I recently talked with a preschool special education teacher. Kids who need extra help often start public school at the age of three. “Maria” had been placed in special education in the public school system. Her teacher loved her. She was a sweet kid, a kid who did not seem slow as much as English-challenged.

Her teacher had not tried to remove her from special education, despite a strong suspicion that Maria’s learning problems resulted from the fact that English was her second language. No services for English as a Second Language existed for children under five within her district. If Maria went home, she would be immersed in Spanish, and the teacher believed academic work in English would benefit Maria.

As a former bilingual teacher, I discussed the issue that leapt out at me. What if Maria ended up stuck in special education? I believe many placement mistakes have been made on both sides of this equation. Distinguishing between language and cognitive issues can be tough — especially if the evaluator(s) don’t fluently speak the language of the child being tested. Once tracked, students can’t always easily step off those tracks.

Eduhonesty: Why can’t Maria talk? Why has Maria fallen behind? Students learning a second language often go through a silent period when they are afraid to talk for fear of making embarrassing mistakes. That silence can easily be mistaken for lack of comprehension. Conversely, a lack of comprehension may be confused with inability to speak English.

What interested me most was the rescue underway. Since no bilingual services existed, the teacher decided that special education should be used to help Maria. I suspect Maria may have gotten lucky. Her teacher claims their district aggressively attempts to exit students from special education.

But then I think of students from my own past, slow learners spending years and years in bilingual programs that may have been mistaken placements. When a child can never pass the English-language exit test used now in most of the country, we ought to quickly consider the possibility that that child’s academic problems do not stem from language confusion. I have seen students spend their whole lives in bilingual programs. That’s both abusive and absurd.

Maria’s teacher is working around the system. I hope her efforts benefit Maria. I wish the system worked more cleanly and efficiently for our Marias. Maria may have been misplaced. If so, she lucked into a fine teacher to help prepare her for elementary school.

I just hope Maria gets exited out of special education quickly if special education proves not to be where she belongs.

Picture from https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

I got back to the Chicagoland area and found my Sunday paper, the one weekly paper that gets tossed onto the driveway outside my stolid, gray brick house. The lead story is titled, “Leaderless gangs vex efforts to stop killing.” The article’s complex and I don’t want to oversimplify what has been happening. The rising Chicago death toll cannot fit into a blog post. The fact that police are making fewer stops due to greater paperwork and accountability demands affects crime statistics a great deal, for example, but I don’t wish to go in this direction today.

A big idea stopped my quick read and connected me to education briefly: At least part of the current crisis was blamed on the lack of leadership and leadership structure within current gangs. The gangs have become diffuse, dispersed organizations with no obvious head, and consequently have become much more difficult for police to address in an organized fashion.

To quote the Chicago News Tribune:

“Two federal law enforcement officers who regularly work with Chicago police on gang violence said that, among the black gangs, the old hierarchical rules of engagement ‘ are nonexistent.’ One of the officers said he traces the change, in part, to the dismantling of public housing high-rises in Chicago.

Without those buildings, the officer said, there was no infrastructure around which to rebuild the gangs the way they used to exist.

‘Public housing scattered,’ he said. ‘You used to have a hierarchy of people who had to live together. You have this big housing event, and GDs are living with Four Corner Hustlers.

They are also going to school with each other. I vividly remember the death of a gang member who had once gone to my school. The community spent a few anxious days waiting to find out if gang activity had been involved, specifically if the Four Corner Hustlers had been sending a message to the Latin Kings. The school spent those days on high alert, ready for lockdown at any time.

Eduhonesty: I recommend this front page Tribune article. I am probably not headed in the directions readers expect, however. I suppose those high rises had to come down. Too many beaten-down people had too many terrifying stories of life in the Cabrini-Green high-rise hallways. But I do not see that the situation seems any less frightening today. Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq and many other newspaper stories headline a neighborhood violence problem that has long since spiraled out of control.

