The illustration above is part of a behavior-modification plan for a seventh grader.

I borrowed this Dear Abby letter from http://lubbockonline.com/filed-online/2016-07-03/dear-abby-friends-admit-living-it-isnt-all-its-cracked-be#.V3psI6x_xxI. The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal makes a good first impression.

Dear Abby: My wife and I have a good marriage and two well-behaved kids who are good students and active in our community. Our 8-year-old son is very much the rule follower in school and outside activities, but cheats when playing board or card games with me or his sister at home.

When I catch him doing it, I end the game and tell him I won’t play with him if he’s going to cheat. My wife believes the cheating is “just for fun” and that I’m being too hard on him. I say the lesson I’m teaching him is that cheating is wrong.

We agree we are fortunate this happens only at home, but I’m concerned that if it is left unchecked, it will be regarded as permissible and it will escalate to become a problem in other circumstances. What do you think? Should I let up? — Virginia Dad

Dear Dad: No, stick to your guns. And the next time you catch your son cheating, impress upon him that if others catch him at it, they not only won’t want to play games with him, but also may not want to be friends with him.

Eduhonesty: Abby’s answer may be alright as far as it goes, but I’d say she does not go far enough. How does dad know this boy is not cheating in school? Cheating has become endemic in American education. The news is peppered with reports of district and school administrators cheating right now, let alone students. Still, dad may be right. Cheating may only be a problem at home — so far.

Dad is coming up on a problem that he may not realize will be part of the bigger cheating picture for his boy, however, a problem that Abby missed. Right now, his boy appears to be on track. Early elementary school students make teaching so easy in some ways.

“Ms. Q, Robbie is sitting in Mayra’s spot!”

“Ms. Q, Mayra is touching the stapler! That’s against the rules!”

“Ms. Q, Robbie looked is looking in the book! You said not to!”

But somewhere in the middle of elementary school, those innocent reports about Robbie’s and Mayra’s misbehavior fade away, as social codes shift. Kindergartners are natural snitches, but over time they learn better. They come to appreciate how much easier their social life becomes when they keep silent.

Snitching can be social suicide and any socially adept eight year old will figure that out. Even kids who dislike the idea of cheating often cease to speak up. The cost outweighs the benefit, with risks as large as getting ostracized or beat up on the playground. While the no-snitching code may be stronger in some cultures than others, that code has become regrettably standard today.

This boy is eight-years old. The transition occurs around eight years of age, give or take a year of two. Yes, kids may not play with this boy if he cheats at games, but cheating at his schoolwork won’t necessarily be a huge social black mark against him. He may even influence others to cheat as they see the short-term effect on his grades, and in the event his son gets caught cheating, not much is likely to happen. We lecture, we explain, and we sometimes even send students to the Principal’s office. Certain kids find these scoldings so intimidating that they think twice before cheating in the future. But other kids slough off our words. Teacher’s and administrator’s recriminations slip off them like water off the proverbial duck’s back.

Dad in the above letter needs to be hammering home the anti-cheating topic and I would say that eight is not too young to spend time on the long-term consequences of cheating. I’d start with, “O.K., you cheated and you won. How do you feel about that win? Were you really the best player? Would anybody who found out you had to cheat to win think you were the best player? Do you think people will respect you if they believe you have to cheat to win? Will you respect yourself?”

(This had to be Friday, when students could wear jeans sometimes provided they wore a school spirit t-shirt. Monday through Thursday were regular uniform days.)

Excerpt from a student paper from a few years in the past:

When I become principal of the school I would make some changes. The first thing I would change is the uniform because many of the students don’t like wearing uniforms. You may wonder why I would change uniform in the first part. Well I will change uniform first because no one wants to be in black and white or red and black or navy blue. Kids want to be cool and be famous like those famous people out there they want to be like Triple H, Akon, Shawn Michaels, John Cena, Lil Wayne. The second thing I would like to change is school hours because people are tired of the hours it’s too much work for them. I will like to make less hours of school for students.

More memories. My student went on to improve lunch, the last thing she believed needed changing. A delightful student, this girl had come from Africa and was pretty much on her own in the sense that her parents had almost no English so she conducted the practical matters of life for her family. She was picking up English quickly and had adapted to her new life. She had a beautiful smile.

P.S. Kids always seem to dislike their uniforms. One factor sometimes missed by outsiders: Uniforms are seldom worn in financially and academically-stronger areas, and then almost exclusively in private schools, with some exceptions such as financially stable, urban areas with gang activity. Students in the average middle-class school get to choose what they wear to school within sets of limits such as “no spaghetti straps” and no “vulgar t-shirts.” Uniforms themselves can make older children in financially-disadvantaged areas feel poor, even if part of the idea behind those uniforms may be to hide financial differences between families. My students used to go on field trips to museums and other venues, where students from other areas appeared in the latest fashions from the mall. They felt their uniforms set them apart.

