NCLB II in the Trenches

I’m still waiting to find out whether I will teach 5th grade, 4th/5th grade combo, 2nd grade, or a K/1 combo on Tuesday. It will probably be 5th grade, but only by default, as the decision will be deferred a few more days or a few more weeks, so that we all have more time to settle in before being horrifically up-rooted. I have difficulty imagining what the district office does all day, if not make their unquestionably most important decisions, but I suspect I don’t want to try too hard. I think it involve 8-hours, a lunch break and donuts, whereas mine involved 14-hours, missing dinner with my fiancée, and McDonalds. Let’s move on.

The discussion draft of the No Child Left Behind 2.0 is being circulated. The NYT has a frightfully short report and I am terribly short on energy, leading to a marvelous symbiosis of commentary.

“President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind…”

Yes. Signature it is. What other administration could have produced such a poorly designed and poorly enacted piece of policy? Here’s a new way to explain the disaster of NCLB to the educationally uninformed: Imagine the educational version of the Iraq War. Barely planned, awfully executed, under-equipped, laced with corruption, and exacting a horrific cost on our nation we’ve only begun to appreciate, ---which one am I writing of, hmm?

“which ties school aid to standardized-test scores”

Yes, but not as you might think. This statement implies that making said test scores entitles you to more aid and not making them gets you less. Actually it’s the other way around. Now that we’re officially labeled a failing school, we’re looking forward to having some more money to acquire the resources we need to change that. Some of my friends at schools that have worked their way out of failing status are worried about how to continue that without the money the label provides.

“may be changed to elevate other criteria and exclude results for some non-native speakers of English”

Yes. This just in: Students labeled by virtue of not passing English tests may not pass English tests. Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t test the ELLs, I’m saying we should test them well.

“States would be able to develop assessments of progress”

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Let’s recognize that schools can make a difference without reaching arbitrary and absolute benchmarks.

“tests would go beyond English and math to include history and science”

Yes, yes, a million times yes. This will cause havoc as schools try to deal with having to teach four subjects again rather than two. They need that havoc. I’m firmly in the camp that believes that when we teach history and science, we’ll see our three-R scores go up as well. Reading and math are, for all but our English and Math academes, means to an end. Let’s give children a taste of the end and see if it motivates them a little better than simply more and more of the same means.

“Schools would be judged partly on graduation rates and college enrollment.”

Yes, yes, a billion times yes. I suspect this only for high schools, but what a brilliant idea to extend it down to middle and elementary schools. We must keep our eyes on the prize, which is not simply passing a test in 3rd or 5th grade. Not The Man, nor my district, nor TFA, has ever once addressed the graduation and college enrollment rate of our students. Teachers had to look that up ourselves and found that our district/state doesn’t even track the right data! There is no sense of ownership over the longitudinal performance of our students and there absolutely should be. This is a great idea.

I’m feeling rather positive, aren’t I?

“This draft is a work in progress, subject to change over the coming weeks…”

Oy. Well, much like my 24-student class, this seems great until someone higher-up mucks it all up.

The Soft Insanity of Rubbery Expectations

I could write about the maddening frustration of my district waiting weeks to make class-shattering decisions about how to address our low enrollment but that was so last year. Instead, to stay calm, I will write about something far more amusing… or is it?

I was “grading” my students’ quick-writes today and was deeply horrified by the lack of appropriate preparation. Not the students, I’m used to that, but mine. I picked up my first essay, a rambling three-line run-on sentence:

If I were ruler of the world I would have lots of cars and a big manchine were all my friends and I could live and play in my really really really big pool.


I looked at my assortment of new grading rubber stamps, intended to make this tedious process easier for me and more rewarding for the kids. Apparently the stamps are being made for 2014, when W believes 100% of students will be on grade-level, ‘cause my options were: “Awesome!” “Outstanding!” “Excellent!” “Wonderful!” “Great Work!” “Nice Job!” and “Please Correct and Return.”

