01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 4, 2006

If a kid's not listening, the kid's not learning.

You might say well, duh, but that little bit of wisdom plays a shockingly small role in most school-reform efforts. Teachers are maddened by the extent to which the kids are distracted and not ready to learn, but the grownups' resentment about the kids' disengagement usually prevails over actually doing something about it.

So forgive me if I make one last, end-of-the-school-year plea that all secondary schools institute a robust advisory system, in which small groups of students meet daily with a faculty member to air their concerns. Kids are failing or disengaged for about a thousand different reasons, and unless someone at the school knows what's going on with each kid, those obstacles to success stay firmly in place. Teachers may be working their butts off, but if the kid's not listening, all that work is the tree falling in the proverbial woods. Maybe according to someone's golden age memory of years gone by, secondary students listened and learned compliantly -- actually the drop-out rate in 1950 was over 50 percent -- but I suspect that even back then most kids needed adult help to survive school.

Rhode Island has the highest rate of certified teachers in the nation. That means the state must have the highest rate of teachers who took child-development courses. Thus, Rhode Island ought to have the highest proportion of school professionals who are aware that parents can't be the only ones responsible for giving tweens and teens badly needed guidance. Starting around the sixth grade, perfectly normal kids begin to distance themselves from their parents, whom they regard as dorks with nothing better to do than thwart fun ideas.

Schools are already staffed in a way that could provide every public school child in America with at least one other significant adult. This is important. America is already organized to deal with its scary proportion of disengaged youth. Moreover, providing every kid with an adult to help solve problems and mute distractions is a reliable way to improve the school's overall academic performance. If the kid is frightened, worried, in love, angry, bullied, feeling dumb, ugly or friendless, she'll be pondering the issue during algebra. Or he might be considering how to take it out on someone smaller. But they won't be learning.

Only advisories guarantee that each and every kid has an adult familiar with her issues. Lots of school-reform efforts, including organizing small learning communities, can alter a school's organization without actually getting to each and every kid. By dividing the number of kids in a building among the school professionals, advisory groups come out to about 12 to 15 students per school professional. The groups meet for 15 to 20 minutes a day -- ideally -- during which the kids do most of the talking and the grownup listens and guides. Most schools' schedules make it almost impossible for anyone to have time to ask a kid how he's doing. Or why she quit doing her math homework. Or what's up with this on-going fight with so-and-so. Advisories are the fastest, surest and most enjoyable way to reduce discipline referrals, suspensions, bullying, student alienation and so on.

For those teachers among you who resist advisories on the grounds that they are a separate prep -- yet another class to prepare -- they are not. Listening and responding from the heart do not require creating tests or grading homework. Those who assert they are not psychologists and are, therefore, not trained to have a warm, caring relationship with kids -- as if one needed a Ph.D. for such a task -- might well be in the wrong profession.

Mind you, advisories are a set-up for failure unless the district or school has organized access to social-service support for issues that require more specialized help than what a caring adult can offer. Teachers need recourse to someone who can connect the kid to help when abuse, drugs, pregnancy or similar big problems arise. Advisories are for the more mundane stuff, the school and social issues, the reasons kids aren't paying attention.

My favorite idea for launching advisories is to have the adult ask the kids to write any questions they have on separate pieces of paper and toss them into a container. The adviser draws them out and puts each question to the group, anonymously. Advisers who do this regularly find that kids keep dropping off more questions. This way, whether the kid has a big burning issue or merely a logistical question that makes her feel dumb to ask, the issue is heard and handled.

The questions will run the gamut from "What do I do if I lose my locker combination?" to "There's this boy who makes my knees go weak when he walks by. What is this?"

Then, especially to support a my-knees-go-weak kind of conversation, advisories are the perfect time to help kids learn and talk about social skills and feelings. I recommend Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence as a good source for social and emotional teaching material, but what's most important is offering students a forum for sharing and understanding their inner lives. As it is, only marketing and advertising reliably reflect an understanding of kids' emotional concerns, and they're only after the kids' dollar. Where else besides advisories does anyone specifically address the kids' inner worlds? No wonder they become easily disaffected and turned off by school. They are just returning the school's evident lack of interest in the stuff that is most important to them.

Finally, I would suggest having each advisee start a journal that records their dreams and concerns. Help them develop goals and grow ambitions. What do they want for themselves in the future? What community issues might they want to work on? What personal concerns would they like help solving? Kids would appreciate having us respectfully acknowledge the unavoidable fact that they are going to solo out in the adult world in a few short years. How they fulfill their dreams and contribute to their communities -- or fail to -- matters to all of us.

The bottom line is that in the course of their secondary-school years, all kids will go through periods of feeling friendless, bullied, ashamed, angry. Especially when the world outside school offers kids little support, school grownups are the ones most obviously available to offer help, guidance and caring. Listening to the kids will greatly improve the kids' capacity for listening. Ironically, better listening on the part of the kids will also improve those blasted test scores.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902