The current push toward PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests aligned to the new Common Core standards have come in part as a natural response to our historical apples and oranges testing situation, I am sure. Data wizards of the past must have been regularly scratching their heads as they tried to compare Mississippi to Maine. Without common tests, that comparison could not be made, and in bygone days when states devised their own tests, no overarching, statistically valid comparison between states was possible.

Among other considerations, the Common Core was developed to help standardize data between states. I would like to pose a few questions, though. Do we need Mississippi and Maine to be comparable? If so, why? How do our students benefit? Will the benefits from that common test be worth the cost? Costs have been ignored in the Common Core experiment, yet those costs loom huge for many districts. Districts are rewriting curricula, sometimes virtually from scratch, buying thousands and thousands of dollars of new books, changing tried and true classroom lesson plans and materials, sending out entire staffs for professional development, buying new software, and re-teaching test-taking strategies across schools, among other changes demanded by the Common Core.

The costs and losses in the above sentence represent real commitments of time and money. I have worked on curriculum writing committees. The curricula I recently published for kindergarten and first grade in a near district? Teachers and administrators spent many hours, many school-day equivalents, choosing the materials expected to be presented in each grade. That time carried an opportunity cost. While developing a curriculum, teachers cannot be preparing lesson plans, calling parents or grading homework.

That re-teaching of test-taking strategies may represent days of lost learning time for students. Strategies for taking computerized, multiple-choice tests with multiple right answers for the same question are so different from the strategies needed to succeed on the old, paper-based, single-answer, multiple choice tests that schools may be spending days teaching new test-taking skills. Yes, students are learning during these days, but I’d still call those lost days. Teaching how to take new tests does not provide a great deal of actual knowledge that students can use to add to their understanding of English, math or the world around them.

Like No Child Left Behind, the Common Core curriculum represents a vast experiment conducted on America’s students, and one concern leaps out at me as educational bureaucrats push for the development of a single set of more demanding, national standards. To piggy-back on yesterday’s post, the idea that America’s educational ills somehow rest in our educational standards and that we can escape those ills by fixing the standards has no basis in evidence. By making the standards harder, we seem to believe, we will make our students smarter. We have zero proof for this assumption.

For data analysis purposes, attempting to standardize our standardized testing system makes sense, but the benefits of that data have never been explained to my satisfaction. What are we getting for our many changes? Fear of these new, harder tests has spawned an opt-out movement with the potential to render U.S. test statistics even less trustworthy than in the past. Unless students are stopped from physically opting out, passive-aggressive resistance to testing can destroy the reliability and validity of test results from new Common Core testing. If enough students refuse to test, gathering accurate data will become impossible.

Students who opt-out skew statistics based on already unreliable numbers. The following snippet from U.S. News and World Report, (Carolyn Thompson, Associated Press, Aug. 12, 2015) helps demonstrate why proof of academic progress as defined by standardized test scores cannot currently be demonstrated and, in fact, is becoming less demonstrable.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — About 20 percent of New York’s third- through eighth-graders refused to take the statewide English and math tests given in the spring, the state’s education chief said, acknowledging the opt-outs affected assessment data released Wednesday, which otherwise showed a slight uptick in overall student achievement.

About 900,000 students sat for the Common Core-aligned tests in April, while 200,000 opted out as part of a protest movement against what’s seen in New York and other states as an overreliance on testing in measuring student and teacher performance.

About 5 percent of students opted out of last year’s tests.

When one in five students refuse to take a test, any “acknowledgement” by the state’s education chief that assessment data was “affected” can only be considered disingenuous, especially when followed by an assertion that student achievement shows improvement. With that many missing numbers in the equation, it’s entirely possible that state student achievement went down, not up. New York school officials are hiding the truth if they suggest anything else. The population of students who opt-out will not reflect the population who take the test. I’d hazard it’s likely that many students who opt out will be those who have not done well historically on state standardized tests, students who expect to do badly on the new test. If so, state test scores might have been appreciably lower if scores from this group had been included along with those from students who chose to take the test. I can’t know whether this is true or not, though. I don’t have the data. Neither does the state of New York.

We  seem to be in the process of upending American education in pursuit of yet another goal that will remain unreached and unreachable.

Eduhonesty: For readers who recognize the above quote from previous posts, I’ll confess I am using past material inside this post. But right now I have this blog of a hammer, and all these tests have begun to look like nails. I’ll take a break tomorrow from testing. I don’t want testing to keep becoming yesterday’s news, though.

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even
where there is no river.      ~ Nikita Khrushchev

Because the U.S. government mandated steadily improving results on annual state standardized tests under NCLB, we have been trying to prepare students for that one test for years. This test-based focus has become institutionalized, and the repeal of NCLB will not make that focus vanish. We remain fixed on test-score results, even as we decry the time students lose today to testing.

