Eliminating Bells...Which Leads To Another of My Ideas: Getting Rid of Cafeteria Seating!

Schools should do away with cafeteria seating and students should eat in the classrooms. This seems inconvenient, but I'm pretty sure it would be very beneficial to students. One reason I say this is because lower-functioning students often do not have appropriate social skills. Violence and gang activity are more prevalent in lower-income neighborhoods. Violence is much more likely to occur when students are in large groups and staff supervision is limited. Eating lunch in the classroom will increase the level of safety for students and staff. It will also help to synchronize the daily schedule.

I know this is easier said than done because now we have to figure out a way to get the lunch from the cafeteria to the students. I have thought up a solution to this. Get the students involved. Let several students from each class take on the responsibility of bringing the classroom lunch from the cafeteria. They can take student orders and be responsible for retrieving the meals. This can be considered job-skill training. Giving responsibility to the students will increase their confidence and self-worth.

It's just an idea, and it may be impossible, but for now it sounds good. Thoughts on this?

Second Issue: Asynchronous Bells

My main overall goal is to lessen the amount of chaos that is present in urban school systems. The first way to do that, which I described in a previous post, is to cap each classroom to a max of 20 students. The second way to do that is to eliminate bells.

Visualize this scenario. It's the middle of the day, I'm teaching an 11th grade English class at a not-so-great public high school, and a bell rings. This bell is not for my students. It is for different students and it is signaling that it is time for them to go to lunch. My class now completely loses concentration as they watch their friends walking by, heading off to social time. Suddenly my students decide that this is the time when they urgently need to use the restroom. They cannot refrain from poking their heads into the hallway to say something to their friends or siblings. I cannot fully regain control of the classroom until the halls have cleared.

Having bells ringing asynchronously is detrimental to student learning, as it presents an unnecessary disturbance. If every bell sounded in the school throughout the day was meant for every student, this would lessen the chaos. I'll take it a step further and propose that bells be eliminated completely. It would take some creativity to pull this off, but I have some recommendations that I will suggest in my next blog to make this idea work.

Cities in Crisis

I found an interesting report on America's graduation rates. It focuses on the most populous cities in the country. It is called Cities in Crisis and is published by America's Promise Alliance. Page 10 gives a chart of the graduation rates for school districts serving the nation's 50 largest cities. The report was recently published and the web address is:
http://www.americaspromise.org/uploadedFiles/AmericasPromiseAlliance/Dropout_Crisis/SWANSONCitiesInCrisis040108.pdf
It shows that there is a pretty huge disparity between the cities and their surrounding metropolitan area. Detroit City School District comes in last with a 24.9% graduation rate. Baltimore City doesn't fare all that much better, with a 34.6% graduation rate. The chart on page 12 of the report shows that the suburban districts of Baltimore have an 81.5% graduation rate. How is it that 34.6% of city kids are successfully graduating while 81.5% of county kids are graduating? We have to figure out a way to do better!