The Interview

I recently contacted a woman, Lisa*, who works with a variety of 3rd through 5th graders and high schoolers as a tutor in two different urban schools in Milwaukee. She is also one of two room moms for a 5th grade class. Lisa writes, "There is very little parent involvement in urban schools. The concept of parents being room parents and helping out the teacher with field trips or anything...is an alien concept in that setting" (personal communication, February 19, 2017). Lisa's main job is to do one-on-one math tutoring for several high school students that she meets with weekly. She says these 9th and 10th graders can sometimes score at a 2nd grade level in different areas of math. Lisa also told me about a few factors that contribute to this low achievement.

The first factor she mentioned was poorly run schools. Urban schools like the one Lisa works in tend to have poor principals and poor teachers. This is mainly because teachers and principals are not interested in working in a low performing school, so it is hard for schools like these to get out of the position they are in. Lisa writes, "...there gets to be a vicious cycle in which the worst performing schools get 'stuck' with the worst teachers and principals also" (personal communication, February 19, 2017).

The next factor Lisa discussed was chaotic family life. Students often move homes and schools several times a year. This can cause students to go to several different grade schools while they grow up, and therefore, have gaps in their education. This make it difficult for them to build on their learning, and they miss out on the important foundation a stable school should be able to bring. Therefore, students can sometimes completely miss out on key education concepts, like in math in this case.

Another problem many students in Lisa's school face is moving too quickly through different math concepts before they truly learn them. The teacher is responsible for getting through a certain amount of content in a year, so they tend to move on once they've finished teaching a concept, whether all of their students have learned the concept or not. Lisa writes, "I have had to teach subtraction with renaming (or borrowing and carrying as I learned it) to many of my high school students. It only takes me a few minutes to teach them this in a one on one setting but somehow they never learned it well enough to retain it in grade school" (personal communication, February 19, 2017).

The final main factor that Lisa mentioned that contributes to students' low achievement is the chaotic classrooms in urban schools. She says that classroom management is extremely difficult and probably the most challenging aspect as an urban teacher. "Because classrooms are so chaotic it is very difficult for kids to learn even if they are motivated to learn. Many students in this environment have not been taught at home to respect teachers and to obey rules" (Lisa, personal communication, February 19, 2017).

Though Lisa faces all of these challenges and more in her job as a tutor at an urban school, and even though most of the high schoolers she works with will not even graduate (because they do not pass enough classes to gain enough credits), she still works hard to help students, because she "totally fall[s] in love with the kids and want[s] to help them" (personal communication, February, 2017). One of the most important things to Lisa in her job is using her Christian views to guide her work. "When Jesus gets in the mix, things go much better for the students. Christian teachers and Christian education makes a huge difference in an urban setting" (Lisa, personal communication, 2017).

*Name has been changed to protect privacy.