I am falling into a rabbit hole outside of cyberspace. Without going into details, posts will be sketchy this month. I will seize those moments I can, picking a few sound bites that I’d like to get out there.

I’d like to start with the House on Mango Street, a novel that is frequent middle school reading in our country. We can do better. The protagonist gets raped by a clown. The book contains numerous errors in grammar, many intentional but nonetheless fundamentally incorrect.

Eduhonesty: If we want our students to learn grammar, we should not hand them books that don’t follow the rules we are attempting to teach.

Laws that require school districts to spend more money will result in almost all of those districts reallocating the money they have. While some lucky districts may receive new grant money, most districts have about the same amount of money this year as they had last year. A law that requires districts to add a new testing, data or curricular requirements can create insuperable difficulties as districts figure out what — and who — to sacrifice in order to meet the latest governmental demand.

Mandated small-group interventions happen at the expense of large group instruction, for example, since districts need staff to do the interventions. Especially in these times, paraprofessionals and aides may have been mostly laid off, leaving teachers to work with small groups. While teachers are doing the small-group work, who helps the students who are not in small groups? A responsible teacher will provide those excluded students with work but, to a great degree, students who don’t qualify for small-group interventions will be on their own. Some students will do the work. Others won’t.

School districts may be running with minimal staff as they attempt to control costs during tough economic times. New mandates that force districts to allocate staff members to well-meaning improvement programs will often then cause unintended, harmful consequences. Even the many staff meetings that occur to plan the latest mandated intervention are taking away time from other possible planning. If my district’s high school has relatively few spirit activities, that’s no surprise. Planning time that might go to creating those activities has been sucked up in the last few years on meetings about improving test scores and integrating the Common Core into lessons.

NCLB has not worked. I believe NCLB could never have worked. But since the government did not provide any significant additional resources when almost everyone was working to near-capacity, the program never had a chance. We can’t add extra instruction without more resources. In many poor districts, teachers spend hundreds and even thousands of their own dollars annually just to keep themselves and students in supplies. Ink for the printer and paper for my colleagues have been among my recent charities.

The debt clock above ought to make the situation clear. Districts seldom have stashes of money sitting around. Many schools barely have enough money, if that, to meet student needs. (Others may be quite comfortable, but that doesn’t help the district in the zip code down the road.) Legislators need to learn to understand financial limits. The credit cards are maxed out in many of America’s educational fortresses. We need an end to unfunded mandates.

Postscript:

The credit cards are certainly maxed out in Illinois. I found it pretty funny a few years back when bullet makers insisted the state pay in advance if they wanted to buy bullets for the Department of Corrections. That was the same year, we postponed numerous bilingual activities until spring as we waited and waited for a check from the state that arrived about six months after it was expected.

We have become an innumerate society. Because of this, we tolerate conditions that ought to seem insupportable. Annual state achievement tests represent one example supporting my contention.

In our lower-scoring schools, we learn something from our 8th grade state achievement test, yes — but not nearly as much as we would learn if we gave our students a test reflecting their actual level of achievement. That test might tell us where the gaps in their knowledge are located, so that we could teach them the missing pieces in their academic puzzles. The 8th grade state test just tells us they are far behind. We knew that from the get-go. What our lower-scoring schools could use, if we must spend all these days testing, is information on exactly where students have fallen behind and where they need to focus. In the case of our lowest students, we learn virtually nothing from state tests since all these students are doing is guessing anyway.

I feel as if I have hammered the evils of indiscriminate testing into the ground with a sledgehammer. Simultaneously, I have been hammering the connected concept of recognizing students as individuals . Unfortunately, I can’t abandon this topic yet. We seem to be moving away from more-appropriate tests as we head toward the Common Core.

We praise daily work that contains little effort and no serious thought. We are taught when studying for teaching degrees to seek something positive to say about any work turned into us, and not to use red pens, since marking up papers with a lot of red ink makes students feel bad. When students copy each other on group projects, we allow this as a “group effort.”

Frankly, some of these papers deserve to be covered in red ink. Some of these group efforts should be shut down. While I believe in positive comments, in fairness I know there are times when “Think!!” is a perfectly reasonable word to scrawl in a margin. Character counts.

“Nobody can get the truth out of me because even I don’t know what it is. I keep myself in a constant state of utter confusion.” Colonel Flagg

Among the first classes I ever taught were two Spanish I classes at Waukegan High School in Illinois. At one point during a frustrating day, I said to the class, “You want to learn Spanish, don’t you?” One of my best students answered back: “Ms. Turner, they makin’ us take this. If I didn’t need this to graduate, no way I’d be here.” The class chimed in to support her. Yeah. Not my idea. I don’t wanna learn no Spanish. Yeah, they stuck us here, Ms. Turner. I wanted woodshop. The most poignant voice said quietly, “I just want to drop out, but my dad won’t let me yet.”

These high school students had to take two years of a foreign language because under NCLB all children had to be prepared for college – whether they wanted to go to college or not. This sounds reasonable in theory. Parents and educators have always selected the material schools provide, understanding that children and adolescents lack the experience to make some choices. Adults know that college graduates earn more over their lifetimes. They know that Spanish has become generally useful. Nowadays some billboards no longer even bother with an English translation. Employment ads often request or even demand that applicants speak Spanish as a condition of employment.

