After school on the subway train today, I overheard the mother advising her son, who looked about six years old, to keep his shirt tucked in.
“You want to keep your shirt tucked in or else you’ll get in trouble.”
“But, I got hot.”
“Well then, sprinkle a little water down your shirt to cool off. But, not too much or you’ll get in trouble for playing with the water”
“I got told to get out of the bathroom.”
“You get in trouble for playing in the bathroom?”
“Uh huh.”
Yes but what did he learn in school today?
He learned that he will get in trouble no matter what he does. He’s learned that he should not act on his own ideas. He learned that school is not a place for thinking and problem solving. If something bothers him, like a tucked in shirt that makes his tummy hot, and if a solution comes into his mind it is very important that he not act on it. Don’t trust yourself. Don’t do anything. Wait for someone with authority to tell you what to do.
The six-year-old wore khaki pants and a forest green polo shirt embroidered with ACHIEVEMENT FIRST, the name of a chain of charter schools that began with flagship Amistad Academy in New Haven, Connecticut in 1999 “to prove that urban students can achieve at the same high levels as their suburban counterparts.”
In 2005 New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein invited the organization to expand into Brooklyn with three schools and the franchise has been expanding ever since, opening an average of two new schools each year.
Achievement First schools in Brooklyn have recently been in the news for two reasons; the amount of classroom real estate removed from public schools and offered to Achievement First and similar charter school corporations and for the high percentage of students put in detention each day for infractions that include slouching, humming and failing to look teachers in the eye.
I attended high performing suburban-style schools and I can attest to the fact that our teachers and parents did care about slouching and tucked in shirts–But only on school picture day! The rest of the time they encouraged us to think for ourselves because they knew that’s what would be expected of us when we got to college.