Whose Adolescence is it? A Reflection on Policy and Parenting

From the first moment you hold your child in your arms, the emotional impulse is, "I must protect this tiny person in every way." It is a common response of both biological and adoptive parents of infants.

For most of their infancy and toddlerhood that imperative to protect them remains dominant in our hearts. But their gradually increasing need to venture out, to become, challenges our sometimes overwhelming need to protect.

Every ‘first’ is an adjustment for us as much as an achievement for them- first steps, first visit without us, first sleepover, first days of school, first bike ride, first game. Through most of childhood those conflicting needs--theirs to launch out, ours to protect-- can be balanced. Then comes adolescence. 

According to the University of Texas Medical Branch, “An adolescent has four tasks to accomplish to become a well-adjusted adult. These tasks are categorized as: 1) independence, 2) body image, 3) peer relations, and 4) identity.”

In lay terms that means teens must choose their own levels of risk (independence), resolve how they relate to their bodies (body image), learn what being a friend means (peer relations), and figure out how to be an individual, themselves- beyond their family and culture--Who am I, beyond who are we? (identity)

"How can I be me and fulfill what my family expects of me?" can often become the critical question for teens. The wider the difference between what we want them to be and their own aspirations and sense of self, the harder it is for them to become their most, best selves.

The potential cost of disappointing us can be almost overwhelming for our children.Yet, their adolescent growth tasks mandate that they must make more of their own decisions, launch into new territories, and challenge our protective shells. This is true for LGBTQIA+ kids and for heteroromantic or cisgender kids.

What has been startling about recent political culture clashes is they almost all revolve around the four necessary areas of growth for teens and how that challenges parents. It is almost as if some would intrude on our most complex and personal parent-child relationships and have us as a collective society renegotiate the path to adulthood for our children, taking away choices in all the developmental growth categories they must engage in.

From questions like- What clothes should I wear, or what books will I read, to who am I physically attracted to, or what name really feels most me- “Who am I, and how does that fit with my family, friends, and world?” resounds in almost every experience adolescents have.

We can, as caring adults try to guide and support our children in their quest, but at a deep level their internal mandate is to figure it out for themselves. We may be temporarily successful in denying them their own selfhood, but only at the expense of their long-term dissatisfaction, struggle, and adult dysfunction.

No amount of legal or societal restrictions and suppression can negate that necessity to become their own persons. Neither parents, nor teachers, nor society as a whole can deny that need, and it is only damaging foolishness to try.

As they grow, it turns out, the best way to protect that tiny person we first hold in our arms is to nurture the internal person they are discovering, rather than demanding they manifest the person we imagined or try to insist they be.

Let Teachers Fix this. They Know How

For the first 6 years I taught, my classes were made up of students with IEPs who entered class reading on average between 5th grade and 7th grade levels at the beginning of 10th grade.. (I know grade levels is old fashioned terminology, but most people understand grade levels better than lexiles, stanines, or other types of scoring bands). 

In other words, for every year they had been in school, they had made 6 to 7 months of reading progress. I was told to align as closely as possible with the general education curriculum and do what I could to raise performance.

After initial reading and writing samples to assess each student’s skills, the course was designed to fill in the skill gaps, get them as much reading and writing practice as possible and convince them again of something they had lost- a belief in their own ability to learn. 

The design was detailed and focused on the students in the room, not on an external testing goal. 

Classes centered around 6 key practices

1. We set classroom rules together as a mutual agreement about how we would act and be together and posted them for all to see. The rules often leaned heavily on mutual safety within the space. I agreed to treat them the way we all agreed to treat one another. We included in that agreement how we would treat our space and materials.

2. Food and Drink were allowed, and provided.  A hot chocolate station with granola bars was set up, 1 drink and 1 food item per class session. - So long as students cleaned up after themselves, took nothing outside the classroom, and were ready to work at their desks when the bell rang. Not being hungry or thirsty was step one in being ready to learn. 