Urban, academically- and financially-disadvantaged schools have been attempting to use the same curriculum as higher-scoring districts, in some areas even rewriting their curricula to make expectations more demanding in response to the U.S. move toward a Common Core curriculum intended for use in schools across the nation. We are “raising the bar,” as it has come to be called, in our struggling school districts, despite the fact that many American students have not been coming close to jumping over easier bars from the past, and despite the fact that we have zero evidence implicating our current or former state standards as any part of the source of America’s academic failures.

What is happening here? Essentially, we are threatening people from the top down. “Get those test scores up! Do it or else!”

“Do it or else!” has been used effectively in private industry for years and, in the right circumstances, this management-by-threat system can work. In effect, though, what happens nowadays in education is often ineffective and even silly. In desperate efforts to push up score numbers, administrators buy 7^th grade language arts or math textbooks specifically written to their state test or to the new Common Core standards – without regard for how well their students can read the books. They know the bulk of their students are reading at a 5^th, 4^th or even 3^rd grade level, but they can’t buy a lower-grade level book. That book doesn’t have “the right material.” It’s not geared to the 7^th grade test. So they hand the kids a book that many can’t read, instead.

Eduhonesty: Here’s the crazy part of chasing that annual test’s tail — we have no reason to believe that making standards tougher will improve test scores, much less student learning. Common sense would suggest the opposite will more likely occur. As bars go up, students will miss the target by a greater margin.

The idea seems to be that if we raise the bar, students will leap higher. Why? What is the rationale underlying this belief? As the bar gets higher and higher, human nature suggests that at least some students will simply toss up their hands. Harder material will only discourage many students who have already fallen behind.

I am struck by an irony. That possibly nonexistent “crisis” of standards that resulted in the Common Core may create the very crisis that the Core was allegedly supposed to fix. A sudden shift in standards leaves many students behind, a fact documented by this year’s PARCC scores, scores that proved a true epic fail across all the states that ventured to try the new test. Many more students failed the PARCC test than had failed their state tests the year before.

Harder tests create higher fail rates. No evidence suggests that these tests necessarily boost learning. The mere fact of a harder test does nothing without remedial education and increased student support.

From my preceding post:

I read the last line and I think, “It’s first grade, dammit. How far behind can you be?” In these times, the answer’s much different than it was twenty years ago. We are teaching reading and math in kindergarten and even preschool. By first grade, a kid can have fallen appreciably behind now.

This issue will be creating large problems in future classrooms, I believe. We are pushing academic material down, down, down the pipeline. We have three-year-olds in public school preschool programs who are being pushed to learn sight words so they can start to read. They are being given IPads with math programs that include addition and subtraction.

Here is a 1st grade curriculum from a cozy, wood-frame school house in a prosperous Northshore suburb in Illinois:

I consider this curriculum to be age-appropriate overall, especially since the students in this school’s classroom were probably barraged with flash cards and educational computer games almost from the moment they emerged from the womb. Our problem lies in our attempts to teach versions of this curriculum to three-, four- and five-year olds who are not ready to “understand and apply properties of operations” or who are unready to tell time, or describe the relationships between two individuals within a story.

In Finland, children start school at seven years of age. Most have attended preschool, but that preschool heavily emphasizes learning through play. Academics like those above are postponed for a few years, until most or all children are ready for the material coming at them.

To understand the problems that arise from forcing students to begin hard academics at earlier ages, it’s instructive to look at reading. A number of pieces have to come together before reading can begin. Children need to know letters and their sounds — and vowels are a real challenge, sometimes even for adults when they confront unfamiliar words — and then be able to string those letters together to make new sounds. They have to understand how to connect those sounds into a complete word. They have to learn the meaning of various words, some of which will have more than one meaning. Differences in sounds may be subtle. Which witch is which? Some kids can put all of this together at three or four years of age, although that strong, early start remains exceptional. Some perfectly normal kids will not be ready until six or seven years of age to do the same thing. We have ample research documenting these differences.

Finland starts late and manages to be among the top-scoring countries on high school tests in the world. Obviously, a fierce early start on academics is unnecessary to long-term success. One question we ought to be asking ourselves is this: What is the effect of starting rigorous academics too early for subgroups within our classrooms?

I am not saying preschool academics are useless. Especially for students who are entering preschool with a noticeable vocabulary deficit, preschool ought to be mandatory. Vocabulary enrichment ought to be the focus of that preschool.

But as America becomes more diverse, I would suggest we need to look carefully at our students. Those preschool students who are becoming frustrated at their inability to read or do math ought to be let off the hook for awhile, as we backtrack and work on more appropriate skills for their ages and aptitudes. The individual child should determine what is taught — not some pie-in-the-sky district plan.

Eduhonesty: Here’s a big truth that seems to be too often ignored today. Children are naturally hierarchical creatures. From their first days in school, they are always figuring out where they stand with respect to others around them.  Who is the better soccer player? Who is the better artist? Who is the better reader?

