This is a perfect example if good intentions run amok. None of these are bad ideas.

But the time demands are absurd. And much of this is simply teaching. Of course you link the content to your students lives. Of course you emphasize key vocabulary. Teaching does not need a lengthy formal plan for every hour and a whiteboard filled with sprawling objectives that sometimes intimidate students. Those students who struggle to keep up with grade-level objectives may look at that whiteboard and tune out instead of tuning in.

Education cannot be run like a car factory. Our students are not products. They are people. When the masterplans become too detailed, some of the kids in the mix don’t fit the plan. That’s where learning first starts to go wrong. But lost learning piles up, eventually becoming an insurmountable mountain for less lucky students.

Eduhonesty: The more detailed the plan, the less flexible it often becomes in spite of attempts at differentiation. In the end, a 50 minute period is only 50 minutes — and the items in the plan that don’t fit in those minutes then become part of the rising mound of things that never were taught.

The crucial question that begs an answer: If there are never leftover minutes — when will remediation ever happen?

I believe “Fighting the White Knight” helps explain the recent widening of the achievement gap. We created calamitous educational policies, later followed by even more atrocious plans and reactions, and yet somehow this post-pandemic growing gap in test scores nonetheless surprised us. COVID has been given the blame, but those assertions of blame are naive or even disingenuous.

Please believe me: The sad state of the gap cannot be laid at COVID’s door, even if COVID aggravated an already precarious situation. Simply, in poor US school districts, local funding had not provided enough. Not enough funding. Not enough academic choice. Not enough up-to-date resources. Not enough tutoring. In particular, not enough laptops, iPads and other technology. We had ignored the wisdom of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Across time and across the country, educational “reformers” had been trying to find solutions to the achievement gap that did not involve changing the US school funding system, hoping to find a magic fix for differences between zip codes, while deflecting attention away from the effects of local property-tax-based school funding. When the pandemic arrived, where were the computers and software required for remote learning? We know that answer now. We watched as districts scrambled to lay their hands on back-ordered Chromebooks and other tech, devices many of their students did not yet know how to use.

As I have observed before, property-tax-based funding favors Congresspeople, mid-level bureaucrats, and other decision makers. Middle-class (or better) employment allows parents to choose between more expensive, prosperous neighborhoods where education funding flows freely into schools that have all the support staff, technological devices and special services most parents could desire. Meanwhile, in less fortunate neighborhoods, laptops, iPads, desktops, software, books, aides, and tutoring tend to be much thinner on the ground. In the US educational system today, you still get what you can pay for. That can be a single language option on the curriculum instead of six different languages, and almost nothing for afterschool activities except sports, while luckier kids down the road get to pick between more than twenty after-school clubs, on top of the usual sports.

Eduhonesty: FUNDING needs to be front and center in our sights as we work to bring equity, fairness and improved performance to the US educational system. Frankin D. Roosevelt predicted the loss of learning in our poorer zip codes, even as so-called “reformers” pushed relentlessly for higher English and math test scores in schools without laptops or stable internet connections.

• * O.K., I admit that “covert attempt superteacher” bit is definitely too long to tag onto my subtitle!

HOWEVER — data only tells you what you did not know when you understand how to dig into that data. Data mining involves shoveling large quantities of numbers and people get lost in those numbers. Sometimes they choose to go astray, trying to bend the numbers to support what they intend to do anyway.

Of more importance, when you already know something, adding more data merely wastes time and money.

Eduhonesty: I could measure my height every day for a month. I wouldn’t grow any taller nor would I shrink. I know this before I pull out the tape measure.

A state test in the spring makes sense. But I believe a state test on top of two benchmark tests, both administered multiple times throughout the year, should be considered educational malpractice, except in the rarest of cases. Because every test sacrifices instructional hours that can never be recovered.

I’ve written this too many times. One more time into the breach, though, because many educational decision makers remain overly enamored of adding and analyzing data. Rather than learning the minutiae of learning gaps, we should be filling the gaps. We can’t fill those gaps while testing.

And we have to watch out for enthusiastic exhortations about the advantages of data.

One problem with discussions on the US educational system is the inherent breadth of the issues. It’s easy to mire down in multiple topics and lose focus. Sunday morning, I joined readers to discuss my book, “Fighting the White Knight: Saving Education from Misguided Testing, Inappropriate Standards and other Good Intentions.” We had a diverse group: people with no experience in education, a paraprofessional from a wealthy district, an urban charter teacher’s spouse, a retired teacher from another wealthy district, a university professor, and me.