The other big reason for instituting uniforms stems from gang activity. If everyone is wearing the same colors, students cannot use colors to represent their gangs.

We don’t know how well teaching to the test works. We cannot measure the costs and benefits from a test-focused curriculum because we cannot know the results that alternative strategies might have provided. How would our students have tested if we had provided a more general, student-focused education for them? Teaching to the test removes the focus from students, and puts that focus on a measurement instrument instead.

For as much time and effort as we are now putting into testing, we don’t know how the results of those teaching efforts compare to past years in which the curriculum was determined by districts based on what leaders thought students needed to know for their future, rather than what students needed to know for the annual state test. Thanks to the Common Core Initiative, we may never be able to even approximate that data.

The new PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests, along with other state tests that are being rewritten to match the Common Core, ensure that we cannot compare today’s apples to yesterday’s apples. How are today’s students doing compared to students from the past? With the new tests, it’s impossible to say because students are taking significantly different tests. They are also taking those tests differently in many cases, as computers replace paper and pencil. For analysis purposes, these changes in testing instruments effectively damage or even destroy the ability to make comparisons over time.

If a million students took a test in 1975, and a million students took the same or a very similar test in 2005, we could comb our data (assuming we had saved enough of that data) to compare educational results for 1975 and 2005. We could say that Nebraska’s students had answered 67% of a section’s math questions correctly in 1975 and only 52% in 2005. (I made those numbers up for purposes of illustration.) When the same test is employed over time, results can be compared over time. Questions that were changed during that time period can be eliminated from analysis as long as the remaining questions make up a large enough sample to use for comparison.

Once those students started taking the PARCC test instead, the ability to make useful comparisons over time became vastly more complex. We don’t have apples to apples now, we have apples to watermelons or even shellfish. With the new emphasis on critical thinking and scenario-based problems, we may have shifted to testing different student attributes as well as different test content.

If we wanted to examine the effectiveness of teaching to state tests, we could go back and look at NCLB numbers for this purpose, numbers that provide slightly over a decade’s slice of teaching to identical or very similar tests* — once we queried school administrators to select those districts that actually adapted instruction to teach to that state test. For comparison purposes, though, we have another set of probably insurmountable problems: Many of America’s strongest districts never changed to that test-based strategy. They continued with their older curricula which had always worked well. Their students continued to receive broad-based instruction based on what administrators believed those students needed to be prepared for the world, instruction with a long-term rather than short-term view.

Other considerations need to be factored in as well. Different schools’ effectiveness at teaching to annual state tests will vary enormously, depending both on how well the teacher and district anticipate and focus on test content, and on how close the testing students’ level of academic understanding reflects the content of the test. Teaching to the test has always been a matter of degree, with some district’s even cheating to find out test content, while others merely chose topics to teach based on that content.

Individual student achievement levels are often ignored in discussions of teaching to the test, but my experience tells me those levels may be vitally important to the big picture. If I teach the content of an eighth grade test to two students, one operating at an eighth-grade level and the other at a third-grade level, I will have prepared the first student, but I may not have done much for the second student, who probably understood little of the material I was presenting. Even with lengthy before-school and after-school tutoring, my lower student may simply be too far behind to get ready for a test set five years above his or her academic operating level. (In the meantime, while I was desperately tutoring that lower student, what other learning opportunities did other students miss?) The net effect of what I just described will be that a district with students near grade level may gain significant points in the test-score game, while a district with students performing much below grade level may sacrifice useful instructional time to a goal that cannot be reached. In the first case, teaching to the test “worked.” In the second, inappropriate instruction may even have prevented learning from taking place.

*A few states changed their tests during these years to make attaining NCLB targets easier. Teasing out valid comparisons over time in these states will be challenging. That was the whole idea behind changing the tests, of course.

Today was cleaning day. Beds moved, plants got repotted and papers were taken out to be sorted and arranged. I stumbled on an opening activity from a few years ago while culling the boxes. I am going to share these papers for a few days. They are fun. They also document the fact that children are not adults, something politicians and educational leaders too often forget.

When I Become School Principal

When I become the school’s principal I would get better lunch. I would get better sports equipment for gym. I would get the bathrooms cleaner. I would let every student have five minutes of free time in class. I’ll get vending machines in the school, but the students must eat or drink whatever they got at lunch. I would increase the amount of passing time between periods to 4 minutes. If possible, at the end of the school year I would take the eighth graders to a big camping field trip for three days. I would also have a field day for the whole school. This is what I would do when I become the school’s principal.