I am afraid our challenging curricula are convincing some kids they are dumber than the average bear at a very early age. Those kids who are not among the better readers? When we push too hard, we can create a misimpression that has the potential to mess a child up for life. Once a child concludes he’s “dumb,” that view can become a self-fulfilling prophecy without interventions that may not happen, or may not happen in time.

(For new teachers especially.)

I want to suggest that readers go look for the following article:

“Researchers say this disagreeable personality trait displayed by Bill Gates as a kid may predict success in adulthood”

 

(Readers need to read the preceding few posts to follow this thread.)

Technically, I was the teacher. A classroom needs a certified teacher. I was there, just incidentally serving as a one-on-one aide to one of the children who regularly sat in that room. A couple of students had been redeployed to regular classrooms and teachers reported they were very happy out there. I am not surprised. Tantrum-land must feel scary sometimes. Another aide told me how frightened one of the missing students had appeared when he was first moved into that special education classroom. Those two boys can be hell on wheels, and apparently there had been a third boy at that time, a boy who now has been placed in an outside school.

Today the boys were fine. Each boy had his own aide. We separated the boys almost from the outset. The aides knew their jobs and I was impressed. One boy spent the day out of the room, so I can’t comment on that effort. The other boy worked on numbers and letters as he occupied himself. His aide understood that if you told this boy to go left, he would probably go right, and possibly while shrieking. So she offered him choices. Would you like to do this or that? She did not make him stop and focus on one thing. She worked on letters while he studied bugs, for example. She responded to nonverbal cues. She did not demand that he make eye contact. The boy prefers nonverbal cues and he is lucky enough to have a (former) aide who understands his signals. Unfortunately, this aide used to work with him one-on-one, but she is now only being pulled in for emergencies like this Friday.

I worked on letters and numbers with the cognitively-delayed girl I was helping. I changed a couple of diapers. I talked and played. We colored and fed monsters on the IPad. We watched Peppa Pig and talked about getting dressed. We talked about birds. We looked at pictures and talked about what different facial expressions meant. We laughed. We practiced running while holding hands. We went to art and molded clay, making lots of long snakes/sticks to go above and below the bushes/fires I sculpted. I had a great day, but how can you miss with only three kids and three aides on a day when the kids have art?

I think the first part of this post should be about elementary and special education. People sometimes assume that teaching small children must be simple. How hard can it be to teach the alphabet? How hard can it be to teach simple addition? I’d like non-teacher readers to imagine twenty-some six year olds all in a small room. Getting all those kids to sit on their square on the little rug takes awhile. Getting them to stay focused takes longer. Especially at first, while routines are being taught, teaching elementary kids definitely resembles herding cats. Every classroom will be different, too. While certain techniques will work in all rooms, the routine from 2015 may not work in 2016. Each class group will have its own character, its own strengths and challenges.

Special education can up the challenges exponentially. What if Andrew can’t sit? What if Andrew can’t concentrate? What if Andrew can only hear in one ear? What if he never bothers to tell anyone that he did not hear or understand a word from the last five minutes? What if Andrew’s brain does not seem able to produce understandable sounds? Andrew may understand what was said, but be unable to reply. What if Andrew loves to scream? What if Andrew naturally wants to go left when anyone asks him to go right? What if Andrew is trying to make intelligible words but often can’t quite get there — and he does not handle frustration well? What if Andrew takes many, many repetitions to learn a new idea? What if Andrew has bundles of quirks, such as the need to arrange materials in rows and an inability to make eye-contact? At what point do we determine that Andrew has fallen onto the autism spectrum? At what point do we decide he may need special education because of this fact? How much attention deficit is too much attention deficit? Certainly, many kids with problems like those listed above do not need special education. They may need extra help with an aide. They may need time with a speech pathologist, physical therapist or social worker.

Special education placement will always be more of an art than a science. Even when placed in special education, results will vary from district to district. A child with Downs Syndrome will naturally merit placement, although not necessarily a separate classroom. Some districts will mainstream that child, placing him or her in with other students in a regular classroom.

The right teacher in that self-contained, special education classroom will be a crucial component in students’ educational progress. I have known great teachers, teachers who approached each child with love and understanding, working to get that child to achieve as much as possible within whatever limits their disability imposed. These teachers understood that what worked for one child might not work for another child, and tried to find the keys to unlock individual learning.

Dissecting the mess from this week:

I liked the teacher who quit, but I’d say she was not the right long-term substitute for this position. She was trying to do too much whole-group instruction, I believe. When she told all the kids to go to the rug for circle time, she hit major obstacles. Her two screamers did not handle transitions well. When they were engaged, they did not want to be forced to drop their activity. She did not know how to manage those transitions well. She expected students to behave and pay attention.

Yes, learning to follow directions is a useful school and life skill. But we are talking about two early-elementary school children who were in special education in part because they did not possess the following-directions skill. If they had been following directions on command in their elementary classrooms, they would probably never have ended up in this special education classroom to start with, at least not at their young ages. Their knowledge levels had not yet fallen catastrophically behind their peers, not in the first grade.  Their behavior was the challenge.