We knocked those high-rises down., Are we better off? We may be worse off.

I’d like to draw an analogy to No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Mandating change without providing support works poorly — when it works at all. I believe No Child Left Behind might have produced much better results if the government had actually provided additional funds to keep struggling schools open longer, allowing those schools to provide more desperately needed remedial tutoring for our lowest students. Absent that tutoring and more schooling, however, the program was destined to fail. In the meantime, putting a whole bunch of gang members in low-rise housing scattered throughout neighborhoods seems to be having about the effect I would have expected — those gang members are still selling drugs and shooting people. What did we do to stop the drugs and that violence? We moved people, who took all their guns, drugs and problems with them.

Simple solutions to complex problems hardly ever work well.

I will suggest readers check out “Digital Device Choices Could Impact Common-Core Test Results, Studies Finding,” by Benjamin Herold, Education Week, July 19, 2016.  The article starts by noting that, “Some test questions are likely harder to answer on tablets than on laptop and desktop computers, presenting states and districts with a new challenge as they move to widespread online assessments.”

…

“”Device effects” are a real threat to test-score comparability, the report concludes, one of many potential challenges that state and district testing directors must wrestle with as they move away from paper-and-pencil exams,” the article later continues.

Eduhonesty: To tie this to my earlier post about financial differences between districts and the impact on technology, I will note tablets are cheaper than laptops. Tablets are also less versatile. While many financially comfortable districts may opt to use tablets with their students, I suspect you will find greater tablet use overall in less advantaged districts, simply because tablets are more affordable.

Putting the links together in my chain, I suggest these device effects will be more problematic and cause more difficulty for less financially fortunate districts, contributing to the chasm that already exists between ZIP Codes in this country. Why? Laptops can provide more advanced performance in comparison to tablets because their larger size generally allows more hardware and consequently software.*

Many factors are in play in the tablet versus desktop versus laptop situation. Total computing power of the district will prove hugely important, as will familiarity with hardware provided. I could list various other factors that might muddy test results considerably, such as numbers of test practice sessions and keyboarding/touchscreen skills.

I wish to reiterate here, though, that those students who are raised in technologically-deficient districts enter testing with an added disadvantage which has nothing to do with their actual knowledge of curriculum content.
*Read more at http://trustedreviews.com/opinions/tablet-vs-laptop#PrlPoYCLS1K9imdt.99

This is a line outside an Apple Store at a Midwestern mall. The store is set to open in about 15 minutes. The techno-literate with money will be able to enter our modern Mecca shortly.

When the country shifted to computerized testing, the children in my suburb suddenly gained a tremendous advantage over the children in the suburb where I had been working. In our more financially comfortable school districts, children start school with iPads and technology. They learn keyboarding in early or mid-elementary school.

Some financially-challenged districts cannot offer the same technological head start. For one thing, these districts may be playing desperate catch up in an attempt to add new Common Core materials, with software falling low on the list of purchase needs because of hardware limitations.

Where I last taught, the school shut down non-testing use of the internet during most of the weeks of the first PARCC test because administrators were afraid students testing would be thrown off the internet and lose their test answers due to lack of available bandwidth. I know a teacher at a charter school that spent months testing because they had to go classroom by classroom due to lack of facilities.

The larger issue is simply familiarity with technology. In 1960,  1970, 1980, and even 1990, technology hardly entered into our educational picture.  Better schools might end up with less fuzzy mimeographs and more free markers for teachers. Students mostly worked from books, though. The differences between math books mattered very little. Wealthier districts might have newer, prettier books, but the content was the same.

Inequities still existed, of course. Sometimes a district did not have enough books to send those books home at night, for example. Teachers in that situation often ended up making copies. If a paper shortage arose, those teachers would have students handwrite out their problems before they left for the day.

