reply:
April 13th, 2012 at 12:17 am
@Nancy, when the student is ready the teacher comes.
This is great! Love the story. Now, how to make it happen? That is the question.
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Clark Vandeventer Reply:
April 12th, 2012 at 11:03 pm
@Rachel Denning, you are exactly right, Rachel. What I think is funny is that Nancy and I come to almost exact opposite conclusions at the end of this post. Nancy’s reply to me earlier: “the beautiful part of this post (for me anyway) is that it shows so clearly that all it takes is one miracle teacher per student. If each kid in the system can “click” with ONE teacher, they’re good. That’s all it takes.”
My position is that I’m not comfortable with an education system that depends on miracles. I’m thankful for Mr. Babbitt — he was my miracle teacher — but are we really okay with just hoping for a miracle? And I’m not okay with the fact that I went through 10 miserable years of school before he found me.
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Nancy Reply:
April 12th, 2012 at 11:24 pm
@Clark Vandeventer, One of the things I’ve known for years is that I won’t click with every student. There is simply no way. I can do the best I can, but I know there will be kids I won’t “work” for. I just hope that another teacher clicks with that kid because they all need that one miracle teacher.
One of the problems with the system is that kids are fairly randomly assigned to teachers. There are some schools who try and match kids with teachers who have strengths those kids need, and they do OK with that – but not perfect. Take any random bunch of 20 kids and put them with one adult and you’ll see that they don’t all click. It’s just the way it is.
In a perfect system, every kid would be with the perfect teacher for him/her every year, but that can’t happen. We know that all it takes is a special connection with one teacher to keep a kid going for many years – and that’s what we hope for. During the other years, we hope it’s a good experience.
That said, I know I’ve had students who hated me. In one class, I’ll have a few kids that totally “get” me, others who think I’m OK but not awesomely wonderful, and some that think I suck. So what is the truth? Am I as bad as some of those kids will say? Am I as good as others say?
I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that you could find kids out there who felt that Mr. Babbitt was an awful teacher. They’ll tell you stories about the horrible things he said and how he treated them like crap. Are they right? Or are you right? How can we guarantee human connections when we’re human?
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Clark Vandeventer Reply:
April 13th, 2012 at 12:15 am
@Nancy, you’re absolutely right that not every student is going to connect with every teacher. There are people on the periphery of my life today who I am sure are great people who I just don’t connect with.
Maybe part of the solution is giving kids multiple coaches. A resurgence of art and music in school could give kids additional teachers to connect with. It doesn’t have to be limited to art and music. How about a class for 4th graders on learning how to read and write code — a future computer whiz may get that connection she needs from the teacher in the computer lab.
As an inner-city high school teacher, it’s very difficult to read all of these posts condemning teachers and education. It’s very east to point fingers and place blame when one has never stepped into the shoes of a teacher. Here’s a bit from my perspective…
Growing up poor, in the same inner-city in which now teach, I had some amazing teachers. They inspired me and pushed me to new heights. However, I also had a mom who checked my homework and helped me with school projects. This brings me to point #1 – at open house this year, FOUR parents came to see me. I teach 140 kids… parents need to reclaim their role in the process of education.
#2 – Our hands are tied by policies and inequality. Despite having two Masters degrees, and all my doctoral coursework completed, I am not considered capable of creating curriculum I see fit for my students. Federal and state education policies force us to teach to standardized tests. Here’s a little secret – teachers HATE these tests. We recognize that our kids are not make from cookie-cutters. Yet the public outcry over the failings of public schools has resulted in standardized testing and penalties for teachers whose kids do not do well on these tests. No consideration is made regarding the learning conditions… though I teach 30+ kids in unbelievable conditions, they are expected to do as well as their affluent counterparts. We expect equal performance for unequal opportunities, supplies, and conditions. Yesterday my students caught a mouse in the classroom. It is just one of hundreds that run rampant in the school. There are only two working stalls in the 2nd floor bathroom – the rest are covered with trash bags because there is no money to fix them. Not a single water fountain in our building works – they are all covered in trash bags. When it rains outside, it rains inside too. Our science labs no longer function, textbooks are painfully out of date, and computers are slower than a tortoise. I have had the same computers for over a decade, yet I am expected to teach the latest technology. The playing field is not equal.
#3 – It is too easy to become, and stay, a teacher… it’s true. It’s not a rigorous education – finish your B.A., take a test, start teaching. If you’re a bad teacher, almost nothing can be done to fire you. Look at countries with strong education programs, like Finland. There, it is competitive to get into teaching – you need a Masters just to get started. It is a respected, well-paid profession, and teachers are treated as professionals. It is up to them to decide how to teach and assess their students.
I am a Mr. Babbitt, and there are a lot of us in the public schools, deeply saddened by the politics and policies keeping us from doing our jobs, and the lack of parental involvement in education. Running away from public education isn’t the answer – stay and help us. Get involved in school activities. Help us fight ridiculous policies that mandate standardized tests. Help us get our kids outdoors. Help us find the funding to do things outside of the classroom. Spend a day in our classroom, and you will begin to understand the challenges from the inside out…
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Nancy Reply:
April 15th, 2012 at 7:23 pm
@Jen, ==I am a Mr. Babbitt, and there are a lot of us in the public schools, deeply saddened by the politics and policies keeping us from doing our jobs, and the lack of parental involvement in education. Running away from public education isn’t the answer – stay and help us. Get involved in school activities. Help us fight ridiculous policies that mandate standardized tests. Help us get our kids outdoors. Help us find the funding to do things outside of the classroom. Spend a day in our classroom, and you will begin to understand the challenges from the inside out…==
AMEN!! It’s been hard for me to read all these posts as well. I know there are shortcomings in the schools, that’s very true. However, I truly believe there is more good than bad in our schools and that teachers – like you – are working miracles every day.
I spent 21 years in the classroom and I know I’ve been Mr. Babbitt to many kids. I know I’ve also been the wicked witch of the west to others. We do the best we can with what we have.
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