Those boys often could not handle an activity well once the transition to the new activity was accomplished — sometimes because they knew too much, not too little. At least one of those boys reads sight words very well.* He had problems sitting. He had problems listening. He was highly unlikely to sit quietly while other students slowly figured out those words. This boy who could already identify the sight words being taught should have been working on comprehension, not identification of those words.

These kids should mostly not have been taught the same material at the same time. Their individual needs were too different. What makes a great special education teacher? (Or any teacher perhaps.) To put it in a nutshell, I’d say the skill required is recognizing areas of academic need and individual behavioral issues, and working within those parameters to help a child maximize his or her potential. In a class with mixed behavioral and academic issues, children cannot usually be taught as a group, not if some students have already moved far ahead of others academically.

I read the last line and I think, “It’s first grade, dammit. How far behind can you be?” In these times, the answer’s much different than it was twenty years ago. We are teaching reading and math in kindergarten and even preschool. By first grade, a kid can have fallen appreciably behind now.

Eduhonesty: I think I’ll end this post shortly although I have more to blog on this classroom. But I want to focus on one point: This class demanded individualized instruction. One of those two boys had recently lost his one-on-one aide. The school will function better if he gets that aide back. For one thing, when that boy decides to make a run for it — as he did a few times while I was there — someone needs to be readily available to chase him. The teacher obviously can’t be running out of the classroom.

I’d say the biggest problem in the room I observed this week stemmed from a lack of continuity in that classroom, combined with the long-term sub’s sometimes clumsy attempts to gather her kids together for whole-group instruction. She was trying furiously to teach, and I’d add that to the list of difficulties — and as a cautionary note about always believing what the textbooks say. The books will tell us that children in first grade have short attention spans and need to shift from activity to activity so that they don’t lose interest. If transitions are killing any readers out there, though, I’d say that longer, flexible activities might be useful. Partial-group transitions would have helped that sub out. Fewer transitions would have helped her. Scheduling also becomes critical. Put the Hungry Hippo game before lunch, for example, and not before an academic activity that’s a lot less fun than Hungry Hippo.

That fact that the sub has quit creates a new problem. All children, and special education children in particular, benefit from routine.  Teacher number three with routine-set number three will be a tough sell to these kids. That teacher will be walking into a classroom that will likely resist her at first, as students try to hold on to the routines they know. The Principal needs a skilled, new teacher fast, but we are deep into February. I’d say her only shot will be a retired teacher willing to take a contract for the remainder of the year. I wish her luck.

*The other boy was out of the classroom so much that I can’t speak to his reading skills, which might be equally good.

Read the last three posts first if you have not seen them.

She quit this morning. Another teacher in the building took the class for the day. I continued to act as a one-on-one aide. I did volunteer to teach the class tomorrow if needed. I still don’t feel quite ready to take over early elementary school classrooms. That job’s a lot harder than it looks and my expertise starts around the age of twelve. I will step into the breach briefly, though. I do know the kids and the routine. I would be teacher number three.

Class was much more peaceful today. Academics were replaced with more playtime, even if that play involved a lot of numbers and letters. Fewer hard transitions happened, too. If a boy wanted to keep doing what he was doing, we let that go. We had a few different activities going at the same time. We played with bubbles. We read books. We took physical activity breaks.

We had Freddie moments, but the screaming was minimal and the violence nonexistent. Separating the boys helps enormously. Letting them play more helps. They benefit from high levels of physical activity, I am sure.

One more day tomorrow and then I will attempt to pull my many speculations together. I expect I will end up giving real kudos to the Principal whose attempt to keep the ship running smoothly almost worked. She’s great in a crisis.

(Read yesterday and the post before first.)

I know more today than I did yesterday. The special education teacher from yesterday’s post is a long-term substitute on her third gig as a long-term sub. Her references are sub references and she thinks she can abandon this contract and still find another long-term sub position elsewhere. She has discussed this with her husband who is O.K. with her quitting. The teacher’s aide for this boy has also dropped hints she may not finish out the year.

One of those two boys clearly dominates the chaos. He lives with grandma. I suspect he runs his house, even if he is only five. His tantrums are monumental in nature. I saw another one today — more shattered crockery, more thrown objects, more kicked objects (including me once) and more high-pitched screaming. The event was kicked off by ending a board game in favor of an academic activity. That kick-off could have been any transition from a more-fun to a less-fun activity.

I am sorry for all the players in this drama. I am also a little concerned for the other kids in the classroom. Chaos Boy is sucking up crazy amounts of learning time while he runs around at top speed shrieking and knocking things down. So far, the teacher has been the target of his wrath, but I don’t know that the other kids could defend themselves if he focused on them. I know one girl who would be just lost. I expect to be doing a fair amount of communicating this week. That kid’s a danger in my view.