I’d like to share one point from this morning that deserves much more attention than it has received.

Eduhonesty: As educators know, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) explicitly planned to evaluate US schools through expanded testing, designed to gain additional data on student progress. The Common Core set out to create a common national curriculum, and associated national test. That test was intended to homogenize data across the country.

Illinois provides a frightening example of what actually happened when various government entities used power and money to push NCLB and the Core on US students.

In Illinois, we abruptly threw all bilingual and special education students into the state testing pool, mostly dropping tests those subgroups had taken previously, but sometimes adding extra tests and thus subtracting instructional time. Over time, we changed the Illinois State Achievement Test (ISAT) into the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) to match new Core expectations. Then we changed PARCC into the Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR), because our PARCC scores pleased almost no one, except maybe a few vindictive psychopaths. Fierce arguments about changes to the IAR are currently underway. Some factions want to break the test into three parts. If this is done, the new IAR definitely will not be the IAR of the recent past.

Here’s the topic that never gets discussed, probably because there is nothing to be done: If we had left that first test, the ISAT, in place instead of playing test roulette, we would know a great deal more about student progress than we do now. When test administration and test content change significantly, the ability to make comparisons over time becomes lost. How does student achievement in 2024 compare to achievement in 2004, 2010 or 2020? Honestly, we don’t know. Answers to that question can be inferred, but the students of today are not taking anything close to the same test given to students in 2004. If 2024 students took the same algebra test as students from 2004, stakeholders could quickly say, “score are down 12%” and reliable, valid data would support that number. But despite burying ourselves in numbers, that reliable, valid data does not exist.

And the money that funded those national curricula, tests, and related professional developments and committee meetings, not to mention the money spent on purchases of test-related classroom materials? That money could probably have funded a permanent base on the moon. I honestly believe we might have spent enough $$$$$ to build a lunar colony — and sadly, if we had spent the money on the moon, and had left education alone, I believe today’s students would have come out academically, socially and emotionally ahead.

Recent reforms have provided yet another example of that old quote from the Viet Nam war: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Except the village remains ravished and wrecked in pockets throughout the country, and it’s unclear who — if anyone — we saved.

P.S. Yes, we do have comparable data from a national test. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a standardized test measuring academic performance given by the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. This test is only for students in grades 4, 8 and 12, however, and students do not receive test results.

How often do we need to repeat the material?

Until they get it.

And we need to be 100% clear — If we move on before students understand, there’s a real chance no one will fill in missing knowledge later. As curricula keep getting more demanding due to districts’ struggles to hit test targets, repeating material becomes more problematic. After curriculum planners put 192 days worth of material into the plans for a 180 day school year, often they can’t add in another whack at finding the area of a hexagon. With curricula stumbling clumsily over one another, maybe the hexagons will disappear. Maybe telling time will be left to a future person whose school’s curriculum has dropped the clocks that used to be taught in the next grade.

Eduhonesty: The risk of putting too much material into the curriculum and then going too fast is huge. Because if we “taught the material” but they “did not get it” — we taught NOTHING, all the while wasting our students time.

Why districts should hire extra help for small group interventions:

Without extra bodies in the picture,

The math’s wrong.

A fixed number of

teachers cannot do small

group interventions

without leaving other

kids rudderless,

teacherless, killing time

by default.

I stumbled upon this while deleting pictures. I paused. It’s not the first such note I ever confiscated, and almost certainly not the last. As we keep trying to create assembly-line models of education, though, I think we should take a moment to remember what it feels like to be thirteen.

Middle schools and high schools are filled with adolescents whose brains are sometimes frozen, mental stutters, wholly stuck on a kid sitting across the room — and oblivious to the woman talking in front of the whiteboard.

These are adolescents.

And they need more than an endless stream of math and English factoids that are expected to be part of the latest year’s spring test. They need adults to understand that children and adolescents are not small versions of adults. Small humans are not simply humans who know fewer facts. They do not struggle to make sound choices because of lack of data.

They struggle because their brains and bodies are changing so rapidly that confusion is often where they live, not merely a way station on the way to adulthood.

Can we save education from today’s onslaught of misguided testing and inappropriate — sometimes even ridiculous — standards? What about the other codified and uncodified good intentions that keep upending our classrooms? That subtitle above is a mouthful and it doesn’t even explicitly capture my chapter on the student loan debacle.