I remember this boy well, in part because his parents pulled him out of school for nearly two months to go back to Puerto Rico, where he did not go to school. He was exceptionally quick to pick up new material, though, so he survived academically, despite that long absence, just as he survived the drama of the glasses. For months, the nurse and I kept trying to get him eyeglasses. I was calling and the nurse was even sending letters home, since the kid was every bit as blind as that proverbial bat. I sat him in the front row, but he still had to copy from the boy next to him. Wacky side benefit: The boy next to him knew this boy could not see the board from the front row and took exceptionally good notes in this one class, because he knew those notes mattered. Kids rise to the occasion when given responsibility. They also take care of each other.

Memories. I watched my student copying from other students and said nothing. Sometimes a kid’s gotta do what a kid’s gotta do. He finally got corrective lenses toward the end of the year.*

I like the idea of finishing school with a three-day, camping field trip. I’ll chaperone any time.

*Best guess as to what was going on with those glasses. Dad had a phone that said, “This phone does not accept incoming calls.” He could never be reached, although I know he was there. His kids talked about him. Mom seemed like the nicest, most caring parent in the world. I’d say that the family had no money and dad would not take advantage of social programs. Those programs will provide one pair of glasses per year, but you have to go on the grid to get those free glasses.

Sometimes, despite best efforts by school districts, annual state test scores come in showing little or no improvement, no doubt in part because of unreadable books. Too often today, books are set years above actual average student reading levels because those books address the Common Core questions expected to be found on the state annual test. No Child Left Behind laid the groundwork for this problem, but the fact that NCLB is no longer technically in operation* has left a legacy that still impacts America’s schools.

Under No Child Left Behind, that lack of improvement  spelled trouble and then progressively deeper trouble for district and school administrators who could not hit targets. Repeated failures led to government sanctions up to and including governmental takeover of a school district. While the axe poised over our many failing school districts seldom fell, NCLB gave states the right to bring down that axe, after first sending consultants to help prepare remediation plans.

A few years back, I watched as the state of Illinois fired my district’s local school board and took over district management. Before the takeover, I had spent two years working on my school’s Building Leadership Team, a committee preparing remediation plans. We filled fat binders. Then we redid the plan in a new computer-based system called Rising Star. Afternoon after afternoon, whole days out for conferences later, we had created a plan that required manpower and funds which did not exist, but which met the approval of consultants who did not have to ensure the plan’s implementation.

Districts with scores at subterranean levels have been locked into required assemblies, forming multiple committees to solve the problem of resistant test scores. Especially in financially disadvantaged districts, resources have commonly been redeployed since money to add new resources can seldom be found. Ironically, time and money have often been stolen from instruction or actual class preparation as everyone went to more meetings.

Not only did the NCLB process lead to sometimes dubious uses of resources, the reasoning behind these frantic efforts was faulty. Districts were responding to a real government threat – but a threat based in a fundamental misconception. Under NCLB, scores were supposed to march steadily upward. But scores cannot always march steadily upward. In fact, scores SHOULD not march steadily upward. For example, a school that has added 25% more English language learners over a decade will be doing extremely well to hold scores steady. Rapidly rising poverty and/or mobility rates in a district also sink scores, absent interventions for which there may be little time and less money.

Test scores are neither the problem nor the solution in district’s with rapidly changing student bodies. They are merely indicators. Rather than indicating a need for “better teachers,” I submit that what these scores actually indicate is a need for a more effective war on poverty, combined with a recognition that immigration patterns may create falling scores that are nobody’s “fault.”

*Under NCLB, the year when all students were supposed to be at grade level came and went in 2014. While government leaders made a big deal about the end of NCLB, the truth was that NCLB had already ended in abysmal failure.

From https://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/pearson-no-profit-left-behind/, a little piece I stumbled on today written by Stephanie Simon on 2/10/15:

The British publishing giant Pearson had made few inroads in the United States — aside from distributing the TV game show “Family Feud” — when it announced plans in the summer of 2000 to spend $2.5 billion on an American testing company.

It turned out to be an exceptionally savvy move.

The next year, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandated millions of new standardized tests for millions of kids in public schools. Pearson was in a prime position to capitalize.

From that perch, the company expanded rapidly, seizing on many subsequent reform trends, from online learning to the Common Core standards adopted in more than 40 states. The company has reaped the benefits: Half its $8 billion in annual global sales comes from its North American education division.

