Monthly Archives: April 2015

Looking through the cracks

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To retain or not retain — that is the question. Should we flunk our underperformers? If we do, should we hold them back? Or send them on the next grade with a hope, a prayer and — if we listen to the research — extra tutoring? Academic studies favor social promotion, usually adding the caveat that the socially promoted should receive extra tutoring when they enter the next grade. Unfortunately, that tutoring may not happen or may be wholly insufficient: Two extra hours of instruction per week cannot begin to cover the losses from years of failure and near-failure. I’m not sure 10 hours a week could hit that target, but ten hours might be plausible for quick learners.

This post is only peripherally about retention, though. I want to briefly visit another topic. So Napoleon has failed or nearly failed his classes, quite likely not for the first time. At least one possible rescue ought to go on the table immediately, one that inexplicably may not be raised for discussion.

For parents and teachers: If Napoleon failed or has been skirting failure, please consider special education. When a parent demands that a child be tested for special education, the district must comply. Absent that demand, sometimes testing never happens. For one thing, the barriers to entering special education keep getting higher. I don’t want to start addressing those issues — they’re huge — but the amount of proof required to move a student into special education may shut the process down before it starts, especially as districts keep adding responsibilities to the teaching day. My 27 days of meetings this year take a lot of time away from possible parent calls or social worker discussions.

One of my students just entered special education. Her mom had mentioned she thought the girl needed extra help and I thought so, too. I talked to special education teachers. They told me the same thing they have been telling me for the last few years: Tell the parent to insist that her child needs to be tested. The amount of documentation a teacher requires to get that ball rolling is so daunting now that I suspect only parent interventions are likely to work in some districts. She’s not my only student who I think needs help. I have one more mission before year’s end, if I can put it together in the time that’s left.

For some kids, special education may be their only chance to graduate from high school and possibly move on to higher education. My colleague down the hall has been educated and trained specifically to work with academically and behaviorally-disadvantaged students. She has classes with eight or fewer children in them and a paraprofessional to help her. She can sit down and focus on one child, providing intensive instruction, while other children work with the paraprofessional. For any kid who is struggling to pass, year after year, my colleague’s class offers a chance to succeed.

Eduhonesty: Economic forces are in play here, something teachers and parents don’t always understand. Districts have a big incentive to keep children in the regular classroom. That special education teacher costs as much or more than her regular education counterpart, probably more since special education endorsements require quite a few college credits — this varies by area — and greater numbers of college credits usually lead to higher pay. Depending on law and contracts, one regular teacher can teach the same number of students as three special education teachers. Putting a child into special education thus represents a financial commitment that poor districts, especially, may prefer to avoid.

I need to observe that educators and administrators tend to be ethical people, dedicated to providing the best education possible to their students. While an obvious financial incentive exists to keep students out of special education, parties to the process are extremely unlikely to falsify testing data. Still, financial factors may lead to data interpretations designed to keep students in regular classrooms. A few years back, I had a student tested for special education. The man who tested her determined that her I.Q. was 78 — 3 digits too high to qualify for special education. She needed a 75 to qualify. But while psychometricians generally regard IQ tests as having high statistical reliability, the fact is that the standard error of measurement for IQ tests is commonly considered to be about three points — the very difference that might have gotten my student into special education. That test can easily be three points off. They didn’t let my girl into special education. (Bilingual education saved this former student, but that’s another story. She did graduate. She may be stranded in a Spanglish world, and she can’t spell or do math for beans, but she diligently attended school, receiving enough credits to walk the stage.)

Am I rambling here? To go straight to my point, many of our failing kids will benefit from special education; however, parents and teachers may need to force the issue. Parents — don’t trust the schools to tell you if your child needs special education. If you suspect learning handicaps, demand that your district test your child. Teachers — the mantra of this time has become, “All children can succeed!” This cheery sound bite sounds appealing but fictions often do. Not all children can succeed in regular classrooms. If they could, we would never have created special education in the first place.

Lost and struggling students deserve to get the help they need. These small classes with individualized attention allow some students to learn when regular classes do not. My colleague down the hall has dedicated her life to teaching reading to students who need extra help to put the letters together. Parents and teachers sometimes hesitate to seek special education placements for fear of labeling a child slow, but special education often proves the best possible world for at least some of our boys and girls.

Leonard Cohen put it perfectly in his song, Anthem:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

It’s all about light, the light of learning. We are here to help our children learn to love learning. We do that best when we don’t force them to go faster and farther than they are ready to travel. We do that best when we hand them books they can read with a teacher who understands the pacing and parameters they require. We do that best when we accept and love them for who they are.