My recently published book can easily be found by putting “Fighting the White Knight Jocelyn Turner” into a search engine. That single act awes me a little. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and so many little bookstores and unfamiliar websites seem to have my book. Poshmark even lists a couple of copies.

Reader, I would be so happy if you would order my book. Kindle and ebook copies are available. I hope for kind reviews, although I also expect to get slammed by some readers. I am calling the current system broken, while demanding that we increase educational time and funding to cover remedial education. I want a longer school year in some places, as well as more consideration for “old-fashioned” educational approaches that do work when appropriately applied.

The system has to change. Piecemeal fixes and occasional grants have not been narrowing the achievement gap. I expected the post-COVID gap to widen significantly, and the data has been bearing me out. A reading and math disaster has been underway, and reading is the foundation upon which all educational success ultimately rests. That disaster unsurprisingly kicked the kids hardest who were already down.

To quote from https://hechingerreport.org/massive-learning-setbacks-show-covids-sweeping-toll-on-kids/:

“… the average student lost more than half a school year of learning in math and nearly a quarter of a school year in reading – with some district averages slipping by more than double those amounts, or worse. Online learning played a major role, but students lost significant ground even where they returned quickly to schoolhouses, especially in math scores in low-income communities.

When you have a massive crisis, the worst effects end up being felt by the people with the least resources,” said Stanford education professor Sean Reardon, who compiled and analyzed the data along with Harvard economist Thomas Kane.*

Yes, the US educational system works wonderfully in many lucky locations. I live in a district that sometimes makes national news because of its first-rate schools. We lost ground to COVID locally, but comparatively came out not too badly damaged — and my neighbors have a long history of hiring expensive tutors to fill in learning gaps.

But I worked elsewhere. I have seen the effect of property-tax-based school funding in areas where houses are cheap and industry scarce. I have seen what happens when remediation does not happen; children who are lost become more lost because bodies and hours needed to fill in past learning gaps simply don’t exist. Those districts with more money can hire more paraprofessionals, but our least financially endowed districts may even struggle to buy enough paper. Parents who are struggling to make the rent because of rising food costs are not hiring tutors or checking out Kumon classes.

So I wrote a book. I am cleaning up a second book right now, one that helps explain in detail how No Child Left Behind and the Common Core failed to bring us out of today’s harsh, luck-of-the-zipcode landscape. I promise readers that “Fighting the White Knight” contains a great deal of food for thought.

Join me in my journey?

Social media sites where I can be found:

• pinterest.com/jocelyntheplaid (2 education sections and some fine iced coffee recipes, etc.)
• facebook.com/jocelyn.turner.75
• instagram.com/shastatheplaid (mostly watercolors)
• biographyjar.com (just for fun — education has only bled into the fabric on occasion)
• I am almost nonexistent on the former Twitter now, but I may rejoin the group when the dust settles, if enough of the old crowd are still there.

*https://hechingerreport.org/massive-learning-setbacks-show-covids-sweeping-toll-on-kids/

A few interesting pre-COVID observations:

In 2019, a full 10.4% of students in public schools were English learners according to EducationWeek — more than 1 in 10 kids. No matter where anyone stands on immigration, that’s a formidable number of kids who required robust, targeted, language-learning support within our schools. This large chunk of our student population should have been receiving support in the form of afterschool and week-end programs, not to mention summer school — effectively requiring a longer school year.

Our distribution of English learners has not been not falling evenly across US schools. According to Education Week, 64% of teachers in the 2017-2018 school year had at least one English learner in their classrooms. If we flip this on its head, that means, 36% — or more than one in three teachers — did not have any English learners.

(From an EducationWeek quiz sponsored by Lexia Learning that popped into my email.)

I don’t entirely agree with the quiz and current writings on the subject of how to help language learners: in particular, these students don’t need access to grade-level texts! I strongly believe part of our struggle to manage bilingual education comes from unrealistic, good intentions — all the kids who are receiving unreadable texts in a scenario where they don’t begin to have the time necessary to conquer the challenge we have thrown at them. Some of these texts are not mountains — they are moon launches.

But common misconceptions mentioned in the quiz email are real:

Yes, our bilingual students are often assumed to be unintelligent because of their language struggles.