No wonder we have low expectations, folks. When the selection is between Fantastic! or Make More Work For Teacher, the popular choice is clear. I know it’s the second day of school and I need to encourage the younglings to write, write, write, but let’s be real. I’m not going to tell them their writing is “Wow!” only to come back in a few weeks and tell them it’s “Whoa.” No matter what, I just can’t bring myself to stamp “Great Work!” on a piece of 5th grade writing with one period.

We need praise stamps, but we need constructively critical stamps too. Stamps to address the real gamut of student work. We need “Pretty Good,” “Mediocre.” and “You Could Do Better.” Or at least the ambiguously neutral “Okay.” They can be decorated just like the praise stamps but appropriately tempered, ---unhappy faces, weeping stars, or perhaps drooping flowers. And let’s not pretend that we don’t need ones that address the bottom. Those kids deserve stamps too, even if they say, “Terrible.” “Try harder!” or just flat out “Take your work seriously.”

It’s time for some honesty in Lakeshore, folks. Let’s admit that not all of our student’s work is “Way to Go!” all year long and get some help here.

New Year’s Resolutions

I have always lived on an academic calendar. I was a student for 16 years and then went straight back to the classroom as a teacher. Mrs. AB, my mother, is a retired teacher, and our concurrent vacations helped me to imagine that most people’s lives just revolved around the school year like ours. June was for closing down and packing up; July was for vacation and travel; August was for getting ready again.

Here, writing on the December 31st of the academic world, I think it a far better time to make my resolutions than the real end of 2007. Any suggestions on how to stick to these are greatly appreciated.

As an instructor…

I will have more fun, on the job. Just going back to teaching reading, vocabulary, science, and history again will be fun. But I want to take my classroom fun to the next level. I am teaching the same standards for the fourth year in a row, I need something to keep me excited and enthused.

I will allow my students to have more fun, in class. My Direct Instruction is strong but it seems neigh on incompetent compared to the teaching power of games. I have watched games devastate entrenched student apathy when it comes to the math facts. I want to wield their mighty power on reading frustration and social studies malaise as well.

I will engage my students more actively and more deeply in the class and school. From SLANT to class meetings, I know how to do much of this already, but my implementation struggled under last year’s departmentalization. There are no excuses this year!

I will vary my instruction more. I have always used informal pairing well but facilitating formalized group work is one of my greatest weaknesses as a teacher. (This stems from hating it as a student.) However, GLAD, our social studies/science “curriculum” demands the students work with each other and without me, so it’s time to learn how to make that happen.

I will encourage questions and discussions. I realized that my students don’t ask nearly enough questions nor have nearly enough good academic conversations. Certainly, this might be partially because they don’t speak English, but it is almost definitely because I have an attitude of, “This better be mighty good to interrupt my lesson.” I can change that.

As a professional…

I will stress less. I spent far too much of last year somewhere between fretting and freaking out about my students’ poor behavior and performance. Much of it was a particularly awful class but much of it was also me. If I am going to stay in this profession, I must find a way to keep the urgency and let the stress go.

I will become responsible. You may recall from this post that I am not the greatest on remembering details. But that must change. Armed with a PDA, Google Calendar, filing crates, clipboards, and a deep desire to not embarrass myself anymore, I will lose papers, miss deadlines, forget meetings, and fail to follow through, no more!

I will let other people do more or let it not be done. I can no longer try to fill every need at my school. Corollary: I will ask people to do more of the work that I do and trust that they will do it well.

I will learn Spanish. I can’t even imagine how much more effective I could be if I could actually communicate with my students’ parents.

I will blog, truly. I see my blogging as part personal passion, but part professional development. For the last three years, this space has been more of a column than a blog. I’ve been more of a columnist, posting and moving on, than, a blogger, who views the post as the beginning of a conversation. From now on, I will answer comments on this blog and post them on the two or three dozen others I read.

Tomorrow, Academic Year 0708 begins!