Eduhonesty: The Principal wants to save this Freddie. I sympathize. But I have watched a couple of days of well-thought-out lesson plans die unborn as this sub tries to teach around the screams. I helped when I could. We taught like chamomile trying to emerge from cracks in the sidewalk. This kid is easily stealing an hour a day directly from learning. That does not include the indirect loss from Boy # 2 copying “Freddie.” The only highly productive periods occurred when Freddie’s teacher’s aide took him out of the room to instruct him individually. I can’t speak for what, if any, instruction occurred. I hope she is teaching Freddie. I know that the only time the rest of the class makes real progress is when Freddie is out of the room.

If I were a parent and I visited that room, my child might be in a charter or private school the next day.

Here’s my closing thought for today: Parents should visit their children’s classrooms. Especially if I had a child in special education, I would ask my child many questions about the school day. I would also want to observe my child’s classroom. That observation becomes even more imperative if my child struggles to communicate.

I believe in special education and in separate, special education classes. Too often, placing special education students in regular classrooms makes those students feel stupid, despite educator’s best intentions and efforts. Some students manage regular classrooms well, but others do not. Each child deserves to be evaluated and placed in the safest, most supportive environment available.

That said, while I have known some wonderful special education teachers, and have seen some special education classrooms that would benefit any child lucky enough to be placed in those classrooms, I don’t believe that parents should automatically trust a school district to do what is best for their child. In this case, students with behavioral disorders have been mixed with students with cognitive delays — a combination that is proving lethal to learning.

(For newbies especially. Please pass this on to new teachers.)

I filled in for a young teacher’s aide today while she got lunch, working in a classroom with four special education students. The classroom was notorious. Another sub had already warned me not to take any postings in that room. A nearby teacher said, “it’s always chaos in there.”

Out of four kids, all about five years old, two spent most of the first half of that lunch screaming, running, and throwing and kicking things nonstop, breaking a piece of pottery as part of the performance. I’d will say their teacher was trying her hardest. But she had two, tiny “Freddies” who fed off each other. She finally had to call for reinforcements.

I could make many observations here. I’ll stick to a short one: I volunteered to call home for her since she did not speak Spanish. I will do this if she asks me tomorrow. But that call home worries me. Yes, someone ought to discuss this behavior with parents. Both of these kids are teetering on the brink of being put in a special school. But if I call home, there’s a chance I’ll get one or both of these kids walloped. Something made those kids the way they are. Something or someone made them want to scream and keep screaming.

That someone might be sitting at home with them right now. And they are little boys. I’ve changed my mind on that phone call.  I will pass this one to the social worker instead. Or I will suggest that teacher talk to the social worker. I’m sure she has already talked to the social worker repeatedly, but this special education teacher appears to be drowning, so I will try to help her — before the school has to find a third teacher for that classroom in one year. That teacher has a worrisome deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes, a help-me-help-me look that pulled me into this drama within five minutes.

Eduhonesty: Are you a new teacher? If so, depending on your background, I may have a warning for you. Those books and articles about not spanking kids? Those books and articles are read by readers. Not all your students’ parents will be readers. In some cultures, spanking remains commonplace. When you decide to make that phone call home, the person on the other end of the line may have a very different value system than your own. I recommend waiting until you are not feeling too frustrated with your student. Be sure to add a few good points about the student as part of any conversation.

And when a kid seems off-the-charts messed up, I always try to keep in mind that his or her parents may be part of the problem.

Han: Lando.

Leia: Lando system?

Han: Lando’s not a system. He’s a man. Lando Calrissian. He’s a card player, gambler, scoundrel. You’d like him.

Leia: Thanks.

Time for another short play to break up all this expository writing.

The Search for Blando Blarney

It’s a windy, cold February day, expected to hit zero degrees by morning. Shasta and Mommy are staying at the Westin in Wheeling for another Capricon, a favorite science fiction convention that mommy attends each year. Mommy has put on her soft, gray owl shirt. The owl looks fried, more stoned than any pet rock. Mommy looks tired and fried, too. She is getting jobs. She added Dagobah #203 after trying to get a long-term sub job. She expects to add Hoth #456 next week. Endor #Whatever may have gotten away, though. Mommy hit send on the app and then failed to pick up a call from Principal Blando Blarney of Pooperscooper Middle School, not finding its traces on the landline for a couple of days. Blarney has not returned two calls. Endor may have slipped through mommy’s clutching fingers.

Shasta is wearing a shiny red spandex outfit, skin tight around her slug’s body. Shasta is an invisible slug, about as large as a medium-sized dog. She has abandoned the usual top hat in favor of a long-haired, purple wig, held on by a copper-colored pair of steampunk goggles covered with wheels and gears. She is resting on a simple, black velvet flying carpet, about five feet off the floor, in the space between the two double bed in the Westin Hotel room. Shasta wonders what mommy is doing.

Shasta: Why do we want Blando Blarney to talk to us mommy?

Mommy: The suburb is right next door. I hear it pays well, too.

Shasta: Do you even like subbing?

