Program of Incompetence

A close friend of mine teaches at a school in its 4th year of Program Improvement, the series of sanctions leveled by the Feds at schools who fail to make their scores. For the last few months, I’ve watched closely and painfully as one of these schools, we’ll call it Park Elementary, struggled through this arduous process. Plagued by incompetence at every level, the resulting “reforms” at Park seem likely to benefit no one, least of all the community it serves.

Incompetence #1: The Law.

Park is a victim of the sort of foolishness I wrote about here. It shouldn’t even be facing these sanctions. They are one of the median schools in our district, nowhere near the bottom and have had excellent growth over the last three years. Park has twice been visited and recognized by the mayor of San Jose for their tremendous progress. But these improvements are in terms of API, California’s intelligent and fair measure, not AYP, the Fed’s idiotic and unjust one. Park made their growth among their lowest, neediest students, not their marginally “proficient” ones, and so Program Improvement they are.

Incompetence #2: The Consultant.

To help Park plan their reform, the district hired a consultant from Sacramento, three hours away. She visited only a small handful of times and made a few small recommendations. Only a few days before the school was supposed to present their plans for improvement to the board, the consultant finally offered a reform plan. She asked the school’s leadership team to sign off on an accompanying document claiming they had been involved in developing the plan, which they had not, including a timeline of meetings that never occurred and drafts that were never written.

Incompetence #3: The P.I. Administrator.

Program Improvement schools are supposed to have a full-time administrator to help the school increase student achievement. Park’s position went unfilled until nearly Christmas. Finally, the position was filled with an intern-credentialed middle school math teacher on her first administrative assignment. Knowing little about the elementary school environment, and even less about teaching reading (Park’s central challenge), she spent her hours making work. Her offerings to the school were morning announcements, increased uniform enforcement, and an effort to keep parents off the school campus. She sends a daily morning briefing to the staff between 9 and 10 o’clock, an hour after the beginning of the school day and is frustrated when it isn’t read.

Incompetence #4: The Board.

In March, the Consultant met with Park’s leadership team and told them they were doing a great job. A few days later, she recommended to the board that the school be “restructured,” that its leadership and a majority of its staff be changed. The Board appeared to have never even heard of Park’s troubles before. They expressed “shock” that the school was allowed to “slip so far.” No Board Member had ever visited Park, nor even read of their scores, good and bad. Almost by confused default, they rubber-stamped the Consultant’s recommendation.

Incompetence #5: The Union.

After the Board approved the restructuring of Park, requiring the transfer or termination of a sizable percent of the staff, the District and Union realized that the contract did not have language addressing this process. The Union categorically refused to negotiate a procedure for a professional evaluation of the Park staff. As a result, teachers were left not knowing how or by whom decisions would be made. The Union’s unwillingness to develop a clear criteria for evaluation placed the district in the position of arbitrary power far worse than any negotiated process could have been. Rather than face what was clearly going to be a painful process, many great teachers decided then to seek other positions.

Incompetence #6: The Human Resources Department.

Instead of determining and announcing a process, the district H.R. department seemed to figure it out as they went. Teachers were left totally in the dark. One day, an application to return to Park appeared in teacher’s boxes. A few weeks later, applicants were asked to schedule themselves for interviews the next day. For weeks thereafter, applicants were told they would hear of the results “next week” or even “in the day or two.” In this interim, the hiring and transfer period came and went. Many of Park’s remaining quality teachers, who wanted and planned to return, could not bear to wait any longer and took open spots elsewhere. When positions were finally announced, many good teachers were invited return, but so were some poor ones. The vast majority of transformation occurred simply through the attrition wrought by the painful process. Only one or two incompetent teachers were removed, and even they were simply transferred to other schools.

Incompetence #7: The Curriculum and Instruction Department.

One of the few aspects of this process that might have truly served the Park community was the school re-design. A committee of administrators, teachers and parents was formed to create a plan for a new, transformed Park. A lengthy process of visiting successful schools, discussing models with parents and students, analyzing weaknesses and making radical changes, might have made the drama at Park meaningful and worthwhile. Yet, after only a handful of meetings, the committee was scheduled to present a plan to the board. With inadequate time to develop real reforms, the school “re-design” plan suggested that Park would become a school “focused on literacy and numeracy in an ELL context.” How that focus is different from any other school in the district, including the Park Elementary of this year and last, is inexplicable.

The Results:

Park is left with a fraction of a staff, in a district that struggles tremendously to attract quality teachers. As the best teachers have already found placements for next year, the school will probably be filled with the novices and leftovers. Much of the school plan has been left blank for the “new staff” to determine, but as that staff will probably not meet until August, it seems unlikely they will be able to design the sort of comprehensive reform the school needs. As everyone appears to have kept their job, from the ill-conceived law down to the most incompetent teachers, the only consequences seem to be those reaped on the kids. They’ve had distracted and disaffected teachers for three months of this year and they’ll have ill-prepared ones for all of next year.

Nerd, Cool Thyself

One of The Man’s greatest weaknesses has always been the showmanship aspect of being a principal. He is clearly a quiet and cerebral man, ---he was once a monk, for Pete’s sake--- not the type of personality that ignites 400 massed five- to ten-year-olds into a school-pride frenzy. But his job demands a degree of cheerleading and, despite all awkwardness, The Man has always stepped up to the plate. Every assembly has seen him slowly improve his comfort and facility with leading the kiddy crowd. He has clearly had to work at it, and it has taken years, but the transformation is unmistakable. As we gathered this week to kick off Testing Season, he looked honestly happy to be in front of the kids, leading them in a new thunderous chant.