For “Rick” — who lives where he works

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“Rick” is my union rep. I haven’t used his services, but he takes his union position seriously. He doesn’t gossip. He’s smart and funny, a middle-aged, African-American man who eats what he wants against medical advice — trying every so often to fix his excesses with a salad or two — and sometimes says what he thinks. He’s got a gift of quiet. He listens. Every so often, he shares his thoughts.

We were talking about the new retention policy, which appears to be another version of “we don’t retain nobody, nohow.” As noted in other posts, I understand where this policy originates. The research supports social promotion. The socially promoted have better outcomes in school and life overall. That point’s no longer debatable, even given the sometimes shoddy nature of social science research.

Here’s what Rick said, though, in a viewpoint that deserves cyberspace and cybertime:

“The thing is, those people in the Board Office, they go home at night to Lake Forest or places like that. They don’t live here. They’re just passing the problem on and it’s no problem for them. They don’t see these teen-age kids who didn’t make it through high school and who can’t find a job. I see them. They are standing on the street corner outside my house. They have nothing to do. They’ve got no way to make money. They’ve got no prospects.”

Rick is a big guy and he carries a natural authority. But he’ll admit to being scared of those kids on the street corner. Those kids don’t have a lot to lose, he tells me. The numbers here are hard to tease out. Crime statistics for the area baffle local residents and have led to a number of articles on the trustworthiness of crime statistics reported by police departments. Our crime statistics, like our graduation statistics, are honestly hard to understand when you are viewing them from the local stage. If 500 people finish at a middle school and 200 graduate from the high school across the street, when the graduation rate is over one-half of students, what happened to the missing bodies on the stage?

Regardless of the numbers, I can see why Rick is worried. Gang activity runs rampant in this locale. Drug abuse has become standard fare. What do you do if you have no education, no job and no legitimate job prospects? The underground economy offers one way to scrounge up cash. We had a middle school student murdered a few years ago when he flashed a bunch of money at some older peers. I’d guess that money came from drugs. I don’t know for sure. I know I held crying teachers who had known the boy, helped them down long, sad hallways. I watched a school mourn a kid who had already begun moving toward that street corner, regularly skipping school and ignoring classes.

What happens when we pass Napoleon on from eighth grade to high school when he is reading at a fourth grade level and doing math at a third grade level? Statistically, we improve his odds of long-term success, according to the studies. But what are those odds of success? Mostly, they range from poor to abysmally awful.

How costly is the decision to drop out of high school? To quote the PBS article “Dropout Nation,” (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/education/dropout-nation/by-the-numbers-dropping-out-of-high-school/,

Consider a few figures about life without a diploma:

$20,241

The average dropout can expect to earn an annual income of $20,241, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (PDF). That’s a full $10,386 less than the typical high school graduate, and $36,424 less than someone with a bachelor’s degree.

12

Of course, simply finding a job is also much more of a challenge for dropouts. While the national unemployment rate stood at 8.1 percent in August, joblessness among those without a high school degree measured 12 percent. Among college graduates, it was 4.1 percent.

…

63

Among dropouts between the ages of 16 and 24, incarceration rates were a whopping 63 times higher than among college graduates, according to a study (PDF) by researchers at Northeastern University. To be sure, there is no direct link between prison and the decision to leave high school early. Rather, the data is further evidence that dropouts are exposed to many of the same socioeconomic forces that are often gateways to crime.

In Rick’s view, when we pass those kids along, we pass along our problems to the community — and he’s right. Those high school students who can’t read, write or multiply often drop out of high school. Year by year, our lowest performers may be digging themselves into deeper holes until we finally offer them an out, legally allowing them to exit school. Then many of these kids enter the underground economy, the only economy where they can make enough money to support their lives and habits.

Rick watches these kids on his street corner while administrators determining district retention policies drive safely home to comfortable, suburban houses in areas where the majority of high school kids move on to graduate from college.

Retention policy for this year

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During my time, my district’s retention policy has changed or been rethought every year. Some years, failing students are kept behind. Other years, all students are promoted regardless of their academic success or effort. I understand the dilemma. The research on retention suggests that flunking failing kids does not help their long-term academic success. Whether we promote these students or fail them, they tend to do badly in school and in later life. Overall, the best outcomes result from social promotion, from students sent on despite their lack of learning. Certainly, social promotion is easier on teachers. If Napoleon did not listen the first time he was in seventh grade, Napoleon hardly ever becomes raptly attentive the next time around. If anything, he tunes out. He’s heard that Civil War rap before and he wasn’t particularly interested last year, either. Having been separated from his peers, Napoleon may also become a behavioral handful as he shows off, trying to capture the attention and admiration of possible new friends and lunch partners. For that matter, Napoleon may have always been a behavioral handful. Some kids fail because they don’t understand the material but, in my experience, most fail because behaviors prevent them from mastering that material. Fail is too neutral a word, too. True fact: One Napoleon I inherited remembered so little of his social studies from the year before, that he did not know who had won the Civil War.