Mommy: I don’t know. Maybe I will when I actually get around to it. As far as I can tell, I mostly hunt for jobs for no pay yet. My job is to do job interviews. Just like I write a top-secret blog with 13,703 users that makes no money whatsoever. I seem to have a real knack for not making money.

Shasta: Well, who needs money?

Mommy: It’s good to be a giant, invisible, young slug. I’d like that uncomplicated life. I don’t want to interfere with the purity of your vision, but money is kind of useful. You want a great mystery? I have a graduate degree in marketing from a school that is rated among the best in the country. I know I could market. Hell, I once wrote an article for Home Office Computing Magazine that made a small, software company’s year. I could market. But I don’t.

Chekhov is about to be captured. Oops. Now he is about to have a seemingly catastrophic fall.

Shasta: It’s that “kind of useful” mommy. If you went for money, you would get money, whether you or the owl are fried or not. But I am worried about this subbing thing.

Mommy: It seems like a natural move. I qualify. I like the idea of working a few days a week, days of my choice. It doesn’t pay well but it’s a few bucks more than double the minimum wage and that idea of being able to work or not work whenever I want does appear to be a real perk. Once I find the right classrooms, the job might even be fun.

Shasta: Don’t think too hard. That’s what I always say. But this may be one of those pigs have wings things. We have to do some thinking on this one, mommy, we do. This might be a thinking type thing. This might even be a hell no I won’t go.  Just because the path goes ever onward, doesn’t mean we have to stay on the path. In fact, that “ever onward” might be a great reason to get off the path. Now.

How about that Starbucks? You could get a green apron! I’d rather have a green apron than a badge that opens school security doors. I’d like to hit those security doors with a blaster. And I’d rather have a free pound of coffee every week than an extra couple hundred of dollars after four weeks of hell.

Mommy: You need to have a more positive attitude!

Shasta: No, I don’t. Everybody talks about that dumb positive attitude. Everybody talks about gratitude. And gratitude journals. And how great Mr. Spock is. But that doesn’t mean they are right.

Mommy: They are about Mr. Spock, although I am not sure everyone is talking about him. Not even here, and we may have a biased sample. This is a science fiction convention. They are probably right about gratitude, too.

Shasta: (Looking at Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock on the TV.) I sure hope they save those humpback whales. But you get what I mean. Yes, be positive. Be grateful. But don’t let that control your life. Too much positive and you keep on that forever path. You stay when you ought to go.

Mommy: Too true.

Shasta: That Blarney guy should be an object lesson. Did he make you feel good? No, he did not. I say, make lattes, not war. Or maybe even try to do something practical with the blog. Or another blog. Or etched glass. Or, I don’t know, anything. But something different. Not classroom management. It doesn’t matter how good you are. It’s still tweezing slivers out of festering skin.Classroom management is never as much fun as etching glass or writing blog posts. Especially nowadays.

Mommy: (Smiling, intrigued.) Why especially nowadays?

Shasta: Because we are saving everyone and anyone. Even when you send them out of class, they send them right back unless they smacked someone or lit a blunt in the middle of class. If a kid sliced his teacher’s desk down the middle with a light saber, he would be back within the hour.

Mommy: They never pull out their blunt in the middle of class. Sometimes it might fall out of their backpack while they are trying to find their homework, but that’s different. There’s a real correlation between red eyes and blunt mismanagement, by the way. You don’t see that problem much in middle school, though, and hardly ever in elementary grades. And I’ve never seen a light saber attack yet.

Shasta: But if you send them out, nothing happens.

Mommy: People call their mommies or daddies when they misbehave. I do, anyway, when I can’t help but see the blunt. Or when I know a kid needs help. We try.

Shasta: You all try too hard. The ones who don’t want to learn? The ones who want to disrupt the class, like the big boy in the last class last week? We should not keep inviting them back into class. It’s like leaving the door open to any Imperial Storm Trooper who promises he gave up violence last week. Right. Like that’s going to happen. Blasters are going off all over America’s schools, and no one even puts up a blast shield. And they keep sending them back to class. Why?

Mommy: Public schools are expected to educate everyone. That’s one reason why so many urban parents opt for charter schools. That’s why public school teachers cannot stem that charter school incursion. What’s curious to me is that you see complaints in the media all the time about how charter schools get their higher performance numbers by throwing out kids who are not succeeding. Yeah. But nobody wants to travel the distance from Point A to Point B in those articles. Yes, charter numbers go up because those schools chucked their miscreants out. The numbers for any school would go up if the school did that.

But the assumption seems to be that these schools are throwing out innocent, slow learners. I’d guess that’s almost entirely crap. I’d put my money on the fact that a hard-working slow learner who listened in class and kept trying to master new material would be welcome to stay in those charter schools. Teachers would advocate for the kid, for one thing. Educators and administrators don’t give up on kids who are genuinely trying. Also, those kids tend to get improving test scores. They may not do great on the state test, but administrators can show progress in benchmark testing. Kids who try to learn almost always succeed in learning, even if they may not move as fast as most of their classmates.

