Blaming school failures on students
by John Loflin
The recent publication of Making a Difference: Alternative Education in Indiana by Indiana State University is unprecedented. Although Indiana is considered the birthplace of the alternative education movement, there has not been a comparable study of alternatives, and indirectly, a study of the traditional system. This study strikes a benchmark for Indiana. It is interesting and provocative to consider the history of the alternative school movement. Before alternative schools, our definition of education was narrow. We believed everyone learned in the same way and should be taught in the same way using a common curriculum. We thought all schools should be alike. We thought children and their parents were incapable of making decisions about how and what they learned. The term itself was used to describe schools that were alternatives to the existing public schools. Be it through curriculum reforms or different infrastructures, alternatives attempted to compensate for the political and academic limitations inherent in traditional public schools. I relate this history because the term alternative has re-emerged over the last 15 years. But it does not carry the banner of innovation. Students are no longer at alternatives by choice due to a school’s creative curriculum. They are sent to “transition” programs — sent for remediation or rehabilitation or behavior modification — to be “fixed” and then returned to the mainstream for re-assimilation. Compared to the past, these are pseudo-alternatives and can represent punitive approaches that isolate and segregate students who can be difficult from the mainstream. Indiana has students who pose problems. Many are disruptive, failing academically or close to expulsion. The state provides funding for districts to create alternatives for these at-risk youth. The Making a Difference study claims 84 percent of the students in alternatives either attain or make satisfactory progress towards meeting their goals. Also, teachers indicate they expect 94 percent of their students to complete high school due to their alternative program. One would assume by these figures that districts have successfully created a system to take in at-risk or disruptive students, and prepare them to return to the mainstream where they go on to graduate. The study claims this is possible due to an “alternative instructional environment”: small classes, devoted educators, personalized attention to each student’s needs and abilities, high expectations in a supportive environment, service learning and self-paced individualized courses. The conclusion of the study is that alternative education works for kids and keep the money coming. Unfortunately, this is not reality. Seen through research from a national perspective and compared to the best practices of alternative public schools gathered over the last 30 years, the study looks like a sales job. The danger of the transition alternatives described in the study is they foster a belief that it is the children who must be fixed while the education system remains essentially intact. It is important for Hoosiers to examine the function of these schools in the unequal social formation of a large section of society. Instead of directly challenging traditional structures, the existence of these programs allows legislators, policy makers and many educators to avoid the necessity of making any major reforms to the institutions of schooling. The result is that policy makers are able to attribute school failure to the characteristics of students. Although created to uphold the public school system’s standards and authority, it is ironic that transition alternatives expose this system’s underbelly. The very existence of these options proves the American school system has failed in its promise to accommodate all students. This is why districts and school boards have rationalized transition alternatives as a remedy for individual rather than institutional failings. Such alternatives may postpone more far-reaching restructuring of the regular school since rebellious or failing students are successfully segregated and labeled deviant. If the study’s main purpose was to evaluate Indiana’s alternative programs, because of their relationship with the traditional system, it is also a study of that system. If alternatives work for kids who failed traditionally, it implies the traditional system does not work for everyone. To the extent that alternatives work, and the study says they do, this study implicates the traditional system as deficient. The study notes: Students in alternatives have one thing in common, they are failing in the system and the system is failing them. So, why blame school failure entirely on students and send them to alternatives to be fixed? By relieving the school of students who defied academic/social norms, alternatives for the maladjusted or different become a more refined type of differentiation and segregation. Since the alternative and the students are stigmatized as problematic, this exposes the true status and ranking nature of tracking, grouping and labeling in American schools and belies their promise of an equal educational opportunity. In whatever form, segregation is harmful and particularly insidious when based on a status of being in need. If alternative programs are as good as the study says, open them to any student on a proactive and voluntary basis, and allow students to stay and graduate. Why wait until students become disruptive? By limiting who attends alternatives to those who are “problematic,” districts actually limit the potential of alternatives to help all students. Ultimately, we need to examine why certain groups do not have the institutional access to acquire the cultural capital necessary to succeed in the existing schools. And why for them transition alternatives become their only choice.
John Loflin has been studying alternative public schools for over 25 years. For a copy of his response to Making a Difference, contact him at johnharrisloflin@yahoo.com.