However, sticking 35 students (40 to start) in a classroom without enough desks, with a first year teacher, a formidable gang presence, and books that predated the internet and looked like it – well, that may not have been terribly useful. The disciplinary issues that arose in that class could have swamped a veteran teacher. Complicating my efforts, many students did not want to be there. They had zero interest in Spanish. Some considered the class unfair; the Hispanic students possessed a natural advantage that angered their white and African-American counterparts.
Other students objected, with justification, that they were sixteen years old and starting Spanish at that point made little sense.

“Mrs. T, I’m not going to learn Spanish,” one said. “Nobody can learn Spanish in two years and I don’t even want to do it.”

I gave that student a pep talk, explaining that learning some basic vocabulary would be useful and pointing out that he might change his mind about Spanish in college. I compassionately explained that he was stuck, unless he was interested in French or German. I might be able to get him into another language, but he had to take a language. He decided to tough out Spanish.

Oddly enough, though, I made it through that first year of teaching and I remember many of those kids with great fondness. I just kept teaching. They sensed the sincerity underlying my white, middle-class suburban momness, and by the end of the year, we had forged a rapport. Gang colors and gang signals swirled around me and mostly right past me, although we took a midyear blow when one of my funniest and most likable students was arrested and charged with manslaughter after a gang disciplinary action that led to the accidental death of one of his friends.

This one student was not going to college anytime soon. (I hope he makes it there someday. K., I still believe in you out here. I always did.) Many of these kids are not going to college. The dirty, not-so-secret fact that we like to ignore is that the U.S. dropout rate may be (or may not be) slowly declining but remains fairly steady. We don’t have an exact number, but the number is high. Many students do not finish high school. Worse, many students graduate lacking basic literacy skills. We have been selling these students college since kindergarten but we have not even managed to sell them high school. We are marketing the most important product that anyone will ever try to sell to these students, an education, and we are doing it so badly that many of them are walking away on the first day that we legally allow them to exit the premises. You can make little children go to school. You can make most adolescents go to school. But you can’t make them like school and if they dislike it fiercely enough, they’ll leave.

Even those kids who stay in school don’t put a lot of effort into material they don’t like. They do what they need to get by, often as little as possible. My daughter used to chuck her laundry and any loose items in her bedroom into the attic when she knew her dad was about to check the room. The floor looked great, the closet wasn’t bad – and the attic was a secret, growing disaster. I found one pair of my glasses in a pile of laundry that had been stuck in that attic for over a year.

We put students in that unwanted language class because we want the best for those students, a clean application to present to a college admissions office. We want to believe they will graduate from a university. Motivated by the best of intentions, politicians and academic administrators tell us the stories we want to hear; in many cases, I believe they are telling us the stories they want to believe. They have goals for America’s children, goals that include college readiness for all America’s children.

The wealth of data available allows them to keep telling stories too. Test scores at Podunk High in northern California may have gone up 21% in the last year. With thousands and thousands of schools across the country, politicians and academic administrators can always find examples to support their contentions, clean bedrooms they can present to America.

Unfortunately, America’s politicians and administrators often end up omitting or sanitizing those educational failures that don’t fit the picture they wish to present. Sorting out the wishful thinking, make believe, and truth in the pile of facts and factoids presented to us is a daunting task. We have too much information and not enough time to evaluate that information. Most of us want to believe that the United States is making progress against illiteracy and innumeracy. We write down the facts that support our belief. We focus on Podunk High, ignoring the high school across the valley where scores fell by 8%, ignoring the many, many schools that have become attics where we cram children who have the misfortune to live in the wrong zip code. We ignore our failures despite that fact that, in a test-based system, those failures glare at us from the pages of mandatory state reports on school performance.

I do not want to be responsible for Mark Jones. I do not want his test scores to affect my salary. I do not want his behavior factored into my teaching evaluation.

As we begin to base staff evaluations and merit pay on student behavior and test scores, I shudder slightly. This shift toward using student actions to determine teacher status serves as a potent argument not to work in urban or underfunded schools. All the research shows a direct relationship between poverty and test scores, despite exceptions that are sometimes cited.

Mark appears slightly less motivated to learn than my wheaten terrier. Many teachers have tried to fix this lack of enthusiasm in the past. Mark listens sometimes but his books never leave his locker. His homework is usually stuck in one of those books.

In the absence of parental nudging, some kids are barnacles on the driftwood of life. While many kids ooze intrinsic motivation, others do not. Some appear to have missed the motivation bus entirely, presumably asleep on another self-declared snow day.

I had to try to run down a student this winter to plead with her to come to school. She had not yet done the speaking portion of the ACCESS test, a vital measure that might allow her to exit the bilingual program. Unfortunately, it had snowed heavily the previous night; this girl and her sister often stayed home when that happened. At first I thought maybe they walked to school and found the walk too arduous after a heavy snowfall. No, they took the bus, like most of their friends. They were simply in the habit of declaring their own snow days.

Having my performance judged by the performance of students makes perfect theoretical sense. But student motivation and learning levels remain only partially in my control — at best. In a microsense, I am judged on factors that are often beyond my ability to manage. If parents don’t insist their children attend school, what can I do? In a macrosense, my best move unquestionably would be to take a job in a district where most of the students will go on to college. That fact implies motivated students and parents, my best chance for success.