I’m sorry if I’m painting a bleak picture and exceptions exist. I have taught a couple of them, although they represent a tiny minority of the retained students I have known. One that will stay with me forever was a boy who failed eighth grade at a time when failing students from the previous year were forced to repeat the first semester of eighth grade and were then allowed to start to high school. He was told he needed at least straight C grades to go on to high school. He got his Cs but the policy shifted under him. The administration decided not to promote students midyear. I remember his angry and frustrated quote: “I did my part. I got Cs. If they had told me to get B s, I would’ve got Bs!” He could have gotten those Bs too — if he had seen a reason to do so.

Eduhonesty: We recently received what appears to be the year’s retention policy. No one will be held back. Win or lose, pass or fail, students will be promoted. The emails on the topic referred to studies showing that promotion better benefits the promoted. I won’t disagree with the research, but I believe I disagree with the policy. I am going to lay out my reasons in a separate, following post because my reasons don’t address the failure research. That research probably accurately reflects the prospects for long-term success for the socially promoted. I want to explore another question.

Specifically, ignoring the advantages to the socially promoted, how does social promotion affect everybody else in our picture?

Can’t fault the efficiency

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Until the PARCC test, we had almost no morning announcements. We had no field trips. We showed only preapproved videos, whether those videos were educational or not. Professional development frequently addressed the need for no wasted minutes. While we did create a minimal number of fun incentives, enough to forestall a rebellion against the Empire, the agenda was clear: Test preparation at all times. The Librarian was not even allowed to announced Picture Day.

The first part of PARCC is over and we are giddy with field trip plans. At least three are in the works to my knowledge. Others have been suggested, some as behavioral and academic rewards that exclude groups of students, but others that are open to the general population. My colleagues look happy planning their trips. Announcements now include details of everyday school life. I expect we will finally begin to hear those details I remember from past years, like soccer victories and dance dress expectations.

Eduhonesty: I’m glad for what I regard as a return to normalcy. So are the kids. Kids like to be acknowledged when they win a game. I honestly have no clue what happened with our volleyball and basketball teams this year since I had no players in my classes. That’s kind of sad. Hooray for next week’s field trip to the museum!

Wednesday-Go-to-Meetin’-Day

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I got home at about 7 tonight. To be fair, I stopped to walk the mall for half an hour, then paused to buy half-price purses at Macys. I don’t want to whine, either. I had a fine day. My classes took notes, discussed sample bias, studied measures of central tendency and generally made progress while sometimes listening to music as I wandered the room, sitting beside individual students while I checked their work. In spaces between and after classes, I mostly attended meetings. They weren’t exciting meetings, but that’s fine. We should all be lucky enough to live in unexciting times. Boring meetings beat most the alternatives.

Since I am attempting to chronicle life in an academically underperforming school caught up in the wake of No Child Left Behind, though, I’ll list a few problematic aspects of my average Wednesday.

Total meeting time for the day: Two hours and fifteen minutes. Fortunately, we moved the 7th grade teachers’ meeting to the last half of the daily planning period. For more than half the year, the weekly 7th grade meeting started when our planning period started and ran until the Dean was done. Sometimes that meeting ran the whole or nearly whole 82 minute block. We have the 7th grade meeting down to a reasonable 45 minutes. No one wanted to complain about the longer meetings last semester. Our Dean is marvelous, a charming and dedicated woman who deserves all the help she can get. As hard as she works — I have often seen her in her office after 5:30 — no one ever felt like stopping the Dean when she was on one of her meeting rolls, even as 1/5 of the week’s planning time disappeared in sound bites on incentives and disciplinary measures. Still, we were grateful when a member of the seventh grade group realized we might be able to salvage some planning time by starting our meeting in the middle of the planning period. After school, we have the all-school meeting. This technically runs an hour and 10 minutes, but we finished a little early today and, joy of joys, the meeting never even touched on the evaluation system, otherwise known as the Charlotte Danielson Rubric. Instead, we discussed bilingual education. After that meeting, members of the English Language Learner’s team — that includes me — had our next meeting. The guy across the hall took notes while the rest of us discussed the plan for a new, expanded lesson plan. You can never have too many detailed, demanding new lesson plans to do!

