Teachers: Students’ Moral Compasses Are Spinning;. All the standardized testing will never measure character and citizenship.

I was interviewed by a panel of esteemed teachers and administrators in 1998 since I was nominated to be the San Diego County’s Teacher of the Year. “What did I teach,” the asked. My answer: “Invisible things.” Naturally, they were perplexed. So they asked for specifics. I replied, “Compassion, tolerance, honesty, envy, jealously, loyalty…you know, the stuff we are supposed to teach.” The wisdom of Atticus Finch seemed to fit the occasion. He told his daughter, “Scout, in order to understand a person, you have to step into a man’s shoes and walk around in them.” That’s what I taught; five shows a day, five days a week, 32 of the most passionate years of my teaching life.

So it with high regard that I express kudos to writer Paul Barnwell, the author of The Atlantic’s recent article regarding the failure of schools to teach character; he made it abundantly clear that: “The pressures of national academic standards have pushed character education out of the classroom.” (7/25/2019)

How bad has it gotten? Barnwell gives many examples, but one quantifies the situation, “…according to a 2015 Council of the Great City Schools study, eighth-graders spend an average of 25.3 hours a year taking standardized tests.” That comes as no surprise to me since my 32 years as a high school teacher in San Diego evolved into a manic panic of administrators behaving like testing cheerleaders for week-long testing; prepping for testing; testing to meet the minimum standard to graduate (which scares the heck out of the kids whose first language is not English), testing for State Exit exams, etc.. I think you get the picture.

What is at stake for the school and its district? In “good” schools/ districts (typically ones with parents of financial means) — it’s all about bragging rights. In “poor” schools/districts (best described as “poorer, ghetto schools”) —closure or survival; thus being taken over by an bean counting state administrator, who often is well versed in dollars and adverse to educational quality. Naturally principals get the hook, as well as head honchos at the district office in charge of curriculum.

And let’s not forget the real estate market. God forbid a school’s score card of proficiency does not fall too far below “the schools with comparable income status” — then it’s RED ALERT! Buyers will opt out of that district’s boundaries and head for private schools (if they have the deep pockets). It is a realtor’s worst nightmare—financial flight from their home, home on their range.

What does all this testing mean to students? Ironically, virtually nothing. As long as the student passes a very basic test in language that the aforementioned second language students distain the scores have no affect on students. None. Zero. As a matter of fact, the teachers never see the results until those students are long gone. The parents get a letter from the state about the math/ language skills of Joey or Jane and promptly deposit it in recycling (after their children say it has no effect on GPA, college admissions, yada, yada). And the kids are right. Fact is, many of the brightest students blow it off because they are stressed out and tested to death; they prefer to concern themselves with an AP test down the road. Administrators then beg them to not opt out. Please!

So what is forsaken for all this testing, not to mention all the money spent on the companies that charge the various states for their “latest-got-to-have-it” tests? Simply put — teaching character, ethics, a moral code that points True North.

Ask any teacher who has taught 5 to 10 years and they will confirm what I am saying. I don’t have time or patience to document the problem of testing any more than I have (read The Atlantic article if you doubt me). I refer teachers who are somewhat experienced because they are the ones who have realized what has been stripped away; the newbie teachers simply are battered down with expectations and are running like crazy to keep up. 

So what to do, you ask?

As the San Diego County “Teacher of the Year,” let me introduce some the characters whose values I insisted my students hear from and contemplate: Ma and Tom Joad from The Grapes of Wrath, who refuse to allow ‘the regular folk to be beaten down by ‘the man’; Mockingbird’s Scout and Atticus Finch, who witness the outrageous miscarriages of justice in the Deep South; Holden Caulfield, as he tries to be the Catcher in the Rye, watching poor souls falling from buildings; Gatsby’s only real friend Nick Carraway, who sees the bloodshed caused by careless, thoughtless rich fools; the ‘slave’ Jim who guides Huck Finn’s adventure as his true father figure; Our Town’s heroine Emily Webb, who realizes, much too late, that people just take life for granted; and the wide array of unforgettable characters of Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin.”

These authors and their thematic motifs served me well, and to this day, my students remember those lessons, especially Don McLean’s eulogy to an America that has “gone dry” in his classic song  “American Pie.” 

When I retired, my former students implored me to write down what I taught and how I taught it. So I did. Meetings at the Metaphor Cafe is now taught is several school districts. But many teachers will say that they don’t have the time. My answer: make the time. Spend the minimum time giving tests and more time guiding the students though the harrowing experience of being a teenager in this cynical world we inhabit. (If you are a teacher, parent, or administrator, I’ll send you a free copy…really! Just Google it…I’ll even pay the shipping. I’ll do anything to get this ship sailing True North.

After all, it is the invisible things that are the heart and soul of what students remember all those years later.