Watching his progress has inspired me to make similar strides with my own public persona. I have always been an unapologetic nerd, ---I even attended a Star Trek convention and, if the distinction is worth making, the University of Chicago. I have come to see that there are students, sometimes enough to set the tone of whole classes, with whom a nerdy teacher simply does not resonate. And there are many times, like most Monday mornings, when a dryly humorous, BBC-inspired, presentation or pep-talk is not what any class of ten-year old English Language Learners needs. Authenticity is important, but I want to be able to connect with any class and connect in all the necessary capacities as their teacher. I want to continue to offer my "challenging sense of humor" and "unusual vocabulary" (to quote a classroom observation), but I also want to be able to invoke a reasonably appropriate pop culture parallel or icon on occassion.

To that end, I think I need to learn a bit more about “coolness” (at least in the world of a ten-year old.) Rather than posing or changing myself, I see these abilities as akin to learning another language. The Man has not become a cheerleader, but he has learned to speak cheerleader when the situation calls for it. I will never, and I do not aspire to be, “ten-year-old cool,” but I believe that, to stay relevant and powerful in the classroom, I need to learn to speak “cool.”

But language learning requires immersion...This doesn’t mean I have to start watching more television, does it? Perhaps I can take a page from the other side of the desk and cheat. Has Cliff Notes come out with a text on The Simpsons or American Idol? Can I start inserting the names of pro wrestlers into my homework even though I don't really know what they mean? Why not find someone's blog entries about Mexican football leagues and pretend their my own opinions? Maybe I should just pass notes to cooler teachers when the kids ask me difficult pop culture questions?

Teaching to the Test

The Tests start on Tuesday, with the math test beginning next week. My long-term planning gave me the last three weeks for review and review I have. A review performed with the released test questions in one hand and my dry-erase marker in the other. Am I saying I am “teaching to the test?” Proudly. I’d even tell my mother.

For English Language Learners, preparation in test formatting, question phrasing and specific vocabulary is as crucial as teaching the math itself. Certainly, if the students truly understand the concept they should be able to adapt to new modes of questioning but that is not the issue. Understanding the new mode of questioning is the issue. Anytime my students encounter a question type they have never seen before, the test ceases to be about math and becomes foremost an assessment of language.

Don’t believe me?

Read this to yourself: “Nitasuiichi, nandesuka?”

Now answer the question.

If you didn’t say “san” than apparently you don’t know that 2 + 1 is 3. Or could it be that you don’t know Japanese?

I’m not saying that ELLs can’t be expected to learn math or even take math tests. I’m just saying that anyone who criticizes “teaching to the test” when ELLs are concerned just doesn’t understand the idea of valid assessment. Fortunately, the vast majority of problems on our math test are similar to the Released Test Questions the state sagely provides and thus we can prepare the students for them. And preparing them I am.

Each class, every day, we’ve been doing review. We start each class with a “quiz,” test-format-mimicking questions of what we covered the day before, self-corrected immediately afterwards. This is followed by a 10-15 minute input rehash of a whole units worth of concepts. The remainder of the class, thirty minutes to a whole hour, is spent in massive white-board practice and peer reteaching. By lunch, my room is so heavy with the smell of dry-erase markers that I sometimes force the class to endure the playground noise in order to get some air.

I paced the review to cover the general and harder concepts first and the specific and simpler concepts last. This last week before the test we’re going to cover the itsy bitsy little standards that, cumulatively, are worth just as much as the big ones. Knowing that “equals and equals make equals” and how to evaluate equations involving parentheses have as much weight as long division on the fourth grade test. It makes me nervous to make my daily check of the blueprints and see so many problems untouched, but I also know that expecting a hyper-active ten-year old to remember the different sums of the angles in a triangle and quadrilateral for longer than a week is foolhardy.

My real problems with all this are more self-centered. First, I fear it is not working. This crowd of students is vastly less focused than my students last year. My conservative estimates of who will pass are only half the numbers I achieved last year. I’m leaving plenty of room to be surprised but I don’t really expect it. Given that the average student came in unable to subtract and is leaving able to manipulate fractions and do long division, I know I should be more than satisfied. But I crave the public, celebrated, Jay Mathews-heralded success and that seems to come only with proficiency-based test scores.

Further, this sort of teaching is absolutely mind-numbing. This is not even teaching. This is test prep. Absolutely necessary, purposefully planned, and carefully prepared test prep, but still just test prep. It’s driving me out of my mind. I love encountering new concepts with a class; I thrive on building lessons with five different models and manipulatives to help kids understand a difficult idea; I really enjoy finding the right anecdote or piece of literature to make a concept meaningful. The time for all that is all passed. Now it is about the drill-and-kill memorization of specific terms and algorithms, the distillation of grand conceptual understandings into easily assessed, multiple-choice format. I hate it. Last year, I had to do it for an hour and a half a day, but right now it is all I teach. I have never been so unenthused about each day of work, I have never found myself trolling job-sites before, and I have never been so anxious for the end of the week. All this with the constant worry that it isn't enough, that I'm leaving something out, that it won't be worth it. Six more days!