But the playing field remained much closer to level. Now, technology has changed the game. It took me a while to find the words to articulate my concern, but I finally put this together: What we are seeing is a shift from a change in degree between our wealthier and less financially fortunate schools to a change in kind.

Those schools that cannot offer free and easy access to the technology of our time are necessarily substandard — and entirely inadequate. Their students cannot receive an equivalent education. As part of our move towards Common Core and computerized testing, many districts are adding technology, but the technology is being added in response to the need to test.

What government and administrative leaders need to understand is that technology in education is not a means to an end. That technology should be seen as an end in itself. All of our kids need to be able to easily manipulate the technological tools of our time.

A few posts back I talked about differences in the financially comfortable district in which I live and the impoverished district in which I worked. Let me add another difference as food for thought.  Where I live, the high schools offer an AP Computer Science program with an emphasis on programming, coding and algorithmic structures. Where I worked, the school offers no regular computer classes at all, although the school did pair with a local corporation for an industry-related IT project opportunity.

Our financially-challenged districts are trying, but computer education teachers and new technology often cost more money than they can find.

In the next day or two, I will head into the mountains to a small town with no schools. The town had an elementary school once, but about a decade back, they ran low on kids; the remaining kids get bussed about  20 miles to school, a slow, snowy ride for much of the winter.  On the plus side, the kids have a swimming hole and the store with ice cream bars, candy, beer and bait reopened a couple of months ago.

I won’t have an internet connection and the cell phone will be trapped in a signal-free valley. Electric lights and tavern pizza are about as good as it gets up by the lake, sometimes with a trout or two thrown in. So blog posts will be erratic, although I should emerge from the valley every so often. The phone blogs reasonably well when I can find the bars on the other side of the hills.

Come August, I’ll begin the tips for new teachers that readers liked last year.

Following up on yesterday’s post: On the front page of a tiny, local newspaper, the column on the left is titled “D-34 Gives Raises, Shrinks School Year.” School District 34 can be found in Glenview in the Illinois North suburbs. Glenview is one of a number of adjacent, middle-class communities where ice cream, soccer, Little League teams, swimming pools and parks abound. D-34 is another district that’s rocking the test score game,

One of its middle schools lists only 16% low income students, with 4% English learners.* A full 56% of the students at that school passed the PARCC test. That’s impressive. The other middle school lists 30% low income students and 5% English learners. That school reached a passing rate of 49%, considerably better than the state as a whole.

I could start tearing the numbers in the state report apart. If I did, I’d note, for example, that overall the district has 15% English learners — suggesting that the district is doing a solid job of preparing students to exit bilingual programs and/or the district is seeing an influx of English learners in the earlier grades. The truth will likely be a combination of exits and entrances.

But I can be too much of a numbers geek. Let’s just look at the thought that struck me immediately when I saw the article. Glenview 34 is a “safe” district. Overall, only 33% of Illinois students passed the PARCC test for 2014 – 2015, a number that hides wide swings between districts. In Waukegan 60, a district with 17,000 students, only 14% passed, for example.

What does it mean to be a safe district? For one thing, a safe district can shave two days off the school year while giving raises. That district’s teachers and students don’t have to start school in July or early August to maximize the amount of time students spend in school before the annual state test. The district can have a state website that says almost nothing except what’s legally required about testing. The impact of testing in District 34 can be minimized, because its students are succeeding in the testing game overall. That translates to free administrative time to plan and prepare all the bells and whistles that create an enriching school experience — spirit assemblies, whole child education, and differentiated instruction based on student needs.

District 34 still has to do all the required state and federal assessment, and is doing its own internal assessment as well, but its leaders can create a balanced school experience that lacks that sense of frantic desperation that can pervade our lowest scoring schools. In District 34, principals and teachers are not worried about losing their jobs because of test scores. They are free to worry about improving their students lives by preparing them for future educational opportunities, the traditional mission of educators.