3.We would work on reading and writing from bell to bell and would limit homework only to what could not be completed in that concentrated class time. One outside assignment was that every student would select a library book of over 100 pages and do an oral book report each quarter.

4. Writing prompts and reading pieces were selected for quality, the students’ areas of interest, accessibility, and progressive complexity from a variety of genres. Key skills of working words, sentences, paragraphs, figurative language, and narratives were developed in context of those daily practices. The goal was for maximum engagement.

5. All students could sign up for to use the classroom bank of computer stations as soon as they finished their writing and reading assignments for the day. (6 donated computers, had been upgraded to be fast enough for educational games. The in-class lab was equipped with games for building vocabulary, developing sentence structures, and identifying key ideas in reading. They were lively and had a high fun factor. There were also academic supports like encyclopedias and dictionaries. In those days, before networking and smartphones, computers were the privilege of comfortable families. Few students had access to fully equipped computers at home, and few rooms in the building had student-use computers.)

6. Assessments were based on the work we did, not on commercially designed standardized tests, except for beginning of year, locally developed grade level mid-terms, and final reading assessments. We did not orient daily work as specific test prep.

Those who know me, know that I don’t like to rely on one-day test scores as a stand alone evaluation, but given the other performance measures corroborating, I’m ok with sharing this one as a short-hand for the wide range of performance changes we saw. 

At the end of the year, most students had made at least 1 full year’s reading progress on the Gates-McGinitie reading test- twice what they had normally made in prior years.  Many students made 2 to 3 years of progress -jumping from 5th grade to 8th or higher in comprehension-  3 to 6 times the growth they had made in the past. Those who entered at 7th or 8th level often reached end of 10th levels. An important note is that these growth numbers occurred in classes of 15-17 students, not the 25-35 commonly seen in gen ed classes.

The point of this piece is not to say I was an extraordinary teacher.  I am/was an ordinary teacher following well-known and common pedagogical practices. If you talk with other teachers they will have similar stories. This is the kind of work teachers do-or can do when given the pedagogical freedom to meet our students’ needs. 

In light of this ability that even ordinary teachers have, media coverage and panics about “learning loss” with recommendations about holding students back, and imposing mandates from above sound just plain uninformed and fool-hardy.

For over twenty years, policy makers and administrators have increasingly insisted teachers follow administrative not instructional protocols. It is time to let teachers manage the post-pandemic academic recovery.

There are a handful of changes that can provide the opportunity to put this 2 year tragedy in the rear view mirror for our children. 

1. Set up full school Faculty Councils in every school that will assess the needs of their students and develop the design and implementation of post pandemic recovery.  Let grade and subject level teams provide input and representation on that council. Center teacher, not administrative, expertise in the decision making.

2. Suspend new purchase of statewide, and district wide tests, materials, and apps. Instead utilize pandemic, training, and assessment dollars to fulfill the recommendations of those local Faculty Councils for what they need for their students, and stop telling teachers what they can’t teach. Each class will have a wide spectrum of needs. Teachers will need the flexibility to differentiate.

3. Spend the necessary money and change policies to attract teachers back into the classroom; teachers who know how to do this, not random applicants without knowledge. Attracting teachers will mean shifting any regs that demean and disempower teachers back to ones that respect their skills and autonomy. 

4. Find teachers who reflect the range of student ethnicities and economic class. To believe they can learn, students need to see and be around people who look like them and are learned. 

5. Reduce class sizes, and lower administrative work for teachers to enable them to meet student and parent needs. Parents will be happier if they can feel their child’s teacher can be responsive to their child’s needs.

6. Increase the number of counselors, to provide support for the more intense family and student trauma-stress.

7.  Quit sending in businessmen to take over and loot the public schools. It creates constant stress and distracts from the major project at hand to bring our students and communities back into academic and personal equilibrium. 

Learning is not lost. It may be delayed and require localized intervention. Panic after a crisis is not productive. Let the physicians treat the wounds.