Yes, parents and others may believe that EL services take away learning opportunities from non-EL peers. Especially in financially disadvantaged neighborhoods, this may even be true: when there is a finite pool of money and it’s not enough from the outset, any and every program in a sense is taking money away from other programs. In a meagerly-funded school district, not all of those cheated programs will be fluff or “extra” opportunities.

Eduhonesty: And then COVID arrived and many areas went to virtual learning. The net result appears to have been a decline in English learning, especially in younger grades — a true concern since data has been documenting academic stagnation in students who become long-term participants in English-learning programs.

Still, the meaning of the downward trend in language learning growth suggested by aggregate student data from 2021 — at least compared to 2020 and 2019 — cannot be honestly quantified. Testing windows changed and many students skipped testing entirely, leading to “concerns among state education agencies that the most vulnerable English-learners weren’t tested, said Amaya Garcia, deputy director of preK-12 education at the think tank New America.” The test population changed at the same time groups of students received different amounts of test preparation than had historically been expected.

Tests showed “relatively larger declines in speaking, according to WIDA’s report, and in 1st and 6th grades… with “more declines in language growth in the younger years,” concerning “since there’s the hope that children will become proficient early enough to exit out of an English-learner program by 4th grade to avoid the risk of becoming a long-term English-learner, who may end up stagnated academically.”

See “The Complicated Picture of English-Language Learners’ Progress During the Pandemic.”*

Eduhonesty: Even if the numbers are fuzzy, that learning loss is real. You don’t need a meteorologist to see which way the wind blows. Students who spent months isolated from the outside world lost the opportunity to practice speaking with English-speaking peers. Students in houses with limited technology, or new, late-arriving, unfamiliar technology, lost ground when compared to students who already had all the tech, not to mention parents who found zooming and its equivalents effortless.

Do we honestly want to tackle the COVID damage to English-learning? If we do, I suggest we must extend the school year for those students who fell behind. When everyone goes to school for about 180 days, the kids who are already ahead naturally get further ahead. Previous learning is the platform upon which we build today’s learning — and the kids who already have larger vocabularies and more background knowledge can learn faster than less fortunate counterparts. Vocabulary is a source of learning as well as a result of learning. We must make certain that students receive the opportunity to learn the words they missed — and have been missing — as our schools barrel forward, teaching standards that only sometimes fit the students within US classrooms.

P.S. Yes, it may be racist to demand that every EL become ‘proficient’ in English — although I’ll observe that any education for our ELs that does not target the acquisition of English language vocabulary must be considered equally or more racist. English remains far and away the primary business language of this country. Adults with a limited English-language vocabulary too often end up condemned to lower-paying jobs in backrooms in the service sector, or worse.

A memory: My student’s mom had a job putting a small part inside another small part in a factory. She did not know what she was making. She just endlessly, hour after hour, stuck one part inside another. We talked about how she wanted to improve her English in hopes of getting “a job on the floor” — a job with benefits, in other words, real paychecks, and even air-conditioning. I hope she got there. But those backrooms without air conditioning and those 29-hour-a-week jobs that keep a person right below the hours needed to qualify for healthcare benefits? Those backrooms and 29-hour jobs are everywhere in the US.

Email from education Week on 3/16/23. titled Quiz|Supporting English Language Learners

*https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/the-complicated-picture-of-english-language-learners-progress-during-the-pandemic/2021/11#:~:text=What%20do%20we%20know%20from,of%20the%20four%20language%20domains. By Ileana Najarro — November 02, 2021 | Corrected: November 03, 2021

I believe I have an especially savvy group of readers. I don’t think my readers require much in the way of classroom management advice. But it’s September and some of you are newbies — in a time when fashions sometimes cram all of us together into overcrowded lifeboats. So I thought I’d run a small stream of useful observations:

Larger class projects heavily favor the self- and grade-motivated. Sometimes these students effectively take over the whole project, directing struggling students to paste shiny stars or glitter on backboards, or write a simple section that the self- and grade-motivated student then almost entirely rewrites.

My own thoughts: If you can’t do a project mostly in class where you can watch group dynamics unfold, I’d avoid that project. I’d also create related assignments to ensure that weaker or less-motivated members can’t simply hand all the hard work to fellow student “Frankie”– who really, really wants that “A” and is perfectly willing to do ALL the work if that’s what the “A” demands. Frankie probably does not care if fellow group members learn the actual content the project teaches.

Eduhonesty observation: EVEN WITH STRONG SUPERVISION, group projects mostly favor the students who least require extra help and remedial education.