Some kids are not trying, though. And I admit you have a point, Shasta. By middle school, a few kids always walk into class with red eyes. Or they raise a ruckus almost every day somewhere, in some part of the school. Like Freddie[1]. One of the special education teachers asked about Freddie yesterday. She wanted to help him last year. So I texted my favorite colleague, Vasco de Gama[2] for a report. Here’s the exact text: “(Unrelated science stuff) But Freddie has been awful. He would have been sent to another school long ago but ROE[3] won’t take him. He had a very good Thursday and Friday, for what it’s worth. Best in a very long time.”

Apparently, Freddie did pass seventh grade despite the fact that he knew virtually none of last year’s material and did not try to learn it. Everyone passed no matter what they knew. I talked to his mom last year about possible special education placement. I’d say he is oppositionally defiant, among other considerations. His behavior has been making learning impossible for him and everyone near him. But he does not want to be in special education and he seems to run his mom, not the other way around.

It’s a mess, Shasta. We have no clue what to do with our Freddies. And idealists want to make sure the Freddies don’t miss the chance to get an education. We have to keep them in school. In the meantime, they harass other kids and their teachers, then take up days of Dean time – and I mean full days in some cases – while regularly disrupting classes. That’s another thing that doesn’t hit the media radar. Sometimes most of a school’s referrals are coming from only a small group of kids. But if the alternative school won’t take the Freddies, who will? They are guaranteed the right to go to school.

Shasta: Mommy, Big Boy in that social studies class last week was a Freddie. You know it. If you sub for that lady again, you will have him again.

Mommy: For one period and I am good with my Freddies. I know them well enough by now. That’s one reason why I can be a good sub.

Shasta: Yes, but it’s also a good reason to go get your green apron. You don’t need that level of crazy. You just want to get out of house a bit, but mostly you like to blog and write. Why set yourself up?

Mommy: I love kids, Shasta. I miss kids. I loved the little drawing that girl did for me on my kindergarten day. And I loved it when that middle-school girl said I was her new, favorite substitute teacher. I enjoyed teaching Spanish. The kids and I mostly had fun while I taught useful stuff. Well, mostly useful stuff. I am not too sure about the capitols of Bolivia and Ecuatorial Guinea. I mean, yes, great stuff capitols and all, but maybe we should work on being able to find the states in the United States. Or the continents. We have fallen a bit behind on the basics. But I guess we have to start somewhere and who knows when someone will suddenly be transported to Montevideo. How embarrassing if that person did not realize that he or she had materialized in the capitol of Uruguay.

Shasta: Mommy, you are trying to distract me, trying to distract us.  Although maybe it would be good if Scotty beamed you to Montevideo. You could use some time to consider your options before you just leap into a classroom. Those two subbing days were kind of stressful.

Mommy: The days will be easier when I get the rhythm of this subbing thing and figure out where to work and where not to work.

Shasta: (Sighs.) Oh, mommy, don’t be so silly. Go get your apron! They are letting the Freddies run loose. You don’t have to work that hard. You just don’t, never again. Especially since nobody even seems grateful anymore. They stick people with Freddies then criticize them for the lack of learning taking place in classrooms with high numbers of Freddies. They are mean to teachers now, meaner and meaner.

Mommy: Yes, I am afraid that’s true, and poor and urban classrooms will always have more Freddies. I’m not sure why some kids become Freddies while most don’t, but I know that missing daddies, mommies in jail, evictions and no food sure can make some Freddies. Too much gunfire outside the window at night creates a Freddie day even in a room that’s normally quiet and attentive.

Shasta: What are we doing today anyway?

Mommy (laughs): Yeah, enough deep thought. At 11:30, I want to go to the panel on antibiotics. I need a shower, first. Then the usual: art show, panels, dealers room, con suite. There’s a Star Wars panel. And that Klingon girl is giving a concert. We are going to have linner at a place with the good pretzels, crab cakes and brussels sprouts.

Shasta: (Doubtfully.) Brussel sprouts?

Mommy: Yumm.

Shasta: Are we really going to pursue that Blando guy?

Mommy: Nope. He ducked two calls. That’s enough I guess. Waste of an application. But we have all of cyberspace. We can apply anywhere! I’d say it’s Endor’s loss, some other district’s gain.

Shasta: If you are smart, it will be Starbuck’s gain.

Mommy just smiles gently at Shasta, who does not get it. Mommy does not mind the miscreants. She likes all kinds of kids. It really is a pity that the nutcase who apparently quit her old district in the middle of this school year drove mommy into retirement. But she did not have another year of incomprehensible tests in her. Mommy spent about 20% of her last year giving obligatory tests and quizzes written by other people, some of them members of an East Coast consulting firm that has since gone bankrupt. Her bilingual students often could not even read those tests. Nutcase kept telling her that it was her fault that students were not prepared for the tests, even though benchmark tests showed the average academic level of her classes was somewhere in the third grade, while the tests were written to match seventh grade common core standards. You need to have faith in your students, Nutcase would say, when mommy pointed out the kids could not read the tests, much less do the math. The schools own benchmark testing completely supported mommy’s contention. No excuses, Nutcase would say.