I am not whining. I will observe that this is a weekly meeting schedule, amounting to over a full educational day in a month, and these are just the Wednesday meetings. Yesterday, I lost almost my whole planning block — over an hour — to a science subject matter meeting. The day before, I lost about the same amount of time to back-to-back math and science meetings, since I teach the two subjects. When today arrived, I was almost discombobulated when I realized that, due to the new late start, I actually had planning time available to me. I used the time to copy, clean and grade, a refreshing change from the usual day-to-day routine. Tallying up Monday through Wednesday meetings, I have spent around four and one-half hours in meetings during these three days. I have more meeting(s) tomorrow and I don’t know yet about Friday. Technically, we are supposed to be able to take Friday off, but practicably sometimes we need to plan more instruction. Those lesson plans suck up a lot of time and paper. Everything plan we make is supposed to include all the differentiation we are doing, and just about everything is supposed to be differentiated. Yesterday, we were discussing the upcoming activity where all students go out nightly for a month and record and draw the latest appearance of the moon. When we got to the obligatory differentiation stage, I wryly observed that maybe this once we could skip differentiation since I was pretty sure they could all draw pictures of the moon. We laughed. Then we set about filling in the differentiation squares. Lower students can get help from family members (In case they can’t find the moon?) and advanced students can compare Earth’s moon stages to the stages of Deimos and Phobos, the moons of Mars. Since upper students are never required to do extension activities, I’m pretty sure we won’t see much if any information on these two irregular, orbiting rocks that swing around Mars, but I’d love to be wrong. I am getting a bit tired of the same-o-same-o routines. Yesterday I joked to the guy across the hall: “I don’t look for meetings. They come looking for me.” This weird statement made us both laugh.

Again, the issue here is one of opportunity cost. I will spend around six hours in meetings during a given week, not including the time I spend conferencing about students and the bilingual curriculum with the guy across the hall. Those minutes add up quickly. If we multiply my six hours by the thirty-six weeks in a school year, total meeting time tallies up to 216 hours for the year. When I divide that 216 hour total by eight, as in an eight-hour day, I realize I will have spent 27 days in meetings by the end of this year. Ummm.. please excuse the profanity, but that’s pretty close to batshit crazy.

Many teachers will spend less. My meeting schedule is complicated by the fact that I teach two subjects and also ELLs (English Language Learners). Still, this just can’t be any way to run a cavalry charge or an educational improvement effort. What could I do with those 27 days? I could prepare new, fun, creative instruction. I could tutor confused students. I could review technical journals in my field, as opposed to the Charlotte Danielson — oh-help-me-not-again — Rubric. I’ll state for the record that the Rubric’s fine, it’s just that we hardly ever seem to talk about anything else in all-school meetings and professional developments. I could even take and finish an on-line class, adding to my understanding of special education, linguistic theory or homework research.

Eduhonesty: I used to create a one-page lesson plan for the week which laid out what I intended to teach on each day. Wednesday might be mean, median and mode review, for example. As time went on, I had a two page lesson plan that included the state standard I was addressing. If data and distributions were part of the seventh grade standards in Illinois, I would note that my lesson fell into that standard. I never minded adding the standards. As one likeable presenter at a PD said some years ago, “You can’t teach dinosaurs just because you like dinosaurs.” Obviously, teachers need a plan. Obviously teachers need to coordinate their plans. Sixth grade material should lead directly into grade seven material. But at this rate, my plan will be a weekly novella by the year 2025.

Here is one last observation on my impending retirement: If I have to write novels, I want aliens and spaceships in my pages. I want to describe barren landscapes on distant planets in faraway star systems. I’d like to hammer out a fictional plot that everyone could recognize as fiction, as opposed to an eight-page document which purports to be a blueprint for educational improvement but, in actual fact, serves as a sinkhole for time.

Jettisoning a standard

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At yesterday’s meeting, grade level teachers for science were planning instruction for the last quarter. We were using a set of common science standards. We’d like to do all of the standards in the picture below but, after discussion, we realized we can’t. We still have MAP testing, AIMSWEB testing, one more bout of PARCC testing and probably a few, random bubble tests used to collect math data, not including regular tests and quizzes.

the standards

In the end, we decided to discard Standard MS.ESS1-3. We simply must spend too much time testing to tackle this standard. It’s a good standard and understanding astronomical distances is likely to benefit students more than spending weeks of the remaining 42 days of the semester in testing. I don’t decide the schedule, though. I just help my groups decide what to drop while we attend our numerous meetings.