Obviously, there is a dark side to the data presented above: If we take it that the skills on the sat are important, and they are strongly correlated with success in college, it means that we have not brought our dominant minorities, blacks and Hispanics, into the mainstream of academic culture. (Those who would explain the differences among ethnic groups in terms of “bias” are left with the difficult job of explaining the extraordinary performance of Asians, 43 percent of whom in 1990 still said English was not their native language.)
The first came from a young woman who stood, faced the bright lights of the television cameras, and asked if she and her schoolmates would receive “more teachers who will give us more time and more help with our studies.” Later, another student asked the same question with a different slant: “Wouldn’t it be best to concentrate on the grammar schools? If the teachers in grammar school spent more time with us and helped us more, we wouldn’t need so much help in high school.”
The students were pleading for what seems to be in such short supply today--time with teachers. The plea is especially poignant in a society that is also drastically deficient in another resource for children--time with parents. The Orr high-school students asked for more time and more help from those who have lived longer, know more, and should care most about them.
They asked only for what education research tells us they need most. When educators call for more “time on task” and “direct instruction,” they euphemistically seek what the Orr students requested more simply and eloquently. They seek time and help from teachers: purposeful time, effective time, precious time. Even “cooperative learning,” far from a laissez faire retreat of the teacher, is a highly-structured attempt to engage the teacher in the construction of social arrangements in the classroom that facilitate learning.
We have seen the comparisons of American schools with Japanese and European schools. Our children, especially those in urban schools, spend less time in school each day and fewer days in school each year than children in other countries. They spend less time with teachers. And when the school day ends, urban children stand and watch their teachers drive away to the suburbs where they live. They stand and watch and then go home, where too often there is no father and too often mother has too little time to give to too many children.
The retreat of adults from the lives of children is not an inner-city phenomenon. Single-parent families are everywhere. Families in which both parents work outside the home are now the rule, not the exception. Few parents rely on children to help with the family business or do chores on the family farm--activities that once demanded time spent with adults. Today, children’s time with parents is likely to be spent watching television. To say that this is time together is to miss the point of what children need from adults. Children need time with attentive adults. They need to be listened to and spoken with.
Parents and teachers wish that children needed something less scarce than time with attentive adults. How can a single parent find more time? Where is the spare time in the lives of the busy mom and dad caught up in the demands of their professions? Can a harried, fatigued teacher be expected to give even more than she is already giving? What about the teacher who is also a parent? To which children does she give more time, her own or those in her class? Who makes up for the inattention of parents who are grossly neglectful of their children?
Children need more time and help from attentive adults; this fact is simple and bare, but finding time is not simple. It is, perhaps, the greatest challenge facing our society today.
Schools can do their part to see that students get more time with attentive adults and that the time they get is productive. First, schools must view time as education’s most precious commodity. Then schools can:
- Examine the way time is spent each school day, carefully considering the opportunity-cost of each activity.
For Chicago students of high-school age, nearly half their school years have begun with teacher strikes--the withdrawal of time with students as a tool in negotiation. These same Chicago students have also witnessed a massive reform effort that has formed councils of parents and teachers to govern each school; teachers and parents are spending more time with each other. Now let teachers and parents find ways to spend more time with children.
