She almost always works. She is diligent and attentive. She asks if I need help before I think to ask for help. If her head is down on her desk, I’ll let it go for a minute or two if I can. You can’t allow students to sleep because one head on a desk will become two will become four until the whole classroom becomes a cabbage patch, at least if it’s a first or second period class. In general, bad precedents are to be avoided.

I am not always so good at avoiding bad precedents, though. Sometimes you know a kid just needs a break.

Eduhonesty: This post is for the students of the world who would claim its unfair when the Marilyns get a break that not everyone else receives.

Fair is not always equal. If you always do your homework and always come to class on time, you earn a few extra privileges over the course of the semester. That’s how the world works.

This line comes from a recent professional development opportunity. It’s a nice sound bite.

Will we give up on teachers? I wonder. I wish we would treat our teachers with the compassion and respect we demand for our students. Evaluations under the new Danielson framework seemed designed to weed out teachers who don’t fit the mold. Our students are allowed to learn in many different ways while teachers are required to present common lesson plans using common techniques with common timing requirements and often common assessments — regardless of the differences between their classes. Then those teachers with lower assessments get to fight to keep their jobs, trying to explain that the 10 special education students in period 2 affected results. There’s a chance the Principal will accuse that teacher of making excuses or will smile and utter some unintended threat such as, “yes, but you have to get those students up to grade level.”

An attractive, energetic young colleague told me she was tired of teaching a few days ago, right after her evaluation. I’ve observed her teaching and she’s good. I watched her carry her coffee back to her classroom, sobered by the negative comments. She’s an African-American teacher in the STEM (Science/math) area who can no doubt find alternative employment, possibly at a much higher wage. She’s a great role model.

I don’t know whether to hope she stays in teaching or not. There’s an easier life with higher wages and a great deal more respect waiting for her out there if she decides to opt out.

“Most bad government has grown out of too much government.”
~ Thomas Jefferson

Just a snippet of No Child Left Behind: Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools were required to meet AYP or face increasingly severe penalties for failure. Consequences of not meeting AYP for Schools Receiving Title I Funds: Without going into tedious detail, first parents are alerted there is trouble and the school has to make a plan to improve and seek help. If the situation continues the following year, the school notifies parents. The school then must develop and implement a school improvement plan that has been submitted to its district for approval. The district submits the plan to state and county departments of education. The school must provide supplemental services to students who can’t hit the target. If the situation continues for another year, the school must offer a choice of alternative school if one is available.

The government is now giving waivers to schools who did not meet targets, since the deadline has leapt upon us and we are mired in scores that don’t come close to the goals. My favorite target demanded that virtually all special education students reach grade level by 2014.

Eduhonesty:

TAXPAYERS! Ask yourselves — How many new government employees and/or contractors are working on these “improvement plans” by now? I imagine a small country’s worth. If you read the requirements carefully, you will see that bloating of the bureaucracy was inevitable.

Yet despite our increasingly-swollen educational bureaucracies, minimal improvements — if any — can be conclusively documented. We can show score improvements in some areas, often unsustained, but we can’t account for the knowledge drain that occurred to get those improvements. How often has science and social studies been sacrificed to teach students what is on the state test? Geography has pretty much been axed, that’s for sure.

I don’t know if scores went up the year I explained to a high school student that Tacoma was a city, not a country.

The relative nature of time does not receive enough attention. Time seems to go faster as we age. Most people will agree with this statement, adding to a large, swirling cauldron of anecdotal statements, all impossible to prove. Provable or not, though, we need to pay more attention to the stretchy minutes of time.

One reason adolescents often act as if they have forever may lay in this difference in perception between adults and adolescents. Adults are selling long-term, future plans to kids who are slouching in classrooms with no sense of immediacy, no sense that doors may close.

“I’ll do it later,” they say, confident that later will always be available. Doors move slowly in their lives. We exacerbate the problem by giving second, third, fourth etc. chances to students who stray academically or behaviorally.