Eduhonesty: I will say, we educators worry a lot regardless 🙂

• Sites used are the following:  http://www.illinoisreportcard.com/School.aspxschoolid=050160340041006 and http://www.illinoisreportcard.com/School.aspx?schoolId=050160340041007, http://www.illinoisreportcard.com/District.aspx?districtId=34049060026
• The article can be found in The North Shore Weekend, a JWC Media Publication

An unfortunate irony should be mentioned here. I live in a district with two superb high schools. Despite sometimes failing to hit NCLB test targets, Glenbrook North and Glenbrook South aren’t being hurt by their numbers like the schools in North Chicago, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and other academically- and financially-disadvantaged areas. The Glenbrooks know the government won’t come after them: The embarrassment for state and federal education officials would be far too great. Even a cursory glance at the schools’ academic performance shows both to be among the best schools in the country. Like other fortunate schools, especially in wealthier parts of the country, the frantic, ongoing attempt to push up test scores does not impact these schools with the intensity that it impacts lower-performing schools.

Those fun elective classes that students most enjoy? Schools like the Glenbrooks commonly provide a wide variety of such electives, electives that are seldom being used for extra math minutes, English essay practice or their equivalents. The Glenbrooks must do test preparation, of course, but they know the state will not dissolve their school or take them over. They don’t have to put frantic energy into figuring out how to fix the numbers. They are “safe.”

I believe one effect of NCLB and the subsequent, laser-like focus on standardized tests has been that advantaged schools, those schools which in the past were able to provide more enrichment options and more fun afterschool activities than less prosperous counterparts, now are often providing proportionally even more enrichment and more fun options than their less wealthy counterparts.

In poor and urban schools, especially, the need to improve test scores may shove enrichment and school-spirit issues aside. North Chicago High School is trying frantically to improve test scores, despite an overall lack of resources. The high school recently stopped allowing students to start French and eliminated woodworking. No electives remain except NJROTC, fine arts and Spanish, and what music one music teacher can offer, along with Consumer Math and a few business courses. Fine arts and a foreign language are the two electives necessary for many college applications.  Currently, the staff directory lists one music/drama teacher, one business teacher, two NJROTC teachers,three foreign language teachers,and two fine arts teachers, one of whom recently left her position. Spanish has become the only language.* NJROTC has manages to stay in the game since students and administrators in financially-disadvantaged areas often see the military as a path out of poverty.

In the meantime, seventeen miles north, in a much larger and wealthier district, we find the following on the District 225 website:

To create a comprehensive high school experience, the Glenbrooks focus on three distinct areas: Academics, Athletics and Activities. Academic success is a top priority for our students and with almost 300 diverse course offerings, there is plenty of opportunity for exploration. In addition to core academic courses in the areas of English, mathematics, science, social studies, and world language; students may pursue special interest classes such as debate, architecture, automotives, and graphic design.

Glenbrook students enjoy success inside and outside of the classroom through numerous athletic and activities programs. The schools offer over 25 different competitive sports and a series of club sports to satisfy any athlete. Each school also hosts from 70-80 different clubs and activities for students throughout the year.

By the numbers:

• 4,823  Students
• 849 Employees
• 40+ Different dialects
• 25.3 Average ACT score
• 96.8% Graduate rate
• 96% Enter college post-graduation
• 300 Course offerings
• 70-80 Clubs and activities for students
• 25+ Competitive sports
• $110M Annual operating district budget

In January, the Board of Education approved new courses recommended by the administration for the 2014-15 school year. Glenbrook North The Career and Life Skills department added a new series of Project Lead the Way (PLTW) courses, designed to meet the needs of students pursuing studies in engineering and technology-related career paths. Four honors courses have been recommended including: Intro to Engineering Design, Principles of Engineering, Civil Engineering and Architecture, and Engineering Design and Development. Glenbrook South The Applied Technology department added two honors PLTW courses to its existing engineering offerings, to complete the four-year sequence. Civil Engineering and Architecture will add an architectural component and Engineering Design and Development will serve upper classman as a capstone course. The business department added Investment Strategies, a course designed to help students develop wealth management, investing, and financial planning skills. The Physical Education department added Weight Training and Conditioning II. The Science department added Honors Physics and Astronomy 171, an option for students electing to earn honors credit.