Scoreboard

The results from the 2006-07 school year are in. They were as I suspected, disappointing in my 5th grade group and encouraging, though not fantastic, with the 4th grade.

Bad news first. The 5th grade doubled their pass percentage, from 15% to 30%, but that is still well below the state average. Worse yet, of the 52 students, only 15 advanced a level and 10 declined. (This does not mean they lost math skills, just that the test got harder.) Perhaps most frustrating, not a single student scored into the advanced range. Certainly, this was a class stripped of its intellectual leadership by our local KIPP, but I can’t help but also take that shut-out as a clear indication that I didn’t do enough for the top kids who remained. I actually expected worse, though my disappointment tells me that there was a small part of me that was still holding out hope for better. The one glimmer of satisfaction from this group was the lack of individual surprises; hard-working high-achieving students in class did well on the test; hard-working low-achieving students at least raised their scores; and the goof-offs dropped. The 66% students who improved did so an average of 30 points (out of a curved 600.) This tells me that the students who bought in were reasonably successful, which is moderately reassuring.

The fourth graders did much better. Around 53% of the class passed, again doubling the prior year, but still falling shy of the state average. However, the average student in the whole class improved their score by 40 points (out of 550), the average improver gained 55! 4 students grew by over 100 points and 30 of the 52 students gained a full level. Only 3 students declined a level and only 6 lost a meaningful number of points at all. In 4th grade, 15 students, or 29%, scored advanced. I will have many of these kids again this year and I’m excited to have the chance to boost even more of them, as well as to work on grade-level material for most of the year. I am now dealing with the happy burden of rewriting my math plan for a class where most kids will enter knowing how to do long division.

In reflecting on these mixed results, there’s the easy excuse that the 5th grade group had end-of-the-day math and a chaotic class community that made excellence, even for very bright students, impossible. But making excuses would make hypocritical my attitude that nothing, not school scheduling nor district-adopted curriculum, is immutable if it diminishes my students’ opportunity to learn. I pride myself on fighting all comers for every instructional minute and leaving Dr. So-and-So’s carefully researched curricula on the shelf if it doesn’t meet my students needs. But that also means that when the scores come in, I have no one else to blame.

There’s also the temptation to discount the scores of the goof-offs, the absentees, and the 4th and 5th grade kids who still can’t be bothered to learn their tables despite my daily admonitions. It would be easy to focus on the boy who almost aced the test or the girl who improved 117 points and passed, despite knowing only two-years worth of English. But that would make me as bad as a certain crop-creaming charter school I detest. I pride myself on teaching any student who walks through my door, so I must own up to all my students scores, good or bad.

It burns even to look at the clearly brilliant, fiercely antagonistic, frequently suspended, emotionally abused and obviously ADHD student who shed 63 points, but I must recognize that I am his teacher and that his failure is also mine. Fortunately and unfortunately, my work with him is over. That he didn’t want to learn is no excuse, it’s my job to change his attitude too. He will go to middle school not knowing what I could not teach him. It’s deeply frustrating that I can never correct the mistakes I made with him, but that is what makes our professional work meaningful. Teachers make a difference, for better or worse.

Back to the Trenches...

It's Fall. Not because the leaves are changing or the days are shortening but because I am back in my classroom. I cheated and did a little work in the Summer, but since it only involved meetings and curriculum writing, it didn't count as bringing about Fall. But, today, I went back into the classroom in force. Posters were hung, old walls were stripped, cupboards were purged and desks were arranged. Tomorrow is more of the same. Followed by a week and a half of other preparatory activities and then the arrival of The Children. It's Fall.

Fall means that Summer is over and so is my brief career as a travel writer. I would love to write a little about my adventures in Switzerland and Paris, but it's all I can do to sort through the 1000+ digital pictures I took. I learned from the months following my trip to Africa last summer that if I don't take care of the pictures right away, it will be Summer again before they appear in my apartment.

I hope you enjoyed Italy. Next Stop: The Trenches.