Photo by PinkStock Photos! on Flickr.

The challenge facing education reformers is more fundamental than teacher contracts. Our children’s value systems have been co-opted largely by the media, and are now the primary obstacle to learning in the classroom. Unlike pre-war youth, today’s children do not give education enough value.

Reformers appear to assume that simply having high expectations of students will shape their values. As a former teacher at Wilson High School and principal at Ellington School for the Arts, I can assert that teaching values is far more complex than that, and must move to the center of education reform dialogue.

Those who actually have responsibility for teaching our children have been engaged in a losing battle since the end of WW II. The rapid and expansive development of the suburbs in the postwar years slowed the breakdown in public education and thus masked this deeper problem. The cities witnessed the growing challenges of educating the postwar generation much earlier than did their suburban colleagues.

One of the first people to recognize that huge changes were in the making, was David Riesman. He wrote “The Lonely Crowd,” a groundbreaking analysis of the post war era and its impact upon our young people. Riesman identified the changes that were in the making and was among the first to point a strong finger at media, which he contended was contributing to the changing landscape of adolescents.

One need only look at the early 1950’s to witness the growing impact of this youth culture on film, music and all forms of media. Riesman contended that many young people had become “other-directed” taking their social cues from an extended peer group and media was a strong conveyer of the “right” cues, not their immediate family, the school, the church or other institutions who had traditionally provided direction.

The films of the 1950’s spoke volumes about the lack of relevance of educators, and that trend has continued through the present day. For every “To Sir With Love,” there are numerous examples of film and television that speak volumes about the irrelevance of education except among a select set of young people, whose peer value system include high SAT scores, top grades and entrance to elite universities.

This value system is constantly advanced in selected print and broadcast media but ignored by the greater mass audience. A similar value system exist among select working class students who see education as a genuine way out of their current situation. Unfortunately, there are too few of them to stem the demise of public education in working class communities.

Thus, the efforts to recruit brilliant teachers, educational leaders and building new and bigger school facilities, while helpful, are not going to going to significantly impact the current educational status quo until strategies and techniques are developed to change the peer messages that surround the “other directed” student.

My experience in DC has shown me that DC primary grades do a good and in many cases an excellent job in those early grades but lose ground as the students move into the intermediate and senior high grades. The teachers can no longer compete with the signals sent from numerous sources, music, television, film and the internet, which impact their students almost non-stop since they are rarely separated from their cell phone.

It is almost as if our educational leaders and policy mavens have never heard of writers and thinkers like Riesman, Marshall McLuhan or other leading writers and thinkers on media and the information age.

The predominant peer value system in a modest income community does not include excelling at academics, but just “getting through” and nothing more. But what is important, is what is being worn by whom, what new cell phone is hot along with which shows, performers and “personalities” are currently hot. This same value system can be found in the most elite private school but it does not dominate the culture.

Unfortunately, those who are teaching students in the later grades are often unfamiliar with these new peer value systems and thus are unable to develop strategies to co-opt them. Nor, is there a resource for them to begin to learn about these new value systems.

If we are to begin to stop the bleeding in our educational community we must begin to evaluate those who enter the ranks of educators by different criteria and the same for those we ask to lead our educational institutions. As a principal of a DC public school I found many of my teachers without basic knowledge about key cultural icons, performers, films, music and even books which were influencing the goals and directions of their students.

These teachers were bright and well versed in their respective academic fields but understood little about the social and cultural forces shaping the actions of their students. And in too many cases, were actually proud of the fact they were not knowledgeable. If education reform continues to operate in a vacuum it is surely bound to the detention center for remaining clueless in a time of needed change.