Here is another sample:

So here I am again, learning about bloodborne pathogens for the umpteenth time. Every year, I relearn that a vaccine exists for Hepatitis B but not Hepatitis C. Every year, they tell me to put on my gloves and sterilize the dust pan. The information might prove useful and insisting that teachers regularly review the dangers of bodily fluids makes perfect sense.

I have other online modules to complete. I have finished diabetes, ADHD/ADD, suicide prevention and ethics and boundaries for school employees. The last module made me feel wistful and a trifle sad. The gist of the module appeared to be that almost all exchanges between a student and teacher ought to remain impersonal. No favoritism should be shown to any student. Teachers should not allow themselves to be alone with students. The module did allow that a coach could contact players to let them know a game time had changed, but suggested emails and other electronic communications to students ought to be cc’d to administrators.

This teaching module reeked of correctness as it laid out a set of rules spawned by our litigious times. I can’t fault the module. These are scary times. People sue Starbucks for drinks that are one ounce short, instead of asking the barista to please fill the cup.

But I thought of Denise. Denise came for afterschool tutoring when I taught her mathematics a few years back. That meant Denise was seeing me much more regularly than other students, since Denise was working hard to catch up on her math. That was my first boundary violation. We often closed the door to the classroom. That quieted the room and we could put on music, eat snacks and relax while we worked. With the door open, random students might walk in to request pretzels. So the door was closed, my second boundary violation. Anyone was welcome to walk in, study math and eat pretzels, of course. It’s entirely possible that (horror!) at some point I hugged the poor girl when she did a great job on a test or quiz retake. I’m no creeper and have zero interest in middle school girls, but I can be enthusiastic about great student efforts. That would have been a whopper of a boundary violation and I cannot say I did not commit that egregious transgression.

Issues of boundaries shut down tutoring in the winter. As it darkened earlier, Denise’s mom did not want her to walk home. Both she and her sister had been attacked on that route previously. I was not allowed to drive students. The school was fierce on that particular boundary violation. I tried walking her but, frankly, I felt unsafe on the walk back.

I felt wistful during that ethics and boundaries module because I know that twenty years earlier, I could simply have driven Denise home. I wonder how many students in tough areas are foregoing tutoring because they have to get home before dark? Poor districts often do not have the money for activity or late busses. Kids in those districts may have no option except to leave when the school day ends, despite a desperate need for remediation, too much remediation to receive during the school day.

Eduhonesty: Many, many students in America today require more than 7 hours of 180 days of education in a school year. In some areas, days and years ought to be extended to meet those needs. Buses should be available for students who stay late. If the federal government wanted to do something useful for a change, our leaders might allocate funds for late buses, allowing formal or informal extension of the school day.

In the meantime, I have committed a number of boundary violations and I will commit more. I wish someone would trust my common sense. With a few boys, and one girl, I have left the door open or even met in the library. I don’t drive students home. (Sigh.) But if I email students to cancel afterschool tutoring, I am not going to CC the administration. They have enough to do without tracking my every move.

Admittedly, sorting out 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. Politicians and bureaucrats may focus on the many, many schools that have become attics where we cram children who have the misfortune to live in the wrong zip code. The failures in those zip codes glare at us from the pages of mandatory state reports on school performance. The desire to fix those failures naturally results in desperate measures.

Nevertheless, our nation’s political and academic leaders seem to be missing a few critical pieces of the puzzle: In particular, testing is a two-edged sword, and I have begun to fear we are slaying more students than dragons.  Let’s look at the composite PARCC test* scores for Illinois for 2014.

(Click to enlarge.)