Eduhonesty: When we wonder why America’s students are spending so much time testing, I’d say we should follow the money. Pearson has tremendous incentive to sell PARCC. New Jersey alone is expected to pay over $100,000,000 for four years of the test.

Money is political clout and the $4 billion in annual global sales that come from Pearson’s educational division give the company incredible leverage. We are talking about a number with nine zeros behind it, a number greater than the total gross domestic product of over twenty-five countries, based on current prices. We’d be foolish to think that Pearson is not regularly lobbying government bodies across this nation. That kind of money does more than talk. Sometimes it screams.

In particular, once a state has spent so many millions on a test, politicos and interested parties can be expected to attempt to justify the purchase. At a certain price, many people become afraid to admit, even to themselves, that they have made a mistake.

This post is meant especially for newbies with multiple certifications, inexperienced teachers who can teach more than one subject. Please pass this post on if you know someone who might fit this particular glass slipper.

Hi, new teacher! If you have been teaching for a year or two, I hope you are having fun in the classroom. If you are enthusiastically preparing for next year, though, I want to pass on a cautionary note: Even if the district told you that you will be repeating your seventh grade language arts classes next year, sudden whims or emergencies can change that assignment. You may think you are headed to Australia only to find yourself landing in New Zealand.

I have had the ground shift on me more than once. One year, I even changed from high school to middle school mid-year to solve a district staffing problem. Expecting to teach science, I have ended up teaching social studies. A district will sometimes shuffle staffing at the start of a school year. Teachers move on in July and August, leaving vacancies that result in a dance across schools. I have helped friends move classrooms when they were abruptly shifted to elementary schools, even after the year started. Subject area shifts in middle school and high school often occur. If four people are certified to teach language arts, but you are the only one of the four who can teach science, you may suddenly find yourself looking at a set of astronomy books and software in September.

So don’t work too hard to get ready for that August opening day. You should be preparing and looking at your upcoming curriculum. You should be forming an overarching curricular plan. But don’t spend all the days of your summer designing specific lessons or making fun math Jeopardy games, activities that you may have to pass on to the person who takes your place while you start cramming on the American Revolution.

Just a tip from someone who has crammed in September more than once.

Want a summer project? Why not build a little library for local dog walkers and others who may be passing by? Put all those books you were thinking of donating to the Goodwill or selling to Half Price Books in a cute display with a sign asking visitors to replace borrowed books with another book. If you are not a builder, you could check the Goodwill or other thrift shops for inexpensive furniture to use to create your library.

It’s summer and many of us are out walking. Why not haul those old books out of their hiding places and put them into the light? I loved this little library.

As I reread my last post, a thought strayed through my mind that’s worth blogging:

“I bet she did not report a lot of what he did, too.”

“Napoleon” was an emotionally-disturbed, second grader who liked to break and cut things. He scared the kids in his class. He scared my daughter. I had a number of conversations with the teacher about Napoleon. I’m sure many parents did.

I had not yet taken the helm in a classroom, though, so I did not fully appreciate this woman’s situation. A teacher’s first and second years are proving grounds. Administrators can be ruthless in weeding out new teachers who are not meeting performance standards, despite the fact that classroom management is learned on the job. Classroom management can be learned, but not all teachers get the opportunity to receive that education. As time goes by, firing teachers becomes harder; any earlier positive reviews can be used as ammunition to fight a dismissal. As a result, many administrators do not take a chance on new teachers who seem to be having more than the usual start-up, classroom management issues.

I vividly remember trying to help a new teacher in my school who was struggling. She did not want to be on administrative radar so she was allowing behaviors that needed to be stopped cold.

“Dumb-ass is not really a swear word,” she said to me.

“No, you need to write that up,” I explained, going over the reasons.

You let anyone call you a dumb-ass and it’s over. But she was afraid to report misbehaviors by that point and she had reason to be. My struggling district was always laying people off. We riffed virtually annually. Firing a new teacher can be seen as proactive on a principal’s part, a chance to get brownie points. And, frankly, I believe some girls in that class were targeting this new teacher.

That teacher did not survive. I later regretted not taking more of a stand for her. I believe would have been a fine teacher eventually.

I now recognize the second-grade teacher with Napoleon in her class had a huge problem. When he cut the computer cords, she had to report that, but a natural response might be, “Why weren’t you watching him?” That sounds reasonable, but monitoring twenty-some seven-year-old students every minute can be tough. When “Mindy” comes over to get help putting on her gloves, you have to focus on the gloves. A lot of kids need help with outerwear at that age. You can’t be watching Napoleon every minute and our Napoleons are often watching carefully to see when their teacher is not watching.

That first-year teacher survived and continued to teach in her district. She was blessed with a strong administration and true support. Financially-comfortable districts have the social workers and psychologists to provide necessary information and support.

