Visualizing the Need for Education Reform
One artist’s take on the education crisis.
Meet the Artist
Audwynn Jermaine Newman is a long -time family friend and we have had, along with our son John, a former fourth grade teacher, many long conversations about our public schools. He is an accomplished professional artist who does commission work, makes sales in his Broad Ripple, IN store and at juried art shows. He is a trained cartoon artist and worked for both Marvel and D.C. Not long ago, after a conversation about many of the serious problems in our schools he said, “Let me see if I can use my artist skills to help you tell this story. Here is some of his thinking as portrayed in his art.
Each pictures carries the title from a section of my web site. I make the statement: “If you knew what I know, you’d be worried too.” Audwynn found this perspective intriguing and extends an invitation for you to take a look and see what it means.
I often say, just as my father used to say to me, “There is only one road to follow for success in life – the education road. Here is how Audwynn sees that road for many students, particularly for lower income kids. This is my favorite cartoon.
Here’s another way to look at the education journey. Poorly funded children must make do with inferior resources compared to wealthier schools. The journey of the kids on the left will probably never leave the ground while on the right it will be a wonderful trip.
Audwynn can’t understand why someone doesn’t throw the life preserver to help save the system. It seems that we’re at a stalemate in terms of reform; meanwhile test scores are dropping and US rank in the world gets worse.
Audwynn was impressed with the importance of what I say in many of our conversations about reading. “You spend grades K-3 learning to read; you then spend the rest of your life reading to learn.” If a child reaches the end of their 3rd grade year and cannot read, they are doomed to failure. In America, 25% of our 16- to 65-year-old people have the reading skills of a 10-year-old child. We must not let this happen; kids must be able to read to advance to the fourth grade.
Success in life comes from the development of two types of skills. 1. Thinking/reasoning skills, the so-called cognitive skills and 2. The social and emotional skills labeled, noncognitive skills. One of the noncognitive skills is GRIT or perseverance. I emphasize this skill because in my book, when I asked the teachers what is different about the disruptive students (they each had 6 such students) they all quickly said, “They just quit.” There is much written about the importance of grit as well as other character skills. Here’s something to remember: Character and grit are the antidote to discipline. In other words, the reason students are discipline problems is because they lack these noncognitive skills.
This is a picture of the three stages of life for a butterfly. Let’s use this concept to see what happens as students make their journey along the education road. They begin as babies and make their way through grades K-12 but most of them never turn into butterflies. For example, in the state of Maryland only 40 percent the students turn into butterflies, kids who are ready to go to college or a trade school. In Indiana this number is only 30 percent. We must never be satisfied with this terrible performance; America has always been better than that.
This is the way Audwynn sees the Teacher Trap. Teachers are caught in a vise between satisfying student needs and the needs of the administration. Generally, teachers are wary of ever getting “crosswise” with the administration; they have well established ways of “getting even” the most severe of which is termination from their job.
Audwynn grew up in a perfectly normal home but has learned a great deal about the dire circumstances in many other homes. He portrays this as a time bomb that does explode from time to time in rioting and chaos.
Audwynn titles this “Fruit from a tree.” This is the tree that grows in the yards of many low-income people. There is no good fruit coming from this tree. The only way to turn this tree into one that bears great fruit is to educate each owner. The only road out of poverty is education.
This represents our youth whose lack of a good education forces them into life situations where they lose everything because of no opportunities. They end up on the wrong side of the law firing bullets that are ruining their family, their community and themselves.
These students are climbing a road that leads to disaster. As we pointed out in another caption 60% of our students who climb the education hill end up without a useable education.
Here’s the failure theme again but shown in a different way. A poor education doesn’t come with a parachute. The well-educated kids will have a safe landing. We must stiffen up our standards and not let kids hook up fake parachutes.
This cartoon pretty much speaks for itself. Inner city schools are often going to devour their students and put them back out on the street poorly prepared for life.
This is the way Audwynn shows what he is hearing me say about our current public schools. We need major reforms, and we need them now. We need a major explosion to wake people up.
Education protects kids – it will give them a longer and better life.
Audwynn shows some of the things poor children must overcome – some will make it, but history says most will not. We must reform the system, so most students have opportunities to go in better directions.