Yellow and orange represent the students who did not make targets. The PARCC people nicely informed all those students that they had failed, too. It appears more Asian students passed than failed. Of all the subgroups tested, Asians are the ONLY group who passed overall — but many fails obviously exist in this category as well.

We clobbered these kids, especially all the kids in the orange bars. That’s important. Forgive the sarcasm but our educational leaders sure made a lot of kids feel like they were doing well in school. Those leaders sure made a lot of kids believe they were college-material.

If America’s government and school leaders can’t see the likely effect of this test, I can see it clearly. The first time I asked a student why a quiz had gone wrong and got the answer, “I’m just dumb, Ms. Q,” I was horrified. Now, I understand too well where my students are coming from. All they have to do in many cases will be to look at their PARCC results to confirm this congealing self-image.

As I said in a previous post, I spent the whole of my last year working on resiliency as I gave nonstop, mandatory, Common-Core based tests and quizzes.

Here’s the other critical piece our leaders miss:

We spend an enormous amount of time getting these kids ready for the test that will hammer them like Jack Torrance with his roque mallet in “The Shining.” Thwack, thwack, some bloodied students keep trying to climb the stairs to safety. Other just lay down to wait for the blows. Some schools spend the whole year getting ready for that test, over and over again. .

AND EVERY TIME WE MEASURE STUDENT PROGRESS, WE SACRIFICE INSTRUCTION.

*An annual state test used by a number of states based on the Common Core. If the PARCC Consortium had let me or any number of teachers take that test before they rolled it out nationally, I could have predicted these test results. Some states are quickly backing away from the Core and/or the PARCC test. My guess is others do not want to admit how badly they screwed up this decision that impacted all the students in their state.

This line from a previous post deserves to be spotlighted.

“At least, they did not blame me, not after the first month anyway.”

That month was a doozy, though. Rocky start does not begin to describe the year of identical tests and quizzes, the year when my students saw almost nothing except material set four years above those students’ average academic operating levels. How about “Mutiny in the Bilingual Class” as a title for September? Not to mention August and part of October.

My students took awhile to understand that the replacement of their beloved principal with the Hired Gun from Texas came with more changes than just the body in the principal’s office. Suddenly, they had been put on a schedule filled with math they had never seen before, a schedule that quickly began culminating in weekly quizzes they could not understand. Suddenly, unit tests that no bilingual student ever passed became a regular feature of the year’s instruction, along with MAP and AIMSWEB benchmark tests.

Most years teachers get a honeymoon period, a few weeks of exceptionally good behavior and attention as students settle into their new classes after the summer break. The Year of Endless Incomprehensible Quizzes had no such honeymoon, however. My students turned angry quickly. Behavior became challenging almost from the start. They blamed me.

I was the teacher. I was the person at the head of the class. I was the person handing out the quizzes. They assumed I must have some control of my job and, if so, they concluded I must be an especially mean person. What do thirteen-year-old kids do when they think someone is being mean to them? They act mean back. They were often snotty, rude and overtly disrespectful during those first few weeks.  I kept having to manage behaviors that I secretly understood. I’d have acted out, too, in their place.

As the year wore on, I got my class back. By October, we were mostly a team working together. By October, they had figured out that I had almost no control over what was happening and that I could not refuse to give them all those crazy tests and quizzes.. By October, they were clear that I was doing my damndest to help them out despite regular interventions by the Assistant Principal and others. By October, they understood that I wanted to be their advocate, but I was trapped. No one was listening to me.

Whatever I said, all I would hear back was, “No excuses!”

Eduhonesty: I miss teaching and the kids, but I am so, so, so glad I retired.

And while I promise readers I would never personally take the path of violence, if a couple of former administrators stepped out into the road in front of oncoming traffic, I would not waste a single minute mourning them. I’m not sure the universe would be a better place without them, but I’m not sure it would be a worse one either.

People that stupid should never be given control of other people’s lives.