Eduhonesty: One argument for stricter academic and behavioral policies is this: We need to slam doors in more faces. You did not do your homework? You fail. You started a fight? You are suspended. Do it again and you will be expelled. No third, fourth etc. chances. (I might give a nod to some second chances on a case-by-case basis.) If that sounds heartless, I believe it’s less heartless than leaving kids with the mistaken notion that they will be able to go through their personal doors whenever they feel like it. They won’t. They can’t.

Some good studies document the fact that the ability to learn a foreign language falls off a cliff toward the end of the teen years. Obviously war brides and others who are immersed or highly motivated have learned languages after that time, but true bilingual fluency may become effectively impossible for some.

The problem with all the revolving doors we create is that students don’t take us seriously after awhile. Many can’t understand our urgency because of their own sense that time is crawling by them. We have to convey the idea of closed doors somehow to kids who have been taught to believe that song, “There’s always tomorrow.” It’s a comforting song, a melodious idea that we can make our dreams come true later, supported by the long, lazy days of childhood and adolescence, as well as our generous habit of extending yet one more chance to those who make mistakes.

The song’s nothing but a pretty fiction, though. To put it more bluntly, the song’s a lie. There isn’t always tomorrow. If you screw up high school badly enough, you won’t get to be an undergraduate at Harvard or Princeton or even the University of Montana. You may not get to be an undergraduate anywhere. My student who is about to have her second child? She’s a lovely girl. I would not be surprised if she makes it to college eventually and succeeds in getting at least a practical two year degree. But she won’t do it in the near future. There’s no money and, more importantly, the poor girl’s absolutely exhausted. Her grades are taking a nosedive. I’m just hoping she makes it through high school.

Nobody seems to think about the opportunity costs. To prevent sneaking a listen to IPODs and possible crimes of a more nefarious nature, my school bans hoodies. Many schools do. Others just ban wearing the hoods, which hide earbuds and occasional faces.

The problem is the time sucked by disciplinary issues created by the No-Hoodie Policy. We are reporting kids to Deans, sometimes throwing kids out for insubordination when they refuse to remove the offending garment, talking to them about the need to follow rules, even calling parents to explain the dress code, despite the fact that the code is provided to families at the beginning of the year. How many hours have I lost to hoodies so far this year?

Eduhonesty: I’d let the Battle of the Hoods go. If a few students heard a few more songs, I still suspect we might net out ahead in the fight for educational minutes. Also, these are high school students. At some point we might try trusting them. If we can’t trust at least most of them now, this country’s in a world of hurt.

My high school has students who are not close to having enough credits to graduate before they are legally no longer entitled to the free education they are receiving. Some of these students disrupt their classes regularly. That’s part of why they have acquired so few credits.

Eduhonesty: The school would benefit from pushing these students out. We are no longer ever supposed to show anyone the door unless it’s unavoidable — a knife carried into a zero-tolerance school, for example. But other students are paying the price for our generosity. Disruptive students interrupt lectures, distract other students and simply waste large quantities of everyone’s time.

Here’s a bit of food for thought for administrators: Sometimes these kids know exactly what they are doing. They feel better creating a group of fellow failures, a group that insulates them from their own sense of failure.

No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”

~ Mark Twain (Among others)

Eduhonesty: I watch national healthcare unravelling. I wonder if they will pull it back together. They haven’t managed to pull American education back together. They haven’t even managed to acknowledge they’ve screwed it up. Yet all these expensive, well-intentioned efforts don’t seem to have made us any more nationally competitive. If we consider that many of these kids can’t figure out whether Egypt is in Europe, Africa or even South America — well, it’s possible we have been moving backwards. They aren’t getting much better at what’s on the test, but sometimes almost the whole curriculum consists of items likely to be on the test. In the meantime, there’s no time for geography and middle schoolers sometimes can’t tell a city from a country.

“President Obama is now making his case for raising the debt limit. He said raising
the debt limit does not increase debt – you know, like raising the speed limit does
not increase speed.”

~ comedian Jay Leno

Eduhonesty: And raising the bar and making the test harder will help those kids who are already failing to jump higher. The government that brought us NCLB is now bringing us Obamacare. A careful look at the rollout may be instructive for those who wonder how American education has become such a mess.

Help! Somebody please get the government to leave us all alone!