Oh, Mommy is glad not to have to get up in the morning to go try to do six impossible things before breakfast. Mommy reaches for her shoes, preparing to go out for a fun day.

All’s well that ends well, she thinks.

Eduhonesty:

Han: “I could arrange for you to receive orders to conquer Coruscant, but your only resources would be twelve drunken Ewoks, four malfunctioning speeders, and forty kilos of beach sand.”

Ms. Q: “That’ll take at least two weeks, sir.“―Han Solo and Ms. Q

(The story of education today.)

[1] An alias, probably the first of many

[2] Not his real name. Not in this time on this planet anyway.

[3] ROE is the Regional Office of Education. They run the “safe schools” for a county. In theory, if a child cannot manage public school, that child can be sent to a safe school. Common reasons for placement include drugs, violence, and zero tolerance violations such as a knife in a car or liquor in a locker. But ROE refuses kids regularly. For that matter, I vividly remember one incident in which a student struck a teacher and was sent away to the safe school. The safe school sent her back less than a month later because she was behaving so badly there that they threw her out. But this was a middle school student. The public schools could not expel the girl due to her age. The teacher who had been hit found the girl back in school only a few weeks after she had been sent away. That naturally made the teacher extremely nervous. She vented often during lunch in the teacher’s lounge. I felt profoundly sorry for that teacher, and for the students in that girl’s classes. Off-the-chain students steal learning time from everyone, sometimes huge, jagged chunks of learning time. At least, the girl was not returned to the nervous teacher’s classroom. Despite the shortage of special education teachers, the administration managed to do that much right, at least.

A few posts back, I commented on a weekly spelling ritual from my 5th grade classroom. I’ll leak a secret. It’s been about 50 years since I had Mr. Stocker, an older, white-haired gentleman who always wore a suit. Male teachers wore suits, crisp, white shirts and ties back then. The women wore dresses. June probably had her pearls on all over town. I remember my crazy fourth grade teacher (the former military man who whapped student chairs with a pointer to prevent slouching) saying the best paid teacher in Tacoma probably made about $6,000 per year.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, then, I had a teacher who gave us ice cream coupons if we got all the spelling words right. I assume he repaid the lunch staff who gave us a choice of a vanilla bar with chocolate topping, a vanilla bar with Heath Bar topping (my favorite), or a Fudgesicle. I don’t know how many weeks I failed to get my ice cream bar. Maybe one or two. But my motivation was high. In a school with many financially-disadvantaged students, motivation was generally high. Kids would do a lot of work back then for ice cream.

Kids still work for treats. I can’t think how much work I have gotten with the promise of Jolly Rancher coupons, redeemable for candies after school. Some good research seems to suggest that rewards are problematic as student motivators, and I find kernels of truth in that research.* But I want to stand up for the occasional reward ritual.

Mr. Stocker never varied. Week by week, he handed out ice cream rewards. I would not be surprised to discover he inspired Jolly Rancher coupons. Each week, we worked to get our treat.

Treats don’t motivate everyone. Some kids just don’t get excited about ice cream. Maybe their freezers are full of tasty, frozen treats at home.  Maybe they don’t like ice cream. Maybe they don’t like work, at least not the work that leads to the ice cream. But I know I worked for ice cream. I admit I had a knack for spelling, but I would go through that list to make sure I was ready for the test. I never wanted to lose my Heath Bar because I skipped studying one word.

I am going to admit I bribed the heck out of my resource class last year while we worked on keyboarding. As typing times went up, I passed out coupons. I can’t exactly measure my effectiveness, but I can say that many boys and girls who might not have taken typing.com seriously, were working as fast as they could to type more words per minute and garner more coupons. The coupon rule was simple: Show me you are typing faster while maintaining reasonable accuracy. I’m sure some students faked their way into a coupon or two by taking advantage of the speed with which I was going around the room handing out future Jolly Ranchers. But participation was high. Enthusiasm was high, even on the part of some boys who were notorious for their lack of academic motivation. In part, I know that the chance to work on the relatively new Chromebooks contributed to my success.

Eduhonesty: Rewards don’t work for many purposes, but in my experience, they will work for shorter-term commitments like those keyboarding classes or weekly vocabulary quizzes. Competitions with prizes motivate many students, especially when students are competing with themselves and their own previous scores. This post is another “see-if-it-works” post. Today’s research might have stopped Mr. Stocker from handing out those ice cream bars, but student effort would have fallen if he did. We students ended up knowing more because of those ice cream bars.

 (Unsuccessful attempt at a Jolly Rancher coupon forgery. I normally printed coupons at home, changing paper and font regularly, but every so often I hand wrote coupons when I ran out.)

*See Dr. Richard Curwin’s article at http://www.edutopia.org/blog/reward-fraud-richard-curwin for a good, short breakdown on problems with rewards.