But I am sure she seized those scissors many times and did not say a thing.

First and second-year teachers are frequently walking a tightrope, balancing the need to ask for useful help and support against the fear of being seen as unable to manage a classroom. Those teachers may be afraid to ask for help or make disciplinary referrals. They want to minimize the time they spend on administrative radar.

Eduhonesty: Pity the new teacher who receives a “Napoleon” or two or three or even more on her roster for the year, especially when Napoleon is new to the school and has not established a track record. Special education placement requires an often-tortuous process, one that new teachers may not know. When those teachers request help, they may realize that they should have been documenting behaviors for months and must now begin a lengthy paperwork process demonstrating possible need for testing and evaluation.

In the meantime, those teachers have to worry about the test scores that Napoleon has been undermining since he first entered the classroom.

Creaming is the act of taking the best applicants for your school, creating a charter school which succeeds because troublesome and/or academically deficient students are not accepted into the charter school. Students who might have held down test scores get sent elsewhere, often to the local public school down the road. Public schools never have an option to cream.

As we continue the charter school debate, I thought I’d throw this comment by a charter school administrator into the mix. This woman passionately believes in saving all the children who come in her door. I give her credit for those views. Other charter administrators can be less welcoming.

In this time of data-rules-all, though, I think we have to be aware of creaming. It’s too easy for charter advocates to point to local charter schools to say, “See? The scores at XYZ Charter are significantly better than the scores at Local Public School. This proves charters are the way to go.”

I am not against charters. I favor choice, for one thing, and if a parent’s only choice is a public school performing in the bottom 2% of state schools, then that parent ought to have an alternative. Zip code should not be destiny.

But I do think that we need to get the issue of creaming up and front for examination. If XYZ Charter does not accept Napoleon because of his behavioral issues or Tom because of his academic deficiencies, then the school gains a sometimes formidable advantage in the annual test score game. For one thing, Napoleon and Tom end up at the local public school. If Napoleon is especially behaviorally challenged, he may disrupt learning for all of his classes, at least until the paperwork for special education placement goes through. That paperwork can take years, depending on the district and the degree of disruption Napoleon creates, though.

Creaming skews local school populations, putting the more problematic students in local public schools while charters duck trouble by passing problems on. I am not blaming the charters. I think our Napoleons are an under-addressed issue in education and I understand why a charter would choose to minimize classroom disruptions.

Charters have another advantage that needs to be on the table. How does a student get into a charter school? A motivated parent puts in the time and effort to apply to the school. They may volunteer to work charity and fund-raising events as part of the process.

Motivated parents are the strongest force I know for educational excellence. Those kids who started to slide academically in middle school? I could mostly predict how that slide would go by looking at their parent(s). When parents started calling, emailing, and turning up to check on homework, taking away phones in response to bad grades, and signing daily homework logs, the odds were good that a kid would pull it together. In the absence of parental participation, though, those slides can become avalanches that no educator can stop.

(To any parents out there who tried and failed, I’d like to say that parents can only do so much. Some adolescent crises cannot be solved by emails and homework logs. I should add not to give up hope. That boy who flunks his way through high school may still get a graduate degree or two, especially after a few years working in the hot sun. I’ve seen it happen.)

Eduhonesty: Some of our local schools are performing so poorly that I can only advocate for alternative schools, currently filled by America’s charters and other private schools. That said, I want to emphasize that using test scores for comparisons between local public and charter schools will not tell the whole story. The public school has to accept everyone who lives in district. Charters have more discretion. Some charters do cream. Any comparisons between local public and charter schools will be unfairly biased when creaming occurs. Who the administration lets into school hugely impacts eventual academic results.

Are those creaming charters better schools? In the sense that students appear to be learning more, they may be the better choice. If I lived in some zip codes, I’d pick that selective charter school for my kids before I’d let my daughter spend a year worrying that Napoleon might cut her or slice off her hair with the scissors he keeps carrying around.*

In the end, I’d get my child into the best school available. That school may be a charter. Or it may be the local public school. If I were a parent, I’d research local options on the internet. Then I’d walk into the schools. I’d see if administrators would let me observe areas of the school. I’d watch the kids. I’d look at the work on the walls. I’d try to find out about the teachers at my child’s grade level. For any parents who have a choice, this research has the potential to affect the rest of your child’s life.

*True story. The boy ended up in an alternative school placement midway through the year, but not before he had sliced a few computer cords and kept a whole classroom of second graders on regular red-alert through the fall and part of the winter. For the first-year teacher who was managing this classroom, that boy was a true trial by fire.