Aaron Sorkin Meets Atticus Finch in the New Jim Crow Era

Paying it forward. That is what one of my former students, Dr. Frank Lopez, did for me. He knew my wife and I were visiting New York City, and he made sure we would be attending Broadway’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Why it mattered so much to Dr. Lopez is that it was the novel I taught him (and other high school students for 32 years) and because his son Lex would be reading Mockingbird that year. So it was that Harper Lee’s novel and Horton Foote’s Academy Award winning screenplay was brought to life in Aaron Sorkin’s new play, and my wife and I along with his family were witness to the courtroom drama.

I was reminded that evening by Dr. Lopez what an impact the heroic Atticus Finch had on him, as well as the tragedy that befell Tom Robinson because the topic of social justice was a motif in my classroom, sometimes dubbed “The Metaphor Café.” As we leaned forward in our seats that evening to hear Atticus Finch once again battle the ignorance “of a tired old town,” I looked at two generations of students—a doctor and his son, and wondered how this new version of Mockingbird would be received.

However, this Atticus Finch, played by Jeff Daniels, is not portrayed as a shining white knight; rather he is a simple country lawyer used to handling land disputes and wills. He discovers he is powerless against the forces of ignorance that prevails then…and now.

For those who do not recall the details, Finch takes Tom Robinson’s case, knowing that both were beat “before they started”—victims of the 1930’s racism that is all too familiar today. I will not repeat depressing statistics of black incarceration or the systematic injustice in America’s courtrooms that is evident to this day, despite what some felt President Obama’s election could rectify—namely, a post-racial society. One man’s election, no matter how historically significant, has not changed intransigent racist attitudes.

With that in mind, Aaron Sorkin’s version of To Kill a Mockingbird challenges its audience that is far too complacent with the outcome of Harper Lee’s disheartened Atticus Finch and bullet-ridden, doomed-from-the-start, Tom Robinson, to imagine a scenario in which the Finch’s maid Calpurnia redefines the novel’s theme.

At the outset, Atticus reminds his children, Scout and Jem, and generations of American students, that one has to “step into his shoes” to understand a person. Nobel in words, but Calpurnia makes it dramatically  clear to Atticus that “understanding” the virulent hatred and violence that racism breeds in the antagonist Bob Ewell and the vast majority of Maycomb, Alabama’s white citizens (and by extension the Deep South) justifies their ignorant behavior. Jeff Daniels, in an interview, explains that his character is “an apologist.”   

Yes, Atticus’ defense of Robinson is courageous and an act worthy of admiration. That is undebatable. His motive is equally compelling as he tells his daughter Scout his personal reason for defending an obviously innocent man so many others attack because of the color of his skin, “You have to learn to live with yourself before you can live with other folks.”

However, in both the novel and the film, Atticus stops short of physical action, other than standing guard at the courthouse when the town’s racist men seek to take justice into their own hands with a noose. Atticus symbolically stands at the door holding only a book which will not stop the henchmen. What stops them? Guilt. Guilt that is stirred up by his children who remind the men how much they owe their father and what he has done for them in their time of financial need. The voices of children who stubbornly refuse to move reminds the angry men that they are still human.   

Sorkin decides it is time for his hero Atticus to respond, in deeds and promises of future actions. Atticus fights back, physically, with the threats of Bob Ewell—something he refuses to do in the novel because he argues that letting Bob Ewell blow off steam and save face ”would save Mayella another beating.” This is a pivotal moment and Sorkin’s signature that it is time for Atticus to put a stop to one man’s threats.

Mayella Ewell, the sexually abused daughter, is trapped in a lie and a society that views her as white trash. She, too, is a victim—a mockingbird who, like Robinson, sings out, only to draw the hunter’s attention. And hunt they do. I’m reminded of a line that Horton Foote added to the film absent in the novel: Atticus turns to Jem, who has just witnessed his father being ridiculed, and says, “Son, I’d like to keep you from all the ugliness in the world…but that’s just not possible.” Indeed.   

And that is just the point Sorkin drives home, as deeply as Boo Radley plunges a kitchen knife into the heart of the novel’s antagonist. “We’ve got to stop this right here and now,” Atticus Finch demands to a faceless jury. “It has gone too far.” Aaron Sorkin is making that same argument; dignity demands that ignorance no longer be tolerated. Not now. Not ever again.

Metaphorically, this play is about just how long this nation will remain apologists, enablers of racist policies of The New Jim Crow, documented by the distinguished writer Michelle Alexander. History will not look kindly to this jury if America continues to show malice towards those mockingbirds that “sing their hearts out for us.” This Atticus Finch aims to show us the way and reminds us, again, “That it is a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

When the curtain came down that evening, and the audience stood, my eyes locked on to Dr. Lopez. There was so much to say and so little time to say it. So this is my time. I hope when Dr. Lopez’s son Lex engages in a class discussion about the characterization of Atticus Finch that he remembers words really do matter, but actions speak louder than words.